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made their way to Philadelphia and Charleston (the nearest port). To the rebels with empty muskets, St. Eustatius made the difference.
    As a free port, Eustatius had reaped the profits both as marketplace and as storehouse where goods waiting sale or transshipment could be safely housed against predatory foreign fleets in search of loot.
    The measure of profit in the munitions traffic can be judged from the price of a pound of gunpowder, which cost 8.5 stivers of the local currency in Holland, and 46 stivers or almost five and a half times as much on Eustatius, because its proximity saved American customers time and the risks of a longer passage. Trade swelled to and from the Colonies. On a single day in March, 1777, four ships from the Colonies came via Statia into Amsterdam bringing 200 hogsheads of tobacco, 600 to 700 barrels of rice and a large shipment of indigo. An English customs officials in Boston recorded, “Daily arrivals from the West Indies but most from St. Eustatius, every one of which brings more or less of gunpowder.”
    The second factor in Statia’s golden growth came from her avoidance of the restrictive cult of mercantilism that prevailed among other nations.
    Mercantilism was born of the belief that national power depended on the accumulation of hard currency to pay for the era’s increasing costs of government and of maintaining armies and navies for constant conflict. In pursuit of the favorable balance of trade necessary to earn revenue, the mercantilist policy laid strict limits on imports of foreign and colonial goods and on the carrying trade of other nations. The rule applied to a nation’s own colonies, which were considered to exist to serve the prosperity of the mother country and were therefore prohibited from exporting manufactured articles that could compete with the mother country’s industries. Except for loot in wars and simple seizures of property from disestablished monasteries or expropriated Jews orfrom Spanish treasure ships carrying silver and gold from the New World, the excess of exports over imports was the only source of external revenue. Hence the century’s overriding and pervasive concern with trade.
    Subject to infinite variables of winds and currents, of supply and demand, of crops and markets, trade has a way of carving its own paths not always obedient to the mercantilist faith. The faith was embodied in Britain’s Navigation Act, enacted under Oliver Cromwell in 1651 in the interests of the rising middle class and the industrial towns and major trading ports—the so-called Cinque Ports, so long influential in British history. Aimed specifically at the Dutch to protect British trade against its most dangerous rival, the Act raised a wall of customs duties, and permitted transshipment of goods only in British bottoms calling at British ports. The natural result had been maritime war with Holland and bitter resentment of customs duties in the Colonies, feeding the spirit of rebellion which led to the American war. For Britain, the expense of fighting the Dutch and trying to suppress the American revolt was more costly than anything that could be gained by the trade laws, causing higher taxes at home and their natural consequence, a rise in domestic disaffection. That was not the least of Britain’s afflictions in her embattled time.
    The instinct of the Dutch for commerce early persuaded them that profits were more likely to come from a free flow of trade than from restrictions. Did something grow within the narrow limits of St. Eustatius that bred a greater need for open doors and looser rules? Whatever the reason, Statia became a free port in 1756 when she abolished customs duties in order to compete with St. Thomas, which had become her only trade rival in the Caribbean. From then on her prosperity flourished extravagantly. As the neighboring islands could not trade with each other in wartime when their principals were entangled in the various belligerencies of