(Continuing with the story of the Bristol merchants.)
The intention in England was that raw materials would flow from Virginia (or the Colonies in general) to England while finished goods would flow back to Virginia. The Colonists were to be "drawers of water and hewers of wood". Tobacco and lumber would come to England and a variety of goods as illustrated in the previous note would go back.
Of British-owned vessels trading to Virginia between 1733 and 1766, London was the home port of more than half, Bristol of about a quarter, and Glasgow of a tenth. Early in the Eighteenth Century, Bristol was a leading importer of tobacco. In the 1720s, Glasgow expanded its share of tobacco trade. The Bristol merchants complained the Glasgow importers evaded the custom duties. By 1742, the ports as ranked by their tobacco imports were Glasgow, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Bristol, and London in fifth place. London still ranked number one for all trade.
As an interesting note on the tobacco trade, the Virginia shippers saw that if they stripped the center stem out of the tobacco leaf, they could pack more tobacco in a hogshead. At the same time, they would not have to pay freight and custom duties on the stems which were not used in the final products. The British government observed then that their import duties were falling because the weight of the imported tobacco was reduced. It outlawed the practice of stripping.
Care had to be taken in the shipping of tobacco to prevent its exposure to sea water, or dampness in general. It was not desirable to put the tobacco in the lowest parts of ships where water sometimes collected. Sometime rocks were used as ballast. During the 1720's, iron started to flow from Virginia to England. Iron was an almost ideal ballasting material because of its density, weight, and immunity to dampness, besides being freight for which a charge could be made. For example, the ship Greyhound in 1723 carried 10 tons of iron consigned by Alexander Spotswood to Charles Harford, a member of a prominent Bristol-based Quaker iron-merchant family. (It is of interest to note that the ship carried also 400 pounds of ivory from Africa and 72 tons of tobacco.) This 10 tons of iron in 1723 was a part of the early pig iron production of Virginia.
The first man to build an operating iron furnace in Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, did not have sufficient money to finance it. He needed partners to help with the financing. The merchant adventurers of Bristol appear to be a part of this. In Virginia, a major element of the cost of an "iron works" was the labor supplied by slaves who were needed to grow the food to support all of the workers, to make the charcoal for the furnace, to obtain the iron ore from the mine, and to cart the materials. That many slaves were involved is evident from Spotswood's statement that he had lost 80 slaves while he was in England. With this number of slaves, it would have been expected that when Spotswood paid for the Spotsylvania tract of land he would have used the head rights of the slaves. Instead, he paid with the head rights of 48 Germans and cash. One possible answer to this is that the slaves were not owned by him but instead they were owned by the Bristol merchants as their share of the partnership.
(12 Sep 04)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.