Andrews, _British Committees_, where the texts of the Instructions and of Povey's Overtures are both given. Footnote 748: The membership included Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had served on Plantation Committees during the Interregnum; Robert Boyle, President of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England; Sir Peter Leere and Sir James Draxe, old Barbadian planters; Povey, Noell, Digges, and Colleton, all merchants and experts on colonial trade. _Ibid._, pp. 76 _f._ Footnote 749: _Ibid._, p. 76. Footnote 750: _Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680_, p. xi. The only individual connecting link between New England and the government in England was the unofficial “agent” whom one or another of the colonies appointed at times of crisis, such as the Hocking murder or the Dr. Child petition, to present their case to the authorities. Although unofficial, the office was recognized by the English government, and such agents were employed by most of the colonies, island as well as continental, the office becoming an integral part of the administrative machinery of the following century.[751] Footnote 751: _Cf._ L. P. Kellogg, “The American Colonial Charter,” _Annual Report, American Historical Association_, 1903, vol. I, p. 228; E. P. Tanner, “Colonial Agencies in England during the 18th Century,” _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. XVI, pp. 24 _ff._ Such, in bare outline, were the organs employed by England in the administration of the colonies. Of the legislative enactments designed to build up the Empire, the most important were precursors of the more famous Navigation Acts of the following century. In 1650, 1651, 1660, and 1663, ordinances were passed for the control of trade and shipping, which, in the period now under review, were more important in their political than in their economic influence upon New England. Holland had been the first of the European nations to understand the effect upon economic prosperity at home of the building up of colonial trade, and in the middle of the seventeenth century threatened to absorb the entire carrying trade of the world, the value of goods shipped annually in Dutch bottoms having been estimated at a billion francs.[752] The English Navigation Acts of Cromwell and Charles II, like the policy initiated by Colbert in France, were aimed mainly at breaking the monopoly of Holland, and building up the national merchant-marines of England and France. Even the fisheries off the coasts of England and Scotland had passed into Dutch hands, and Englishmen had long been clamoring for some means of fighting commercially the growing menace of Dutch sea power.[753] Footnote 752: Mahan, _Sea Power_, p. 96. _Cf._ Leroy-Beaulieu, _De la Colonisation chez les peuples modernes_, vol. I, pp. 113 ff. Footnote 753: G. Edmundson, _Anglo-Dutch Rivalry_ (Oxford, 1912), pp. 36 _ff._, 79, 154.