[47] A comparison of the figures just quoted, as to the British West Indies, with Sheffield's Table VII., indicates that the trade of the Continent with the foreign islands about equalled that with the British. The trade with the French West Indies, "open or clandestine, was considerable, and wholly in American vessels."—Macpherson, vol. iii. p. 584.
[48] Sheffield, Commerce of the American States, p. 108.
[49] That is, for the navy.
[50] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 472.
[51] Macpherson, vol. iv. p. 11. The great West India cargo of 1772, an especial preserve of the Navigation Act, was carried to England in 679 ships, of which one-third were built in America.
[52] "The contraband trade carried on by plantation ships in defiance of the Act of Navigation was a subject of repeated complaint." "The laws of Navigation were nowhere disobeyed and contemned so openly as in New England. The people of Massachusetts Bay were from the first disposed to act as if independent of the mother country."—Reeves, pp. 54, 58. The particular quotations apply to the early days of the measure, 1662-3; but the complaint continued to the end. In 1764-5, "one of the great grievances in the American trade was, that great quantities of foreign molasses and syrups were clandestinely run on shore in the British Colonies."—p. 79.
[53] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 82.