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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Old Merchant Marine, by Ralph D. Paine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Old Merchant Marine
+       A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in
+       the Chronicles Of America Series
+
+Author: Ralph D. Paine
+
+Editor: Allen Johnson
+
+Posting Date: February 12, 2009 [EBook #3099]
+Release Date: February, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's
+University, Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, and Carrie Lorenz
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE,
+
+A CHRONICLE OF AMERICAN SHIPS AND SAILORS
+
+By Ralph D. Paine
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I.    COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS
+     II.   THE PRIVATEERS OF '76
+     III.  OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD!
+     IV.   THE FAMOUS DAYS OF SALEM PORT
+     V.    YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES
+     VI.  "FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS!"
+     VII.  THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812
+     VIII. THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES"
+     IX.   THE STATELY CLIPPER AND HER GLORY
+     X.    BOUND COASTWISE
+
+     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS
+
+The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which
+seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A
+people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant
+supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of
+theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its
+swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every ocean,
+whose captains courageous from father to son had fought with pike and
+cannonade to defend the freedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a
+different destiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and rich
+cargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag.
+
+Vanished fleets and brave memories--a chronicle of America which had
+written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will be other
+Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like those when
+skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports mysterious and
+unknown.
+
+The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
+destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much to
+clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing settlement.
+Like the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had steered across to
+harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected to wrest a livelihood
+mostly from salt water. The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was
+that it offered a good harbor for boats and was "a place of profitable
+fishing." Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the
+wilderness and the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where
+they were soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the
+Kennebec colony.
+
+Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the Puritans who
+came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing carpenters and shipbuilders
+with them to hew the pine and oak so close at hand into keelsons,
+frames, and planking. Two years later, Governor John Winthrop launched
+his thirty-ton sloop Blessing of the Bay, and sent her to open "friendly
+commercial relations" with the Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the
+traffic was in furs and wampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem
+were not content to voyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled,
+adventurous seamen of them, and what they caught with hook and line,
+when dried and salted, was readily exchanged for other merchandise in
+Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe.
+
+A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives in the
+ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden schooners are
+fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker, took their pay
+in shares. They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who
+supplied stores and material; and when the ship was afloat, the master,
+the mates, and even the seamen, were allowed cargo space for commodities
+which they might buy and sell to their own advantage. Thus early
+they learned to trade as shrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage
+directly concerned a whole neighborhood.
+
+This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
+resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more interested
+in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the Great Lakes and in
+finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on the Hudson were similarly
+engaged by means of the western trails to the country of the Iroquois,
+while the planters of Virginia had discovered an easy opulence in the
+tobacco crop, with slave labor to toil for them, and they were not
+compelled to turn to the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New
+Englander, hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow
+sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, was between the
+devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere
+in the colonies the forest was an enemy to be destroyed with infinite
+pains. The New England pioneer regarded it with favor as the stuff with
+which to make stout ships and step the straight masts in them.
+
+And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its course
+before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic trade route,
+causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and economist, to lament in
+1668 that in his opinion nothing was "more prejudicial and in prospect
+more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in
+her colonies, plantations, or provinces."
+
+This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered in
+almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova Scotia to
+Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. It was
+not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with crews of trained
+artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log houses was the row of
+keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter weather too rough for
+fishing, when the little farms lay idle, this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades
+plied his axe and adze to shape the timbers, and it was a routine task
+to peg together a sloop, a ketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which
+to fare forth to London, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them
+not much larger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs
+at a liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the
+ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign merchantmen,
+while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer lines and less clumsy
+models to weather the risks of a stormy coast and channels beset with
+shoals and ledges. The square-rig did well enough for deepwater voyages,
+but it was an awkward, lubberly contrivance for working along shore,
+and the colonial Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat
+fore-and-aft sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which
+required fewer men in the handling.
+
+Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude beginnings
+foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which should one day
+comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the wind and the finest
+sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then these early vessels were
+conspicuously efficient, carrying smaller crews than the Dutch or
+English, paring expenses to a closer margin, daring to go wherever
+commerce beckoned in order to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.
+
+By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels
+were registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem already
+displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was to make
+her the most illustrious port of the New World. The first of her line
+of shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own ketch
+Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few
+years he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which
+traded coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados,
+St. Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading,
+flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by the Grace
+of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower.... and by God's Grace
+bound to Virginia or Merriland."
+
+No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to cross
+to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in the
+West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or Rhode
+Island. The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of commerce in
+Puritan New England and its golden gains and exotic voyages allured
+high-hearted lads from farm and counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built
+at Marblehead, returned from the West Indies and "brought some cotton
+and tobacco and negroes, etc. from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch
+of Manhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that the
+Incorporated West India Company should "allot to each Patroon twelve
+black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroes should be found."
+
+It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most needed
+and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the most
+lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in "rum
+and niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle
+Passage. The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home
+from Guinea in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise:
+"For never was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not
+ye like of ye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is
+full of them. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away,
+for I purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is very
+scarce. We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, so that
+ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is now forced to take any that
+comes. Here is seven sail of us Rum men that are ready to devour one
+another, for our case is desprit."
+
+Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture beyond all
+computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned by governments,
+at length rending the nation asunder in civil war and bequeathing a
+problem still unsolved--all this followed in the wake of those
+first voyages in search of labor which could be bought and sold as
+merchandise. It belonged to the dark ages with piracy and witchcraft,
+better forgotten than recalled, save for its potent influence in
+schooling brave seamen and building faster ships for peace and war.
+
+These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers so
+manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. It was not merely a
+matter of small vessels with a few men and boys daring distant voyages
+and the mischances of foundering or stranding, but of facing an
+incessant plague of privateers, French and Spanish, Dutch and English,
+or a swarm of freebooters under no flag at all. Coasts were unlighted,
+charts few and unreliable, and the instruments of navigation almost as
+crude as in the days of Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content
+with lurking in ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records
+of the First Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of
+July 25, 1677: "The Lord having given a Commission to the Indians to
+take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the
+men... it struck a great consternation into all the people here. The
+Pastor moved on the Lord's Day, and the whole people readily consented,
+to keep the Lecture Day following as a Fast Day, which was accordingly
+done.... The Lord was pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast
+Day which was looked on as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there
+had been 19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also a
+Ketch sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest of the
+Ketches. The Lord give them Good Success."
+
+To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and often
+more sordid than picturesque. Many of these sea rogues were thieves with
+small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter. They were of the sort that
+overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from Jamaica in 1718 when he
+reported his capture by one Captain Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns
+and 120 men who took him to Crooked Island, plundered him of various
+articles, stripped the brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go.
+In the same year the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola
+they met with pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off
+their mate because they had no navigator.
+
+Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped to filch
+the stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermen of Cape
+Sable. He had a sense of dramatic values, however, and frequently
+brandished his pistols on deck, besides which, as set down by one of his
+prisoners, "he had a young child in Boston for whom he entertained such
+tenderness that on every lucid interval from drinking and revelling, I
+have seen him sit down and weep plentifully."
+
+A more satisfying figure was Thomas Pounds, who was taken by the sloop
+Mary, sent after him from Boston in 1689. He was discovered in Vineyard
+Sound, and the two vessels fought a gallant action, the pirate flying
+a red flag and refusing to strike. Captain Samuel Pease of the Mary
+was mortally wounded, while Pounds, this proper pirate, strode his
+quarter-deck and waved his naked sword, crying, "Come on board, ye dogs,
+and I will strike YOU presently." This invitation was promptly accepted
+by the stout seamen from Boston, who thereupon swarmed over the bulwark
+and drove all hands below, preserving Thomas Pounds to be hanged in
+public.
+
+In 1703 John Quelch, a man of resource, hoisted what he called "Old
+Roger" over the Charles--a brigantine which had been equipped as a
+privateer to cruise against the French of Acadia. This curious flag of
+his was described as displaying a skeleton with an hour-glass in one
+hand and "a dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from
+it in the other." Quelch led a mutiny, tossed the skipper overboard, and
+sailed for Brazil, capturing several merchantmen on the way and looting
+them of rum, silks, sugar, gold dust, and munitions. Rashly he came
+sailing back to Marblehead, primed with a plausible yarn, but his men
+talked too much when drunk and all hands were jailed. Upon the gallows
+Quelch behaved exceedingly well, "pulling off his hat and bowing to the
+spectators," while the somber Puritan merchants in the crowd were, many
+of them, quietly dealing in the merchandise fetched home by pirates who
+were lucky enough to steer clear of the law.
+
+This was a shady industry in which New York took the more active part,
+sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravaged the waters of
+the Far East and made their haven at Madagascar, and disposing of the
+booty received in exchange. Governor Fletcher had dirtied his hands by
+protecting this commerce and, as a result, Lord Bellomont was named
+to succeed him. Said William III, "I send you, my Lord, to New York,
+because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down,
+and because I believe you to be such a man."
+
+Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd, respectable
+master mariner in the merchant service, was employed by Lord Bellomont,
+royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, to command
+an armed ship and harry the pirates of the West Indies and Madagascar.
+Strangest of all the sea tales of colonial history is that of Captain
+Kidd and his cruise in the Adventure-Galley. His name is reddened with
+crimes never committed, his grisly phantom has stalked through the
+legends and literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magic
+to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and headland
+from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were told, he never cut
+a throat or made a victim walk the plank. He was tried and hanged for
+the trivial offense of breaking the head of a mutinous gunner of his
+own crew with a wooden bucket. It was even a matter of grave legal doubt
+whether he had committed one single piratical act. His trial in London
+was a farce. In the case of the captured ships he alleged that they
+were sailing under French passes, and he protested that his privateering
+commission justified him, and this contention was not disproven. The
+suspicion is not wanting that he was condemned as a scapegoat because
+certain noblemen of England had subscribed the capital to outfit his
+cruise, expecting to win rich dividends in gold captured from the
+pirates he was sent to attack. Against these men a political outcry was
+raised, and as a result Captain Kidd was sacrificed. He was a seaman who
+had earned honorable distinction in earlier years, and fate has played
+his memory a shabby trick.
+
+It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonial
+pirates, who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewing
+wine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem
+more like hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlantic coast.
+Charleston lived in terror of him until Lieutenant Maynard, in a small
+sloop, laid him alongside in a hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off
+the head of Blackbeard to dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy.
+
+Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seaman more
+typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who became the first
+royal Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692. Born on a frontier
+farm of the Maine coast while many of the Pilgrim fathers were living,
+"his faithful mother," wrote Cotton Mather, "had no less than twenty-six
+children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to them all was
+William, one of the youngest, whom, his father dying, was left
+young with his mother, and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in Ye
+Wilderness until he was eighteen years old." Then he apprenticed himself
+to a neighboring shipwright who was building sloops and pinnaces and,
+having learned the trade, set out for Boston. As a ship-carpenter he
+plied his trade, spent his wages in the taverns of the waterside and
+there picked up wondrous yarns of the silver-laden galleons of Spain
+which had shivered their timbers on the reefs of the Bahama Passage or
+gone down in the hurricanes that beset those southerly seas. Meantime
+he had married a wealthy widow whose property enabled him to go
+treasure-hunting on the Spanish main. From his first voyage thither in a
+small vessel he escaped with his life and barely enough treasure to pay
+the cost of the expedition.
+
+In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richly ladened
+galleon which was said to have been wrecked half a century before off
+the coast of Hispaniola. Since his own funds were not sufficient for
+this exploit, he betook himself to England to enlist the aid of the
+Government. With bulldog persistence he besieged the court of James II
+for a whole year, this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster, until
+he was given a royal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up more
+silver from the sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other patrons
+to outfit him with a small merchantman, the James and Mary, in which he
+sailed for the coast of Hispaniola. This time he found his galleon and
+thirty-two tons of silver. "Besides that incredible treasure of plate,
+thus fetched up from seven or eight fathoms under water, there were vast
+riches of Gold, and Pearls, and Jewels.... All that a Spanish frigot was
+to be enriched withal."
+
+Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of
+1687, with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as her freightage
+of treasure. Captain Phips made honest division with his backers and,
+because men of his integrity were not over plentiful in England after
+the Restoration, King James knighted him. He sailed home to Boston, "a
+man of strong and sturdy frame," as Hawthorne fancied him, "whose face
+had been roughened by northern tempests and blackened by the burning sun
+of the West Indies.... He wears an immense periwig flowing down over
+his shoulders.... His red, rough hands which have done many a good day's
+work with the hammer and adze are half-covered by the delicate lace rues
+at the wrist." But he carried with him the manners of the forecastle,
+a man hasty and unlettered but superbly brave and honest. Even after he
+had become Governor he thrashed the captain of the Nonesuch frigate of
+the royal navy, and used his fists on the Collector of the Port after
+cursing him with tremendous gusto. Such behavior in a Governor was too
+strenuous, and Sir William Phips was summoned to England, where he died
+while waiting his restoration to office and royal favor. Failing both,
+he dreamed of still another treasure voyage, "for it was his purpose,
+upon his dismission from his Government once more to have gone upon his
+old Fishing-Trade, upon a mighty shelf of rock and banks of sand that
+lie where he had informed himself."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. THE PRIVATEERS OF '76
+
+The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the high
+seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century. Yet with an
+immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers increased their
+trade and multiplied their ships in the face of every manner of
+adversity. The surprising fact is that most of them were not driven
+ashore to earn their bread. What Daniel Webster said of them at a later
+day was true from the beginning: "It is not, sir, by protection and
+bounties, but by unwearied exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly
+and resolute spirit which relies on itself to protect itself. These
+causes alone enable American ships still to keep the element and show
+the flag of their country in distant seas."
+
+What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent eighteenth
+century may be inferred from the misfortunes of Captain Michael Driver
+of Salem. In 1759 he was in command of the schooner Three Brothers,
+bound to the West Indies on his lawful business. Jogging along with
+a cargo of fish and lumber, he was taken by a privateer under British
+colors and sent into Antigua as a prize. Unable to regain either his
+schooner or his two thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for
+home. Another owner gave him employment and he set sail in the schooner
+Betsy for Guadaloupe. During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and
+carried into port by a French privateer. On the suggestion that he might
+ransom his vessel on payment of four thousand livres, he departed for
+Boston in hope of finding the money, leaving behind three of his sailors
+as hostages.
+
+Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver
+turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag
+of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing to the ruffian
+who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He violently seized the
+innocent Mary and sent her into New Providence. Here Captain Driver
+made lawful protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with
+vessel and cargo--an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court
+of the Bahamas.
+
+Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois and
+rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the ransom
+money. As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French frigate
+snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw them ashore at
+Santiago, where for two months they existed as ragged beachcombers until
+by some judicial twist the schooner was returned to them. They worked
+her home and presented their long list of grievances to the colonial
+Government of Massachusetts, which duly forwarded them--and that was
+the end of it. Three years had been spent in this catalogue of
+misadventures, and Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless
+against such intolerable aggression. They and their kind were a prey to
+every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill his
+own pockets.
+
+Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these undaunted
+Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on blue water until
+shortly before the Revolution the New England fleet alone numbered six
+hundred sail. Its captains felt at home in Surinam and the Canaries.
+They trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and
+the North Sea or bargained thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of
+Nantucket, in their apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant
+seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay,
+Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar
+eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not
+a witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the
+activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever
+carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which
+it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it
+were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."
+
+In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which
+more than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there were one
+hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331
+barrels of oil valued at $358,200. In size these vessels averaged no
+more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered
+their way half around the watery globe and comfortably supported six
+thousand people who dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and having
+no other industries. Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share
+of the catch and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his own.
+
+Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable
+seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born
+Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war,
+Parliament flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of
+the fishermen who thronged the Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to forbid
+the colonies to export fish to those foreign markets in which every
+seacoast village was vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving
+the fishing fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob
+six thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin among
+the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which sailed
+hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This measure became law
+notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one peers of the realm who
+declared: "We dissent because the attempt to coerce by famine the whole
+body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces is without
+example in the history of this, or perhaps, of any civilized nation."
+
+The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without
+representation but whetted their anger with grudges more robust. They
+had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to
+Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue
+privateering commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up
+anchor and away to bag a Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled
+his arrival with a deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than
+he received orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for
+mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred eager
+privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous. The
+timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and nine-pounders,
+muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand
+grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and doubleheaded shot.
+
+In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and Baltimore,
+crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping recruiting
+officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied landsmen who had
+a mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious cause of their country
+and make their fortunes." Many a ship's company was mustered between
+noon and sunset, including men who had served in armed merchantmen and
+who in times of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or
+whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a
+race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering
+as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart
+square-riggers, their sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive
+to sea like hawks.
+
+In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd and
+sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard, mounting one
+or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold and glory, only
+to be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced to sight them.
+A few even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out
+of the first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases
+they actually did.
+
+The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the
+war than has been commonly recognized. This fact, however, was clearly
+perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator" candidly
+admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of
+assurances at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was
+able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred
+pennants were flying on our coast. Were we able to prevent their going
+in and out, or stop them from taking our trade and our storeships even
+in sight of our garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and
+Irish Channels, picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their
+prizes into French and Spanish ports to the great terror of our
+merchants and shipowners?"
+
+The naval forces of the Thirteen Colonies were pitifully feeble in
+comparison with the mighty fleets of the enemy whose flaming broadsides
+upheld the ancient doctrine that "the Monarchs of Great Britain have a
+peculiar and Sovereign authority upon the Ocean... from the Laws of God
+and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages
+past as that its Beginnings cannot be traced out." *
+
+
+    * "The Seaman's Vade-Mecum." London, 1744.
+
+
+In 1776 only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes were in
+commission, and this number was swiftly diminished by capture and
+blockade until in 1782 no more than seven ships flew the flag of the
+American Navy. On the other hand, at the close of 1777, one hundred and
+seventy-four private armed vessels had been commissioned, mounting two
+thousand guns and carrying nine thousand men. During this brief period
+of the war they took as prizes 733 British merchantmen and inflicted
+losses of more than two million pounds sterling. Over ten thousand
+seamen were made prisoners at a time when England sorely needed them for
+drafting into her navy. To lose them was a far more serious matter than
+for General Washington to capture as many Hessian mercenaries who could
+be replaced by purchase.
+
+In some respects privateering as waged a century and more ago was a
+sordid, unlovely business, the ruling motive being rather a greed of
+gain than an ardent love of country. Shares in lucky ships were bought
+and sold in the gambling spirit of a stock exchange. Fortunes were won
+and lost regardless of the public service. It became almost impossible
+to recruit men for the navy because they preferred the chance of booty
+in a privateer. For instance, the State of Massachusetts bought a
+twenty-gun ship, the Protector, as a contribution to the naval strength,
+and one of her crew, Ebenezer Fox, wrote of the effort to enlist
+sufficient men: "The recruiting business went on slowly, however, but
+at length upwards of three hundred men were carried, dragged, and driven
+abroad; of all ages, kinds, and descriptions; in all the various stages
+of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness;
+with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than
+described. Such a motley group has never been seen since Falstaff's
+ragged regiment paraded the streets of Coventry."
+
+There was nothing of glory to boast of in fetching into port some little
+Nova Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and potatoes, whose
+master was also the owner and who lost the savings of a lifetime because
+he lacked the men and guns to defend his property against spoliation.
+The war was no concern of his, and he was the victim of a system now
+obsolete among civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical
+age whose spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the
+Government of the German Empire. The chief fault of the privateersman
+was that he sailed and fought for his own gain, but he was never guilty
+of sinking ships with passengers and crew aboard, and very often he
+played the gentleman in gallant style. Nothing could have seemed to him
+more abhorrent and incredible than a kind of warfare which should drown
+women and children because they had embarked under an enemy's flag.
+
+Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it was a
+game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and the temptation
+is to extol their audacious achievements while glossing over the
+heavy losses which their own merchant marine suffered. The weakness
+of privateering was that it was wholly offensive and could not, like
+a strong navy, protect its own commerce from depredation. While the
+Americans were capturing over seven hundred British vessels during the
+first two years of the war, as many as nine hundred American ships were
+taken or sunk by the enemy, a rate of destruction which fairly swept
+the Stars and Stripes from the tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes these
+vessels were sold at Liverpool and London for an average amount of two
+thousand pounds each and the loss to the American owners was, of course,
+ever so much larger.
+
+The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of history
+to recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy, with blockading
+squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged armies on land which
+retreated oftener than they fought, private armed ships dealt the
+maritime prestige of Great Britain a far deadlier blow than the Dutch,
+French, and Spanish were able to inflict. In England, there resulted
+actual distress, even lack of food, because these intrepid seamen could
+not be driven away from her own coasts and continued to snatch their
+prizes from under the guns of British forts and fleets. The plight of
+the West India Colonies was even worse, as witness this letter from a
+merchant of Grenada: "We are happy if we can get anything for money by
+reason of the quantity of vessels taken by the Americans. A fleet
+of vessels came from Ireland a few days ago. From sixty vessels
+that departed from Ireland not above twenty-five arrived in this and
+neighboring islands, the others, it is thought, being all taken by
+American privateers. God knows, if this American war continues much
+longer, we shall all die of hunger."
+
+On both sides, by far the greater number of captures was made during the
+earlier period of the war which cleared the seas of the smaller, slower,
+and unarmed vessels. As the war progressed and the profits flowed
+in, swifter and larger ships were built for the special business of
+privateering until the game resembled actual naval warfare. Whereas,
+at first, craft of ten guns with forty or fifty men had been considered
+adequate for the service, three or four years later ships were afloat
+with a score of heavy cannon and a trained crew of a hundred and fifty
+or two hundred men, ready to engage a sloop of war or to stand up to
+the enemy's largest privateers. In those days single ship actions, now
+almost forgotten in naval tactics, were fought with illustrious skill
+and courage, and commanders won victories worthy of comparison with
+deeds distinguished in the annals of the American Navy.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD
+
+Salem was the foremost privateering port of the Revolution, and from
+this pleasant harbor, long since deserted by ships and sailormen, there
+filled away past Cape Ann one hundred and fifty-eight vessels of all
+sizes to scan the horizon for British topsails. They accounted for four
+hundred prizes, or half the whole number to the credit of American arms
+afloat. This preeminence was due partly to freedom from a close blockade
+and partly to a seafaring population which was born and bred to its
+trade and knew no other. Besides the crews of Salem merchantmen,
+privateering enlisted the idle fishermen of ports nearby and the
+mariners of Boston whose commerce had been snuffed out by the British
+occupation. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston sent some splendid
+armed ships to sea but not with the impetuous rush nor in anything like
+the numbers enrolled by this gray old town whose fame was unique.
+
+For the most part, the records of all these brave ships and the
+thousands of men who sailed and sweated and fought in them are dim and
+scanty, no more than routine entries in dusty log-books which read like
+this: "Filled away in pursuit of a second sail in the N. W. At 4.30 she
+hoisted English colors and commenced firing her stern guns. At 5.90 took
+in the steering sails, at the same time she fired a broadside. We opened
+a fire from our larboard battery and at 5.30 she struck her colors. Got
+out the boats and boarded her. She proved to be the British brig Acorn
+from Liverpool to Rio Janeiro, mounting fourteen cannon." * But now and
+then one finds in these old sea-journals an entry more intimate and
+human, such as the complaint of the master of the privateer Scorpion,
+cruising in 1778 and never a prize in sight. "This Book I made to keep
+the Accounts of my Voyage but God knows beste what that will be, for I
+am at this time very Impashent but I hope soon there will be a Change to
+ease my Trubled Mind. On this Day I was Chaced by Two Ships of War which
+I tuck to be Enemies, but coming on thick Weather I have lost site of
+them and so conclude myself escaped which is a small good Fortune in the
+midste of my Discouragements." * * A burst of gusty laughter still echoes
+along the crowded deck of the letter-of-marque schooner Success, whose
+master, Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his
+humdrum record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail
+ahead. Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of
+the Sail which appeared to be a damn'd Comical Boat, by G-d."
+
+
+    * From the manuscript collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
+
+
+    * * From the manuscript collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
+
+
+There are a few figures of the time and place which stand out,
+full-length, in vivid colors against a background that satisfies the
+desire of romance and thrillingly conveys the spirit of the time and the
+place. Such a one was Captain Jonathan Haraden, Salem privateersman, who
+captured one thousand British cannon afloat and is worthy to be ranked
+as one of the ablest sea-fighters of his generation. He was a merchant
+mariner, a master at the outbreak of the Revolution, who had followed
+the sea since boyhood. But it was more to his taste to command the Salem
+ship General Pickering of 180 tons which was fitted out under a letter
+of marque in the spring of 1780. She carried fourteen six-pounders and
+forty-five men and boys, nothing very formidable, when Captain Haraden
+sailed for Bilbao with a cargo of sugar. During the voyage, before his
+crew had been hammered into shape, he beat off a British privateer of
+twenty guns and safely tacked into the Bay of Biscay.
+
+There he sighted another hostile privateer, the Golden Eagle, larger
+than his own ship. Instead of shifting his course to avoid her, Haraden
+clapped on sail and steered alongside after nightfall, roaring through
+his trumpet: "What ship is this? An American frigate, sir. Strike, or
+I'll sink you with a broadside."
+
+Dazed by this unexpected summons in the gloom, the master of the Golden
+Eagle promptly surrendered, and a prize crew was thrown aboard with
+orders to follow the Pickering into Bilbao. While just outside that
+Spanish harbor, a strange sail was descried and again Jonathan Haraden
+cleared for action. The vessel turned out to be the Achilles, one of the
+most powerful privateers out of London, with forty guns and a hundred
+and fifty men, or almost thrice the fighting strength of the little
+Pickering. She was, in fact, more like a sloop of war. Before Captain
+Haraden could haul within gunshot to protect his prize, it had been
+recaptured by the Achilles, which then maneuvered to engage the
+Pickering.
+
+Darkness intervened, but Jonathan Haraden had no idea of escaping under
+cover of it. He was waiting for the morning breeze and a chance to
+fight it out to a finish. He was a handsome man with an air of serene
+composure and a touch of the theatrical such as Nelson displayed in his
+great moments. Having prepared his ship for battle, he slept soundly
+until dawn and then dressed with fastidious care to stroll on deck,
+where he beheld the Achilles bearing down on him with her crew at
+quarters.
+
+His own men were clustered behind their open ports, matches lighted,
+tackles and breechings cast off, crowbars, handspikes, and sponge-staves
+in place, gunners stripped to the waist, powder-boys ready for the word
+like sprinters on the mark. Forty-five of them against a hundred and
+fifty, and Captain Haraden, debonair, unruffled, walking to and fro with
+a leisurely demeanor, remarking that although the Achilles appeared to
+be superior in force, "he had no doubt they would beat her if they were
+firm and steady and did not throw away their fire."
+
+It was, indeed, a memorable sea-picture, the sturdy Pickering riding
+deep with her burden of sugar and seeming smaller than she really was,
+the Achilles towering like a frigate, and all Bilbao turned out to
+watch the duel, shore and headlands crowded with spectators, the blue
+harbor-mouth gay with an immense flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure
+craft. The stake for which Haraden fought was to retake the Golden
+Eagle prize and to gain his port. His seamanship was flawless. Vastly
+outnumbered if it should come to boarding, he handled his vessel so as
+to avoid the Achilles while he poured the broadsides into her. After two
+hours the London privateer emerged from the smoke which had obscured the
+combat and put out to sea in flight, hulled through and through, while
+a farewell flight of crowbars, with which the guns of the Pickering had
+been crammed to the muzzle, ripped through her sails and rigging.
+
+Haraden hoisted canvas and drove in chase, but the Achilles had the
+heels of him "with a mainsail as large as a ship of the line," and
+reluctantly he wore ship and, with the Golden Eagle again in his
+possession, he sailed to an anchorage in Bilbao harbor. The Spanish
+populace welcomed him with tremendous enthusiasm. He was carried through
+the streets in a holiday procession and was the hero of banquets and
+public receptions.
+
+Such a man was bound to be the idol of his sailors and one of them quite
+plausibly related that "so great was the confidence he inspired that if
+he but looked at a sail through his glass and told the helmsman to steer
+for her, the observation went round,'If she is an enemy, she is ours.'"
+
+It was in this same General Pickering, no longer sugar-laden but in
+cruising trim, that Jonathan Haraden accomplished a feat which Paul
+Jones might have been proud to claim. There lifted above the sky-line
+three armed merchantmen sailing in company from Halifax to New York, a
+brig of fourteen guns, a ship of sixteen guns, a sloop of twelve guns.
+When they flew signals and formed in line, the ship alone appeared
+to outmatch the Pickering, but Haraden, in that lordly manner of his,
+assured his men that "he had no doubt whatever that if they would
+do their duty he would quickly capture the three vessels." Here
+was performance very much out of the ordinary, naval strategy of an
+exceptionally high order, and yet it is dismissed by the only witness
+who took the trouble to mention it in these few, casual words: "This he
+did with great ease by going alongside of each of them, one after the
+other."
+
+One more story of this master sea-rover of the Revolution, sailor and
+gentleman, who served his country so much more brilliantly than many
+a landsman lauded in the written histories of the war. While in the
+Pickering he attacked a heavily armed royal mail packet bound to England
+from the West Indies, one of the largest merchant vessels of her day and
+equipped to defend herself against privateers. A tough antagonist and a
+hard nut to crack! They battered each other like two pugilists for four
+hours and even then the decision was still in the balance. Then Haraden
+sheered off to mend his damaged gear and splintered hull before closing
+in again.
+
+He then discovered that all his powder had been shot away excepting one
+last charge. Instead of calling it a drawn battle, he rammed home this
+last shot in the locker, and ran down to windward of the packet, so
+close that he could shout across to the other quarter-deck: "I will give
+you five minutes to haul down your colors. If they are not down at the
+end of that time, I will fire into you and sink you, so help me God."
+
+It was the bluff magnificent--courage cold-blooded and calculating.
+The adversary was still unbeaten. Haraden stood with watch in hand and
+sonorously counted off the minutes. It was the stronger will and not the
+heavier metal that won the day. To be shattered by fresh broadsides at
+pistol-range was too much for the nerves of the gallant English skipper
+whose decks were already like a slaughterhouse. One by one, Haraden
+shouted the minutes and his gunners blew their matches. At "four" the
+red ensign came fluttering down and the mail packet was a prize of war.
+
+Another merchant seaman of this muster-roll of patriots was Silas
+Talbot, who took to salt water as a cabin boy at the age of twelve and
+was a prosperous shipmaster at twenty-one with savings invested in a
+house of his own in Providence. Enlisting under Washington, he was made
+a captain of infantry and was soon promoted, but he was restless ashore
+and glad to obtain an odd assignment. As Colonel Talbot he selected
+sixty infantry volunteers, most of them seamen by trade, and led them
+aboard the small sloop Argo in May, 1779, to punish the New York Tories
+who were equipping privateers against their own countrymen and working
+great mischief in Long Island Sound. So serious was the situation that
+General Gates found it almost impossible to obtain food supplies for the
+northern department of the Continental army.
+
+Silas Talbot and his nautical infantrymen promptly fell in with the New
+York privateer Lively, a fair match for him, and as promptly sent her
+into port. He then ran offshore and picked up and carried into Boston
+two English privateers headed for New York with large cargoes of
+merchandise from the West Indies. But he was particularly anxious to
+square accounts with a renegade Captain Hazard who made Newport his base
+and had captured many American vessels with the stout brig King George,
+using her for "the base purpose of plundering his old neighbors and
+friends."
+
+On his second cruise in the Argo, young Silas Talbot encountered the
+perfidious King George to the southward of Long Island and riddled her
+with one broadside after another, first hailing Captain Hazard by name
+and cursing him in double-shotted phrases for the traitorous swab that
+he was. Then the seagoing infantry scrambled over the bulwarks and
+tumbled the Tories down their own hatches without losing a man. A prize
+crew with the humiliated King George made for New London, where there
+was much cheering in the port, and "even the women, both young and old,
+expressed the greatest joy."
+
+With no very heavy fighting, Talbot had captured five vessels and was
+keen to show what his crew could do against mettlesome foemen. He found
+them at last well out to sea in a large ship which seemed eager to
+engage him. Only a few hundred feet apart through a long afternoon, they
+briskly and cheerily belabored each other with grape and solid shot.
+Talbot's speaking-trumpet was shot out of his hand, the tails of his
+coat were shorn off, and all the officers and men stationed with him on
+the quarter-deck were killed or wounded.
+
+His crew reported that the Argo was in a sinking condition, with the
+water flooding the gun-deck, but he told them to lower a man or two in
+the bight of a line and they pluckily plugged the holes from overside.
+There was a lusty huzza when the Englishman's mainmast crashed to
+the deck and this finished the affair. Silas Talbot found that he had
+trounced the privateer Dragon, of twice his own tonnage and with the
+advantage in both guns and men.
+
+While his crew was patching the Argo and pumping the water from her
+hold, the lookout yelled that another sail was making for them. Without
+hesitation Talbot somehow got this absurdly impudent one-masted craft
+of his under way and told those of his sixty men who survived to prepare
+for a second tussle. Fortunately another Yankee privateer joined the
+chase and together they subdued the armed brig Hannah. When the Argo
+safely convoyed the two prizes into New Bedford, "all who beheld her
+were astonished that a vessel of her diminutive size could suffer so
+much and yet get safely to port."
+
+Men fought and slew each other in those rude and distant days with a
+certain courtesy, with a fine, punctilious regard for the etiquette of
+the bloody game. There was the Scotch skipper of the Betsy, a privateer,
+whom Silas Talbot hailed as follows, before they opened fire:
+
+"You must now haul down those British colors, my friend."
+
+"Notwithstanding I find you an enemy, as I suspected," was the dignified
+reply, "yet, sir, I shall let them hang a little bit longer,--with your
+permission,--so fire away, Flanagan."
+
+During another of her cruises the Argo pursued an artfully disguised
+ship of the line which could have blown her to kingdom come with a
+broadside of thirty guns. The little Argo was actually becalmed within
+short range, but her company got out the sweeps and rowed her some
+distance before darkness and a favoring slant of wind carried them
+clear. In the summer of 1780, Captain Silas Talbot, again a mariner by
+title, was given the private cruiser General Washington with one hundred
+and twenty men, but he was less fortunate with her than when afloat in
+the tiny Argo with his sixty Continentals. Off Sandy Hook he ran into
+the British fleet under Admiral Arbuthnot and, being outsailed in a
+gale of wind, he was forced to lower his flag to the great seventy-four
+Culloden. After a year in English prisons he was released and made his
+way home, serving no more in the war but having the honor to command the
+immortal frigate Constitution in 1799 as a captain in the American Navy.
+
+In several notable instances the privateersmen tried conclusions with
+ships that flew the royal ensign, and got the better of them. The hero
+of an uncommonly brilliant action of this sort was Captain George Geddes
+of Philadelphia, who was entrusted with the Congress, a noble privateer
+of twenty-four guns and two hundred men. Several of the smaller British
+cruisers had been sending parties ashore to plunder estates along the
+southern shores, and one of them, the sloop of war Savage, had even
+raided Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Later she shifted to the
+coast of Georgia in quest of loot and was unlucky enough to fall athwart
+Captain Geddes in the Congress.
+
+The privateer was the more formidable ship and faster on the wind,
+forcing Captain Sterling of the Savage to accept the challenge. Disabled
+aloft very early in the fight, Captain Geddes was unable to choose his
+position, for which reason they literally battled hand-to-hand, hulls
+grinding against each other, the gunners scorched by the flashes of the
+cannon in the ports of the opposing ship, with scarcely room to ply
+the rammers, and the sailors throwing missiles from the decks, hand
+grenades, cold shot, scraps of iron, belaying-pins.
+
+As the vessels lay interlocked, the Savage was partly dismasted and
+Captain Geddes, leaping upon the forecastle head, told the boarders to
+follow him. Before they could swing their cutlases and dash over the
+hammock-nettings, the British boatswain waved his cap and yelled that
+the Savage had surrendered. Captain Sterling was dead, eight others were
+killed, and twenty-four wounded. The American loss was about the same.
+Captain Geddes, however, was unable to save his prize because a British
+frigate swooped down and took them both into Charleston.
+
+When peace came in 1783, it was independence dearly bought by land and
+sea, and no small part of the price was the loss of a thousand merchant
+ships which would see their home ports no more. Other misfortunes added
+to the toll of destruction. The great fishing fleets which had been the
+chief occupation of coastwise New England were almost obliterated and
+their crews were scattered. Many of the men had changed their allegiance
+and were sailing out of Halifax, and others were impressed into British
+men-of-war or returned broken in health from long confinement in British
+prisons. The ocean was empty of the stanch schooners which had raced
+home with lee rails awash to cheer waiting wives and sweethearts.
+
+The fate of Nantucket and its whalers was even more tragic. This colony
+on its lonely island amid the shoals was helpless against raids by sea,
+and its ships and storehouses were destroyed without mercy. Many vessels
+in distant waters were captured before they were even aware that a
+state of war existed. Of a fleet numbering a hundred and fifty sail, one
+hundred and thirty-four were taken by the enemy and Nantucket whaling
+suffered almost total extinction. These seamen, thus robbed of their
+livelihood, fought nobly for their country's cause. Theirs was not the
+breed to sulk or whine in port. Twelve hundred of them were killed or
+made prisoners during the Revolution. They were to be found in the
+Army and Navy and behind the guns of privateers. There were twenty-five
+Nantucket whalemen in the crew of the Ranger when Paul Jones steered
+her across the Atlantic on that famous cruise which inspired the old
+forecastle song that begins
+
+    'Tis of the gallant Yankee ship
+    That flew the Stripes and Stars,
+    And the whistling wind from the west nor'west
+    Blew through her pitch pine spars.
+    With her starboard tacks aboard, my boys,
+    She hung upon the gale.
+    On an autumn night we raised the light
+    Off the Old Head of Kinsale.
+
+Pitiful as was the situation of Nantucket, with its only industry wiped
+out and two hundred widows among the eight hundred families left on the
+island, the aftermath of war seemed almost as ruinous along the whole
+Atlantic coast. More ships could be built and there were thousands of
+adventurous sailors to man them, but where were the markets for the
+product of the farms and mills and plantations? The ports of Europe had
+been so long closed to American shipping that little demand was left for
+American goods. To the Government of England the people of the Republic
+were no longer fellow-countrymen but foreigners. As such they were
+subject to the Navigation Acts, and no cargoes could be sent to that
+kingdom unless in British vessels. The flourishing trade with the West
+Indies was made impossible for the same reason, a special Order in
+Council aiming at one fell stroke to "put an end to the building and
+increase of American vessels" and to finish the careers of three hundred
+West Indiamen already afloat. In the islands themselves the results
+were appalling. Fifteen thousand slaves died of starvation because the
+American traders were compelled to cease bringing them dried fish
+and corn during seasons in which their own crops were destroyed by
+hurricanes.
+
+In 1776, one-third of the seagoing merchant marine of Great Britain had
+been bought or built to order in America because lumber was cheaper
+and wages were lower. This lucrative business was killed by a law which
+denied Englishmen the privilege of purchasing ships built in American
+yards. So narrow and bitter was this commercial enmity, so ardent
+this desire to banish the Stars and Stripes from blue water, that Lord
+Sheffield in 1784 advised Parliament that the pirates of Algiers and
+Tripoli really benefited English commerce by preying on the shipping of
+weaker nations. "It is not probable that the American States will have
+a very free trade in the Mediterranean," said he. "It will not be to the
+interest of any of the great maritime Powers to protect them from the
+Barbary States. If they know their interests, they will not encourage
+the Americans to be carriers. That the Barbary States are advantageous
+to maritime Powers is certain."
+
+Denied the normal ebb and flow of trade and commerce and with the
+imports from England far exceeding the value of the merchandise exported
+thence, the United States, already impoverished, was drained of its
+money, and a currency of dollars, guineas, joes, and moidores grew
+scarcer day by day. There was no help in a government which consisted of
+States united only in name. Congress comprised a handful of respectable
+gentlemen who had little power and less responsibility, quarreling among
+themselves for lack of better employment. Retaliation against England by
+means of legislation was utterly impossible. Each State looked after
+its commerce in its own peculiar fashion and the devil might take
+the hindmost. Their rivalries and jealousies were like those of petty
+kingdoms. If one State should close her ports is to English ships, the
+others would welcome them in order to divert the trade, with no feeling
+of national pride or federal cooperation.
+
+The Articles of Confederation had empowered Congress to make treaties of
+commerce, but only such as did not restrain the legislative power of
+any State from laying imposts and regulating exports and imports. If a
+foreign power imposed heavy duties upon American shipping, it was for
+the individual States and not for Congress to say whether the vessels of
+the offending nation should be allowed free entrance to the ports of the
+United States: It was folly to suppose, ran the common opinion, that
+if South Carolina should bar her ports to Spain because rice and indigo
+were excluded from the Spanish colonies, New Hampshire, which furnished
+masts and lumber for the Spanish Navy, ought to do the same. The idea of
+turning the whole matter over to Congress was considered preposterous by
+many intelligent Americans.
+
+In these thirteen States were nearly three and a quarter million people
+hemmed in a long and narrow strip between the sea and an unexplored
+wilderness in which the Indians were an ever present peril. The Southern
+States, including Maryland, prosperous agricultural regions, contained
+almost one-half the English-speaking population of America. As colonies,
+they had found the Old World eager for their rice, tobacco, indigo,
+and tar, and slavery was the means of labor so firmly established that
+one-fifth of the inhabitants were black. By contrast, the Northern
+States were still concerned with commerce as the very lifeblood of their
+existence. New England had not dreamed of the millions of spindles which
+should hum on the banks of her rivers and lure her young men and women
+from the farms to the clamorous factory towns. The city of New York
+had not yet outgrown its traffic in furs and its magnificent commercial
+destiny was still unrevealed. It was a considerable seaport but not yet
+a gateway. From Sandy Hook, however, to the stormy headlands of Maine,
+it was a matter of life and death that ships should freely come and
+go with cargoes to exchange. All other resources were trifling in
+comparison.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE FAMOUS DAYS OF SALEM PORT
+
+In such compelling circumstances as these, necessity became the mother
+of achievement. There is nothing finer in American history than the
+dogged fortitude and high-hearted endeavor with which the merchant
+seamen returned to their work after the Revolution and sought and
+found new markets for their wares. It was then that Salem played
+that conspicuous part which was, for a generation, to overshadow the
+activities of all other American seaports. Six thousand privateersmen
+had signed articles in her taverns, as many as the total population of
+the town, and they filled it with a spirit of enterprise and daring.
+Not for them the stupid monotony of voyages coastwise if more hazardous
+ventures beckoned and there were havens and islands unvexed by trade
+where bold men might win profit and perhaps fight for life and cargo.
+
+Now there dwelt in Salem one of the great men of his time, Elias Hasket
+Derby, the first American millionaire, and very much more than this. He
+was a shipping merchant with a vision and with the hard-headed sagacity
+to make his dreams come true. His was a notable seafaring family,
+to begin with. His father, Captain Richard Derby, born in 1712, had
+dispatched his small vessels to the West Indies and Virginia and with
+the returns from these voyages he had loaded assorted cargoes for Spain
+and Madeira and had the proceeds remitted in bills of exchange to
+London or in wine, salt, fruit, oil, lead, and handkerchiefs to America.
+Richard Derby's vessels had eluded or banged away at the privateers
+during the French War from 1756 to 1763, mounting from eight to twelve
+guns, "with four cannon below decks for close quarters." Of such a
+temper was this old sea-dog who led the militia and defiantly halted
+General Gage's regulars at the North River bridge in Salem, two full
+months before the skirmish at Lexington. Eight of the nineteen cannon
+which it was proposed to seize from the patriots had been taken from the
+ships of Captain Richard Derby and stored in his warehouse for the use
+of the Provincial Congress.
+
+It was Richard's son, Captain John Derby, who carried to England in the
+swift schooner Quero the first news of the affair at Lexington, ahead of
+the King's messenger. A sensational arrival, if ever there was one! This
+Salem shipmaster, cracking on sail like a proper son of his sire, making
+the passage in twenty-nine days and handsomely beating the lubberly
+Royal Express Packet Sukey which left Boston four days sooner, and
+startling the British nation with the tidings which meant the loss of an
+American empire! A singular coincidence was that this same Captain John
+Derby should have been the first mariner to inform the United States
+that peace had come, when he arrived from France in 1783 with the
+message that a treaty had been signed.
+
+Elias Hasket Derby was another son of Richard. When his manifold
+energies were crippled by the war, he diverted his ability and abundant
+resources into privateering. He was interested in at least eighty of the
+privateers out of Salem, invariably subscribing for such shares as might
+not be taken up by his fellow-townsmen. He soon perceived that many
+of these craft were wretchedly unfit for the purpose and were easily
+captured or wrecked. It was characteristic of his genius that he
+should establish shipyards of his own, turn his attention to naval
+architecture, and begin to build a class of vessels vastly superior in
+size, model, and speed to any previously launched in the colonies. They
+were designed to meet the small cruiser of the British Navy on even
+terms and were remarkably successful, both in enriching their owner and
+in defying the enemy.
+
+At the end of the war Elias Hasket Derby discovered that these fine
+ships were too large and costly to ply up and down the coast. Instead
+of bewailing his hard lot, he resolved to send them to the other side of
+the globe. At a time when the British and the Dutch East India companies
+insolently claimed a monopoly of the trade of the Orient, when American
+merchant seamen had never ventured beyond the two Atlantics, this was a
+conception which made of commerce a surpassing romance and heralded the
+golden era of the nation's life upon the sea.
+
+His Grand Turk of three hundred tons was promptly fitted out for a
+pioneering voyage as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Salem knew her as
+"the great ship" and yet her hull was not quite one hundred feet long.
+Safely Captain Jonathan Ingersoll took her out over the long road, his
+navigating equipment consisting of a few erroneous maps and charts, a
+sextant, and Guthrie's Geographical Grammar. In Table Bay he sold his
+cargo of provisions and then visited the coast of Guinea to dispose of
+his rum for ivory and gold dust but brought not a single slave back,
+Mr. Derby having declared that "he would rather sink the whole capital
+employed than directly or indirectly be concerned in so infamous a
+trade"--an unusual point of view for a shipping merchant of New England
+in 1784!
+
+Derby ships were first to go to Mauritius, then called the Isle of
+France, first at Calcutta, and among the earliest to swing at anchor off
+Canton. When Elias Hasket Derby decided to invade this rich East India
+commerce, he sent his eldest son, Elias Hasket, Jr., to England and the
+Continent after a course at Harvard. The young man became a linguist
+and made a thorough study of English and French methods of trade. Having
+laid this foundation for the venture, the son was now sent to India,
+where he lived for three years in the interests of his house, building
+up a trade almost fabulously profitable.
+
+How fortunes were won in those stirring days may be discerned from
+the record of young Derby's ventures while in the Orient. In 1788 the
+proceeds of one cargo enabled him to buy a ship and a brigantine in the
+Isle of France. These two vessels he sent to Bombay to load with cotton.
+Two other ships of his fleet, the Astrea and Light Horse, were filled
+at Calcutta and Rangoon and ordered to Salem. It was found, when the
+profits of these transactions were reckoned, that the little squadron
+had earned $100,000 above all outlay.
+
+To carry on such a business as this enlisted many men and industries.
+While the larger ships were making their distant voyages, the brigs and
+schooners were gathering cargoes for them, crossing to Gothenburg and
+St. Petersburg for iron, duck, and hemp, to France, Spain, and Madeira
+for wine and lead, to the French West Indies for molasses to be turned
+into rum, to New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond for flour, provisions,
+and tobacco. These shipments were assembled in the warehouses on Derby
+Wharf and paid for the teas, coffees, pepper, muslin, silks, and ivory
+which the ships from the Far East were fetching home. In fourteen years
+the Derby ships made one hundred and twenty-five voyages to Europe and
+far eastern ports and out of the thirty-five vessels engaged only one
+was lost at sea.
+
+It was in 1785 when the Grand Turk, on a second voyage, brought back
+a cargo of silks, teas, and nankeens from Batavia and China, that "The
+Independent Chronicle" of London, unconsciously humorous, was moved to
+affirm that "the Americans have given up all thought of a China trade
+which can never be carried on to advantage without some settlement in
+the East Indies."
+
+As soon as these new sea-trails had been furrowed by the keels of Elias
+Hasket Derby, other Salem merchants were quick to follow in a rivalry
+which left no sea unexplored for virgin markets and which ransacked
+every nook and corner of barbarism which had a shore. Vessels slipped
+their cables and sailed away by night for some secret destination with
+whose savage potentate trade relations had been established. It might
+be Captain Jonathan Carnes who, while at the port of Bencoolen in
+1793, heard that pepper grew wild on the northern coast of Sumatra. He
+whispered the word to the Salem owner, who sent him back in the schooner
+Rajah with only four guns and ten men. Eighteen months later, Jonathan
+Carnes returned to Salem with a cargo of pepper in bulk, the first
+direct importation, and cleared seven hundred per cent on the voyage.
+When he made ready to go again, keeping his business strictly to
+himself, other owners tracked him clear to Bencoolen, but there he
+vanished in the Rajah, and his secret with him, until he reappeared with
+another precious cargo of pepper. When, at length, he shared this trade
+with other vessels, it meant that Salem controlled the pepper market of
+Sumatra and for many years supplied a large part of the world's demand.
+
+And so it happened that in the spicy warehouses that overlooked Salem
+Harbor there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from Zanzibar,
+palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from Madagascar, whale
+oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg
+and cloves from Malaysia. Such merchandise had been bought or bartered
+for by shipmasters who were much more than mere navigators. They had to
+be shrewd merchants on their own accounts, for the success or failure
+of a voyage was mostly in their hands. Carefully trained and highly
+intelligent men, they attained command in the early twenties and were
+able to retire, after a few years more afloat, to own ships and exchange
+the quarterdeck for the counting-room, and the cabin for the solid
+mansion and lawn on Derby Street. Every opportunity, indeed, was offered
+them to advance their own fortunes. They sailed not for wages but for
+handsome commissions and privileges--in the Derby ships, five per cent
+of a cargo outward bound, two and a half per cent of the freightage
+home, five per cent profit on goods bought and sold between foreign
+ports, and five per cent of the cargo space for their own use.
+
+Such was the system which persuaded the pick and flower of young
+American manhood to choose the sea as the most advantageous career
+possible. There was the Crowninshield family, for example, with five
+brothers all in command of ships before they were old enough to vote and
+at one time all five away from Salem, each in his own vessel and three
+of them in the East India trade. "When little boys," to quote from
+the memoirs of Benjamin Crowninshield, "they were all sent to a common
+school and about their eleventh year began their first particular study
+which should develop them as sailors and ship captains. These boys
+studied their navigation as little chaps of twelve years old and were
+required to thoroughly master the subject before being sent to sea....
+As soon as the art of navigation was mastered, the youngsters were sent
+to sea, sometimes as common sailors but commonly as ship's clerks, in
+which position they were able to learn everything about the management
+of a ship without actually being a common sailor."
+
+This was the practice in families of solid station and social rank, for
+to be a shipmaster was to follow the profession of a gentleman. Yet the
+bright lad who entered by way of the forecastle also played for high
+stakes. Soon promoted to the berth of mate, he was granted cargo space
+for his own adventures in merchandise and a share of the profits.
+In these days the youth of twenty-one is likely to be a college
+undergraduate, rated too callow and unfit to be intrusted with the
+smallest business responsibilities and tolerantly regarded as unable
+to take care of himself. It provokes both a smile and a glow of pride,
+therefore, to recall those seasoned striplings and what they did.
+
+No unusual instance was that of Nathaniel Silsbee, later United States
+Senator from Massachusetts, who took command of the new ship Benjamin in
+the year 1792, laden with a costly cargo from Salem for the Cape of
+Good Hope and India, "with such instructions," says he, "as left the
+management of the voyage very much to my own discretion. Neither
+myself nor the chief mate, Mr. Charles Derby, had attained the age
+of twenty-one years when we left home. I was not then twenty." This
+reminded him to speak of his own family. Of the three Silsbee brothers,
+"each of us obtained the command of vessels and the consignment of their
+cargoes before attaining the age of twenty years, viz., myself at the
+age of eighteen and a half, my brother William at nineteen and a half,
+and my brother Zachariah before he was twenty years old. Each and all of
+us left off going to sea before reaching the age of twenty-nine years."
+
+How resourcefully these children of the sea could handle affairs was
+shown in this voyage of the Benjamin. While in the Indian Ocean young
+Silsbee fell in with a frigate which gave him news of the beginning of
+war between England and France. He shifted his course for Mauritius and
+there sold the cargo for a dazzling price in paper dollars, which he
+turned into Spanish silver. An embargo detained him for six months,
+during which this currency increased to three times the value of the
+paper money. He gave up the voyage to Calcutta, sold the Spanish dollars
+and loaded with coffee and spices for Salem. At the Cape of Good Hope,
+however, he discovered that he could earn a pretty penny by sending his
+cargo home in other ships and loading the Benjamin again for Mauritius.
+When, at length, he arrived in Salem harbor, after nineteen months away,
+his enterprises had reaped a hundred per cent for Elias Hasket Derby and
+his own share was the snug little fortune of four thousand dollars. Part
+of this he, of course, invested at sea, and at twenty-two he was part
+owner of the Betsy, East Indiaman, and on the road to independence.
+
+As second mate in the Benjamin had sailed Richard Cleveland, another
+matured mariner of nineteen, who crowded into one life an Odyssey of
+adventure noteworthy even in that era and who had the knack of writing
+about it with rare skill and spirit. In 1797, when twenty-three years
+old, he was master of the bark Enterprise bound from Salem to Mocha for
+coffee. The voyage was abandoned at Havre and he sent the mate home
+with the ship, deciding to remain abroad and gamble for himself with the
+chances of the sea. In France he bought on credit a "cutter-sloop"
+of forty-three tons, no larger than the yachts whose owners think it
+venturesome to take them off soundings in summer cruises. In this little
+box of a craft he planned to carry a cargo of merchandise to the Cape of
+Good Hope and thence to Mauritius.
+
+His crew included two men, a black cook, and a brace of boys who were
+hastily shipped at Havre. "Fortunately they were all so much in debt
+as not to want any time to spend their advance, but were ready at the
+instant, and with this motley crew, (who, for aught I knew, were robbers
+or pirates) I put to sea." The only sailor of the lot was a Nantucket
+lad who was made mate and had to be taught the rudiments of navigation
+while at sea. Of the others he had this to say, in his lighthearted
+manner:
+
+"The first of my fore-mast hands is a great, surly, crabbed, raw-boned,
+ignorant Prussian who is so timid aloft that the mate has frequently
+been obliged to do his duty there. I believe him to be more of a
+soldier than a sailor, though he has often assured me that he has been
+a boatswain's mate of a Dutch Indiaman, which I do not believe as he
+hardly knows how to put two ends of a rope together.... My cook... a
+good-natured negro and a tolerable cook, so unused to a vessel that in
+the smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding onto
+something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact that he is
+so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to
+him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro
+race... nor did I ever see such a simpleton. It is impossible to teach
+him anything and... he can hardly tell the main-halliards from the
+mainstay.
+
+"Next is an English boy of seventeen years old, who from having lately
+had the small-pox is feeble and almost blind, a miserable object,
+but pity for his misfortunes induces me to make his duty as easy as
+possible. Finally I have a little ugly French boy, the very image of a
+baboon, who from having served for some time on different privateers has
+all the tricks of a veteran man-of-war's man, though only thirteen years
+old, and by having been in an English prison, has learned enough of the
+language to be a proficient in swearing."
+
+With these human scrapings for a ship's company, the cutter Caroline was
+three months on her solitary way as far as the Cape of Good Hope, where
+the inhabitants "could not disguise their astonishment at the size of
+the vessel, the boyish appearance of the master and mate, and the queer
+and unique characters of the two men and boy who composed the crew." The
+English officials thought it strange indeed, suspecting some scheme of
+French spies or smuggled dispatches, but Richard Cleveland's petition
+to the Governor, Lord McCartney, ingenuously patterned after certain
+letters addressed to noblemen as found in an old magazine aboard his
+vessel, won the day for him and he was permitted to sell the cutter and
+her cargo, having changed his mind about proceeding farther.
+
+Taking passage to Batavia, he looked about for another venture but found
+nothing to his liking and wandered on to Canton, where he was attracted
+by the prospect of a voyage to the northwest coast of America to buy
+furs from the Indians. In a cutter no larger than the Caroline he risked
+all his cash and credit, stocking her with $20,000 worth of assorted
+merchandise for barter, and put out across the Pacific, "having on board
+twenty-one persons, consisting, except two Americans, of English, Irish,
+Swedes and French, but principally the first, who were runaways from
+the men-of-war and Indiamen, and two from a Botany Bay ship who had made
+their escape, for we were obliged to take such as we could get, served
+to complete a list of as accomplished villains as ever disgraced any
+country."
+
+After a month of weary, drenching hardship off the China coast, this
+crew of cutthroats mutinied. With a loyal handful, including the black
+cook, Cleveland locked up the provisions, mounted two four-pounders
+on the quarterdeck, rammed them full of grape-shot, and fetched up the
+flint-lock muskets and pistols from the cabin. The mutineers were then
+informed that if they poked their heads above the hatches he would blow
+them overboard. Losing enthusiasm and weakened by hunger, they asked to
+be set ashore; so the skipper marooned the lot. For two days the cutter
+lay offshore while a truce was argued, the upshot being that four of the
+rascals gave in and the others were left behind.
+
+Fifty days more of it and, washed by icy seas, racked and storm-beaten,
+the vessel made Norfolk Sound. So small was the crew, so imminent the
+danger that the Indians might take her by boarding, that screens
+of hides were rigged along the bulwarks to hide the deck from view.
+Stranded and getting clear, warding off attacks, Captain Richard
+Cleveland stayed two months on the wilderness coast of Oregon, trading
+one musket for eight prime sea-otter skins until there was no more
+room below. Sixty thousand dollars was the value of the venture when
+he sailed for China by way of the Sandwich Islands, forty thousand
+of profit, and he was twenty-five years old with the zest for roving
+undiminished.
+
+He next appeared in Calcutta, buying a twenty-five-ton pilot boat under
+the Danish flag for a fling at Mauritius and a speculation in prizes
+brought in by French privateers. Finding none in port, he loaded seven
+thousand bags of coffee in a ship for Copenhagen and conveyed as a
+passenger a kindred spirit, young Nathaniel Shaler, whom he took into
+partnership. At Hamburg these two bought a fast brig, the Lelia Byrd,
+to try their fortune on the west coast of South America, and recruited
+a third partner, a boyish Polish nobleman, Count de Rousillon, who had
+been an aide to Kosciusko. Three seafaring musketeers, true gentlemen
+rovers, all under thirty, sailing out to beard the viceroys of Spain!
+
+From Valparaiso, where other American ships were detained and robbed,
+they adroitly escaped and steered north to Mexico and California. At
+San Diego they fought their way out of the harbor, silencing the
+Spanish fort with their six guns. Then to Canton with furs, and Richard
+Cleveland went home at thirty years of age after seven years' absence
+and voyaging twice around the world, having wrested success from almost
+every imaginable danger and obstacle, with $70,000 to make him a rich
+man in his own town. He was neither more nor less than an American
+sailor of the kind that made the old merchant marine magnificent.
+
+It was true romance, also, when the first American shipmasters set foot
+in mysterious Japan, a half century before Perry's squadron shattered
+the immemorial isolation of the land of the Shoguns and the Samurai.
+Only the Dutch had been permitted to hold any foreign intercourse
+whatever with this hermit nation and for two centuries they had
+maintained their singular commercial monopoly at a price measured in
+terms of the deepest degradation of dignity and respect. The few Dutch
+merchants suffered to reside in Japan were restricted to a small
+island in Nagasaki harbor, leaving it only once in four years when the
+Resident, or chief agent, journeyed to Yeddo to offer gifts and most
+humble obeisance to the Shogun, "creeping forward on his hands and feet,
+and falling on his knees, bowed his head to the ground, and retired
+again in absolute silence, crawling exactly like a crab," said one of
+these pilgrims who added: "We may not keep Sundays or fast days, or
+allow our spiritual hymns or prayers to be heard; never mention the name
+of Christ. Besides these things, we have to submit to other insulting
+imputations which are always painful to a noble heart. The reason which
+impels the Dutch to bear all these sufferings so patiently is simply the
+love of gain."
+
+In return for these humiliations the Dutch East India Company was
+permitted to send one or two ships a year from Batavia to Japan and to
+export copper, silk, gold, camphor, porcelain, bronze, and rare woods.
+The American ship Franklin arrived at Batavia in 1799 and Captain James
+Devereux of Salem learned that a charter was offered for one of these
+annual voyages. After a deal of Yankee dickering with the hard-headed
+Dutchmen, a bargain was struck and the Franklin sailed for Nagasaki with
+cloves, chintz, sugar, tin, black pepper, sapan wood, and elephants'
+teeth. The instructions were elaborate and punctilious, salutes to be
+fired right and left, nine guns for the Emperor's guard while passing
+in, thirteen guns at the anchorage; all books on board to be sealed
+up in a cask, Bibles in particular, and turned over to the Japanese
+officials, all firearms sent ashore, ship dressed with colors whenever
+the "Commissaries of the Chief" graciously came aboard, and a carpet on
+deck for them to sit upon.
+
+Two years later, the Margaret of Salem made the same sort of a voyage,
+and in both instances the supercargoes, one of whom happened to be a
+younger brother of Captain Richard Cleveland, wrote journals of the
+extraordinary episode. For these mariners alone was the curtain lifted
+which concealed the feudal Japan from the eyes of the civilized world.
+Alert and curious, these Yankee traders explored the narrow streets of
+Nagasaki, visited temples, were handsomely entertained by officers and
+merchants, and exchanged their wares in the marketplace. They were as
+much at home, no doubt, as when buying piculs of pepper from a rajah of
+Qualah Battoo, or dining with an elderly mandarin of Cochin China. It
+was not too much to say that "the profuse stores of knowledge brought
+by every ship's crew, together with unheard of curiosities from
+every savage shore, gave the community of Salem a rare alertness of
+intellect."
+
+It was a Salem bark, the Lydia, that first displayed the American
+flag to the natives of Guam in 1801. She was chartered by the Spanish
+government of Manila to carry to the Marianne Islands, as those dots on
+the chart of the Pacific were then called, the new Governor, his family,
+his suite, and his luggage. First Mate William Haswell kept a diary in a
+most conscientious fashion, and here and there one gleans an item with
+a humor of its own. "Now having to pass through dangerous straits," he
+observes, "we went to work to make boarding nettings and to get our arms
+in the best order, but had we been attacked we should have been taken
+with ease. Between Panay and Negros all the passengers were in the
+greatest confusion for fear of being taken and put to death in the dark
+and not have time to say their prayers."
+
+The decks were in confusion most of the time, what with the Governor,
+his lady, three children, two servant girls and twelve men servants,
+a friar and his servant, a judge and two servants, not to mention some
+small hogs, two sheep, an ox, and a goat to feed the passengers who were
+too dainty for sea provender. The friar was an interesting character. A
+great pity that the worthy mate of the Lydia should not have been more
+explicit! It intrigues the reader of his manuscript diary to be told
+that "the Friar was praying night and day but it would not bring a
+fair wind. His behavior was so bad that we were forced to send him to
+Coventry, or in other words, no one would speak to him."
+
+The Spanish governors of Guam had in operation an economic system which
+compelled the admiration of this thrifty Yankee mate. The natives
+wore very few clothes, he concluded, because the Governor was the only
+shopkeeper and he insisted on a profit of at least eight hundred per
+cent. There was a native militia regiment of a thousand men who were
+paid ten dollars a year. With this cash they bought Bengal goods,
+cottons, Chinese pans, pots, knives, and hoes at the Governor's store,
+so that "all this money never left the Governor's hands. It was fetched
+to him by the galleons in passing, and when he was relieved he carried
+it with him to Manila, often to the amount of eighty or ninety thousand
+dollars." A glimpse of high finance without a flaw!
+
+There is pathos, simple and moving, in the stories of shipwreck and
+stranding on hostile or desert coasts. These disasters were far more
+frequent then than now, because navigation was partly guesswork and
+ships were very small. Among these tragedies was that of the Commerce,
+bound from Boston to Bombay in 1793. The captain lost his bearings and
+thought he was off Malabar when the ship piled up on the beach in the
+night. The nearest port was Muscat and the crew took to the boats in the
+hope of reaching it. Stormy weather drove them ashore where armed Arabs
+on camels stripped them of clothes and stores and left them to die among
+the sand dunes.
+
+On foot they trudged day after day in the direction of Muscat, and how
+they suffered and what they endured was told by one of the survivors,
+young Daniel Saunders. Soon they began to drop out and die in their
+tracks in the manner of "Benjamin Williams, William Leghorn, and Thomas
+Barnard whose bodies were exposed naked to the scorching sun and finding
+their strength and spirits quite exhausted they lay down expecting
+nothing but death for relief." The next to be left behind was Mr. Robert
+Williams, merchant and part owner, "and we therefore with reluctance
+abandoned him to the mercy of God, suffering ourselves all the horrors
+that fill the mind at the approach of death." Near the beach and a
+forlorn little oasis, they stumbled across Charles Lapham, who had
+become separated from them. He had been without water for five days "and
+after many efforts he got upon his feet and endeavored to walk. Seeing
+him in so wretched a condition I could not but sympathize enough with
+him in his torments to go back with him" toward water two miles away,
+"which both my other companions refused to do. Accordingly they walked
+forward while I went back a considerable distance with Lapham until, his
+strength failing him, he suddenly fell on the ground, nor was he able
+to rise again or even speak to me. Finding it vain to stay with him, I
+covered him with sprays and leaves which I tore from an adjacent tree,
+it being the last friendly office I could do him."
+
+Eight living skeletons left of eighteen strong seamen tottered into
+Muscat and were cared for by the English consul. Daniel Saunders worked
+his passage to England, was picked up by a press-gang, escaped, and so
+returned to Salem. It was the fate of Juba Hill, the black cook from
+Boston, to be detained among the Arabs as a slave. It is worth noting
+that a black sea-cook figured in many of these tales of daring and
+disaster, and among them was the heroic and amazing figure of one Peter
+Jackson who belonged in the brig Ceres. While running down the river
+from Calcutta she was thrown on her beam ends and Peter, perhaps dumping
+garbage over the rail, took a header. Among the things tossed to him as
+he floated away was a sail-boom on which he was swiftly carried out of
+sight by the turbid current. All on board concluded that Peter Jackson
+had been eaten by sharks or crocodiles and it was so reported when they
+arrived home. An administrator was appointed for his goods and chattels
+and he was officially deceased in the eyes of the law. A year or so
+later this unconquerable sea-cook appeared in the streets of Salem,
+grinning a welcome to former shipmates who fled from him in terror as
+a ghostly visitation. He had floated twelve hours on his sail-boom,
+it seemed, fighting off the sharks with his feet; and finally drifting
+ashore. "He had hard work to do away with the impressions of being
+dead," runs the old account, "but succeeded and was allowed the rights
+and privileges of the living."
+
+The community of interests in these voyages of long ago included not
+only the ship's company but also the townspeople, even the boys and
+girls, who entrusted their little private speculations or "adventures"
+to the captain. It was a custom which flourished well into the
+nineteenth century. These memoranda are sprinkled through the account
+books of the East Indiamen out of Salem and Boston. It might be Miss
+Harriet Elkins who requested the master of the Messenger "please to
+purchase at Calcutta two net beads with draperies; if at Batavia or any
+spice market, nutmegs or mace; or if at Canton, two Canton shawls of the
+enclosed colors at $5 per shawl. Enclosed is $10."
+
+Again, it might be Mr. John R. Tucker who ventured in the same ship one
+hundred Spanish dollars to be invested in coffee and sugar, or Captain
+Nathaniel West who risked in the Astrea fifteen boxes of spermaceti
+candles and a pipe of Teneriffe wine. It is interesting to discover what
+was done with Mr. Tucker's hundred Spanish dollars, as invested for him
+by the skipper of the Messenger at Batavia and duly accounted for.
+Ten bags of coffee were bought for $83.30, the extra expenses of duty,
+boat-hire, and sacking bringing the total outlay to $90.19. The coffee
+was sold at Antwerp on the way home for $183.75, and Mr. Tucker's
+handsome profit on the adventure was therefore $93.56, or more than one
+hundred per cent.
+
+It was all a grand adventure, in fact, and the word was aptly chosen to
+fit this ocean trade. The merchant freighted his ship and sent her
+out to vanish from his ken for months and months of waiting, with the
+greater part of his savings, perhaps, in goods and specie beneath her
+hatches. No cable messages kept him in touch with her nor were there
+frequent letters from the master. Not until her signal was displayed by
+the fluttering flags of the headland station at the harbor mouth could
+he know whether he had gained or lost a fortune. The spirit of such
+merchants was admirably typified in the last venture of Elias Hasket
+Derby in 1798, when unofficial war existed between the United States and
+France.
+
+American ships were everywhere seeking refuge from the privateers under
+the tricolor, which fairly ran amuck in the routes of trade. For this
+reason it meant a rich reward to land a cargo abroad. The ship Mount
+Vernon, commanded by Captain Elias Hasket Derby, Jr., was laden with
+sugar and coffee for Mediterranean ports, and was prepared for trouble,
+with twenty guns mounted and fifty men to handle them. A smart ship and
+a powerful one, she raced across to Cape Saint Vincent in sixteen days,
+which was clipper speed. She ran into a French fleet of sixty sail,
+exchanged broadsides with the nearest, and showed her stern to the
+others.
+
+"We arrived at 12 o'clock [wrote Captain Derby from Gibraltar] popping
+at Frenchmen all the forenoon. At 10 A.M. off Algeciras Point we were
+seriously attacked by a large latineer who had on board more than one
+hundred men. He came so near our broadside as to allow our six-pound
+grape to do execution handsomely. We then bore away and gave him our
+stern guns in a cool and deliberate manner, doing apparently great
+execution. Our bars having cut his sails considerably, he was thrown
+into confusion, struck both his ensign and his pennant. I was then
+puzzled to know what to do with so many men; our ship was running large
+with all her steering sails out, so that we could not immediately bring
+her to the wind, and we were directly off Algeciras Point from whence I
+had reason to fear she might receive assistance, and my port Gibraltar
+in full view. These were circumstances that induced me to give up the
+gratification of bringing him in. It was, however, a satisfaction to
+flog the rascal in full view of the English fleet who were to leeward."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES
+
+Soon after the Revolution the spirit of commercial exploration began
+to stir in other ports than Salem. Out from New York sailed the ship
+Empress of China in 1784 for the first direct voyage to Canton, to make
+the acquaintance of a vast nation absolutely unknown to the people
+of the United States, nor had one in a million of the industrious and
+highly civilized Chinese ever so much as heard the name of the little
+community of barbarians who dwelt on the western shore of the North
+Atlantic. The oriental dignitaries in their silken robes graciously
+welcomed the foreign ship with the strange flag and showed a lively
+interest in the map spread upon the cabin table, offering every facility
+to promote this new market for their silks and teas. After an absence
+of fifteen months the Empress of China returned to her home port and her
+pilgrimage aroused so much attention that the report of the supercargo,
+Samuel Shaw, was read in Congress.
+
+Surpassing this achievement was that of Captain Stewart Dean, who very
+shortly afterward had his fling at the China trade in an eighty-ton
+sloop built at Albany. He was a stout-hearted old privateersman of the
+Revolution whom nothing could dismay, and in this tiny Experiment of
+his he won merited fame as one of the American pioneers of blue water.
+Fifteen men and boys sailed with him, drilled and disciplined as if the
+sloop were a frigate, and when the Experiment hauled into the stream, of
+Battery Park, New York, "martial music and the boatswain's whistle were
+heard on board with all the pomp and circumstance of war." Typhoons
+and Malay proas, Chinese pirates and unknown shoals, had no terrors for
+Stewart Dean. He saw Canton for himself, found a cargo, and drove home
+again in a four months' passage, which was better than many a clipper
+could do at a much later day. Smallest and bravest of the first Yankee
+East Indiamen, this taut sloop, with the boatswain's pipe trilling
+cheerily and all hands ready with cutlases and pikes to repel boarders,
+was by no means the least important vessel that ever passed in by Sandy
+Hook.
+
+In the beginnings of this picturesque relation with the Far East, Boston
+lagged behind Salem, but her merchants, too, awoke to the opportunity
+and so successfully that for generations there were no more conspicuous
+names and shipping-houses in the China trade than those of Russell,
+Perkins, and Forbes. The first attempt was very ambitious and rather
+luckless. The largest merchantman ever built at that time in the United
+States was launched at Quincy in 1789 to rival the towering ships of the
+British East India Company. This Massachusetts created a sensation.
+Her departure was a national event. She embodied the dreams of Captain
+Randall and of the Samuel Shaw who had gone as supercargo in the Empress
+of China. They formed a partnership and were able to find the necessary
+capital.
+
+This six-hundred-ton ship loomed huge in the ayes of the crowds which
+visited her. She was in fact no larger than such four-masted coasting
+schooners as claw around Hatteras with deck-loads of Georgia pine or
+fill with coal for down East, and manage it comfortably with seven or
+eight men for a crew. The Massachusetts, however, sailed in 411 the
+old-fashioned state and dignity of a master, four mates, a purser,
+surgeon, carpenter, gunner, four quartermasters, three midshipmen, a
+cooper, two cooks, a steward, and fifty seamen. The second officer was
+Amasa Delano, a man even more remarkable than the ship, who wandered far
+and wide and wrote a fascinating book about his voyages, a classic of
+its kind, the memoirs of an American merchant mariner of a breed long
+since extinct.
+
+While the Massachusetts was fitting out at Boston, one small annoyance
+ruffled the auspicious undertaking. Three different crews were signed
+before a full complement could be persuaded to tarry in the forecastle.
+The trouble was caused by a fortune-teller of Lynn, Moll Pitcher by
+name, who predicted disaster for the ship. Now every honest sailor knows
+that certain superstitions are gospel fact, such as the bad luck brought
+by a cross-eyed Finn, a black cat, or going to sea on Friday, and
+these eighteenth century shellbacks must not be too severely chided for
+deserting while they had the chance. As it turned out, the voyage did
+have a sorry ending and death overtook an astonishingly large number of
+the ship's people.
+
+Though she had been designed and built by master craftsmen of New
+England who knew their trade surpassingly well, it was discovered when
+the ship arrived at Canton that her timbers were already rotting. They
+were of white oak which had been put into her green instead of properly
+seasoned. This blunder wrecked the hopes of her owners. To cap it, the
+cargo of masts and spars had also been stowed while wet and covered
+with mud and ice, and the hatches had been battened. As a result the
+air became so foul with decay that several hundred barrels of beef were
+spoiled. To repair the ship was beyond the means of Captain Randall
+and Samuel Shaw, and reluctantly they sold her to the Danish East India
+Company at a heavy loss. Nothing could have been more unexpected than to
+find that, for once, the experienced shipbuilders had been guilty of a
+miscalculation.
+
+The crew scattered, and perhaps the prediction of the fortune-teller of
+Lynn followed their roving courses, for when Captain Amasa Delano tried
+to trace them a few years later, he jotted down such obituaries as these
+on the list of names:
+
+ "John Harris. A slave in Algiers at last accounts.
+  Roger Dyer. Died and thrown overboard off Cape Horn.
+  William Williams. Lost overboard off Japan.
+  James Crowley. Murdered by the Chinese near Macao.
+  John Johnson. Died on board an English Indiaman.
+  Seth Stowell. Was drowned at Whampoa in 1790.
+  Jeremiah Chace. Died with the small-pox at Whampoa in 1791.
+  Humphrey Chadburn. Shot and died at Whampoa in 1791.
+  Samuel Tripe. Drowned off Java Head in 1790.
+  James Stackpole. Murdered by the Chinese.
+  Nicholas Nicholson. Died with the leprosy at Macao.
+  William Murphy. Killed by Chinese pirates.
+  Larry Conner. Killed at sea."
+
+There were more of these gruesome items--so many of them that it appears
+as though no more than a handful of this stalwart crew survived the
+Massachusetts by a dozen years. Incredible as it sounds, Captain
+Delano's roster accounted for fifty of them as dead while he was still
+in the prime of life, and most of them had been snuffed out by violence.
+As for his own career, it was overcast by no such unlucky star, and he
+passed unscathed through all the hazards and vicissitudes that could
+be encountered in that rugged and heroic era of endeavor. Set adrift in
+Canton when the Massachusetts was sold, he promptly turned his hand to
+repairing a large Danish ship which had been wrecked by storm, and he
+virtually rebuilt her to the great satisfaction of the owners.
+
+Thence, with money in his pocket, young Delano went to Macao, where
+he fell in with Commodore John McClure of the English Navy, who was
+in command of an expedition setting out to explore a part of the South
+Seas, including the Pelew Islands, New Guinea, New Holland, and the
+Spice Islands. The Englishman liked this resourceful Yankee seaman and
+did him the honor to say, recalls Delano, "that he considered I should
+be a very useful man to him as a seaman, an officer, or a shipbuilder;
+and if it was agreeable to me to go on board the Panther with him, I
+should receive the some pay and emoluments with his lieutenants and
+astronomers." A signal honor it was at a time when no love was lost
+between British and American seafarers who had so recently fought each
+other afloat.
+
+And so Amasa Delano embarked as a lieutenant of the Bombay Marine, to
+explore tropic harbors and goons until then unmapped and to parley with
+dusky kings. Commodore McClure, diplomatic and humane, had almost no
+trouble with the untutored islanders, except on the coast of New Guinea,
+where the Panther was attacked by a swarm of canoes and the surgeon was
+killed. It was a spirited little affair, four-foot arrows pelting like
+hail across the deck, a cannon hurling grapeshot from the taffrail,
+Amasa Delano hit in the chest and pulling out the arrow to jump to his
+duty again.
+
+Only a few years earlier the mutineers of the Bounty had established
+themselves on Pitcairn Island, and Delano was able to compile the first
+complete narrative of this extraordinary colony, which governed itself
+in the light of the primitive Christian virtues. There was profound
+wisdom in the comment of Amasa Delano: "While the present natural,
+simple, and affectionate character prevails among these descendants
+of the mutineers, they will be delightful to our minds, they will be
+amiable and acceptable in the sight of God, and they will be useful
+and happy among themselves. Let it be our fervent prayer that neither
+canting and hypocritical emissaries from schools of artificial theology
+on the one hand, nor sensual and licentious crews and adventurers on the
+other, may ever enter the charming village of Pitcairn to give disease
+to the minds or the bodies of the unsuspecting inhabitants."
+
+Two years of this intensely romantic existence, and Delano started
+homeward. But there was a chance of profit at Mauritius, and there he
+bought a tremendous East Indiaman of fourteen hundred tons as a joint
+venture with a Captain Stewart and put a crew of a hundred and fifty men
+on board. She had been brought in by a French privateer and Delano was
+moved to remark, with an indignation which was much in advance of his
+times: "Privateering is entirely at variance with the first principle of
+honorable warfare.... This system of licensed robbery enables a wicked
+and mercenary man to insult and injure even neutral friends on the
+ocean; and when he meets an honest sailor who may have all his earnings
+on board his ship but who carries an enemy's flag, he plunders him of
+every cent and leaves him the poor consolation that it is done according
+to law.... When the Malay subjects of Abba Thule cut down the cocoanut
+trees of an enemy, in the spirit of private revenge, he asked them why
+they acted in opposition to the principles on which they knew he always
+made and conducted a war. They answered, and let the reason make us
+humble, 'The English do so.'"
+
+In his grand East Indiaman young Captain Delano traded on the coast of
+India but soon came to grief. The enterprise had been too large for him
+to swing with what cash and credit he could muster, and the ship was
+sold from under him to pay her debts. Again on the beach, with one
+solitary gold moidore in his purse, he found a friendly American skipper
+who offered him a passage to Philadelphia, which he accepted with the
+pious reflection that, although his mind was wounded and mortified by
+the financial disaster, his motives had been perfectly pure and honest.
+He never saw his native land with so little pleasure as on this return
+to it, he assures us, and the shore on which he would have leaped with
+delight was covered with gloom and sadness.
+
+Now what makes it so well worth while to sketch in brief outline the
+careers of one and another of these bygone shipmasters is that they
+accurately reflected the genius and the temper of their generation.
+There was, in truth, no such word as failure in their lexicon. It is
+this quality that appeals to us beyond all else. Thrown on their beam
+ends, they were presently planning something else, eager to shake dice
+with destiny and with courage unbroken. It was so with Amasa Delano, who
+promptly went to work "with what spirits I could revive within me. After
+a time they returned to their former elasticity."
+
+He obtained a position as master builder in a shipyard, saved some
+money, borrowed more, and with one of his brothers was soon blithely
+building a vessel of two hundred tons for a voyage into the Pacific
+and to the northwest coast after seals. They sailed along Patagonia and
+found much to interest them, dodged in and out of the ports of Chili and
+Peru, and incidentally recaptured a Spanish ship which was in the hands
+of the slaves who formed her cargo.
+
+This was all in the day's work and happened at the island of Santa
+Maria, not far from Juan Fernandez, where Captain Delano's Perseverance
+found the high-pooped Tryal in a desperate state. Spanish sailors who
+had survived the massacre were leaping overboard or scrambling up to the
+mastheads while the African savages capered on deck and flourished their
+weapons. Captain Delano liked neither the Spaniard nor the slavetrade,
+but it was his duty to help fellow seamen in distress; so he cleared
+for action and ordered two boats away to attend to the matter. The chief
+mate, Rufus Low, was in charge, and a gallant sailor he showed himself.
+They had to climb the high sides of the Tryal and carry, in hand-to-hand
+conflict, the barricades of water-casks and bales of matting which the
+slaves had built across the deck. There was no hanging back, and even
+a mite of a midshipman from Boston pranced into it with his dirk. The
+negroes were well armed and fought ferociously. The mate was seriously
+wounded, four seamen were stabbed, the Spanish first mate had two musket
+balls in him, and a passenger was killed in the fray.
+
+Having driven the slaves below and battened them down, the American
+party returned next morning to put the irons on them. A horrid sight
+confronted them. Thirsting for vengeance, the Spanish sailors had
+spread-eagled several of the negroes to ringbolts in the deck and were
+shaving the living flesh from them with razor-edged boarding lances.
+Captain Delano thereupon disarmed these brutes and locked them up in
+their turn, taking possession of the ship until he could restore order.
+The sequel was that he received the august thanks of the Viceroy of
+Chili and a gold medal from His Catholic Majesty. As was the custom, the
+guilty slaves, poor wretches, were condemned to be dragged to the gibbet
+at the tails of mules, to be hanged, their bodies burned, and their
+heads stuck upon poles in the plaza.
+
+It was while in this Chilean port of Talcahuano that Amasa Delano heard
+the tale of the British whaler which had sailed just before his arrival.
+He tells it so well that I am tempted to quote it as a generous tribute
+to a sailor of a rival race. After all, they were sprung from a common
+stock and blood was thicker than water. Besides, it is the sort of
+yarn that ought to be dragged to the light of day from its musty burial
+between the covers of Delano's rare and ancient "Voyages and Travels."
+
+The whaler Betsy, it seems, went in and anchored under the guns of the
+forts to seek provisions and make repairs. The captain went ashore
+to interview the officials, leaving word that no Spaniards should be
+allowed to come aboard because of the bad feeling against the English.
+Three or four large boats filled with troops presently veered alongside
+and were ordered to keep clear. This command was resented, and the
+troops opened fire, followed by the forts. Now for the deed of a man
+with his two feet under him.
+
+"The chief officer of the Betsy whose name was Hudson, a man of
+extraordinary bravery, cut his cable and his ship swung the wrong way,
+with her head in shore, passing close to several Spanish ships which,
+with every vessel in the harbor that could bring a gun to bear, together
+with three hundred soldiers in boats and on ship's decks and the two
+batteries, all kept up a constant fire on him. The wind was light,
+nearly a calm. The shot flew so thick that it was difficult for him to
+make sail, some part of the rigging being cut away every minute.
+
+"He kept his men at the guns, and when the ship swung her broadside so
+as to bear upon any of the Spanish ships, he kept up a fire at them. In
+this situation the brave fellow continued to lie for three-quarters of
+an hour before he got his topsails sheeted home. The action continued
+in this manner for near an hour and a half. He succeeded in getting the
+ship to sea, however, in defiance of all the force that could be brought
+against him. The ship was very much cut to pieces in sails, rigging, and
+hull; and a considerable number of men were killed and wounded on board.
+
+"Hudson kept flying from one part of the deck to the other during the
+whole time of action, encouraging and threatening the men as occasion
+required. He kept a musket in his hand most part of the time, firing
+when he could find the leisure. Some of the men came aft and begged him
+to give up the ship, telling him they should all be killed--that the
+carpenter had all one side of him shot away--that one man was cut in
+halves with a double-headed shot as he was going aloft to loose the
+foretopsail and the body had fallen on deck in two separate parts--that
+such a man was killed at his duty on the forecastle, and one more had
+been killed in the maintop--that Sam, Jim, Jack, and Tom were wounded
+and that they would do nothing more towards getting the ship out of the
+harbor.
+
+"His reply to them was, 'then you shall be sure to die, for if they
+do not kill you I will, so sure as you persist in any such cowardly
+resolution,' saying at the same time, 'OUT SHE GOES, OR DOWN SHE GOES.'"
+
+By this resolute and determined conduct he kept the men to their duty
+and succeeded in accomplishing one of the most daring enterprises
+perhaps ever attempted.
+
+An immortal phrase, this simple dictum of first mate Hudson of the
+Betsy, "Out she goes, or down she goes," and not unworthy of being
+mentioned in the same breath with Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes."
+
+Joined by his brother Samuel in the schooner Pilgrim, which was used
+as a tender in the sealing trade, Amasa Delano frequented unfamiliar
+beaches until he had taken his toll of skins and was ready to bear away
+for Canton to sell them. There were many Yankee ships after seals in
+those early days, enduring more peril and privation than the whalemen,
+roving over the South Pacific among the rock-bound islands unknown
+to the merchant navigator. The men sailed wholly on shares, a seaman
+receiving one per cent of the catch and the captain ten per cent, and
+they slaughtered the seal by the million, driving them from the most
+favored haunts within a few years. For instance, American ships first
+visited Mas a Fuera in 1797, and Captain Delano estimated that during
+the seven years following three million skins were taken to China from
+this island alone. He found as many as fourteen vessels there at one
+time, and he himself carried away one hundred thousand skins. It was a
+gold mine for profit while it lasted.
+
+There were three Delano brothers afloat in two vessels, and of their
+wanderings Amasa set down this epitome: "Almost the whole of our
+connections who were left behind had need of our assistance, and to look
+forward it was no more than a reasonable calculation to make that
+our absence would not be less than three years... together with the
+extraordinary uncertainty of the issue of the voyage, as we had nothing
+but our hands to depend upon to obtain a cargo which was only to be done
+through storms, dangers, and breakers, and taken from barren rocks in
+distant regions. But after a voyage of four years for one vessel and
+five for the other, we were all permitted to return safe home to our
+friends and not quite empty-handed. We had built both of the vessels we
+were in and navigated them two and three times around the globe." Each
+one of the brothers had been a master builder and rigger and a navigator
+of ships in every part of the world.
+
+By far the most important voyage undertaken by American merchantmen
+during the decade of brilliant achievement following the Revolution was
+that of Captain Robert Gray in the Columbia, which was the first ship
+to visit and explore the northwest coast and to lead the way for such
+adventurers as Richard Cleveland and Amasa Delano. On his second voyage
+in 1792, Captain Gray discovered the great river he christened Columbia
+and so gave to the United States its valid title to that vast territory
+which Lewis and Clark were to find after toiling over the mountains
+thirteen years later.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. "FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS"
+
+When the first Congress under the new Federal Constitution assembled
+in 1789, a spirit of pride was manifested in the swift recovery and the
+encouraging growth of the merchant marine, together with a concerted
+determination to promote and protect it by means of national
+legislation. The most imperative need was a series of retaliatory
+measures to meet the burdensome navigation laws of England, to give
+American ships a fair field and no favors. The Atlantic trade was
+therefore stimulated by allowing a reduction of ten per cent of the
+customs duties on goods imported in vessels built and owned by American
+citizens. The East India trade, which already employed forty New England
+ships, was fostered in like manner. Teas brought direct under the
+American flag paid an average duty of twelve cents a pound while teas in
+foreign bottoms were taxed twenty-seven cents. It was sturdy protection,
+for on a cargo of one hundred thousand pounds of assorted teas from
+India or China, a British ship would pay $27,800 into the custom house
+and a Salem square-rigger only $10,980.
+
+The result was that the valuable direct trade with the Far East was
+absolutely secured to the American flag. Not content with this, Congress
+decreed a system of tonnage duties which permitted the native owner to
+pay six cents per ton on his vessel while the foreigner laid down fifty
+cents as an entry fee for every ton his ship measured, or thirty cents
+if he owned an American-built vessel. In 1794, Congress became even more
+energetic in defense of its mariners and increased the tariff rates on
+merchandise in foreign vessels. A nation at last united, jealous of its
+rights, resentful of indignities long suffered, and intelligently alive
+to its shipping as the chief bulwark of prosperity, struck back with
+peaceful weapons and gained a victory of incalculable advantage.
+Its Congress, no longer feeble and divided, laid the foundations for
+American greatness upon the high seas which was to endure for more than
+a half century. Wars, embargoes, and confiscations might interrupt but
+they could not seriously harm it.
+
+In the three years after 1789 the merchant shipping registered for the
+foreign trade increased from 123,893 tons to 411,438 tons, presaging a
+growth without parallel in the history of the commercial world. Foreign
+ships were almost entirely driven out of American ports, and ninety-one
+per cent of imports and eighty-six per cent of exports were conveyed
+in vessels built and manned by Americans. Before Congress intervened,
+English merchantmen had controlled three-fourths of our commerce
+overseas. When Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, fought down
+Southern opposition to a retaliatory shipping policy, he uttered a
+warning which his countrymen were to find still true and apt in the
+twentieth century: "If we have no seamen, our ships will be useless,
+consequently our ship timber, iron, and hemp; our shipbuilding will be
+at an end; ship carpenters will go over to other nations; our young men
+have no call to the sea; our products, carried in foreign bottoms,
+will be saddled with war-freight and insurance in time of war--and the
+history of the last hundred years shows that the nation which is our
+carrier has three years of war for every four years of peace."
+
+The steady growth of an American merchant marine was interrupted only
+once in the following decade. In the year 1793 war broke out between
+England and France. A decree of the National Convention of the French
+Republic granted neutral vessels the same rights as those which flew the
+tricolor. This privilege reopened a rushing trade with the West Indies,
+and hundreds of ships hastened from American ports to Martinique,
+Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia.
+
+Like a thunderbolt came the tidings that England refused to look upon
+this trade with the French colonies as neutral and that her cruisers
+had been told to seize all vessels engaged in it and to search them
+for English-born seamen. This ruling was enforced with such barbarous
+severity that it seemed as if the War for Independence had been fought
+in vain. Without warning, unable to save themselves, great fleets of
+Yankee merchantmen were literally swept from the waters of the West
+Indies. At St. Eustatius one hundred and thirty of them were condemned.
+The judges at Bermuda condemned eleven more. Crews and passengers were
+flung ashore without food or clothing, were abused, insulted, or perhaps
+impressed in British privateers. The ships were lost to their owners.
+There was no appeal and no redress. At Martinique an English fleet and
+army captured St. Pierre in February, 1794. Files of marines boarded
+every American ship in the harbor, tore down the colors, and flung two
+hundred and fifty seamen into the foul holds of a prison hulk. There
+they were kept, half-dead with thirst and hunger while their vessels,
+uncared for, had stranded or sunk at their moorings. Scores of outrages
+as abominable as this were on record in the office of the Secretary of
+State. Shipmasters were afraid to sail to the southward and, for lack
+of these markets for dried cod, the fishing schooners of Marblehead were
+idle.
+
+For a time a second war with England seemed imminent. An alarmed
+Congress passed laws to create a navy and to fortify the most important
+American harbors. President Washington recommended an embargo of thirty
+days, which Congress promptly voted and then extended for thirty
+more. It was a popular measure and strictly enforced by the mariners
+themselves. The mates and captains of the brigs and snows in the
+Delaware River met and resolved not to go to sea for another ten days,
+swearing to lie idle sooner than feed the British robbers in the West
+Indies. It was in the midst of these demonstrations that Washington
+seized the one hope of peace and recommended a special mission to
+England.
+
+The treaty negotiated by John Jay in 1794 was received with an outburst
+of popular indignation. Jay was damned as a traitor, while the sailors
+of Portsmouth burned him in effigy. By way of an answer to the terms of
+the obnoxious treaty, a seafaring mob in Boston raided and burned
+the British privateer Speedwell, which had put into that port as a
+merchantman with her guns and munitions hidden beneath a cargo of West
+India produce.
+
+The most that can be said of the commercial provisions of the treaty is
+that they opened direct trade with the East Indies but at the price of
+complete freedom of trade for British shipping in American ports. It
+must be said, too, that although the treaty failed to clear away the
+gravest cause of hostility--the right of search and impressment--yet it
+served to postpone the actual dash, and during the years in which it was
+in force American shipping splendidly prospered, freed of most irksome
+handicaps.
+
+The quarrel with France had been brewing at the same time and for
+similar reasons. Neutral trade with England was under the ban, and the
+Yankee shipmaster was in danger of losing his vessel if he sailed to or
+from a port under the British flag. It was out of the frying-pan into
+the fire, and French privateers welcomed the excuse to go marauding in
+the Atlantic and the Caribbean. What it meant to fight off these greedy
+cutthroats is told in a newspaper account of the engagement of
+Captain Richard Wheatland, who was homeward bound to Salem in the ship
+Perseverance in 1799. He was in the Old Straits of Bahama when a
+fast schooner came up astern, showing Spanish colors and carrying
+a tremendous press of canvas. Unable to run away from her, Captain
+Wheatland reported to his owners:
+
+"We took in steering sails, wore ship, hauled up our courses, piped all
+hands to quarters and prepared for action. The schooner immediately took
+in sail, hoisted an English Union flag and passed under our lee at a
+considerable distance. We wore ship, she did the same, and we passed
+each other within half a musket. A fellow hailed us in broken English
+and ordered the boat hoisted out and the captain to come aboard, which
+he refused. He again ordered our boat out and enforced his orders with a
+menace that in case of refusal he would sink us, using at the same time
+the vilest and most infamous language it is possible to conceive of.
+... We hauled the ship to wind and as he passed poured a whole
+broadside into him with great success. Sailing faster than we, he ranged
+considerably ahead, tacked and again passed, giving us a broadside and
+furious discharge of musketry, which he kept up incessantly until the
+latter part of the engagement. His musket balls reached us in every
+direction but his large shot either fell short or went considerably over
+us while our guns loaded with round shot and square bars of iron were
+plied so briskly and directed with such good judgment that before he
+got out of range we had cut his mainsail and foretopsail all to rags and
+cleared his decks so effectively that when he bore away from us there
+were scarcely ten men to be seen. He then struck his English flag and
+hoisted the flag of The Terrible Republic and made off with all the sail
+he could carry, much disappointed, no doubt, at not being able to give
+us a fraternal embrace. We feel confidence that we have rid the world of
+some infamous pests of society."
+
+By this time, the United States was engaged in active hostilities with
+France, although war had not been declared. The news of the indignities
+which American commissions had suffered at the hands of the French
+Directory had stirred the people to war pitch. Strong measures for
+national defense were taken, which stopped little short of war. The
+country rallied to the slogan, "Millions for defense but not one cent
+for tribute," and the merchants of the seaports hastened to subscribe
+funds to build frigates to be loaned to the Government. Salem launched
+the famous Essex, ready for sea six months after the keel was laid, at
+a cost of $75,000. Her two foremost merchants, Elias Hasket Derby and
+William Gray, led the list with ten thousand dollars each. The call sent
+out by the master builder, Enos Briggs, rings with thrilling effect:
+
+"To Sons of Freedom! All true lovers of Liberty of your Country! Step
+forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French
+insolence and piracy. Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be
+ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to Salem where the
+noble structure is to be fabricated to maintain your rights upon the
+seas and make the name of America respected among the nations of the
+world. Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms of them
+for knees and rising timber. Four trees are wanted for the keel which
+altogether will measure 146 feet in length, and hew sixteen inches
+square."
+
+This handsome frigate privately built by patriots of the republic
+illuminates the coastwise spirit and conditions of her time. She was
+a Salem ship from keel to truck. Captain Jonathan Haraden, the finest
+privateersman of the Revolution, made the rigging for the mainmast at
+his ropewalk in Brown Street. Joseph Vincent fitted out the foremast and
+Thomas Briggs the mizzenmast in their lofts at the foot of the Common.
+When the huge hemp cables were ready for the frigate, the workmen
+carried them to the shipyard on their shoulders, the parade led by fife
+and drum. Her sails were cut from duck woven in Daniel Rust's factory
+in Broad Street and her iron work was forged by Salem shipsmiths. It
+was not surprising that Captain Richard Derby was chosen to command
+the Essex, but he was abroad in a ship of his own and she sailed under
+Captain Edward Preble of the Navy.
+
+The war cloud passed and the merchant argosies overflowed the wharves
+and havens of New England, which had ceased to monopolize the business
+on blue water. New York had become a seaport with long ranks of
+high-steeved bowsprits soaring above pleasant Battery Park and a forest
+of spars extending up the East River. In 1790 more than two thousand
+ships, brigs, schooners, and smaller craft had entered and cleared,
+and the merchants met in the coffee-houses to discuss charters,
+bills-of-lading, and adventures. Sailors commanded thrice the wages of
+laborers ashore. Shipyards were increasing and the builders could build
+as large and swift East Indiamen as those of which Boston and Salem
+boasted.
+
+Philadelphia had her Stephen Girard, whose wealth was earned in ships,
+a man most remarkable and eccentric, whose career was one of the great
+maritime romances. Though his father was a prosperous merchant of
+Bordeaux engaged in the West India trade, he was shifting for himself as
+a cabin-boy on his father's ships when only fourteen years old. With
+no schooling, barely able to read and write, this urchin sailed between
+Bordeaux and the French West Indies for nine years, until he gained
+the rank of first mate. At the age of twenty-six he entered the port of
+Philadelphia in command of a sloop which had narrowly escaped capture by
+British frigates. There he took up his domicile and laid the foundation
+of his fortune in small trading ventures to New Orleans and Santo
+Domingo.
+
+In 1791 he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China
+and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and
+Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty. So successfully
+did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be
+the wealthiest merchant in the United States. In that year one of his
+ships from China was captured off the Capes of the Delaware by a British
+privateer. Her cargo of teas, nankeens, and silks was worth half a
+million dollars to him but he succeeded in ransoming it on the spot by
+counting out one hundred and eighty thousand Spanish milled dollars. No
+privateersman could resist such strategy as this.
+
+Alone in his old age, without a friend or relative to close his eyes
+in death, Stephen Girard, once a penniless, ignorant French cabin-boy,
+bequeathed his millions to philanthropy, and the Girard College for
+orphan boys, in Philadelphia, is his monument.
+
+The Treaty of Amiens brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful
+interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips
+again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the
+only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on
+land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the
+Stars and Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and
+merchantmen, from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased to
+carry cargoes beneath their own ensigns. Spain was afraid to send her
+galleons to Mexico and Peru. All the Continental ports were begging for
+American ships to transport their merchandise. 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. There was no French navy to
+enforce it, but American vessels dared not sail for England lest they
+be snapped up by French privateers. The British Government savagely
+retaliated with further prohibitions, and Napoleon countered in like
+manner until no sea was safe for a neutral ship and the United States
+was powerless to assert its rights. Thomas Jefferson as President used
+as a weapon the Embargo of 1807, which was, at first, a popular measure,
+and which he justified in these pregnant sentences: "The whole world
+is thus laid under interdict by these two nations, and our own vessels,
+their cargoes, and crews, are to be taken by the one or the other for
+whatever place they may be destined out of our limits. If, therefore, on
+leaving our harbors we are certainly to lose them, is it not better as
+to vessels, cargoes, and seamen, to keep them at home?"
+
+A people proud, independent, and pugnacious, could not long submit to a
+measure of defense which was, in the final sense, an abject surrender to
+brute force. New England, which bore the brunt of the embargo, was first
+to rebel against it. Sailors marched through the streets clamoring for
+bread or loaded their vessels and fought their way to sea. In New
+York the streets of the waterside were deserted, ships dismantled,
+countinghouses unoccupied, and warehouses empty. In one year foreign
+commerce decreased in value from $108,000,000 to $22,000,000.
+
+After fifteen months Congress repealed the law, substituting a
+Non-Intercourse Act which suspended trade with Great Britain and France
+until their offending orders were repealed. All such measures were
+doomed to be futile. Words and documents, threats and arguments could
+not intimidate adversaries who paid heed to nothing else than broadsides
+from line-of-battle ships or the charge of battalions. With other
+countries trade could now be opened. Hopefully the hundreds of American
+ships long pent-up in harbor winged it deep-laden for the Baltic, the
+North Sea, and the Mediterranean. But few of them ever returned. Like
+a brigand, Napoleon lured them into a trap and closed it, advising the
+Prussian Government, which was under his heel: "Let the American ships
+enter your ports. Seize them afterward. You shall deliver the cargoes to
+me and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt."
+
+Similar orders were executed wherever his mailed fist reached, the
+pretext being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act. More than two
+hundred American vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar
+robbery for which France paid an indemnity of five millions after
+twenty years. It was the grand climax of the exploitation which American
+commerce had been compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult
+and bloodshed afloat. There lingers today in many a coastwise town an
+inherited dislike for France. It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe
+which beggared many a household and filled the streets with haggard,
+broken shipmasters.
+
+It was said of this virile merchant marine that it throve under pillage
+and challenged confiscation. Statistics confirm this brave paradox. In
+1810, while Napoleon was doing his worst, the deep-sea tonnage amounted
+to 981,019; and it is a singular fact that in proportion to population
+this was to stand as the high tide of American foreign shipping until
+thirty-seven years later. It ebbed during the War of 1812 but rose again
+with peace and a real and lasting freedom of the seas.
+
+This second war with England was fought in behalf of merchant seamen
+and they played a nobly active part in it. The ruthless impressment
+of seamen was the most conspicuous provocation, but it was only one
+of many. Two years before hostilities were openly declared, British
+frigates were virtually blockading the port of New York, halting and
+searching ships as they pleased, making prizes of those with French
+destinations, stealing sailors to fill their crews, waging war in
+everything but name, and enjoying the sport of it. A midshipman of
+one of them merrily related: "Every morning at daybreak we set about
+arresting the progress of all the vessels we saw, firing off guns to the
+right and left to make every ship that was running in heave to or wait
+until we had leisure to send a boat on board to see, in our lingo, what
+she was made of. I have frequently known a dozen and sometimes a couple
+of dozen ships lying a league or two off the port, losing their fair
+wind, their tide, and worse than all, their market for many hours,
+sometimes the whole day, before our search was completed."
+
+The right of a belligerent to search neutral vessels for contraband of
+war or evidence of a forbidden destination was not the issue at stake.
+This was a usage sanctioned by such international law as then existed.
+It was the alleged right to search for English seamen in neutral vessels
+that Great Britain exercised, not only on the high seas but even in
+territorial waters, which the American Government refused to recognize.
+In vain the Government had endeavored to protect its sailors from
+impressment by means of certificates of birth and citizenship. These
+documents were jeered at by the English naval lieutenant and his
+boarding gang, who kidnapped from the forecastle such stalwart tars as
+pleased their fancy. The victim who sought to inform an American consul
+of his plight was lashed to the rigging and flogged by a boatswain's
+mate. The files of the State Department, in 1807, had contained the
+names of six thousand American sailors who were as much slaves and
+prisoners aboard British men-of-war as if they had been made captives by
+the Dey of Algiers. One of these incidents, occurring on the ship Betsy,
+Captain Nathaniel Silsbee, while at Madras in 1795, will serve to show
+how this brutal business was done.
+
+"I received a note early one morning from my chief mate that one of my
+sailors, Edward Hulen, a fellow townsman whom I had known from boyhood,
+had been impressed and taken on board of a British frigate then being
+in port.... I immediately went on board my ship and having there learned
+all the facts in the case, proceeded to the frigate, where I found Hulen
+and in his presence was informed by the first lieutenant of the frigate
+that he had taken Hulen from my ship under a peremptory order from his
+commander to visit every American ship in port and take from each of
+them one or more of their seamen.... I then called upon Captain Cook,
+who commanded the frigate, and sought first by all the persuasive means
+that I was capable of using and ultimately by threats to appeal to the
+Government of the place to obtain Hulen's release, but in vain....
+It remained for me only to recommend Hulen to that protection of
+the lieutenant which a good seaman deserves, and to submit to the
+high-handed insult thus offered to the flag of my country which I had no
+means either of preventing or resisting."
+
+After several years' detention in the British Navy, Hulen returned to
+Salem and lived to serve on board privateers in the second war with
+England.
+
+Several years' detention! This was what it meant to be a pressed man,
+perhaps with wife and children at home who had no news of him nor any
+wages to support them. At the time of the Nore Mutiny in 1797, there
+were ships in the British fleet whose men had not been paid off for
+eight, ten, twelve, and in one instance fifteen years. These wooden
+walls of England were floating hells, and a seaman was far better off in
+jail. He was flogged if he sulked and again if he smiled flogged until
+the blood ran for a hundred offenses as trivial as these. His food was
+unspeakably bad and often years passed before he was allowed to set foot
+ashore. Decent men refused to volunteer and the ships were filled with
+the human scum and refuse caught in the nets of the press-gangs of
+Liverpool, London, and Bristol.
+
+It is largely forgotten or unknown that this system of recruiting was
+as intolerable in England as it was in the United States and as fiercely
+resented. Oppressive and unjust, it was nevertheless endured as the
+bulwark of England's defense against her foes. It ground under its heel
+the very people it protected and made them serfs in order to keep them
+free. No man of the common people who lived near the coast of England
+was safe from the ruffianly press-gangs nor any merchant ship that
+entered her ports. It was the most cruel form of conscription ever
+devised. Mob violence opposed it again and again, and British East
+Indiamen fought the King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their
+crews and left helpless. Feeling in America against impressment was
+never more highly inflamed, even on the brink of the War of 1812, than
+it had long been in England itself, although the latter country was
+unable to rise and throw it off. Here are the words, not of an angry
+American patriot but of a modern English historian writing of his own
+nation: * "To the people the impress was an axe laid at the foot of the
+tree. There was here no question, as with trade, of the mere loss of
+hands who could be replaced. Attacking the family in the person of its
+natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs
+were the tentacles, struck at the very foundations of domestic life and
+brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief as
+poignant as death. ... The mutiny at the Nore brought the people face to
+face with the appalling risks attendant on wholesale pressing while the
+war with America, incurred for the sole purpose of upholding the right
+to press, taught them the lengths to which their rulers were still
+prepared to go in order to enslave them." *
+
+
+    * The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore, by J. R. Hutchinson.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812
+
+American privateering in 1812 was even bolder and more successful than
+during the Revolution. It was the work of a race of merchant seamen who
+had found themselves, who were in the forefront of the world's trade and
+commerce, and who were equipped to challenge the enemy's pretensions to
+supremacy afloat. Once more there was a mere shadow of a navy to protect
+them, but they had learned to trust their own resources. They would send
+to sea fewer of the small craft, slow and poorly armed, and likely to
+meet disaster. They were capable of manning what was, in fact, a
+private navy comprised of fast and formidable cruisers. The intervening
+generation had advanced the art of building and handling ships beyond
+all rivalry, and England grudgingly acknowledged their ability. The year
+of 1812 was indeed but a little distance from the resplendent modern era
+of the Atlantic packet and the Cape Horn clipper.
+
+Already these Yankee deep-water ships could be recognized afar by their
+lofty spars and snowy clouds of cotton duck beneath which the slender
+hull was a thin black line. Far up to the gleaming royals they carried
+sail in winds so strong that the lumbering English East Indiamen were
+hove to or snugged down to reefed topsails. It was not recklessness but
+better seamanship. The deeds of the Yankee privateers of 1812 prove this
+assertion to the hilt. Their total booty amounted to thirteen hundred
+prizes taken over all the Seven Seas, with a loss to England of forty
+million dollars in ships and cargoes. There were, all told, more
+than five hundred of them in commission, but New England no longer
+monopolized this dashing trade. Instead of Salem it was Baltimore that
+furnished the largest fleet--fifty-eight vessels, many of them the fast
+ships and schooners which were to make the port famous as the home
+of the Baltimore clipper model. All down the coast, out of Norfolk,
+Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, sallied the
+privateers to show that theirs was, in truth, a seafaring nation
+ardently united in a common cause.
+
+Again and more vehemently the people of England raised their voices in
+protest and lament, for these saucy sea-raiders fairly romped to and fro
+in the Channel, careless of pursuit, conducting a blockade of their own
+until London was paying the famine price of fifty-eight dollars a barrel
+for flour, and it was publicly declared mortifying and distressing
+that "a horde of American cruisers should be allowed, unresisted and
+unmolested, to take, burn, or sink our own vessels in our own inlets and
+almost in sight of our own harbors." It was Captain Thomas Boyle in the
+Chasseur of Baltimore who impudently sent ashore his proclamation of a
+blockade of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which he
+requested should be posted in Lloyd's Coffee House.
+
+A wonderfully fine figure of a fighting seaman was this Captain Boyle,
+with an Irish sense of humor which led him to haunt the enemy's coast
+and to make sport of the frigates which tried to catch him. His Chasseur
+was considered one of the ablest privateers of the war and the most
+beautiful vessel ever seen in Baltimore. A fleet and graceful schooner
+with a magical turn for speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders
+and carried a hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never
+outsailed in fair winds or foul. "Out of sheer wantonness," said an
+admirer, "she sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of
+far superior force." Once when surrounded by two frigates and two naval
+brigs, she slipped through and was gone like a phantom. During his
+first cruise in the Chasseur, Captain Boyle captured eighteen valuable
+merchantmen. It was such defiant rovers as he that provoked the "Morning
+Chronicle" of London to splutter "that the whole coast of Ireland from
+Wexford round by Cape Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above
+a month under the unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights
+from the blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally
+intolerable and disgraceful."
+
+This was when the schooner Syren had captured His Majesty's cutter
+Landrail while crossing the Irish Sea with dispatches; when the Governor
+Tompkins burned fourteen English vessels in the English Channel in quick
+succession; when the Harpy of Baltimore cruised for three months off
+the Irish and English coasts and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned to
+Boston filled with spoils, including a half million dollars of money;
+when the Prince de Neuchatel hovered at her leisure in the Irish
+Channel and made coasting trade impossible; and when the Young Wasp of
+Philadelphia cruised for six months in those same waters.
+
+Two of the privateers mentioned were first-class fighting ships whose
+engagements were as notable, in their way, as those of the American
+frigates which made the war as illustrious by sea as it was ignominious
+by land. While off Havana in 1815, Captain Boyle met the schooner St.
+Lawrence of the British Navy, a fair match in men and guns. The Chasseur
+could easily have run away but stood up to it and shot the enemy
+to pieces in fifteen minutes. Brave and courteous were these two
+commanders, and Lieutenant Gordon of the St. Lawrence gave his captor a
+letter which read, in part: "In the event of Captain Boyle's becoming
+a prisoner of war to any British cruiser I consider it a tribute justly
+due to his humane and generous treatment of myself, the surviving
+officers, and crew of His Majesty's late schooner St. Lawrence, to state
+that his obliging attention and watchful solicitude to preserve our
+effects and render us comfortable during the short time we were in his
+possession were such as justly entitle him to the indulgence and respect
+of every British subject."
+
+The Prince de Neuchatel had the honor of beating off the attack of a
+forty-gun British frigate--an exploit second only to that of the General
+Armstrong in the harbor of Fayal. This privateer with a foreign name
+hailed from New York and was so fortunate as to capture for her owners
+three million dollars' worth of British merchandise. With Captain J.
+Ordronaux on the quarterdeck, she was near Nantucket Shoals at noon on
+October 11, 1814, when a strange sail was discovered. As this vessel
+promptly gave chase, Captain Ordronaux guessed-and as events proved
+correctly--that she must be a British frigate. She turned out to be the
+Endymion. The privateer had in tow a prize which she was anxious to
+get into port, but she was forced to cast off the hawser late in the
+afternoon and make every effort to escape.
+
+The breeze died with the sun and the vessels were close inshore.
+Becalmed, the privateer and the frigate anchored a quarter of a mile
+apart. Captain Ordronaux might have put his crew on the beach in boats
+and abandoned his ship. This was the reasonable course, for, as he had
+sent in several prize crews, he was short-handed and could muster no
+more than thirty-seven men and boys. The Endymion, on the other hand,
+had a complement of three hundred and fifty sailors and marines, and in
+size and fighting power she was in the class of the American frigates
+President and Constitution. Quite unreasonably, however, the master of
+the privateer decided to await events.
+
+The unexpected occurred shortly after dusk when several boats loaded to
+the gunwales with a boarding party crept away from the frigate. Five
+of them, with one hundred and twenty men, made a concerted attack
+at different points, alongside and under the bow and stern. Captain
+Ordronaux had told his crew that he would blow up the ship with all
+hands before striking his colors, and they believed him implicitly. This
+was the hero who was described as "a Jew by persuasion, a Frenchman by
+birth, an American for convenience, and so diminutive in stature as
+to make him appear ridiculous, in the eyes of others, even for him to
+enforce authority among a hardy, weatherbeaten crew should they do aught
+against his will." He was big enough, nevertheless, for this night's
+bloody work, and there was no doubt about his authority. While the
+British tried to climb over the bulwarks, his thirty-seven men and boys
+fought like raging devils, with knives, pistols, cutlases, with their
+bare fists and their teeth. A few of the enemy gained the deck, but
+the privateersmen turned and killed them. Others leaped aboard and were
+gradually driving the Americans back, when the skipper ran to the hatch
+above the powder magazine, waving a lighted match and swearing to drop
+it in if his crew retreated one step further. Either way the issue
+seemed desperate. But again they took their skipper's word for it and
+rallied for a bloody struggle which soon swept the decks.
+
+No more than twenty minutes had passed and the battle was won. The enemy
+was begging for quarter. One boat had been sunk, three had drifted away
+filled with dead and wounded, and the fifth was captured with thirty-six
+men in it of whom only eight were unhurt. The American loss was
+seven killed and twenty-four wounded, or thirty-one of her crew of
+thirty-seven. Yet they had not given up the ship. The frigate Endymion
+concluded that once was enough, and next morning the Prince de Neuchatel
+bore away for Boston with a freshening breeze.
+
+Those were merchant seamen also who held the General Armstrong against
+a British squadron through that moonlit night in Fayal Roads, inflicting
+heavier losses than were suffered in any naval action of the war. It is
+a story Homeric, almost incredible in its details and so often repeated
+that it can be only touched upon in this brief chronicle. The leader
+was a kindly featured man who wore a tall hat, side-whiskers, and a tail
+coat. His portrait might easily have served for that of a New England
+deacon of the old school. No trace of the swashbuckler in this Captain
+Samuel Reid, who had been a thrifty, respected merchant skipper until
+offered the command of a privateer.
+
+Touching at the Azores for water and provisions in September, 1814,
+he was trapped in port by the great seventy-four-gun ship of the
+line Plantagenet, the thirty-eight-gun frigate Rota, and the warbrig
+Carnation. Though he was in neutral water, they paid no heed to this
+but determined to destroy a Yankee schooner which had played havoc with
+their shipping. Four hundred men in twelve boats, with a howitzer in
+the bow of each boat, were sent against the General Armstrong in one
+flotilla. But not a man of the four hundred gained her deck. Said an
+eyewitness: "The Americans fought with great firmness but more like
+bloodthirsty savages than anything else. They rushed into the boats
+sword in hand and put every soul to death as far as came within their
+power. Some of the boats were left without a single man to row them,
+others with three or four. The most that any one returned with was about
+ten. Several boats floated ashore full of dead bodies.... For three days
+after the battle we were employed in burying the dead that washed on
+shore in the surf."
+
+This tragedy cost the British squadron one hundred and twenty men in
+killed and one hundred and thirty in wounded, while Captain Reid lost
+only two dead and had seven wounded. He was compelled to retreat ashore
+next day when the ships stood in to sink his schooner with their big
+guns, but the honors of war belonged to him and well-earned were the
+popular tributes when he saw home again, nor was there a word too much
+in the florid toast: "Captain Reid--his valor has shed a blaze of
+renown upon the character of our seamen, and won for himself a laurel of
+eternal bloom."
+
+It is not to glorify war nor to rekindle an ancient feud that such
+episodes as these are recalled to mind. These men, and others like them,
+did their duty as it came to them, and they were sailors of whom
+the whole Anglo-Saxon race might be proud. In the crisis they were
+Americans, not privateersmen in quest of plunder, and they would gladly
+die sooner than haul down the Stars and Stripes. The England against
+which they fought was not the England of today. Their honest grievances,
+inflicted by a Government too intent upon crushing Napoleon to be fair
+to neutrals, have long ago been obliterated. This War of 1812 cleared
+the vision of the Mother Country and forever taught her Government that
+the people of the Republic were, in truth, free and independent.
+
+This lesson was driven home not only by the guns of the Constitution and
+the United States, but also by the hundreds of privateers and the forty
+thousand able seamen who were eager to sail in them. They found no great
+place in naval history, but England knew their prowess and respected it.
+Every schoolboy is familiar with the duels of the Wasp and the Frolic,
+of the Enterprise and the Boxer; but how many people know what happened
+when the privateer Decatur met and whipped the Dominica of the British
+Navy to the southward of Bermuda?
+
+Captain Diron was the man who did it as he was cruising out of
+Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1813. Sighting an armed
+schooner slightly heavier than his own vessel, he made for her and was
+unperturbed when the royal ensign streamed from her gaff. Clearing for
+action, he closed the hatches so that none of his men could hide below.
+The two schooners fought in the veiling smoke until the American could
+ram her bowsprit over the other's stern and pour her whole crew aboard.
+In the confined space of the deck, almost two hundred men and lads were
+slashing and stabbing and shooting amid yells and huzzas. Lieutenant
+Barrette, the English commander, only twenty-five years old, was
+mortally hurt and every other officer, excepting the surgeon and one
+midshipman, was killed or wounded. Two-thirds of the crew were down but
+still they refused to surrender, and Captain Diron had to pull down the
+colors with his own hands. Better discipline and marksmanship had won
+the day for him and his losses were comparatively small.
+
+Men of his description were apt to think first of glory and let the
+profits go hang, for there was no cargo to be looted in a King's ship.
+Other privateersmen, however, were not so valiant or quarrelsome, and
+there was many a one tied up in London River or the Mersey which had
+been captured without very savage resistance. Yet on the whole it is
+fair to say that the private armed ships outfought and outsailed the
+enemy as impressively as did the few frigates of the American Navy.
+
+There was a class of them which exemplified the rapid development of the
+merchant marine in a conspicuous manner--large commerce destroyers too
+swift to be caught, too powerful to fear the smaller cruisers. They were
+extremely profitable business ventures, entrusted to the command of the
+most audacious and skillful masters that could be engaged. Of this type
+was the ship America of Salem, owned by the Crowninshields, which made
+twenty-six prizes and brought safely into port property which realized
+more than a million dollars. Of this the owners and shareholders
+received six hundred thousand dollars as dividends. She was a stately
+vessel, built for the East India trade, and was generally conceded to
+be the fastest privateer afloat. For this service the upper deck was
+removed and the sides were filled in with stout oak timber as an armored
+protection, and longer yards and royal masts gave her a huge area
+of sail. Her crew of one hundred and fifty men had the exacting
+organization of a man-of-war, including, it is interesting to note,
+three lieutenants, three mates, a sailingmaster, surgeon, purser,
+captain of marines, gunners, seven prize masters, armorer, drummer,
+and a fifer. Discipline was severe, and flogging was the penalty for
+breaking the regulations.
+
+During her four cruises, the America swooped among the plodding
+merchantmen like a falcon on a dovecote, the sight of her frightening
+most of her prey into submission, with a brush now and then to exercise
+the crews of the twenty-two guns, and perhaps a man or two hit. Long
+after the war, Captain James Chever, again a peaceful merchant mariner,
+met at Valparaiso, Sir James Thompson, commander of the British frigate
+Dublin, which had been fitted out in 1813 for the special purpose of
+chasing the America. In the course of a cordial chat between the two
+captains the Briton remarked:
+
+"I was once almost within gun-shot of that infernal Yankee
+skimming-dish, just as night came on. By daylight she had outsailed
+the Dublin so devilish fast that she was no more than a speck on the
+horizon. By the way, I wonder if you happen to know the name of the
+beggar that was master of her."
+
+"I'm the beggar," chuckled Captain Chever, and they drank each other's
+health on the strength of it.
+
+Although the Treaty of Ghent omitted mention of the impressment of
+sailors, which had been the burning issue of the war, there were no more
+offenses of this kind. American seafarers were safe against kidnapping
+on their own decks, and they had won this security by virtue of their
+own double-shotted guns. At the same time England lifted the curse of
+the press-gang from her own people, who refused longer to endure it.
+
+There seemed no reason why the two nations, having finally fought their
+differences to a finish, should not share the high seas in peaceful
+rivalry; but the irritating problems of protection and reciprocity
+survived to plague and hamper commerce. It was difficult for England
+to overcome the habit of guarding her trade against foreign invasion.
+Agreeing with the United States to waive all discriminating duties
+between the ports of the two countries--this was as much as she was at
+that time willing to yield. She still insisted upon regulating the trade
+of her West Indies and Canada. American East Indiamen were to be limited
+to direct voyages and could not bring cargoes to Europe. Though this
+discrimination angered Congress, to which it appeared as lopsided
+reciprocity, the old duties were nevertheless repealed; and then,
+presto! the British colonial policy of exclusion was enforced and eighty
+thousand tons of American shipping became idle because the West India
+market was closed.
+
+There followed several years of unhappy wrangling, a revival of the old
+smuggling spirit, the risk of seizure and confiscations, and shipping
+merchants with long faces talking ruin. The theory of free trade versus
+protection was as debatable and opinions were as conflicting then as
+now. Some were for retaliation, others for conciliation; and meanwhile
+American shipmasters went about their business, with no room for
+theories in their honest heads, and secured more and more of the world's
+trade. Curiously enough, the cries of calamity in the United States
+were echoed across the water, where the "London Times" lugubriously
+exclaimed: "The shipping interest, the cradle of our navy, is half
+ruined. Our commercial monopoly exists no longer; and thousands of our
+manufacturers are starving or seeking redemption in distant lands.
+We have closed the Western Indies against America from feelings
+of commercial rivalry. Its active seamen have already engrossed an
+important branch of our carrying trade to the Eastern Indies. Her
+starred flag is now conspicuous on every sea and will soon defy our
+thunder."
+
+It was not until 1849 that Great Britain threw overboard her long
+catalogue of protective navigation laws which had been piling up since
+the time of Cromwell, and declared for free trade afloat. Meanwhile the
+United States had drifted in the same direction, barring foreign
+flags from its coastwise shipping but offering full exemption from all
+discriminating duties and tonnage duties to every maritime nation which
+should respond in like manner. This latter legislation was enacted in
+1828 and definitely abandoned the doctrine of protection in so far as
+it applied to American ships and sailors. For a generation thereafter,
+during which ocean rivalry was a battle royal of industry, enterprise,
+and skill, the United States was paramount and her merchant marine
+attained its greatest successes.
+
+There is one school of modern economists who hold that the seeds of
+decay and downfall were planted by this adoption of free trade in 1828,
+while another faction of gentlemen quite as estimable and authoritative
+will quote facts and figures by the ream to prove that governmental
+policies had nothing whatever to do with the case. These adversaries
+have written and are still writing many volumes in which they almost
+invariably lose their tempers. Partisan politics befog the tariff issue
+afloat as well as ashore, and one's course is not easy to chart. It is
+indisputable, however, that so long as Yankee ships were better, faster,
+and more economically managed, they won a commanding share of the
+world's trade. When they ceased to enjoy these qualities of superiority,
+they lost the trade and suffered for lack of protection to overcome the
+handicap.
+
+The War of 1812 was the dividing line between two eras of salt water
+history. On the farther side lay the turbulent centuries of hazard and
+bloodshed and piracy, of little ships and indomitable seamen who pursued
+their voyages in the reek of gunpowder and of legalized pillage by the
+stronger, and of merchant adventurers who explored new markets wherever
+there was water enough to float their keels. They belonged to the rude
+and lusty youth of a world which lived by the sword and which gloried
+in action. Even into the early years of the nineteenth century these
+mariners still sailed--Elizabethan in deed and spirit.
+
+On the hither side of 1812 were seas unvexed by the privateer and the
+freebooter. The lateen-rigged corsairs had been banished from their
+lairs in the harbors of Algiers, and ships needed to show no broadsides
+of cannon in the Atlantic trade. For a time they carried the
+old armament among the lawless islands of the Orient and off
+Spanish-American coasts where the vocation of piracy made its last
+stand, but the great trade routes of the globe were peaceful highways
+for the white-winged fleets of all nations. The American seamen who
+had fought for the right to use the open sea were now to display their
+prowess in another way and in a romance of achievement that was no less
+large and thrilling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES"
+
+It was on the stormy Atlantic, called by sailormen the Western Ocean,
+that the packet ships won the first great contest for supremacy and knew
+no rivals until the coming of the age of steam made them obsolete. Their
+era antedated that of the clipper and was wholly distinct. The Atlantic
+packet was the earliest liner: she made regular sailings and carried
+freight and passengers instead of trading on her owners' account as was
+the ancient custom. Not for her the tranquillity of tropic seas and
+the breath of the Pacific trades, but an almost incessant battle with
+swinging surges and boisterous winds, for she was driven harder in all
+weathers and seasons than any other ships that sailed. In such battering
+service as this the lines of the clipper were too extremely fine, her
+spars too tall and slender. The packet was by no means slow and if
+the list of her record passages was superb, it was because they were
+accomplished by masters who would sooner let a sail blow away than take
+it in and who raced each other every inch of the way.
+
+They were small ships of three hundred to five hundred tons when the
+famous Black Ball Line was started in 1816. From the first they were the
+ablest vessels that could be built, full-bodied and stoutly rigged. They
+were the only regular means of communication between the United States
+and Europe and were entrusted with the mails, specie, government
+dispatches, and the lives of eminent personages. Blow high, blow low,
+one of the Black Ball packets sailed from New York for Liverpool on the
+first and sixteenth of every month. Other lines were soon competing--the
+Red Star and the Swallow Tail out of New York, and fine ships from
+Boston and Philadelphia. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825
+the commercial greatness of New York was assured, and her Atlantic
+packets increased in size and numbers, averaging a thousand tons each in
+the zenith of their glory.
+
+England, frankly confessing herself beaten and unable to compete
+with such ships as these, changed her attitude from hostility to open
+admiration. She surrendered the Atlantic packet trade to American
+enterprise, and British merchantmen sought their gains in other waters.
+The Navigation Laws still protected their commerce in the Far East and
+they were content to jog at a more sedate gait than these weltering
+packets whose skippers were striving for passages of a fortnight, with
+the forecastle doors nailed fast and the crew compelled to stay on deck
+from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Rock.
+
+No blustering, rum-drinking tarpaulin was the captain who sailed the
+Independence, the Ocean Queen, or the Dreadnought but a man very careful
+of his manners and his dress, who had been selected from the most highly
+educated merchant service in the world. He was attentive to the comfort
+of his passengers and was presumed to have no other duties on deck than
+to give the proper orders to his first officer and work out his daily
+reckoning. It was an exacting, nerve-racking ordeal, however, demanding
+a sleepless vigilance, courage, and cool judgment of the first order.
+The compensations were large. As a rule, he owned a share of the ship
+and received a percentage of the freights and passage money. His rank
+when ashore was more exalted than can be conveyed in mere words. Any
+normal New York boy would sooner have been captain of a Black Ball
+packet than President of the United States, and he knew by heart the
+roaring chantey
+
+    It is of a flash packet,
+      A packet of fame.
+    She is bound to New York
+      And the Dreadnought's her name.
+    She is bound to the west'ard
+      Where the stormy winds blow.
+    Bound away to the west'ard,
+      Good Lord, let her go.
+
+
+There were never more than fifty of these ships afloat, a trifling
+fraction of the American deep-water tonnage of that day, but the laurels
+they won were immortal. Not only did the English mariner doff his hat to
+them, but a Parliamentary committee reported in 1837 that "the American
+ships frequenting the ports of England are stated by several witnesses
+to be superior to those of a similar class among the ships of Great
+Britain, the commanders and officers being generally considered to be
+more competent as seamen and navigators and more uniformly persons of
+education than the commanders and officers of British ships of a similar
+size and class trading from England to America."
+
+It was no longer a rivalry with the flags of other nations but an
+unceasing series of contests among the packets of the several lines, and
+their records aroused far more popular excitement than when the great
+steamers of this century were chipping off the minutes, at an enormous
+coal consumption, toward a five-day passage. Theirs were tests of real
+seamanship, and there were few disasters. The packet captain scorned a
+towboat to haul him into the stream if the wind served fair to set all
+plain sail as his ship lay at her wharf. Driving her stern foremost,
+he braced his yards and swung her head to sea, clothing the masts with
+soaring canvas amid the farewell cheers of the crowds which lined the
+waterfront.
+
+A typical match race was sailed between the Black Ball liner Columbus,
+Captain De Peyster, and the Sheridan, Captain Russell, of the splendid
+Dramatic fleet, in 1837. The stake was $10,000 a side, put up by the
+owners and their friends. The crews were picked men who were promised a
+bonus of fifty dollars each for winning. The ships sailed side by side
+in February, facing the wild winter passage, and the Columbus reached
+Liverpool in the remarkable time of sixteen days, two days ahead of the
+Sheridan.
+
+The crack packets were never able to reel off more than twelve or
+fourteen knots under the most favorable conditions, but they were kept
+going night and day, and some of them maintained their schedules almost
+with the regularity of the early steamers. The Montezuma, the Patrick
+Henry, and the Southampton crossed from New York to Liverpool in fifteen
+days, and for years the Independence held the record of fourteen days
+and six hours. It remained for the Dreadnought, Captain Samuel Samuels,
+in 1859, to set the mark for packet ships to Liverpool at thirteen days
+and eight hours.
+
+Meanwhile the era of the matchless clipper had arrived and it was one of
+these ships which achieved the fastest Atlantic passage ever made by a
+vessel under sail. The James Baines was built for English owners to be
+used in the Australian trade. She was a full clipper of 2515 tons, twice
+the size of the ablest packets, and was praised as "the most perfect
+sailing ship that ever entered the river Mersey." Bound out from Boston
+to Liverpool, she anchored after twelve days and six hours at sea.
+
+There was no lucky chance in this extraordinary voyage, for this clipper
+was the work of the greatest American builder, Donald McKay, who at the
+same time designed the Lightning for the same owners. This clipper,
+sent across the Atlantic on her maiden trip, left in her foaming wake a
+twenty-four hour run which no steamer had even approached and which
+was not equaled by the fastest express steamers until twenty-five years
+later when the greyhound Arizona ran eighteen knots in one hour on her
+trial trip. This is a rather startling statement when one reflects
+that the Arizona of the Guion line seems to a generation still living
+a modern steamer and record-holder. It is even more impressive when
+coupled with the fact that, of the innumerable passenger steamers
+traversing the seas today, only a few are capable of a speed of more
+than eighteen knots.
+
+This clipper Lightning did her 436 sea miles in one day, or eighteen and
+a half knots, better than twenty land miles an hour, and this is how the
+surpassing feat was entered in her log, or official journal: "March 1.
+Wind south. Strong gales; bore away for the North Channel, carrying away
+the foretopsail and lost jib; hove the log several times and found the
+ship going through the water at the rate of 18 to 18 1/2 knots; lee rail
+under water and rigging slack. Distance run in twenty-four hours, 436
+miles." The passage was remarkably fast, thirteen days and nineteen and
+a half hours from Boston Light, but the spectacular feature was this
+day's work. It is a fitting memorial of the Yankee clipper, and, save
+only a cathedral, the loveliest, noblest fabric ever wrought by man's
+handiwork.
+
+The clipper, however, was a stranger in the Atlantic and her chosen
+courses were elsewhere. The records made by the James Baines and the
+Lightning were no discredit to the stanch, unconquerable packet ships
+which, year in and year out, held their own with the steamer lines until
+just before the Civil War. It was the boast of Captain Samuels that
+on her first voyage in 1853 the Dreadnought reached Sandy Hook as
+the Cunarder Canada, which had left Liverpool a day ahead of her, was
+passing in by Boston Light. Twice she carried the latest news to Europe,
+and many seasoned travelers preferred her to the mail steamers.
+
+The masters and officers who handled these ships with such magnificent
+success were true-blue American seamen, inspired by the finest
+traditions, successors of the privateersmen of 1812. The forecastles,
+however, were filled with English, Irish, and Scandinavians. American
+lads shunned these ships and, in fact, the ambitious youngster of the
+coastwise towns began to cease following the sea almost a century ago.
+It is sometimes forgotten that the period during which the best American
+manhood sought a maritime career lay between the Revolution and the War
+of 1812. Thereafter the story became more and more one of American ships
+and less of American sailors, excepting on the quarter-deck.
+
+In later years the Yankee crews were to be found in the ports where the
+old customs survived, the long trading voyage, the community of interest
+in cabin and forecastle, all friends and neighbors together, with
+opportunities for profit and advancement. Such an instance was that of
+the Salem ship George, built at Salem in 1814 and owned by the great
+merchant, Joseph Peabody. For twenty-two years she sailed in the East
+India trade, making twenty-one round voyages, with an astonishing
+regularity which would be creditable for a modern cargo tramp. Her
+sailors were native-born, seldom more than twenty-one years old,
+and most of them were studying navigation. Forty-five of them became
+shipmasters, twenty of them chief mates, and six second mates. This
+reliable George was, in short, a nautical training-school of the best
+kind and any young seaman with the right stuff in him was sure of
+advancement.
+
+Seven thousand sailors signed articles in the counting-room of Joseph
+Peabody and went to sea in his eighty ships which flew the house-flag
+in Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, and the ports of Europe until 1844. These
+were mostly New England boys who followed in the footsteps of their
+fathers because deep-water voyages were still "adventures" and a career
+was possible under a system which was both congenial and paternal.
+Brutal treatment was the rare exception. Flogging still survived in the
+merchant service and was defended by captains otherwise humane, but
+a skipper, no matter how short-tempered, would be unlikely to abuse a
+youth whose parents might live on the same street with him and attend
+the same church.
+
+The Atlantic packets brought a different order of things, which was to
+be continued through the clipper era. Yankee sailors showed no love for
+the cold and storms of the Western Ocean in these foaming packets which
+were remorselessly driven for speed. The masters therefore took
+what they could get. All the work of rigging, sail-making, scraping,
+painting, and keeping a ship in perfect repair was done in port instead
+of at sea, as was the habit in the China and California clippers, and
+the lore and training of the real deep-water sailor became superfluous.
+The crew of a packet made sail or took it in with the two-fisted mates
+to show them how.
+
+From these conditions was evolved the "Liverpool packet rat," hairy and
+wild and drunken, the prey of crimps and dive-keepers ashore, brave and
+toughened to every hardship afloat, climbing aloft in his red shirt,
+dungaree breeches, and sea-boots, with a snow-squall whistling, the
+rigging sheathed with ice, and the old ship burying her bows in the
+thundering combers. It was the doctrine of his officers that he could
+not be ruled by anything short of violence, and the man to tame and
+hammer him was the "bucko" second mate, the test of whose fitness was
+that he could whip his weight in wild cats. When he became unable to
+maintain discipline with fists and belaying-pins, he was deposed for a
+better man.
+
+Your seasoned packet rat sought the ship with a hard name by choice.
+His chief ambition was to kick in the ribs or pound senseless some
+invincible bucko mate. There was provocation enough on both sides.
+Officers had to take their ships to sea and strain every nerve to make
+a safe and rapid passage with crews which were drunk and useless when
+herded aboard, half of them greenhorns, perhaps, who could neither
+reef nor steer. Brutality was the one argument able to enforce instant
+obedience among men who respected nothing else. As a class the packet
+sailors became more and more degraded because their life was intolerable
+to decent men. It followed therefore that the quarterdeck employed
+increasing severity, and, as the officer's authority in this respect was
+unchecked and unlimited, it was easy to mistake the harshest tyranny for
+wholesome discipline.
+
+Reenforcing the bucko mate was the tradition that the sailor was a dog,
+a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages
+to protect him. This was a tradition which, for centuries, had been
+fostered in the naval service, and it survived among merchant sailors as
+an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an
+American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of
+existence enjoyed by the poorest laborer ashore.
+
+It is in the nature of a paradox that the brilliant success of the
+packet ships in dominating the North Atlantic trade should have been a
+factor in the decline of the nation's maritime prestige and resources.
+Through a period of forty years the pride and confidence in these ships,
+their builders, and the men who sailed them, was intense and universal.
+They were a superlative product of the American genius, which still
+displayed the energies of a maritime race. On other oceans the situation
+was no less gratifying. American ships were the best and cheapest in the
+world. The business held the confidence of investors and commanded an
+abundance of capital. It was assumed, as late as 1840, that the wooden
+sailing ship would continue to be the supreme type of deep-water vessel
+because the United States possessed the greatest stores of timber,
+the most skillful builders and mechanics, and the ablest merchant
+navigators. No industry was ever more efficiently organized and
+conducted. American ships were most in demand and commanded the highest
+freights. The tonnage in foreign trade increased to a maximum of 904,476
+in 1845. There was no doubt in the minds of the shrewdest merchants and
+owners and builders of the time that Great Britain would soon cease to
+be the mistress of the seas and must content herself with second place.
+
+It was not considered ominous when, in 1838, the Admiralty had requested
+proposals for a steam service to America. This demand was prompted by
+the voyages of the Sirius and Great Western, wooden-hulled sidewheelers
+which thrashed along at ten knots' speed and crossed the Atlantic in
+fourteen to seventeen days. This was a much faster rate than the average
+time of the Yankee packets, but America was unperturbed and showed no
+interest in steam. In 1839 the British Government awarded an Atlantic
+mail contract, with an annual subsidy of $425,000 to Samuel Cunard and
+his associates, and thereby created the most famous of the Atlantic
+steamship companies.
+
+Four of these liners began running in 1840--an event which foretold the
+doom of the packet fleets, though the warning was almost unheeded in
+New York and Boston. Four years later Enoch Train was establishing a new
+packet line to Liverpool with the largest, finest ships built up to that
+time, the Washington Irving, Anglo-American, Ocean Monarch, Anglo-Saxon,
+and Daniel Webster. Other prominent shipping houses were expanding
+their service and were launching noble packets until 1853. Meanwhile the
+Cunard steamers were increasing in size and speed, and the service was
+no longer an experiment.
+
+American capital now began to awaken from its dreams, and Edward K.
+Collins, managing owner of the Dramatic line of packets, determined to
+challenge the Cunarders at their own game. Aided by the Government
+to the extent of $385,000 a year as subsidy, he put afloat the four
+magnificent steamers, Atlantic, Pacific, Baltic, and Arctic, which were
+a day faster than the Cunarders in crossing, and reduced the voyage to
+nine and ten days. The Collins line, so auspiciously begun in 1850, and
+promising to give the United States the supremacy in steam which it had
+won under sail, was singularly unfortunate and short-lived. The Arctic
+and the Pacific were lost at sea, and Congress withdrew its financial
+support after five years. Deprived of this aid, Mr. Collins was unable
+to keep the enterprise afloat in competition with the subsidized
+Cunard fleet. In this manner and with little further effort by American
+interests to compete for the prize, the dominion of the Atlantic passed
+into British hands.
+
+The packet ships had held on too long. It had been a stirring episode
+for the passengers to cheer in mid-ocean when the lofty pyramids of
+canvas swept grandly by some wallowing steamer and left her far astern,
+but in the fifties this gallant picture became less frequent, and a
+sooty banner of smoke on the horizon proclaimed the new era and the
+obliteration of all the rushing life and beauty of the tall ship under
+sail. Slow to realize and acknowledge defeat, persisting after the
+steamers were capturing the cabin passenger and express freight
+traffic, the American ship-owners could not visualize this profound
+transformation. Their majestic clippers still surpassed all rivals in
+the East India and China trade and were racing around the Horn, making
+new records for speed and winning fresh nautical triumphs for the Stars
+and Stripes.
+
+This reluctance to change the industrial and commercial habits of
+generations of American shipowners was one of several causes for the
+decadence which was hastened by the Civil War. For once the astute
+American was caught napping by his British cousin, who was swayed by no
+sentimental values and showed greater adaptability in adopting the iron
+steamer with the screw propeller as the inevitable successor of the
+wooden ship with arching topsails.
+
+The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of the
+square-rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in her beauty,
+with forty nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that of the metal trough
+with an engine in the middle and mechanics sweating in her depths. When
+the Atlantic packet was compelled to abdicate, it was the beginning
+of the end. After all, her master was the fickle wind, for a slashing
+outward passage might be followed by weeks of beating home to the
+westward. Steadily forging ahead to the beat of her paddles or
+the thrash of her screw, the steamer even of that day was far more
+dependable than the sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a
+hundred miles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had
+done, but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed. Upon the
+heaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over again the
+fable of the hare and the tortoise.
+
+Most of the famous chanteys were born in the packet service and shouted
+as working choruses by the tars of this Western Ocean before the
+chanteyman perched upon a capstan and led the refrain in the clipper
+trade. You will find their origin unmistakable in such lines as these:
+
+    As I was a-walking down Rotherhite Street,
+      'Way, ho, blow the man down;
+    A pretty young creature I chanced for to meet,
+      Give me some time to blow the man down.
+    Soon we'll be in London City,
+      Blow, boys, blow,
+    And see the gals all dressed so pretty,
+      Blow, my bully boys, blow.
+
+
+Haunting melodies, folk-song as truly as that of the plantation negro,
+they vanished from the sea with a breed of men who, for all their
+faults, possessed the valor of the Viking and the fortitude of the
+Spartan. Outcasts ashore--which meant to them only the dance halls of
+Cherry Street and the grog-shops of Ratcliffe Road--they had virtues
+that were as great as their failings. Across the intervening years, with
+a pathos indefinable, come the lovely strains of
+
+    Shenandoah, I'll ne'er forget you,
+      Away, ye rolling river,
+      Till the day I die I'll love you ever,
+    Ah, ha, we're bound away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE STATELY CLIPPER AND HER GLORY
+
+The American clipper ship was the result of an evolution which can be
+traced back to the swift privateers which were built during the War of
+1812. In this type of vessel the shipyards of Chesapeake Bay excelled
+and their handiwork was known as the "Baltimore clipper," the name
+suggested by the old English verb which Dryden uses to describe the
+flight of the falcon that "clips it down the wind." The essential
+difference between the clipper ship and other kinds of merchant craft
+was that speed and not capacity became the chief consideration. This was
+a radical departure for large vessels, which in all maritime history had
+been designed with an eye to the number of tons they were able to
+carry. More finely molded lines had hitherto been found only in the much
+smaller French lugger, the Mediterranean galley, the American schooner.
+
+To borrow the lines of these fleet and graceful models and apply them
+to the design of a deepwater ship was a bold conception. It was first
+attempted by Isaac McKim, a Baltimore merchant, who ordered his builders
+in 1832 to reproduce as closely as possible the superior sailing
+qualities of the renowned clipper brigs and schooners of their own port.
+The result was the Ann McKim, of nearly five hundred tons, the first
+Yankee clipper ship, and distinguished as such by her long, easy
+water-lines, low free-board, and raking stem. She was built and finished
+without regard to cost, copper-sheathed, the decks gleaming with
+brasswork and mahogany fittings. But though she was a very fast and
+handsome ship and the pride of her owner, the Ann McKim could stow so
+little cargo that shipping men regarded her as unprofitable and swore by
+their full-bodied vessels a few years longer.
+
+That the Ann McKim, however, influenced the ideas of the most
+progressive builders is very probable, for she was later owned by the
+New York firm of Howland and Aspinwall, who placed an order for the
+first extremely sharp clipper ship of the era. This vessel, the Rainbow,
+was designed by John W. Griffeths, a marine architect, who was a pioneer
+in that he studied shipbuilding as a science instead of working by
+rule-of-thumb. The Rainbow, which created a sensation while on the
+stocks because of her concave or hollowed lines forward, which defied
+all tradition and practice, was launched in 1845. She was a more radical
+innovation than the Ann McKim but a successful one, for on her second
+voyage to China the Rainbow went out against the northeast monsoon in
+ninety-two days and came home in eighty-eight, a record which few ships
+were able to better. Her commander, Captain John Land, declared her to
+be the fastest ship in the world and there were none to dispute him.
+
+Even the Rainbow however, was eclipsed when not long afterward Howland
+and Aspinwall, now converted to the clipper, ordered the Sea Witch to be
+built for Captain Bob Waterman. Among all the splendid skippers of the
+time he was the most dashing figure. About his briny memory cluster a
+hundred yarns, some of them true, others legendary. It has been argued
+that the speed of the clippers was due more to the men who commanded
+them than to their hulls and rigging, and to support the theory the
+career of Captain Bob Waterman is quoted. He was first known to fame in
+the old Natchez, which was not a clipper at all and was even rated as
+slow while carrying cotton from New Orleans to New York. But Captain Bob
+took this full-pooped old packet ship around the Horn and employed her
+in the China tea trade. The voyages which he made in her were all fast,
+and he crowned them with the amazing run of seventy-eight days from
+Canton to New York, just one day behind the swiftest clipper passage
+ever sailed and which he himself performed in the Sea Witch. Incredulous
+mariners simply could not explain this feat of the Natchez and suggested
+that Bob Waterman must have brought the old hooker home by some new
+route of his own discovery.
+
+Captain Bob had won a reputation for discipline as the mate of a Black
+Ball liner, a rough school, and he was not a mild man. Ashore his
+personality was said to have been a most attractive one, but there is
+no doubt that afloat he worked the very souls out of his sailors. The
+rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however,
+until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under
+canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she
+seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her
+there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the
+quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then
+in seventy-nine--records which were never surpassed.
+
+With what consummate skill and daring this master mariner drove his ship
+and how the race of hardy sailors to which he belonged compared with
+those of other nations may be descried in the log of another of them,
+Captain Philip Dumaresq, homeward bound from China in 1849 in the
+clipper Great Britain. Three weeks out from Java Head she had overtaken
+and passed seven ships heading the same way, and then she began to rush
+by them in one gale after another. Her log records her exploits in such
+entries as these: "Passed a ship under double reefs, we with our royals
+and studdingsails set.... Passed a ship laying-to under a close-reefed
+maintopsail.... Split all three topsails and had to heave to.... Seven
+vessels in sight and we outsail all of them.... Under double-reefed
+topsails passed several vessels hove-to." Much the same record might be
+read in the log of the medium clipper Florence--and it is the same story
+of carrying sail superbly on a ship which had been built to stand
+up under it: "Passed two barks under reefed courses and close-reefed
+topsails standing the same way, we with royals and topgallant
+studding-sails," or "Passed a ship under topsails, we with our royals
+set." For eleven weeks "the topsail halliards were started only once, to
+take in a single reef for a few hours." It is not surprising, therefore,
+to learn that, seventeen days out from Shanghai, the Florence exchanged
+signals with the English ship John Hagerman, which had sailed thirteen
+days before her.
+
+Two notable events in the history of the nineteenth century occurred
+within the same year, 1849, to open new fields of trade to the Yankee
+clipper. One of these was the repeal of the British Navigation Laws
+which had given English ships a monopoly of the trade between London
+and the British East Indies, and the other was the discovery of gold
+in California. After centuries of pomp and power, the great East India
+Company had been deprived of its last exclusive rights afloat in 1833.
+Its ponderous, frigate-built merchantmen ceased to dominate the British
+commerce with China and India and were sold or broken up. All British
+ships were now free to engage in this trade, but the spirit and customs
+of the old regime still strongly survived. Flying the house-flags of
+private owners, the East Indiamen and China tea ships were still built
+and manned like frigates, slow, comfortable, snugging down for the night
+under reduced sail. There was no competition to arouse them until the
+last barrier of the Navigation Laws was let down and they had to meet
+the Yankee clipper with the tea trade as the huge stake.
+
+Then at last it was farewell to the gallant old Indianian and her
+ornate, dignified prestige. With a sigh the London Times confessed: "We
+must run a race with our gigantic and unshackled rival. We must set our
+long-practised skill, our steady industry, and our dogged determination
+against his youth, ingenuity, and ardor. Let our shipbuilders and
+employers take warning in time. There will always be an abundant supply
+of vessels good enough and fast enough for short voyages. But we
+want fast vessels for the long voyages which otherwise will fall into
+American hands."
+
+Before English merchants could prepare themselves for these new
+conditions, the American clipper Oriental was loading in 1850 at Hong
+Kong with tea for the London market. Because of her reputation for
+speed, she received freightage of six pounds sterling per ton while
+British ships rode at anchor with empty holds or were glad to sail at
+three pounds ten per ton. Captain Theodore Palmer delivered his sixteen
+hundred tons of tea in the West India Docks, London, after a crack
+passage of ninety-one days which had never been equaled. His clipper
+earned $48,000, or two-thirds of what it had cost to build her. Her
+arrival in London created a profound impression. The port had seen
+nothing like her for power and speed; her skysail yards soared far
+above the other shipping; the cut of her snowy canvas was faultless; all
+clumsy, needless tophamper had been done away with; and she appeared
+to be the last word in design and construction, as lean and fine and
+spirited as a race-horse in training.
+
+This new competition dismayed British shipping until it could rally
+and fight with similar weapons The technical journal, Naval Science,
+acknowledged that the tea trade of the London markets had passed almost
+out of the hands of the English ship-owner, and that British vessels,
+well-manned and well-found, were known to lie for weeks in the harbor
+of Foo-chow, waiting for a cargo and seeing American clippers come in,
+load, and sail immediately with full cargoes at a higher freight than
+they could command. Even the Government viewed the loss of trade with
+concern and sent admiralty draftsmen to copy the lines of the Oriental
+and Challenge while they were in drydock.
+
+British clippers were soon afloat, somewhat different in model from the
+Yankee ships, but very fast and able, and racing them in the tea trade
+until the Civil War. With them it was often nip and tuck, as in the
+contest between the English Lord of the Isles and the American clipper
+bark Maury in 1856. The prize was a premium of one pound per ton for
+the first ship to reach London with tea of the new crop. The Lord of
+the Isles finished loading and sailed four days ahead of the Maury, and
+after thirteen thousand miles of ocean they passed Gravesend within ten
+minutes of each other. The British skipper, having the smartest tug
+and getting his ship first into dock, won the honors. In a similar race
+between the American Sea Serpent and the English Crest of the Wave, both
+ships arrived off the Isle of Wight on the same day. It was a notable
+fact that the Lord of the Isles was the first tea clipper built of iron
+at a date when the use of this stubborn material was not yet thought of
+by the men who constructed the splendid wooden ships of America.
+
+For the peculiar requirements of the tea trade, English maritime talent
+was quick to perfect a clipper type which, smaller than the great Yankee
+skysail-yarder, was nevertheless most admirable for its beauty and
+performance. On both sides of the Atlantic partizans hotly championed
+their respective fleets. In 1852 the American Navigation Club, organized
+by Boston merchants and owners, challenged the shipbuilders of Great
+Britain to race from a port in England to a port in China and return,
+for a stake of $50,000 a side, ships to be not under eight hundred nor
+over twelve hundred tons American register. The challenge was aimed at
+the Stornaway and the Chrysolite, the two clippers that were known to be
+the fastest ships under the British flag. Though this sporting defiance
+caused lively discussion, nothing came of it, and it was with a spirit
+even keener that Sampson and Tappan of Boston offered to match their
+Nightingale for the same amount against any clipper afloat, British or
+American.
+
+In spite of the fact that Yankee enterprise had set the pace in the
+tea trade, within a few years after 1850 England had so successfully
+mastered the art of building these smaller clippers that the honors were
+fairly divided. The American owners were diverting their energies to
+the more lucrative trade in larger ships sailing around the Horn to San
+Francisco, a long road which, as a coastwise voyage, was forbidden
+to foreign vessels under the navigation laws. After the Civil War the
+fastest tea clippers flew the British flag and into the seventies they
+survived the competition of steam, racing among themselves for the
+premiums awarded to the quickest dispatch. No more of these beautiful
+vessels were launched after 1869, and one by one they vanished into
+other trades, overtaken by the same fate which had befallen the Atlantic
+packet and conquered by the cargo steamers which filed through the Suez
+Canal.
+
+Until 1848 San Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post,
+a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected
+hides--vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast--or a whaler
+called for wood and water. During the year preceding the frenzied
+migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark
+and one brig, sailed in through the Golden Gate. In the twelve months
+following, 775 vessels cleared from Atlantic ports for San Francisco,
+besides the rush from other countries, and nearly fifty thousand
+passengers scrambled ashore to dig for gold. Crews deserted their
+ships, leaving them unable to go to sea again for lack of men, and in
+consequence a hundred of them were used as storehouses, hotels, and
+hospitals, or else rotted at their moorings. Sailors by hundreds jumped
+from the forecastle without waiting to stow the sails or receive their
+wages. Though offered as much as two hundred dollars a month to sign
+again, they jeered at the notion. Of this great fleet at San Francisco
+in 1849, it was a lucky ship that ever left the harbor again.
+
+It seemed as if the whole world were bound to California and almost
+overnight there was created the wildest, most extravagant demand for
+transportation known to history. A clipper costing $70,000 could pay for
+herself in one voyage, with freights at sixty dollars a ton. This gold
+stampede might last but a little while. To take instant advantage of it
+was the thing. The fastest ships, and as many of them as could be built,
+would skim the cream of it. This explains the brief and illustrious era
+of the California clipper, one hundred and sixty of which were launched
+from 1850 to 1854. The shipyards of New York and Boston were crowded
+with them, and they graced the keel blocks of the historic old ports
+of New England--Medford, Mystic, Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland,
+Rockland, and Bath--wherever the timber and the shipwrights could be
+assembled.
+
+Until that time there had been few ships afloat as large as a thousand
+tons. These were of a new type, rapidly increased to fifteen hundred,
+two thousand tons, and over. They presented new and difficult problems
+in spars and rigging able to withstand the strain of immense areas of
+canvas which climbed two hundred feet to the skysail pole and which,
+with lower studdingsails set, spread one hundred and sixty feet from
+boom-end to boom-end. There had to be the strength to battle with the
+furious tempests of Cape Horn and at the same time the driving power to
+sweep before the sweet and steadfast tradewinds. Such a queenly clipper
+was the Flying Cloud, the achievement of that master builder, Donald
+McKay, which sailed from New York to San Francisco in eighty-nine days,
+with Captain Josiah Creesy in command. This record was never lowered and
+was equaled only twice--by the Flying Cloud herself and by the Andrew
+Jackson nine years later. It was during this memorable voyage that
+the Flying Cloud sailed 1256 miles in four days while steering to the
+northward under topgallantsails after rounding Cape Horn. This was a
+rate of speed which, if sustained, would have carried her from New York
+to Queenstown in eight days and seventeen hours. This speedy passage was
+made in 1851, and only two years earlier the record for the same voyage
+of fifteen thousand miles had been one hundred and twenty days, by the
+clipper Memnon.
+
+Donald McKay now resolved to build a ship larger and faster than the
+Flying Cloud, and his genius neared perfection in the Sovereign of the
+Seas, of 2421 tons register, which exceeded in size all merchant vessels
+afloat. This Titan of the clipper fleet was commanded by Donald's
+brother, Captain Lauchlan McKay, with a crew of one hundred and five
+men and boys. During her only voyage to San Francisco she was partly
+dismasted, but Lauchlan McKay rigged her anew at sea in fourteen days
+and still made port in one hundred and three days, a record for the
+season of the year.
+
+It was while running home from Honolulu in 1853 that the Sovereign of
+the Seas realized the hopes of her builder. In eleven days she sailed
+3562 miles, with four days logged for a total of 1478 knots. Making
+allowance for the longitudes and difference in time, this was an average
+daily run of 378 sea miles or 435 land miles. Using the same comparison,
+the distance from Sandy Hook to Queenstown would have been covered in
+seven days and nine hours. Figures are arid reading, perhaps, but these
+are wet by the spray and swept by the salt winds of romance. During one
+of these four days the Sovereign of the Seas reeled off 424 nautical
+miles, during which her average speed was seventeen and two-thirds knots
+and at times reached nineteen and twenty. The only sailing ship which
+ever exceeded this day's work was the Lightning, built later by the
+same Donald McKay, which ran 436 knots in the Atlantic passage already
+referred to. The Sovereign of the Seas could also boast of a sensational
+feat upon the Western Ocean, for between New York and Liverpool she
+outsailed the Cunard liner Canada by 325 miles in five days.
+
+It is curiously interesting to notice that the California clipper era
+is almost generally ignored by the foremost English writers of maritime
+history. For one thing, it was a trade in which their own ships were not
+directly concerned, and partizan bias is apt to color the views of
+the best of us when national prestige is involved. American historians
+themselves have dispensed with many unpleasant facts when engaged with
+the War of 1812. With regard to the speed of clipper ships, however,
+involving a rivalry far more thrilling and important than all the races
+ever sailed for the America's cup, the evidence is available in concrete
+form.
+
+Lindsay's "History of Merchant Shipping" is the most elaborate English
+work of the kind. Heavily ballasted with facts and rather dull reading
+for the most part, it kindles with enthusiasm when eulogizing the
+Thermopylae and the Sir Launcelot, composite clippers of wood and iron,
+afloat in 1870, which it declares to be "the fastest sailing ships
+that ever traversed the ocean." This fairly presents the issue which a
+true-blooded Yankee has no right to evade. The greatest distance sailed
+by the Sir Launcelot in twenty-four hours between China and London was
+354 knots, compared with the 424 miles of the Sovereign of the Seas and
+the 436 miles of the Lightning. Her best sustained run was one of seven
+days for an average of a trifle more than 300 miles a day. Against this
+is to be recorded the performance of the Sovereign of the Seas, 3562
+miles in eleven days, at the rate of 324 miles every twenty-four hours,
+and her wonderful four-day run of 1478 miles, an average of 378 miles.
+
+The Thermopylae achieved her reputation in a passage of sixty-three days
+from London to Melbourne--a record which was never beaten. Her fastest
+day's sailing was 330 miles, or not quite sixteen knots an hour. In six
+days she traversed 1748 miles, an average of 291 miles a day. In this
+Australian trade the American clippers made little effort to compete.
+Those engaged in it were mostly built for English owners and sailed by
+British skippers, who could not reasonably be expected to get the most
+out of these loftily sparred Yankee ships, which were much larger than
+their own vessels of the same type. The Lightning showed what she could
+do from Melbourne to Liverpool by making the passage in sixty-three'
+days, with 3722 miles in ten consecutive days and one day's sprint of
+412 miles.
+
+In the China tea trade the Thermopylae drove home from Foo-chow in
+ninety-one days, which was equaled by the Sir Launcelot. The American
+Witch of the Wave had a ninety-day voyage to her credit, and the Comet
+ran from Liverpool to Shanghai in eighty-four days. Luck was a larger
+factor on this route than in the California or Australian trade because
+of the fitful uncertainty of the monsoons, and as a test of speed it was
+rather unsatisfactory. In a very fair-minded and expert summary, Captain
+Arthur H. Clark, * in his youth an officer on Yankee clippers, has
+discussed this question of rival speed and power under sail--a question
+which still absorbs those who love the sea. His conclusion is that
+in ordinary weather at sea, when great power to carry sail was not
+required, the British tea clippers were extremely fast vessels, chiefly
+on account of their narrow beam. Under these conditions they were
+perhaps as fast as the American clippers of the same class, such as the
+Sea Witch, White Squall, Northern Light, and Sword-Fish. But if speed
+is to be reckoned by the maximum performance of a ship under the most
+favorable conditions, then the British tea clippers were certainly no
+match for the larger American ships such as the Flying Cloud, Sovereign
+of the Seas, Hurricane, Trade Wind, Typhoon, Flying Fish, Challenge, and
+Red Jacket. The greater breadth of the American ships in proportion to
+their length meant power to carry canvas and increased buoyancy which
+enabled them, with their sharper ends, to be driven in strong gales and
+heavy seas at much greater speed than the British clippers. The latter
+were seldom of more than one thousand tons' register and combined in a
+superlative degree the good qualities of merchant ships.
+
+
+    * "The Clipper Ship Era." N.Y., 1910.
+
+
+It was the California trade, brief and crowded and fevered, which saw
+the roaring days of the Yankee clipper and which was familiar with
+racing surpassing in thrill and intensity that of the packet ships of
+the Western Ocean. In 1851, for instance, the Raven, Sea Witch, and
+Typhoon sailed for San Francisco within the same week. They crossed the
+Equator a day apart and stood away to the southward for three thousand
+miles of the southeast trades and the piping westerly winds which
+prevailed farther south. At fifty degrees south latitude the Raven and
+the Sea Witch were abeam of each other with the Typhoon only two days
+astern.
+
+Now they stripped for the tussle to windward around Cape Horn, sending
+down studdingsail booms and skysail yards, making all secure with extra
+lashings, plunging into the incessant head seas of the desolate ocean,
+fighting it out tack for tack, reefing topsails and shaking them out
+again, the vigilant commanders going below only to change their clothes,
+the exhausted seamen stubbornly, heroically handling with frozen,
+bleeding fingers the icy sheets and canvas. A fortnight of this inferno
+and the Sea Witch and the Raven gained the Pacific, still within sight
+of each other, and the Typhoon only one day behind. Then they swept
+northward, blown by the booming tradewinds, spreading studdingsails,
+skysails, and above them, like mere handkerchiefs, the water-sails and
+ring-tails. Again the three clippers crossed the Equator. Close-hauled
+on the starboard tack, their bowsprits were pointed for the last stage
+of the journey to the Golden Gate. The Typhoon now overhauled her rivals
+and was the first to signal her arrival, but the victory was earned
+by the Raven, which had set her departure from Boston Light while the
+others had sailed from New York. The Typhoon and the Raven were only a
+day apart, with the Sea Witch five days behind the leader.
+
+Clipper ship crews included men of many nations. In the average
+forecastle there would be two or three Americans, a majority of English
+and Norwegians, and perhaps a few Portuguese and Italians. The hardiest
+seamen, and the most unmanageable, were the Liverpool packet rats who
+were lured from their accustomed haunts to join the clippers by the
+magical call of the gold-diggings. There were not enough deep-water
+sailors to man half the ships that were built in these few years, and
+the crimps and boarding-house runners decoyed or flung aboard on sailing
+day as many men as were demanded, and any drunken, broken landlubber was
+good enough to be shipped as an able seaman. They were things of rags
+and tatters--their only luggage a bottle of whiskey.
+
+The mates were thankful if they could muster enough real sailors to
+work the ship to sea and then began the stern process of whipping the
+wastrels and incompetents into shape for the perils and emergencies of
+the long voyage. That these great clippers were brought safely to port
+is a shining tribute to the masterful skill of their officers. While
+many of them were humane and just, with all their severity, the stories
+of savage abuse which are told of some are shocking in the extreme.
+The defense was that it was either mutiny or club the men under. Better
+treatment might have persuaded better men to sail. Certain it is that
+life in the forecastle of a clipper was even more intolerable to the
+self-respecting American youth than it had previously been aboard the
+Atlantic packet.
+
+When Captain Bob Waterman arrived at San Francisco in the Challenge
+clipper in 1851, a mob tried very earnestly to find and hang him and his
+officers because of the harrowing stories told by his sailors. That
+he had shot several of them from the yards with his pistol to make
+the others move faster was one count in the indictment. For his part,
+Captain Waterman asserted that a more desperate crew of ruffians had
+never sailed out of New York and that only two of them were Americans.
+They were mutinous from the start, half of them blacklegs of the vilest
+type who swore to get the upper hand of him. His mates, boatswain,
+and carpenter had broken open their chests and boxes and had removed a
+collection of slung-shots, knuckle-dusters, bowie-knives, and pistols.
+Off Rio Janeiro they had tried to kill the chief mate, and Captain
+Waterman had been compelled to jump in and stretch two of them dead with
+an iron belaying-pin. Off Cape Horn three sailors fell from aloft and
+were lost. This accounted for the casualties.
+
+The truth of such episodes as these was difficult to fathom. Captain
+Waterman demanded a legal investigation, but nothing came of his request
+and he was commended by his owners for his skill and courage in bringing
+the ship to port without losing a spar or a sail. It was a skipper of
+this old school who blandly maintained the doctrine that if you wanted
+the men to love you, you must starve them and knock them down. The fact
+is proven by scores of cases that the discipline of the American clipper
+was both famously efficient and notoriously cruel. It was not until long
+after American sailors had ceased to exist that adequate legislation was
+enacted to provide that they should be treated as human beings afloat
+and ashore. Other days and other customs! It is perhaps unkind to judge
+these vanished master-mariners too harshly, for we cannot comprehend the
+crises which continually beset them in their command.
+
+No more extreme clipper ships were built after 1854. The California
+frenzy had subsided and speed in carrying merchandise was no longer
+so essential; besides, the passenger traffic was seeking the Isthmian
+route. What were called medium clippers enjoyed a profitable trade
+for many years later, and one of them, the Andrew Jackson, was never
+outsailed for the record from New York to San Francisco. This splendid
+type of ship was to be found on every sea, for the United States was
+still a commanding factor in the maritime activities of South America,
+India, China, Europe, and Australia. In 1851 its merchant tonnage
+rivaled that of England and was everywhere competing with it.
+
+The effects of the financial panic of 1857 and the aftermath of business
+depression were particularly disastrous to American ships. Freights were
+so low as to yield no profit, and the finest clippers went begging for
+charters. The yards ceased to launch new tonnage. British builders had
+made such rapid progress in design and construction that the days of
+Yankee preference in the China trade had passed. The Stars and Stripes
+floated over ships waiting idle in Manila Bay, at Shanghai, Hong-Kong,
+and Calcutta. The tide of commerce had slackened abroad as well as at
+home and the surplus of deep-water tonnage was world-wide.
+
+In earlier generations afloat, the American spirit had displayed amazing
+recuperative powers. The havoc of the Revolution had been unable to
+check it, and its vigor and aggressive enterprise had never been
+more notable than after the blows dealt by the Embargo, the French
+Spoliations, and the War of 1812. The conditions of trade and the temper
+of the people were now so changed that this mighty industry, aforetime
+so robust and resilient, was unable to recover from such shocks as the
+panic of 1857 and the Civil War. Yet it had previously survived and
+triumphed over calamities far more severe. The destruction wrought by
+Confederate cruisers was trifling compared with the work of the British
+and French privateers when the nation was very small and weak.
+
+The American spirit had ceased to concern itself with the sea as the
+vital and dominant element. The footsteps of the young men no longer
+turned toward the wharf and the waterside and the tiers of tall ships
+outward bound. They were aspiring to conquer an inland empire of prairie
+and mountain and desert, impelled by the same pioneering and adventurous
+ardor which had burned in their seafaring sires. Steam had vanquished
+sail--an epochal event in a thousand years of maritime history--but the
+nation did not care enough to accept this situation as a new challenge
+or to continue the ancient struggle for supremacy upon the sea. England
+did care, because it was life or death to the little, sea-girt island,
+but as soon as the United States ceased to be a strip of Atlantic
+seaboard and the panorama, of a continent was unrolled to settlement,
+it was foreordained that the maritime habit of thought and action
+should lose its virility in America. All great seafaring races, English,
+Norwegian, Portuguese, and Dutch, have taken to salt water because there
+was lack of space, food, or work ashore, and their strong young men
+craved opportunities. Like the Pilgrim Fathers and their fishing
+shallops they had nowhere else to go.
+
+When the Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind--taut, serene,
+immaculate--were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic
+and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig
+and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight
+of a huge carcass alongside. With a poor opinion of the seamanship
+of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among their
+favorite chanteys:
+
+    Oh, poor Reuben Ranzo,
+    Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo,
+    Oh, Ranzo was no sailor,
+    So they shipped him aboard a whaler,
+    Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo.
+
+This was crass, intolerant prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of
+appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there
+were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars,
+and trimming the yards to a hair. On a voyage of two or three
+years, moreover, there was always plenty of time tomorrow. Brave and
+resourceful seamen were these New England adventurers and deep-sea
+hunters who made nautical history after their own fashion. They
+flourished coeval with the merchant marine in its prime, and they passed
+from the sea at about the same time and for similar reasons. Modernity
+dispensed with their services, and young men found elsewhere more
+profitable and easier employment.
+
+The great days of Nantucket as a whaling port were passed before the
+Revolution wiped out her ships and killed or scattered her sailors.
+It was later discovered that larger ships were more economical, and
+Nantucket harbor bar was too shoal to admit their passage. For this
+reason New Bedford became the scene of the foremost activity, and
+Nantucket thereafter played a minor part, although her barks went
+cruising on to the end of the chapter and her old whaling families were
+true to strain. As explorers the whalemen rambled into every nook
+and corner of the Pacific before merchant vessels had found their way
+thither. They discovered uncharted islands and cheerfully fought savages
+or suffered direful shipwreck. The chase led them into Arctic regions
+where their stout barks were nipped like eggshells among the grinding
+floes, or else far to the southward where they broiled in tropic calms.
+The New Bedford lad was as keen to go a-whaling as was his counterpart
+in Boston or New York to be the dandy mate of a California clipper, and
+true was the song:
+
+      I asked a maiden by my side,
+    Who sighed and looked to me forlorn,
+      "Where is your heart?" She quick replied,
+    "Round Cape Horn."
+
+Yankee whaling reached its high tide in 1857 when the New Bedford fleet
+alone numbered 329 sail and those owned in other ports of Buzzard's Bay
+swelled the total to 426 vessels, besides thirty more hailing from New
+London and Sag Harbor. In this year the value of the catch was more
+than ten million dollars. The old custom of sailing on shares or
+"lays" instead of wages was never changed. It was win or lose for
+all hands--now a handsome fortune or again an empty hold and pockets
+likewise. There was Captain W.T. Walker of New Bedford who, in 1847,
+bought for a song a ship so old that she was about to be broken up for
+junk and no insurance broker would look at her. In this rotten relic
+he shipped a crew and went sailing in the Pacific. Miraculously keeping
+afloat, this Envoy of his was filled to the hatches with oil and bones,
+twice running, before she returned to her home port; and she earned
+$138,450 on a total investment of eight thousand dollars.
+
+The ship Sarah of Nantucket, after a three years' cruise, brought
+back 3497 barrels of sperm oil which sold for $89,000, and the William
+Hamilton of New Bedford set another high mark by stowing 4181 barrels of
+a value of $109,269. The Pioneer of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan,
+was away only a year and stocked a cargo of oil and whalebone which sold
+for $150,060. Most of the profits of prosperous voyages were taken
+as the owners' share, and the incomes of the captain and crew were
+so niggardly as to make one wonder why they persisted in a calling so
+perilous, arduous, and poorly paid. During the best years of whaling,
+when the ships were averaging $16,000 for a voyage, the master received
+an eighteenth, or about nine hundred dollars a year. The highly skilled
+hands, such as the boat-steerers and harpooners, had a lay of only one
+seventy-fifth, or perhaps a little more than two hundred dollars cash as
+the reward of a voyage which netted the owner at least fifty per cent on
+his investment. Occasionally they fared better than this and sometimes
+worse. The answer to the riddle is that they liked the life and had
+always the gambling spirit which hopes for a lucky turn of the cards.
+
+The countless episodes of fragile boats smashed to kindling by fighting
+whales, of the attack renewed with harpoon and lance, of ships actually
+rammed and sunk, would fill a volume by themselves and have been
+stirringly narrated in many a one. Zanzibar and Kamchatka, Tasmania and
+the Seychelles knew the lean, sun-dried Yankee whaleman and his motto of
+a "dead whale or a stove boat." The Civil War did not drive him from the
+seas. The curious fact is that his products commanded higher prices
+in 1907 than fifty years before, but the number of his ships rapidly
+decreased. Whales were becoming scarce, and New England capital
+preferred other forms of investment. The leisurely old sailing craft was
+succeeded by the steam whaler, and the explosive bomb slew, instead of
+the harpoon and lance hurled by the sinewy right arm of a New Bedford
+man or Cape Verde islander.
+
+Roving whaler and armed East Indiaman, plunging packet ship and stately
+clipper, they served their appointed days and passed on their several
+courses to become mere memories, as shadowy and unsubstantial as the
+gleam of their own topsails when seen at twilight. The souls of their
+sailors have fled to Fiddler's Green, where all dead mariners go. They
+were of the old merchant marine which contributed something fine and
+imperishable to the story of the United States. Down the wind, vibrant
+and deep-throated, comes their own refrain for a requiem:
+
+    We're outward bound this very day,
+    Good-bye, fare you well,
+    Good-bye, fare you well.
+    We're outward bound this very day,
+      Hurrah, my boys, we're outward bound.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. BOUND COASTWISE
+
+One thinks of the old merchant marine in terms of the clipper ship and
+distant ports. The coasting trade has been overlooked in song and story;
+yet, since the year 1859, its fleets have always been larger and more
+important than the American deep-water commerce nor have decay and
+misfortune overtaken them. It is a traffic which flourished from the
+beginning, ingeniously adapting itself to new conditions, unchecked by
+war, and surviving with splendid vigor, under steam and sail, in this
+modern era.
+
+The seafaring pioneers won their way from port to port of the
+tempestuous Atlantic coast in tiny ketches, sloops, and shallops when
+the voyage of five hundred miles from New England to Virginia was a
+prolonged and hazardous adventure. Fog and shoals and lee shores beset
+these coastwise sailors, and shipwrecks were pitifully frequent. In
+no Hall of Fame will you find the name of Captain Andrew Robinson
+of Gloucester, but he was nevertheless an illustrious benefactor and
+deserves a place among the most useful Americans. His invention was the
+Yankee schooner of fore-and-aft rig, and he gave to this type of vessel
+its name. * Seaworthy, fast, and easily handled, adapted for use in
+the early eighteenth century when inland transportation was almost
+impossible, the schooner carried on trade between the colonies and was
+an important factor in the growth of the fisheries.
+
+
+    * It is said that as the odd two-master slid gracefully into the water,
+a spectator exclaimed: "See how she scoons!" "Aye," answered Captain
+Robinson, "a SCHOONER let her be!" This launching took place in 1718 or
+1714.
+
+
+Before the Revolution the first New England schooners were beating up
+to the Grand Bank of Newfoundland after cod and halibut. They were of
+no more than fifty tons' burden, too small for their task but manned
+by fishermen of surpassing hardihood. Marblehead was then the foremost
+fishing port with two hundred brigs and schooners on the offshore banks.
+But to Gloucester belongs the glory of sending the first schooner to the
+Grand Bank. * From these two rock-bound harbors went thousands of trained
+seamen to man the privateers and the ships of the Continental navy,
+slinging their hammocks on the gun-decks beside the whalemen of
+Nantucket. These fishermen and coastwise sailors fought on the land as
+well and followed the drums of Washington's armies until the final
+scene at Yorktown. Gloucester and Marblehead were filled with widows and
+orphans, and half their men-folk were dead or missing.
+
+
+    * Marvin's "American Merchant Marine," p. 287.
+
+
+The fishing-trade soon prospered again, and the men of the old ports
+tenaciously clung to the sea even when the great migration flowed
+westward to people the wilderness and found a new American empire.
+They were fishermen from father to son, bound together in an intimate
+community of interests, a race of pure native or English stock,
+deserving this tribute which was paid to them in Congress: "Every
+person on board our fishing vessels has an interest in common with his
+associates; their reward depends upon their industry and enterprise.
+Much caution is observed in the selection of the crews of our fishing
+vessels; it often happens that every individual is connected by blood
+and the strongest ties of friendship; our fishermen are remarkable for
+their sobriety and good conduct, and they rank with the most skillful
+navigators."
+
+Fishing and the coastwise merchant trade were closely linked. Schooners
+loaded dried cod as well as lumber for southern ports and carried back
+naval stores and other southern products. Well-to-do fishermen owned
+trading vessels and sent out their ventures, the sailors shifting from
+one forecastle to the other. With a taste for an easier life than the
+stormy, freezing Banks, the young Gloucesterman would sign on for a
+voyage to Pernambuco or Havana and so be fired with ambition to become
+a mate or master and take to deep water after a while. In this way was
+maintained a school of seamanship which furnished the most intelligent
+and efficient officers of the merchant marine. For generations they were
+mostly recruited from the old fishing and shipping ports of New England
+until the term "Yankee shipmaster" had a meaning peculiarly its own.
+
+Seafaring has undergone so many revolutionary changes and old days and
+ways are so nearly obliterated that it is singular to find the sailing
+vessel still employed in great numbers, even though the gasolene motor
+is being installed to kick her along in spells of calm weather. The
+Gloucester fishing schooner, perfect of her type, stanch, fleet, and
+powerful, still drives homeward from the Banks under a tall press of
+canvas, and her crew still divide the earnings, share and share, as did
+their forefathers a hundred and fifty years ago. But the old New England
+strain of blood no longer predominates, and Portuguese, Scandinavians,
+and Nova Scotia "Bluenoses" bunk with the lads of Gloucester stock. Yet
+they are alike for courage, hardihood, and mastery of the sea, and the
+traditions of the calling are undimmed.
+
+There was a time before the Civil War when Congress jealously protected
+the fisheries by means of a bounty system and legislation aimed against
+our Canadian neighbors. The fishing fleets were regarded as a source
+of national wealth and the nursery of prime seamen for the navy and
+merchant marine. In 1858 the bounty system was abandoned, however, and
+the fishermen were left to shift for themselves, earning small profits
+at peril of their lives and preferring to follow the sea because they
+knew no other profession. In spite of this loss of assistance from the
+Government, the tonnage engaged in deep-sea fisheries was never so great
+as in the second year of the Civil War. Four years later the industry
+had shrunk one-half; and it has never recovered its early importance *
+
+
+    * In 1882, the tonnage amounted to 193,459; in 1866, to 89,336.
+
+
+The coastwise merchant trade, on the other hand, has been jealously
+guarded against competition and otherwise fostered ever since 1789, when
+the first discriminatory tonnage tax was enforced. The Embargo Act of
+1808 prohibited domestic commerce to foreign flags, and this edict was
+renewed in the American Navigation Act of 1817. It remained a firmly
+established doctrine of maritime policy until the Great War compelled
+its suspension as an emergency measure. The theories of protection
+and free trade have been bitterly debated for generations, but in this
+instance the practice was eminently successful and the results were
+vastly impressive. Deepwater shipping dwindled and died, but the
+increase in coastwise sailing was consistent. It rose to five million
+tons early in this century and makes the United States still one of the
+foremost maritime powers in respect to saltwater activity.
+
+To speak of this deep-water shipping as trade coastwise is misleading,
+in a way. The words convey an impression of dodging from port to port
+for short distances, whereas many of the voyages are longer than those
+of the foreign routes in European waters. It is farther by sea from
+Boston to Philadelphia than from Plymouth, England, to Bordeaux. A
+schooner making the run from Portland to Savannah lays more knots over
+her stern than a tramp bound out from England to Lisbon. It is a shorter
+voyage from Cardiff to Algiers than an American skipper pricks off on
+his chart when he takes his steamer from New York to New Orleans or
+Galveston. This coastwise trade may lack the romance of the old school
+of the square-rigged ship in the Roaring Forties, but it has always
+been the more perilous and exacting. Its seamen suffer hardships unknown
+elsewhere, for they have to endure winters of intense cold and heavy
+gales and they are always in risk of stranding or being driven ashore.
+
+The story of these hardy men is interwoven, for the most part, with the
+development of the schooner in size and power. This graceful craft,
+so peculiar to its own coast and people, was built for utility and
+possessed a simple beauty of its own when under full sail. The schooners
+were at first very small because it was believed that large fore-and-aft
+sails could not be handled with safety. They were difficult to reef or
+lower in a blow until it was discovered that three masts instead of two
+made the task much easier. For many years the three-masted schooner was
+the most popular kind of American merchant vessel. They clustered in
+every Atlantic port and were built in the yards of New England, New
+York, New Jersey, and Virginia,--built by the mile, as the saying was,
+and sawed off in lengths to suit the owners' pleasure. They carried
+the coal, ice, lumber of the whole seaboard and were so economical of
+man-power that they earned dividends where steamers or square-rigged
+ships would not have paid for themselves.
+
+As soon as a small steam-engine was employed to hoist the sails, it
+became possible to launch much larger schooners and to operate them at
+a marvelously low cost. Rapidly the four-master gained favor, and then
+came the five- and six-masted vessels, gigantic ships of their kind.
+Instead of the hundred-ton schooner of a century ago, Hampton Roads
+and Boston Harbor saw these great cargo carriers which could stow under
+hatches four and five thousand tons of coal, and whose masts soared a
+hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Square-rigged ships of the same
+capacity would have required crews of a hundred men, but these schooners
+were comfortably handled by a company of fifteen all told, only ten of
+whom were in the forecastle. There was no need of sweating and hauling
+at braces and halliards. The steam-winch undertook all this toil. The
+tremendous sails, stretching a hundred feet from boom to gaff could
+not have been managed otherwise. Even for trimming sheets or setting
+topsails, it was necessary merely to take a turn or two around the drum
+of the winch engine and turn the steam valve. The big schooner was the
+last word in cheap, efficient transportation by water. In her own sphere
+of activity she was as notable an achievement as the Western Ocean
+packet or the Cape Horn clipper.
+
+The masters who sailed these extraordinary vessels also changed and had
+to learn a new kind of seamanship. They must be very competent men, for
+the tests of their skill and readiness were really greater than those
+demanded of the deepwater skipper. They drove these great schooners
+alongshore winter and summer; across Nantucket Shoals and around Cape
+Cod, and their salvation depended on shortening sail ahead of the gale.
+Let the wind once blow and the sea get up, and it was almost impossible
+to strip the canvas off an unwieldy six-master. The captain's chief fear
+was of being blown offshore, of having his vessel run away with him!
+Unlike the deep-water man, he preferred running in toward the beach and
+letting go his anchors. There he would ride out the storm and hoist sail
+when the weather moderated.
+
+These were American shipmasters of the old breed, raised in schooners
+as a rule, and adapting themselves to modern conditions. They sailed for
+nominal wages and primage, or five per cent of the gross freight paid
+the vessel. Before the Great War in Europe, freights were low and the
+schooner skippers earned scanty incomes. Then came a world shortage
+of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big
+schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their
+masters shared in the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they
+owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently
+their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income
+of a thousand dollars a month. They earned this money, and the
+managing owners cheerfully paid them, for there had been lean years and
+uncomplaining service and the sailor had proved himself worthy of his
+hire. So tempting was the foreign war trade, that a fleet of them was
+sent across the Atlantic until the American Government barred them from
+the war zone as too easy a prey for submarine attack. They therefore
+returned to the old coastwise route or loaded for South American
+ports--singularly interesting ships because they were the last bold
+venture of the old American maritime spirit, a challenge to the Age of
+Steam.
+
+No more of these huge, towering schooners have been built in the last
+dozen years. Steam colliers and barges have won the fight because time
+is now more valuable than cheapness of transportation. The schooner
+might bowl down to Norfolk from Boston or Portland in four days and be
+threshing about for two weeks in head winds on the return voyage.
+
+The small schooner appeared to be doomed somewhat earlier. She had
+ceased to be profitable in competition with the larger, more modern
+fore-and-after, but these battered, veteran craft died hard. They
+harked back to a simpler age, to the era of the stage-coach and the
+spinning-wheel, to the little shipyards that were to be found on every
+bay and inlet of New England. They were still owned and sailed by men
+who ashore were friends and neighbors. Even now you may find during your
+summer wanderings some stumpy, weatherworn two-master running on for
+shelter overnight, which has plied up and down the coast for fifty or
+sixty years, now leaking like a basket and too frail for winter voyages.
+It was in a craft very much like this that your rude ancestors went
+privateering against the British. Indeed, the little schooner Polly,
+which fought briskly in the War of 1812, is still afloat and loading
+cargoes in New England ports.
+
+These little coasters, surviving long after the stately merchant marine
+had vanished from blue water, have enjoyed a slant of favoring fortune
+in recent years. They, too, have been in demand, and once again there is
+money to spare for paint and cordage and calking. They have been granted
+a new lease of life and may be found moored at the wharfs, beached on
+the marine railways, or anchored in the stream, eagerly awaiting their
+turn to refit. It is a matter of vital concern that the freight on
+spruce boards from Bangor to New York has increased to five dollars a
+thousand feet. Many of these craft belong to grandfatherly skippers who
+dared not venture past Cape Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda
+Emerson or the valetudinarian Joshua R. Coggswell should open up and
+founder in a blow. During the winter storms these skippers used to hug
+the kitchen stove in bleak farmhouses until spring came and they could
+put to sea again. The rigor of circumstances, however, forced others to
+seek for trade the whole year through. In a recent winter fifty-seven
+schooners were lost on the New England coast, most of which were unfit
+for anything but summer breezes. As by a miracle, others have been able
+to renew their youth, to replace spongy planking and rotten stems, and
+to deck themselves out in white canvas and fresh paint!
+
+The captains of these craft foregather in the ship-chandler's shops,
+where the floor is strewn with sawdust, the armchairs are capacious,
+and the environment harmonizes with the tales that are told. It is an
+informal club of coastwise skippers and the old energy begins to show
+itself once more. They move with a brisker gait than when times were so
+hard and they went begging for charters at any terms. A sinewy patriarch
+stumps to a window, flourishes his arm at an ancient two-master, and
+booms out:
+
+"That vessel of mine is as sound as a nut, I tell ye. She ain't as big
+as some, but I'd like nothin' better than to fill her full of suthin'
+for the west coast of Africy, same as the Horace M. Bickford that
+cleared t'other day, stocked for SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS."
+
+"Huh, you'd get lost out o' sight of land, John," is the cruel retort,
+"and that old shoe-box of yours 'ud be scared to death without a harbor
+to run into every time the sun clouded over. Expect to navigate to
+Africy with an alarm-clock and a soundin'-lead, I presume."
+
+"Mebbe I'd better let well enough alone," replies the old man. "Africy
+don't seem as neighborly as Phippsburg and Machiasport. I'll chance it
+as far as Philadelphy next voyage and I guess the old woman can buy a
+new dress."
+
+The activity and the reawakening of the old shipyards, their slips all
+filled with the frames of wooden vessels for the foreign trade, is
+like a revival of the old merchant marine, a reincarnation of ghostly
+memories. In mellowed dignity the square white houses beneath the New
+England elms recall to mind the mariners who dwelt therein. It seems
+as if their shipyards also belonged to the past; but the summer visitor
+finds a fresh attraction in watching the new schooners rise from the
+stocks, and the gay pageant of launching them, every mast ablaze with
+bunting, draws crowds to the water-front. And as a business venture,
+with somewhat of the tang of old-fashioned romance, the casual stranger
+is now and then tempted to purchase a sixty-fourth "piece" of a splendid
+Yankee four-master and keep in touch with its roving fortunes. The
+shipping reports of the daily newspaper prove more fascinating than the
+ticker tape, and the tidings of a successful voyage thrill one with a
+sense of personal gratification. For the sea has not lost its magic
+and its mystery, and those who go down to it in ships must still battle
+against elemental odds--still carry on the noble and enduring traditions
+of the Old Merchant Marine.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+As a rule, American historians like McMaster, Adams, and Rhodes give
+too little space to the maritime achievements of the nation. The gap has
+been partially filled by the following special works:
+
+Winthrop L. Marvin, "The American Merchant Marine: Its History and
+Romance from 1620 to 1902" (1902). This is the most nearly complete
+volume of its kind by an author who knows the subject and handles it
+with accuracy.
+
+John R. Spears, "The Story of the American Merchant Marine" (1910), "The
+American Slave Trade" (1901), "The Story of the New England Whalers"
+(1908). Mr. Spears has sought original sources for much of his material
+and his books are worth reading, particularly his history of the
+slave-trade.
+
+Ralph D. Paine, "The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem: The Record of a
+Brilliant Era of American Achievement" (1912). A history of the most
+famous seaport of the Atlantic coast, drawn from log-books and other
+manuscript collections. "The Book of Buried Treasure: Being a True
+History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, etc."
+(1911). Several chapters have to do with certain picturesque pirates and
+seamen of the colonies.
+
+Edgar S. Maclay, "A History of American Privateers" (1899). The only
+book of its kind, and indispensable to those who wish to learn the story
+of Yankee ships and sailors.
+
+J. R. Hutchinson, "The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore" (1914). This recent
+volume, written from an English point of view, illuminates the system of
+conscription which caused the War of 1812.
+
+Nothing can take the place, however, of the narratives of those master
+mariners who made the old merchant marine famous:
+
+Richard Henry Dana, Jr., "Two Years Before the Mast" (1840). The latest
+edition, handsomely illustrated, (1915). The classic narrative of
+American forecastle life in the sailing-ship era.
+
+Captain Richard Cleveland, "Narrative of Voyages and Commercial
+Enterprises" (1842). This is one of the fascinating autobiographies of
+the old school of shipmasters who had the gift of writing.
+
+Captain Amasa Delano, "Narrative of Voyages and Travels" (1817).
+Another of the rare human documents of blue water. It describes the most
+adventurous period of activity, a century ago.
+
+Captain Arthur H. Clark, "The Clipper Ship Era" (1910). A thrilling,
+spray-swept, true story. Far and away the best account of the clipper,
+by a man who was an officer of one in his youth.
+
+Robert Bennet Forbes, "Notes on Ships of the Past" (1888). Random facts
+and memories of a famous Boston ship-owner. It is valuable for its
+records of noteworthy passages.
+
+Captain John D. Whidden, "Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days"
+(1908). The entertaining reminiscences of a veteran shipmaster.
+
+Captain A. W. Nelson, "Yankee Swanson: Chapters from a Life at Sea"
+(1913). Another of the true romances, recommended for a lively sense of
+humor and a faithful portrayal of life aboard a windjammer.
+
+There are many other personal narratives, some of them privately printed
+and very old, which may be found in the libraries. Typical of them is
+"A Journal of the Travels and Sufferings of Daniel Saunders" (1794), in
+which a young sailor relates his adventures after shipwreck on the coast
+of Arabia.
+
+Among general works the following are valuable:
+
+J. Grey Jewell, "Among Our Sailors" (1874). A plea for more humane
+treatment of American seamen, with many instances on shocking
+brutalities as reported to the author, who was a United States Consul.
+
+E. Keble Chatterton, "Sailing Ships: The Story of their Development"
+(1909). An elaborate history of the development of the sailing vessel
+from the earliest times to the modern steel clipper.
+
+W. S. Lindsay, "History of Merchant Shipping and Ancient Commerce," 4
+vols. (1874-76). An English work, notably fair to the American marine,
+and considered authoritative.
+
+Douglas Owen, "Ocean Trade and Shipping" (1914). An English economist
+explains the machinery of maritime trade and commerce.
+
+William Wood, "All Afloat." In "The Chronicles of Canada Series."
+Glasgow, Brook and Co., Toronto, 1914.
+
+J. B. McMaster, "The Life and Times of Stephen Girard, Mariner and
+Merchant," 2 vols. (1918).
+
+The relation of governmental policy to the merchant marine is discussed
+by various writers:
+
+David A. Wells, "Our Merchant Marine: How It Rose, Increased, Became
+Great, Declined, and Decayed" (1882). A political treatise in defense of
+a protective policy.
+
+William A. Bates, "American Marine: The Shipping Question in History
+and Politics" (1892); "American Navigation: The Political History of Its
+Rise and Ruin" (1902). These works are statistical and highly technical,
+partly compiled from governmental reports, and are also frankly
+controversial.
+
+Henry Hall, "American Navigation, With Some Account of the Causes of Its
+Former Prosperity and Present Decline" (1878).
+
+Charles S. Hill, "History of American Shipping: Its Prestige, Decline,
+and Prospect" (1883).
+
+J. D. J. Kelley, "The Question of Ships: The Navy and the Merchant
+Marine" (1884).
+
+Arthur J. Maginnis, "The Atlantic Ferry: Its Ships, Men, and Working"
+(1900).
+
+A vast amount of information is to be found in the Congressional Report
+of the Merchant Marine Commission, published in three volumes (1905).
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Old Merchant Marine, by Ralph D. Paine
+
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