discharge its cargo in the English dominions in Europe. This duty was to be paid in the medium of coin, bills of exchange with good security, or in commodities rated at an advance of only twenty-five per cent on the original cost. Persons who transported their tobacco in vessels belonging to Virginians were exempted from this imposition, the principal object of which exception was to encourage the inhabitants of the Colony to purchase vessels, as well as to make it to the interest of mariners to take up their residence there.[1] The provisions of this Act, unlike those of the Act of 1658, with which it is in many respects substantially identical, is expressed in general terms, and does not refer specifically to the traders of any foreign country; in the same year, however, the Assembly included the Dutch in their announcement that they would afford the amplest protection to the ships of all nations at peace with England arriving in Virginia, provided that they paid the impost of ten shillings which had been laid in 1658. This impost was to be reduced to two shillings upon every hogshead received in payment for slaves who had been acquired in exchange for tobacco.[2]
Whatever privileges of free trade had been enjoyed by the Virginians subsequent to their surrender to the Commissioners of Parliament in 1651, privileges which, in practice at least, appeared to spring chiefly from the laxness with which the Navigation Act was enforced in the time of Cromwell,[3] they were destroyed by the second Act of Navigation passed in 1660, one of the first laws adopted after the Restoration. The main object of the Act of 1651, as we have seen, was to promote the increase
