I have never told this to David Williams, but his scholarship is the reason I decided to become a maritime historian, although I would not have used this particular term at the time. The chain of events goes something like this. As a new graduate student in the early 1970s, I was searching without a great deal of success for help in specifying the questions and methodologies for my thesis. I knew that I was interested in general terms in examining why Nova Scotia, alone among the predominantly Englishspeaking colonies in mainland North American, did not join the American Revolution, but I was at a loss as to how to launch the project. While the late John Bartlet Brebner's magnificent trilogy had already convinced me that it was possible to write colonial history that was relevant to scholars with broader interests, I still had a problem. Because I was interested in commerce, something that was peripheral to Brebner's interests, I was searching desperately for a model to help sharpen my questions. Moreover, because there were few private mercantile records extant for Nova Scotia in this period, and because the best available source for trade data was a set of shipping records (the Naval Officers’ returns), none of the previous approaches seemed to fit my needs. Fortunately, my thesis supervisor, Joseph Ernst, suggested that I read an essay in Mariner's Mirror by a young scholar at the University of Leicester. The article, of course, was David Williams’ marvellous “Bulk Carriers and Timber Imports: The British North American Timber Trade and the Shipping Boom of 1824-5,” which taught me a good deal about the role of transatlantic shipping and its symbiotic relationship with trade. I was even more thrilled when a literature search turned up “Liverpool Merchants and the Cotton Trade, 1820-50” and especially “Merchanting in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: The Liverpool Timber Trade” (both included in this volume). These latter essays used trade statistics in a sophisticated way and focussed on an entire merchant community, just as I knew I was going to have to do for Nova Scotia.