"
trading contrary to the Navigation Acts; the owners of the logwood
ship _William and Nicholas_, also seized by Wheeler on suspicion that
it had obtained its lading in violation of the treaty of 1670 with
Spain; owners of the _Peter_, of London, seized by the Spaniards in
violation of the same treaty; Jamaica planters who claimed that Spain
had broken the clause of the treaty relating to logwood cutting at
Campeachy; one Mark Gabry, exporter of wool; merchants in Jamaica
complaining of the number of Jews there and their engrossment of trade;
inhabitants of Easthampton, Southampton, and Southold in Long Island in
regard to their whale fishery and their relations with the Dutch at New
Amsterdam; the government of Virginia against the Arlington and Culpeper
grant. The Council also discussed many other matters, all more or less
closely bound up with the welfare of the plantations and of plantation
trade, such as the despatch of their letters and orders; the proper time
for the sailing of merchant ships in order that advantage might be taken
of companies or convoys; the sugar question in the West Indies, notably
Barbadoes, that perennial cause of dispute from the point of view of
customs and impositions; the enticing or spiriting away of young people
from England to go as servants to the plantations, a grievance almost
as old as the plantations themselves and one which Ashley had made a
special subject of inquiry with the result that Parliament passed an
Act, March 18, 1670, making "spiriting" a capital offence; the fisheries
and the abuses in the Newfoundland trade; privateering, especially in
relation to the act of Governor Modyford in commissioning Capt. Morgan
to cruise against the Spaniards and to capture Panama; the slave trade
and the relations of the plantations with the Royal African Company;
and lastly, in obedience to the fourth article of its additional
instructions, the proper supplying of the West India colonies with such
commodities as silk, galls, spices, senna and other dyeing materials,
in order to see whether or not such things could be obtained from
the plantations, a subject upon which Dr. Worsley, who had already
experimented with senna, was deemed an authority.

The efficiency of the Council of Foreign Plantations and the
inefficiency of the Council of Trade during the same period may
well have led to the belief that the work would be better done if the
functions of the latter were transferred to the