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And I'm in a ten times worse fix. I've chucked up a steamer-berth at Genoa; I'm on a God-forsaken island where there's next to no sea-traffic; and I've run up debts with no prospect of repayment. It looks a bit as if jail's somewhere very close under my lee. And whom have we to thank for it? Why you, my sportsman, and no one else." "Great heavens, what do you mean?"
Colbert made great efforts to develop the French navy, both the fighting and the merchant. "The sea-traffic of all the world," he wrote in 1669 to M. de Pomponne, then ambassador to Holland, "is done with twenty thousand vessels or thereabouts. In the natural order of things, each nation should have its own share thereof in proportion to its power, population, and seaboard.
The city, in fact, held within its warehouses the combined results of the taste, luxury, and necessities of the age, and was busied in exchanging them with the great trading towns of the low countries, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, the trade of the latter rising on the decline of that of old Nürnberg, whose inland position kept it far away from the sea-traffic which resulted from the discovery already alluded to.
The old Amsterdam Bank was transformed into a Bank of the Netherlands. A number of canals were planned and constructed. Chief among these was the North Holland Canal, connecting Amsterdam with the Helder. The approaches to Rotterdam were improved, so that this port became the meeting-point of sea-traffic from England and river-traffic by the Rhine from Germany.
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