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THE NAVIGATION ACT OF 1651

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England, Ireland or the Plantations save in English ships or foreign ships of that country "of which the said goods are the growth, production or manufacture"; foreign goods brought in by English ships to be brought only from the place of origin, as above defined; salt fish, fish oil and whalebone to be brought in solely in English ships; the above fish, etc., to be exported from English territory solely in English ships; and the trade from one port to another "of this Commonwealth" to be reserved solely to English ships. Exceptions are allowed as follows: English ships to be permitted to bring from countries in the East Indies and the Levant goods which have not been produced in those countries; English ships to be permitted to bring from Spain and Portugal goods produced in the colonies of those countries; and lastly, English ships may bring silks of Italian origin from the ports of the Dutch and Spanish Netherlands.1 The prepossessions of nineteenth-century economics have vitiated modern criticism of this measure. Modern economists have almost with one accord2 declared that it must have been harmful to the trade of England or, at best, that there is no evidence that it benefited English trade. On this it may be proper to remark that there is also no evidence that the framers of the Act intended it to benefit English trade, or that they cared greatly if the result should be some diminution of it. For their measure was what they named it, an Act of Navigation, an Act for promoting the employment of English ships and English seamen; and that might well be consistent with some restriction of English trade in general, taken in a wide sense. Restriction lies in every clause, restriction mainly of the operations of foreigners, but also of many which could be carried on by English merchants. Realisation of this fact renders it useless to probe for the "interest" which might be supposed to have inspired the Act. The interest was that of the national safety and not that of any particular clique; and contemporary statements to the contrary emanate from jealous Dutch sources. Charles I had made many trading regulations for increasing the flow of colonial cargoes into English ports irrespective of the nationality of the shipping which carried them; under Charles II there was to be passed a Navigation Act combining that motive with the encouragement of the national shipping; but the Act of 1651 belongs solely to the economics of defence, and to judge it from any other standpoint is to misjudge it. How far it was successful in creating ships and seamen cannot now be determined, for the evidence has been swamped. First came the Dutch War with a flood of prizes, double the number of the pre-existent mercantile marine of England;3 then came the Spanish War with very serious losses at the hands of enemy privateers; and much of the increase in the numbers of seamen

1 Acts and Ordinances, 11, 559-62.

3

2 The American, G. L. Beer, is an exception to this statement.

Oppenheim, M., Administration of the Royal Navy, p. 307.

must have been due to the requirements of the Navy. There was no chance for the Puritan Navigation Acts to show their value before they were superseded by other measures at the Restoration.

If the above view is correct, the Navigation Act of 1651 must be taken out of the category of commercial measures and placed amongst the efforts made by the Commonwealth to equip the country with a sea power adequate to its security. That work went on without intermission from the beginning of 1649. It seems to have been inspired by the necessity of hunting down Prince Rupert and of coping with the French and royalist privateers, and to have been furthered by the realisation that an ocean-going navy would be indispensable if England meant to regain her ascendancy over her colonies and their trade. The deficiency of sea power at the outset is attested by the fact that the colonial revolt endured for more than two years before it was suppressed. But the Council of State was aware of the weakness, and its Admiralty Committee worked unceasingly. In two years it doubled the material strength of the fleet and infused a new tone into the combatant ranks and the dockyard staffs, with the result that in a remarkably short time England regained the naval fitness and spirit she had lost during half-a-century of Stuart rule.

Concurrently with the reorganisation, an active campaign went forward against the maritime foes of the Commonwealth. As was stated earlier,1 Blake drove Prince Rupert's royalist squadron from European waters; and it could not reach the West Indies until the revolt there had collapsed.

By the opening of 1652 the maritime civil war was virtually over, and the Commonwealth's energetic promotion of sea power had justified itself. In the autumn of 1650, whilst passing the Act prohibiting trade with the revolted colonies, Parliament took steps to organise an expedition to visit and subdue each of them in turn. The command was entrusted to Sir George Ayscue, who was also named one of a board of three commissioners for negotiation and political resettlement. Lack of shipping delayed the undertaking for nearly a year. Not until August 1651 did Ayscue sail for the West, and not until October did he reach Barbados, his first point of attack.

Meanwhile, the Act of 1650 had evoked a colonial rejoinder which anticipated the constitutional arguments of the Americans under George III. In February 1651 Lord Willoughby, the royalist governor of Barbados, passed with the concurrence of his council and Assembly a declaration to the effect that the recent Act was prejudicial to the freedom and safety of the colonists, who had themselves made no innovations, but were bent merely upon maintaining their established form of government; and that the colonists would not consider binding the enactments of a Parliament in which they were not 1 Vide supra, p. 133.

SUBMISSION OF THE COLONIES

219 represented. The Act of 1650, with its assertion of the sovereignty of Parliament, and Willoughby's declaration, based on the established constitutional rights of Englishmen, illustrate the dilemma of the old colonial Empire. But it is characteristic of the political methods of the race that this dilemma, although never escaped, never became troublesome except when complicated with a dispute over material interests. That dispute, in the present instance, related to trade, and the Barbadians concluded their manifesto by placing on record their gratitude to the Dutch for commercial benefits received at Dutch hands.1 Without this, it is doubtful whether Willoughby would have obtained much support; for the royalist faction, although energetic, was small, and there was among the planters hardly one genuine adherent of the proprietary claims which he represented.

Ayscue, on arriving at Barbados, found its military strength considerable. The coastline offered few landing places, and Willoughby had under arms seven or eight times as many men as the admiral could hope to disembark. A pause of three months ensued, during which the pressure of blockade did its work. At the outset Ayscue seized a number of Dutch merchantmen whom he found trading in contravention of the Act of 1650. As time went on, the planters saw themselves faced with ruin, and the moderates among them, with motives rather economic than political, at length compelled Willoughby to yield. The articles of surrender, signed on 11 January 1652, provided that the island should receive a governor appointed from home, but that there should be no taxation save that imposed by the Assembly, and that trade with friendly nations should be free. The sense of the latter phrase was left undefined, and was in practice interpreted as subject to the Acts of 1650 and 1651. Free trade with foreigners, therefore, meant trade conducted solely in English ships. The colonists afterwards protested, but there can be little doubt that they had understood the condition; it had been vital to them to get rid of the existing blockade, even at the expense of agreeing to a future restriction which might not be seriously enforced. Willoughby and other extremists were banished, the proprietary rights were annulled, and Barbados was left under the governorship of Daniel Searle, one of Ayscue's fellow-commissioners.

Bermuda had abandoned the revolt on hearing that the expedition was at sea, and Antigua's submission quickly followed that of Barbados. A small squadron with a separate body of commissioners entered Chesapeake Bay in March 1652. Berkeley and the ultraRoyalists of Virginia made a show of resistance, but the public opinion of the colony was against them, and articles were signed without hostilities. They included the same clauses on freedom of trade and taxation as the Barbados agreement, and Richard Bennett, one of See Schomburgk, Sir R., History of Barbados; Davis, N. D., Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados; and Harlow, V. T., Hist. of Barbados, 1625-85, chap. ii.

the parliamentary commissioners, became governor. But the Interregnum statesmen showed little interest in the internal affairs of Virginia when once she had acknowledged their authority, and Bennett's successors until the Restoration were elected by the Assembly. No objection was raised even to Berkeley's residence in the colony, and he remained as a private individual until he resumed office under Charles II. A single warship ensured the submission of Maryland, which also was left thereafter very much to its own devices. The Chesapeake Plantations, penetrated in all directions by navigable creeks, offered conditions the exact opposite to those presented by the convex coastline of Barbados. A few cruisers could paralyse resistance, and there was no point in imposing harsh terms upon colonists who admitted its futility.

The subjugation of the colonies provided the first example since their foundation of the employment of the Navy as a link of empire. It may be regarded as an important branch of the new imperial policy which was taking shape and which was to be developed after the Restoration. On the other policies laid down in the Act of 1650, it may be said that, having established in theory the principle of parliamentary supremacy, the Commonwealth made little attempt— none, indeed, outside Bermuda and the Caribbean islands-to interfere in practice with local autonomy; that it did partially annul the chartered rights conferred by the Stuart prerogative, abolishing completely those of Carlisle and Willoughby, suspending those of Lord Baltimore, and reconstructing the Bermuda Company, but leaving untouched the privileges of Massachusetts; and that it made serious but incomplete attempts to put in practice those clauses of the Navigation Acts that affected colonial trade. The efficacy of those attempts is a debated question which is probably incapable of settlement. All that can be said is that there was some enforcement and some evasion of the monopoly granted to English shipping.1

The chief imperial interest of the Commonwealth is in the framing of a domestic policy for the Empire; the interest of the Protectorate lies in the relations of the Empire towards foreign Powers. Here also some principles emerge which can be traced as of more or less continuous application, helping to elucidate some of the transactions of the eighteenth century. Between the domestic and foreign policies, Anglo-Dutch relations form a connecting link, since the Dutch, although foreigners, had entrenched themselves so deeply within the boundaries of the Empire as almost to share the interests of its subjects. The Dutch have often been thought of as one of the great colonising nations of the world, but the truth is that they were not pre-eminent as colonists, nor even as rulers of native dependencies, save for one purpose, that of trade. Trade was the means and the end of Dutch greatness, and Dutchmen overseas lacked both the religious fervour 1 Beer, pp. 391-9.

THE DUTCH IN THE ATLANTIC

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which palliated the gold lust of the Spanish pioneers, and the capacity for establishing new polities of the parent type which rooted the English at so many points in the West in the space of a single generation. As against these deficiencies, the Dutch had an unsurpassed faculty for recognising and seizing the strategic positions of world trade, for exploiting the services of native races, and for developing those business methods which enabled them to enter into the fruits of the colonial enterprise of others. The history of the Atlantic area in the seventeenth century justifies these remarks. The Dutch colonies in it were few and feeble: the progress of New Amsterdam, with its 7000 inhabitants after fifty years of effort, cannot compare with that of New England; in the West Indies the Dutch produced no such lusty communities as Barbados and St Christopher; and in Brazil they failed to establish a colony by conquest, although sea power and initial success gave them every advantage. But they did succeed in planting an excellent system of trading posts. In that capacity New Amsterdam was a success, attracting to itself the produce of its populous English neighbours; so also were St Martin and St Eustatius, adjoining the English and French Antilles, and Curaçoa, giving facilities for an illicit trade on the Spanish Main. In the mouths of several Guiana rivers the Dutch built fortified factories where they collected valuable wares from the natives. And in West Africa they ousted both Portuguese and English from the best slaving stations, capturing Elmina in 1637 after Portugal had held it for close on two centuries. The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, presided over these activities. Like most chartered companies it failed as a patron of colonies, but it did succeed in its maritime operations against Spain and Portugal and went far towards realising the policy of monopolising the trade of the Atlantic whilst leaving others to colonise its shores.

Enough has already been said to show that the Commonwealth's determination to be master of its own colonies and of their trade contained the seeds of a quarrel with the Dutch; and on more general grounds there was the certainty of rivalry if the maritime advance of England should fulfil the promise of its promoters. The mercantilist habit of mind, which regarded commerce as a kind of warfare, was bound to accentuate this tendency. Politics moved in the same direction. The stadholder, William II, succeeding to his office just as the treaties of 1647-8 brought the Thirty Years' War, and with it the Dutch-Spanish contest, to a close, was known to be dissatisfied with the peace. He wished to join France in still further humiliating Spain; both he and the French court had personal reasons for seeking to avenge Charles I; and France was already virtually at war with England upon the sea. These circumstances, coupled with the Portuguese patronage of Prince Rupert in the early part of 1650, seemed to indicate a coalition of three Powers against England and Spain,

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