A Shoemakers’ Holiday

Through much of its history, Bristol had looked to the Atlantic for its fortune. Its sailors were already busy in Iceland’s waters at the beginning of the fifteenth century.¹ But until the mid-seventeenth century, their inner eye was always elsewhere. When they surveyed the ocean they saw either the fish they needed in their quest for the wealth of the Iberian and Mediterranean markets or the passage that would take them directly to the riches of the East. It was only in the 1620s and 1630s that the English settlements in the Americas began to produce goods that attracted Bristol’s