Richard Derby mentioned above bought a French prize of 300 tons at Gibraltar, loaded her with wine, and sent her under Captain George Crowninshield to the West Indies, where her cargo was sold to good advantage, and sugar purchased. With this she headed away for Leghorn, but was taken by an English privateer on the plea that she had no register. As a matter of fact the voyage was entirely lawful; she had no register, but being a purchased prize, she did not need one until she should be able to go to an English port. Nevertheless, when the vessel was taken before the court in the Bahamas, she was at once condemned. It was sheer robbery. The records of that court showed that, of 200 ships that had been brought in, the only ones escaping condemnation were a few belonging to owners who had been willing to pay the judge a higher price than the privateers were. The governor of the colony as well as this judge had gone to their posts poor, but in a few years they retired worth fortunes of £30,000 each. The Derby vessels were seized in each case on the charge that they had violated one or another section of the navigation laws. The navigation laws had at last begun to injure the shipping of the colonial owners. A remarkable change had taken place in the condition of affairs. What had happened, and through what agencies had the change come? A small space only is needed for a statement of the important facts, but the reader is reminded that here, as in the case of slavery, it is difficult to get the right point of view. The eighteenth-century state of morality, not that of the twentieth, prevailed. From the beginning of the eighteenth century until well past the middle, England was constantly at war with France and Spain in spite of treaties that were made from time to time to provide for peace. There was never a day from 1700 to 1763 when the ships of either nation were free to sail the seas unmolested. It was the period during which Lord Clive fought the battles of his country in the East Indies, and when, in America, the frontiersman never saw the sun set without a well-grounded fear that the night would bring bloodthirsty and fiendishly cruel enemies prowling around his cabin. According to the documents that remain, these long wars were seemingly no more than disputes over boundaries (neighborhood quarrels over line fences), or efforts to avenge some such personal injury as that when Captain Jenkins had his ear cut off by the Spaniards while sailing near the coast of Cuba. But as seen now, each seemingly petty quarrel was but a feature of a prolonged struggle between races for the commercial control of the New World.