THE RESTORATION ERA 41
on the coasts of England and Scotland employs above
8ooo Dutch ships or vessels, 20,000 of their seamen and
fishers.” t ‘The fishing trade was the © principal gold-
mine of the United Provinces’ in virtue of its double
aspect. It was at once in itself a most lucrative
kind of industry and commerce, especially to the
Dutch, whose narrow borders on land obliged them
to look for riches to the sea ; and it was a calling of the
utmost importance for purposes of defence, a prolific
nursery of ships and sailors. The interdependence of
trade and sea power was well illustrated in the case of
the Dutch in the seventeenth century, but their fishing
industry was practically confined to European waters ;
they were not in evidence as fishers on the other side
of the Atlantic and on the Banks of Newfoundland.?
Here was the English nursery for ships and sailors, and
the opposition in England to permanent colonisation
of Newfoundland which, after the first few years of
spasmodic infant settlements, was strong and bitter,
was all in the direction of making the coasts and seas
of that island subordinate to considerations of English
sea power. But the controversy had not matured when
Mun wrote his treatise : there is no contrast between
permanent settlement and seasonal fishing in the fol-
lowing words. ‘Out fishing plantation likewise in
New England, Virginia, Greenland, the Summer
Islands, and the Newfoundland, are of the like nature,
affording much wealth and employments to maintain
\ Britannia Languens, or A Discourse of Trade, ete. (1680), p. 31.
* In Britannia Languens, however, pp. 168-9, there is mention of the
Dutch having beaten the English out of the Iceland. Newfoundland
and Greenland fishing.