canes, and other particular's in the art of cultivating the plant. All these deficiencies, however, were soon got over; the business of sugar-making was carried on every year to a greater and greater extent; and many large fortunes were amassed by the planters in a wonderfully short time. The author of a pamphlet entitled "Trade Revived," published in 1659, speaks of Barbadoes as "having given to many men of low degree exceeding vast fortunes, equal to noblemen." He adds, that "upwards of a hundred sail of ships there yearly find employment, by carrying goods and passengers thither, and bringing thence other commodities; whereby seamen are bred and custom increased, our commodities vended, and many thousands employed therein, and in refining sugar therefrom, which we formerly had from other countries." Till this extended cultivation of sugar in Barbadoes, all of that article consumed in England had been obtained from the Portuguese territory of Brazil. Nor were the English in Barbadoes long in imitating their Portuguese rivals on the southern continent of America in another branch of trade which has darkened the history of the rearing of the sugar-cane wherever it has spread over those regions,—the importation of negroes from the opposite coast of Africa. The rapid increase, again, of the population of this and our other West Indian settlements thus produced soon created a large demand for necessaries of all kinds from England. While the trade, however, between the mother country and her colonies was still only growing up to this state, an ordinance of the Lords and Commons, in 1646, although acknowledging in the preamble that the several plantations of Virginia, Bermuda, Barbadoes, and other places of America had been very beneficial to the kingdom by the increase of navigation and of the customs arising from the import of the commodities of their growth, and thereupon continuing for three years longer the exemption from all duties except the new duty of excise which home produce and manufactures carried out to these plantations had hitherto enjoyed, imposed, for the first time, the important restriction that "none in any of the ports of
