New England, however, did not fit into this elaborate and delicately adjusted trade-machine. In spite of her enormous forest-resources, which had been counted upon to provide the Empire with naval stores and timber, she failed utterly in competition with the countries on the Baltic.[725] Her agricultural products were practically identical with those of the old country, and so competed with them. There was no staple crop, like sugar or tobacco, to form an element of imperial commerce. Her fisheries, which had loomed so large at the time of the first settlement, served, for various reasons, only to compete with those of Newfoundland, and at once to reduce England's profits and to retard the increase of her fishing fleet. The purely colonial shipping, which the New England colonies early produced, drew away English seamen, competed with English vessels, and reduced the naval strength of the mother-country. Following the economic crisis of 1640, Massachusetts and her sister colonies made strenuous and partly successful efforts to establish home manufactures, which curtailed the market for English goods.[726] As, even then, those colonies imported much more from England than they exported to her, they had to seek an outlet for such products as were not adapted for the English trade, in order to obtain the money to settle their English bills. The West Indian colonies, on the other hand, exported to England far more than they imported. Consequently New England sold her timber and provisions to the island settlements, and used their bills of exchange to pay her English debts. In this, however, she seemed to be in part merely drawing away the trade-balance of the West Indies by increasing her competition with the home-country.[727] Nor, as the shrewd and thrifty New England merchants grew in numbers and in wealth, did the English West Indian islands afford them sufficient outlet for their commercial energies; and there gradually developed that system of trade with the French island-group which was to be one of the causes of the Revolution.[728] Footnote 725: Efforts were continually made, however, to secure naval stores from her. _Cf._, under the Commonwealth, _Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660_, pp. 392, 399. Footnote 726: _Cf._ J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, pp. 29 _f._; V. S. Clark, _Manufacturing in the U. S._, pp. 31, 34, 40, 50. Footnote 727: Beer, _Origins_, pp. 268, 285 _f._; _Old Colonial System_, vol. II, pp. 210, 221, 230 _ff._ Footnote 728: Mims, _Colbert's West Indian Policy_, pp. 224, _f._