It was a maritime harvest unique and unexpected.
Yankee skippers were dominating the sugar trade of Cuba and were rolling across the Atlantic with the coffee, hides, and indigo of Venezuela and Brazil.

Their fleets crowded the roadsteads of Manila and Batavia and packed the warehouses of Antwerp, Lisbon, and Hamburg.

It was a situation which England could not tolerate without attempting to thwart an immense traffic which she construed as giving aid and comfort to her enemies.

Under cover of the so-called Rule of 1756 British admiralty courts began to condemn American vessels carrying products from enemies' colonies to Europe, even when the voyage was broken by first entering an American port.

It was on record in September, 1805, that fifty American ships had been condemned in England and as many more in the British West Indies.
This was a trifling disaster, however, compared with the huge calamity which befell when Napoleon entered Berlin as a conqueror and proclaimed his paper blockade of the British Isles.