We were talking about ships between England (Great Britain?) and Virginia and I thought I would give some indication of the number of them. Data was extracted from the Custom House Books to generate a report to King George I who had inherited a going business and he was wondering how it was going. (Whether records of the individual ships have been maintained is unknown.) The report was for the three-year period from Christmas 1714 (the year he came to the throne) to Christmas 1717. It was their custom in annual reports to use Christmas as the starting and ending dates, maybe because nothing much happened on that day.
In this three-year period, 340 ships cleared English ports for Virginia. This means that, on the average, about every three days a ship left England for Virginia. The distribution of departure dates through the year would not have been uniform. Many ships left England to arrive in Virginia to be ready to pick up tobacco to take back to England. Here in Pennsylvania, tobacco is drying right now in the barns, but it will be taken down very shortly. In Virginia, it would be packed into barrels or packed into containers for rolling to market. I would suspect that somewhere around our New Year, the tobacco might be ready to begin shipping. But the shipping continued throughout the year perhaps. Tobacco was stored and inspected at warehouses and the shipping of it might occur at various time through the year.
The weather, no doubt, influenced when many of the ships left England. From my personal experience in being on the Atlantic Ocean in the winter time, I would not want to schedule my trip for crossing the Atlantic in the winter. It was not a very pleasant time. Ships carrying passengers as their main cargo were the minority. Every ship could carry some passengers, but the ships that specialized in passengers generally sailed west in the summer months and arrived in the late summer or early fall. There were other factors influencing the choice of these dates, but the main one was the desire of the passengers to travel then. I think that one problem the First Colony had in finding a ship to take them to Virginia in the winter time was the lack of ships making the trip then.
Considering the average departure rate, the number of ships leaving England in June and July was probably one a day, the peak rate. Most of the ships were engaged in the tobacco trade, the item which dominated all trade with Virginia. Ships made only one round trip per year across the Atlantic Ocean
It might be of interest to know that two other colonies sent more goods to England than Virginia. The two were Barbados and Jamaica.
Ships coming and going did have notices in the newspapers. The Customs House may have records.
(20 Oct 03)
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