upon designs which, however hopeful in their character, required a special knowledge that they did not possess. In a subsequent letter, after mentioning that sixty or seventy pounds of silk were made in his own house, he asserts that the Colony would show an annual exportation of five hundred bales if experts from Sicily, Naples, or Marseilles were sent out by the English consuls residing in those places.[1] In answering the inquiries of the English Commissioners, he boldly complained that the inability to establish the silk industry in Virginia on a sound footing was due to the operation of the Navigation Act, which shut the people off from a direct trade with countries interested in the production of this commodity.[2] No fault could be found with him upon the failure of silk husbandry in the Colony, for not only did he seek to promote its growth by every form of official encouragement, but he even went so far as to express an intention of going in person to France and procuring the special experts who were needed.[3] Only two years after the premiums on silk were withdrawn on the ground that its culture did not now require to be fostered, the Assembly found that the interest in the industry was declining so rapidly in the absence of the specific inducements which had been recalled, that it was compelled to revive the large premium of fifty pounds of tobacco for every pound of silk produced.
In 1677, the year succeeding the uprising under the leadership of Bacon, Virginia was paying into the English
- ↑ Governor Berkeley to Committee for Trade and Plantations, June 20, 1671, British State Papers, Colonial Papers; Sainsbury-Abstracts for 1671, p. 174, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. II, pp. 515, 516.
- ↑ Governor Berkeley to the King, July 22, 1668, British State Papers, Colonial Papers; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1668, p. 137, Va. State Library.
