George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States, Vol. 1, 17th edition.

‘ [2] year embarked for Boston with fonts of letters for

Chap. X.}

printing, and a printer.’ He died on the passage; but in 1639, Stephen Daye, the printer, printed the Freeman's Oath, and an Almanac calculated for New England; and in 1640, ‘for the edification and comfort of the saints,’ the Psalms,—faithfully but rudely translated in metre from the Hebrew by Thomas Welde and John Eliot, ministers of Roxbury, assisted by Richard Mather, minister of Dorchester,—were published in a volume of three hundred octavo pages, the first ever printed in America, north of the Gulf of Mexico.

In temporal affairs, plenty prevailed throughout the settlements, and affluence came in the train of industry. The natural exports of the country were furs and lumber; grain was carried to the West Indies; fish also was a staple. The art of shipbuilding was introduced with the first emigrants for Salem; but ‘Winthrop had with him William Stephens, a shipwright who had been preparing to go for Spain, and who would have been as a precious jewel to any State that obtained him.’ He had built in England many ships of great burthen, one even of six hundred tons, and he was ‘so able a man, that there was hardly such another to be found in the kingdom.’ In New England he lived with great content, where, from the time of his arrival, shipbuilding was carried on with surpassing skill, so that vessels were soon constructed of four hundred tons. So long as the ports were filled with new comers, the domestic consumption had required nearly all the produce of the colony. But now, ‘supplies from England failing much, men began to look about them, and fell to a manufacture ’