I am forwarding the following email I received in response to a
posting to the MARHST-L email list.

Paul
---
Paul R. Mitchell
New Rochelle, NY

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 17th century ports of origin
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 16:31:25 -0330 (NST)


Gentlemen, I've been reading with interest the thread on
MARHIST-L in
which you have participated, concerning seventeenth-century
English ports
engaged in trade with New York. I'd like to make a couple of
observations
that might be of some service to the discussion.

First, New York was a relatively small port in the seventeenth
century,
second to Boston and Philadelphia; it was only in the eighteenth
century
that New York began to develop significantly as a major colonial
port.
Even in the second half of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia
was still
preeminent, according to John McCusker and Russell Menard in _The
Economy
of British America 1607-1789_ (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 193. For
more on New
York's early history and emergence as a port, see chapter 9, "The
Middle
Colonies" of that book; see especially the many sources cited in
footnote
#4.

At the other end, yes, Bristol was a major port in the
seventeenth
century, but it was a very distant second to London even then.
According
to Ralph Davis, "London was by far the greatest of the English
seaports,
without a serious rival. Until far into the eighteenth century
the volume
of its foreign and coastal trade at least equaled that of all
other ports
together. ... London opened up the American and West Indian
colonies, and
for over half a century almost monopolized their trade, throwing
a meager
share to Bristol." See _The Rise of the English Shipping Industry
in the
17th and 18th Centuries_ (Newton Abbot, 1962), p. 34.

Kenneth Morgan confirms this picture in _Bristol & the Atlantic
Trade in
the Eighteenth Century_ (Cambridge, 1993). Table 1.2 on p. 17
describes
"Number and tonnage of ships entering selected British ports from
the
American mainland colonies, 1721-1730," and London consistently
dominates
the numbers, with more than double and sometimes triple the
number of
vessels as Bristol, and with an even greater proportion of the
tonnage
totals. Morgan's footnotes are also useful in pointing to more
specialized
studies that confirm London's preeminence. I do not have to hand
a copy of
David H. Sacks, _The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic
Economy,
1450-1700_ (Berkeley, 1991) but I am fairly confident that his
work will
confirm for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries what was an
established fact by the eighteenth -- London was the dominant
port in
England's overseas trade with the colonies generally, and with
the
emerging port of New York in particular, once New York was
acquired by
the English in mid-seventeenth century.

Sincerely,

Olaf Janzen
Corner Brook, Newfoundland