Yarmouth

Yarmouth is a northern port, and no one now remembers when it was founded or when it recovered. It was a working harbour already of some weight by the time the colonial ventures began, one of the cities that, alongside London and Dover, put up money of its own for fortified compounds overseas, wherever a contract could secure fisheries, dyes, timber, minerals or salts. Those compounds were founded by cities and houses rather than by the Crown, and Yarmouth's share in them still pays.

The port lives on timber as much as on the sea. Spars and masts from the north come down the coast by way of Yarmouth, and the Kentish boat-builders, who cut their frames in the Weald where they can and buy their planking across the water, depend on it for the tall stuff. A Dover yard short of a mast is, in practice, waiting on a Yarmouth cargo. The city's own shipwrights are well regarded on their coast; the London writers like to observe that a Yarmouth improvement to a hull may be praised for ten years along that shore and become a national improvement only in the week a London yard takes it up and the London press reports it, which Yarmouth men find more irritating than flattering.

Its merchant houses trade south as well. They keep factors on the Near Coast and correspond with them by sealed commercial bags carried on the Dover packet under an arrangement older than the public post, opened by nobody but the houses themselves and full of bills, instructions and the gossip of the southern trade. The men who run Yarmouth's share of the compounds pass through the Near Coast harbours going out and coming home, and the syndics there treat them, with the Dover and London compound men, as the only Britannians on that coast worth taking seriously.

A company will meet Yarmouth chiefly at second hand: in a mast on a Dover packet, a bag in the sorting room, a compound officer on a southern quay. Those who go there find a port of spar-yards and timber wharves whose masters know the northern forests and the southern compounds equally well, and who hire bands for convoy and cargo watching on terms much like Dover's.