Colony would be exchanged for the merchandise sent over, first by the Company, and afterwards, when the Colony required a greater volume of supplies than the Company could furnish, by private traders. The principal article to be exported to Virginia by England would be woollen goods. Captain Carlile, in his discourse upon the voyage to America projected by him in 1583, after dwelling on the natural advantages offered by that country to English merchants who would invest their capital in the enterprise in which he was interested, declared that the success of the proposed action signified “a very liberall utterance of our English clothes into a maine country described to bee bigger than all Europe, the larger part whereof bending to the Northward, shall have wonderful great use of our sayde English clothes after they shall come once to knowe the commoditie thereof.”[1]
Sir George Peckham, in enumerating the benefits to arise to the whole realm of England from the establishment of colonies beyond the Atlantic, wrote that it would be especially promotive of the trades of clothiers, woolmen, carders, spinners, weavers, fullers, shearmen, dyers, drapers, cappers, and hatters, and he predicted that the former prosperity of the towns now gone to ruin on account of the increased export of raw wool to continental Europe would be revived to its original proportions.[2] Ralph Lane, in his statement of the peculiar advantages which the country in the vicinity of Roanoke possessed, which should induce the English to colonize it, was care-
- ↑ Hakluyt’s Voyages, vol. III, p. 231.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 218. The same hope was entertained by the author of the Nova Britannia, who wrote many years later, “Cloth will always have to be brought from England. . . . When the colonies are well grown and the savages are brought to civilization, they will need a great abundance of cloth and this business will once more flourish in England.”
