As Southampton, Weymouth, Dartmouth, And Several Others Which
I Shall Speak To In Their Order; And If It Be Otherwise
At this
time, with some other towns, which are lately increased in trade
and navigation, wealth, and people, while their
Neighbours decay,
it is because they have some particular trade, or accident to
trade, which is a kind of nostrum to them, inseparable to the
place, and which fixes there by the nature of the thing; as the
herring-fishery to Yarmouth; the coal trade to Newcastle; the Leeds
clothing trade; the export of butter and lead, and the great corn
trade for Holland, is to Hull; the Virginia and West India trade at
Liverpool; the Irish trade at Bristol, and the like. Thus the war
has brought a flux of business and people, and consequently of
wealth, to several places, as well as to Portsmouth, Chatham,
Plymouth, Falmouth, and others; and were any wars like those, to
continue twenty years with the Dutch, or any nation whose fleets
lay that way, as the Dutch do, it would be the like perhaps at
Ipswich in a few years, and at other places on the same coast.
But at this present time an occasion offers to speak in favour of
this port; namely, the Greenland fishery, lately proposed to be
carried on by the South Sea Company. On which account I may freely
advance this, without any compliment to the town of Ipswich, no
place in Britain is equally qualified like Ipswich; whether we
respect the cheapness of building and fitting out their ships and
shallops; also furnishing, victualling, and providing them with all
kinds of stores; convenience for laying up the ships after the
voyage, room for erecting their magazines, warehouses, rope walks,
cooperages, etc., on the easiest terms; and especially for the
noisome cookery, which attends the boiling their blubber, which may
be on this river (as it ought to be) remote from any places of
resort.
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