Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/337

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AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
311

agricultural operations to the cultivation of English grain and vines.[1]

The shipments to the North were not confied to grain; the commissions granted to Nathaniel Basse and others, in 1631, instructed them to offer for sale in the coun- tries with which they were authorized to trade, cows, oxen. hogs, and goats at favorable rates.[2] Devries has recorded that, in 1633, he met Captain Stone making his way from Virginia towards New England, with a cargo of grain and young cattle;[3] a few years later, Samuel Maverick, of Massachusetts, visited the Colony, and purchased four heifers and eighty goats, which he conveyed to Boston in two pinnaces.[4] So numerous had the hogs, goats, and poultry become by the fourth year of Governor Harvey's administration, that the planters were able to furnish large supplies of meat to the crews of ships lying at anchor in the river.[5] The vessels engaged in the transportation of tobacco offered, even at this time, an important market, as may be inferred from the fact that they numbered from thirty to forty, manned by many sailors, the tomnage ranging from four hundred upwards.[6] When Devries arrived in the James, in the autumn of 1635, he found ihirty-six sail at Blunt Point alone.[7] At this time, pork

  1. Governor Harvey to Lords Commissioners, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. VI, No. 54; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1632, p. 35, Va. State Library.
  2. Randolph MSS, vol. III, p. 219.
  3. Devries' Voyages from Holland to America, p. 64.
  4. Neill's lirginia Carolorum. p. 131.
  5. New Description of Virginia, p. 4, Force's Historical Tracts, vol. II; Neill's Virginia Carolorum, p. 127, note.
  6. Devries' Voyages from Holland to America, p. 53.
  7. Ibid., p. 112. The number of ships leaving.James River for the port of London alone in 1636, with cargoes of tobacco, was twenty-one. British State Papers, Colonial, vol. IX, No. 9; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1636, p. 154, Va. State Library. The author of the New Description