of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hard
industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent
people."

The influence of the business was widespread. A large and lucrative
European trade was built upon it. The better quality of the fish caught
for food was sold in the markets of Spain, Portugal, and Italy, or
exchanged for salt, lemons, and raisins for the American market. The
lower grades of fish were carried to the West Indies for slave
consumption, and in part traded for sugar and molasses, which furnished
the raw materials for the thriving rum industry of New England. These
activities, in turn, stimulated shipbuilding, steadily enlarging the
demand for fishing and merchant craft of every kind and thus keeping the
shipwrights, calkers, rope makers, and other artisans of the seaport
towns rushed with work. They also increased trade with the mother
country for, out of the cash collected in the fish markets of Europe and
the West Indies, the colonists paid for English manufactures. So an
ever-widening circle of American enterprise centered around this single
industry, the nursery of seamanship and the maritime spirit.

=Oceanic Commerce and American Merchants.=--All through the eighteenth
century, the commerce of the American colonies spread in every direction
until it rivaled in the number of people employed, the capital engaged,
and the profits gleaned, the commerce of European nations. A modern
historian has said: "The enterprising merchants of New England developed
a network of trade routes that covered well-nigh half the world." This
commerce, destined to be of such significance in the conflict with the
mother country, presented, broadly speaking, two aspects.

On the one side, it involved the export of raw materials and