ship was built at New Amsterdam, and by the middle of that century
shipyards were scattered along the New England coast at Newburyport,
Salem, New Bedford, Newport, Providence, New London, and New Haven.
Yards at Albany and Poughkeepsie in New York built ships for the trade
of that colony with England and the Indies. Wilmington and Philadelphia
soon entered the race and outdistanced New York, though unable to equal
the pace set by New England. While Maryland, Virginia, and South
Carolina also built ships, Southern interest was mainly confined to the
lucrative business of producing ship materials: fir, cedar, hemp, and
tar.

=Fishing.=--The greatest single economic resource of New England outside
of agriculture was the fisheries. This industry, started by hardy
sailors from Europe, long before the landing of the Pilgrims, flourished
under the indomitable seamanship of the Puritans, who labored with the
net and the harpoon in almost every quarter of the Atlantic. "Look,"
exclaimed Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons, "at the manner in
which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale
fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice and
behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay
and Davis's Straits, while we are looking for them beneath the arctic
circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar
cold, that they are at the antipodes and engaged under the frozen
serpent of the south.... Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging
to them than the accumulated winter of both poles. We know that, whilst
some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of
Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic game along
the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No
climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of
Holland nor the activity of France nor the dexterous and firm sagacity