This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more
interested in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the
Great Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on
the Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trails
to the country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginia
had discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slave
labor to toil for them, and they were not compelled to turn to
the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander,
hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow
sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, was
between the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the
latter. Elsewhere in the colonies the forest was an enemy to be
destroyed with infinite pains. The New England pioneer regarded
it with favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and
step the straight masts in them.

And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its
course before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic
trade route, causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and
economist, to lament in 1668 that in his opinion nothing was
"more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother
kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies,
plantations, or provinces."

This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered
in almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova
Scotia to Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island
Sound. It was not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with