OLD SEA WAYS
I
Sixty years ago the thread snapped in that fine sea-piece of the
American foreign trade, and now the calling and time of those
deep-water sailors are dead as Nineveh. But Old Cape Cod was one with
the illimitable seas and the spot most loved by men for whom the
ocean was a workroom where fortunes might be made to spend at home.
No picture of these men could be complete without the background of
their life afloat. For five decades Yankee ships were weaving at
the great loom of the Western Ocean to set the splendid colors of
European adventure into new patterns of romance. Their tea-frigates
raced around the “Cape” to the Far East; they took the short cut
about Scotland to bargain with Kronstadt and Hamburg and Elsinore;
barques and brigantines and full-riggers caught the “brave west
winds” at the right slant and made record voyages past old Leeuwin,
the Cape of Storms, standing out there to give them a last toss as
they “ran down by” to Port Philip and “Melbun” and Sydney; clipper
ships, the fastest under sail that have ever been known, winged their
way around to “Frisco” in the great days of ’49. Cargoes sold there
at a fabulous price, and then, short-handed, perhaps, because of
desertion to the gold-fields, the great ships rushed by San Diego
and Callao, rich ports enough for other times, and, storm or shine,
swung ’round the Horn,
“... the fine keen bows of the stately clippers steering
Towards the lone northern star and the fair ports of home,”
to load again, and return by the path they had come.
Yankee captains who crowded on sail every hour in the twenty-four
had soon out-raced stolid John Company’s ships in the Far East;
but back in the seventeen-hundreds, before Maury had written on
navigation, they thanked England for their sailing texts, and notably
the “English Pilot,” printed by Messrs Mount & Page on Tower Hill, to
show “the Courses and Distances from one Place to another, the Ebbing
and Flowing of the Sea, the Setting of Tides and Currents.” “We shall
say no more,” cry Mount & Page, “but let it commend itself, and all
knowing Mariners are desired to lend their Assistance and Information
towards the perfecting of this useful work.” Every inch of water is
charted, the land invites with names of eld; the black letterpress,
with the long lisping _s_, tells of the great Western Ocean, water
and rim, from Barbary to Hispaniola, from Frobisher’s Meta Incognita
to the “Icey Sea” of the Far South. There are burning mountains and
cliffs, castles and towns, treacherous rocks and tides; and west of
a certain “white mount” on Darien three peaks are sharply etched,
and the legend, “Here hath been Gold found.” Due regard is had to
eastern and western variation, and the line of no variation at all
that springs from the coast of Florida; and it should be noted that
Sir Thomas Smith’s Sound is “most admirable in this respect, because
there is in it the greatest variation of the compass, that is in any
part of the world, as was discovered ... by divers good observations
made by that judicious artist Captain Baffin.” One Captain Davis, no
less judicious, had observed the same phenomenon on his third voyage
to the North in the year 1587. And those who sailed the Western Ocean
had learned painfully other facts than variations of the compass: the
sharp path about the doldrums, the way of Gulf Stream and trades,
and of the great west winds that sent them bowling along through the
Roaring Forties.
From the beginning of things men of the Old World, with the salt of
adventure in their blood, had passed “the forelands of the tideless
sea” to look upon the green distances beyond; those more greatly
daring had swept through the gate and brought back stories of the
Hesperides. Phœnicians seeking trade, ocean thieves their prey, poet
adventurers they knew not what, had sighted on the Barbary Coast
the “Pilot’s” “little Hommock which appeareth like a Castle,” and
sailed perhaps down by Arzille and Lavrache, Fedale and Azamoor,
names of sorcery with the soft purr of Eastern tongues. Another
and another slipped by Spartel, “shooting far into the Sea, the
very Point guarded with a Rock,” the “Pilot” tells us, and circled
northward through stormy cross-currents to Britain, or southward
by the treacherous coasts where “the grown Sea cometh rowling in
so hard.” Then sailors, north and south, put the land behind them,
and turned their prows due west: here lay the great adventure for
men who loved to play at chance, and they won, beyond dreams, a new
world. Norsemen, Portuguese, Basque, and Briton found, not Cathaia,
but the fishing-banks of Newfoundland, or boundless forests where
men might be free, or those magic islands of the South where Spain
was the first to gather her fleet of plate-ships for the homeward
run to Cadiz, where secret landlocked harbors sheltered evil, and
simple natives, bearing gifts, were kidnapped for their pains.
Other mariners, whose thirst for gold was not to be slaked with a
New World, made for the Far East by the Cape of “Buena Esperanza.”
Slipping down the coast of Africa beyond Blanco, they skirted a
sullen coast where the shore is broken by distorted trees and rocks
and the mouths of great rivers that cast their freight from the
sinister entrails of the land far out into a protesting ocean.
These men, and others, nameless and forgotten mariners, with a keen
eye for coast configuration and accurate soundings, made calculations
and drawings and passed them on to their mates, until Messrs. Mount
& Page winnowed out something of the truth of it all and constructed
their “English Pilot.” And now should you devise a voyage about the
seas of old romance, here is the chart for your venture. Swashbuckler
pirates sailed this way, and discreet men who would elude them;
slavers skulked down malign African coasts; clean, hardy voyagers,
who sought only glory and the Northwest Passage, battered frail
ships against the everlasting barriers of ice; adventurers in quest
of gold worked their way down the Spanish Main; and, turn about, our
fine young seamen of the New World wrung their vantage from the Old.
A certain navigator from the Cape, we know, used his “Pilot” on
sober trading voyages to the West Coast of Africa, or London, or the
Spanish Main, and sailing days over pushed his great sea-chest back
under the eaves of the trim house he had built after a rich voyage
to Russia. He had sailed for pure love of churning blue water, and
the sweep of wind through the rigging, and great clean distances,
and a fine manly sense of mastering the tools of fate: wind and
water and cloud, and men, and the job of making a good trade. Yet
never had he been at sea that he was not homesick for the land, and
his adventurous youth was no more than the price he paid for plenty
ashore. He had met chance as it came and turned it to gold; and
here in the “Pilot,” forgotten for a generation in the cavernous
depths of his worm-eaten coffer, were notes for the story he had
been too simple to read as romance. Its worn leather covers open out
comfortably, and within, a cabin boy, perhaps, idling about while the
master was on deck, had scrawled “Sloop Maremad of Boston,” and for
another try “The Sloop Mairmad,” and knew his hornbook no better than
a merman. Some leaves are burned through by a coal that smouldered
there how many years ago, on this good sloop Mermaid, at a guess,
in the year 1789, and silver-moths now plunge among the pages like
cachalots in southern seas.
When the captain had set out for Africa, with a cargo of cloth,
iron kettles, and such-like trifles to barter for ivory and gold,
the “Pilot,” by word and chart, painted the chances before him.
Over there among the Cape Verdes lay Saint Jago, “rich in products,
so that were it not for the continual Rains in the Times of the
Travadoes, which render it unpleasant to the Inhabitants, it would
without doubt be as delightsome an Island as any in the world”;
and Garrichica, in the Canaries, is no winter port, for then “the
grown Sea out of the North West comes running in there sometimes so
forcible and strong, that it is not possible to hold a Ship, although
she had ten Anchors out.” South and east now the sullen mainland
lowers, and there “lying under the Tropick of Cancer,” is a country
“high and stony, so that there is nothing to be had hereabouts, ...
and with the Sun’s heat, continuing sometimes thirty and forty Days
together ... it is so intolerable hot in the Valleys, that it blinds
and deafens those that travel this Way.” But knowing skippers that
“sail near this Coast, pass along, none go a-shore, for ’tis not
worth their while.” At a shoal called “the Goulden Bark, much Fish is
taken at sometimes of the Year,” and there’s trading at last on “the
great River Senega”: “several Commodities, as Amber, Elephants Teeth,
with Abundance of Wax and Skins.” But on Serbera is the Traders’
Paradise, whose delights the “Pilot” accentuates by a printer’s slip:
“When you come into the heaven, you may anchor where you will, but
commonly they run towards Madra Bombo, as being the chief Place for
Traffic; though there is Merchandizing on the Right Side of the
River, where you may run with Sloops and Boats. The Place affords all
Varieties of Refreshment, as Hens, Rice, Lemons, Apples, with several
merchantable Commidities.”
Happy Madra Bombo! thrice happy Trader! And let him refresh himself
well before proceeding to the unfriendly Coast of Malegate where
the “Rains begins with May, and continues till October; during
which time, they have great and terrible Thunder and Lightning,”
and “mountainous Billows rowl to the Shore, so that ’tis in effect
impossible to approach the same in Boats, without danger of
splitting. But these Seasons once over, from October to May, the
Weather proves pleasant and dry; ’till indammaged by the fiery Heat
of the scalding Air.”
The lean coast is marked by trees and blasted rocks: “a high tree
called Arbor de Castacuis”; “a few Trees, appearing like Horsemen”;
a white rock, with a look, “afar off, like a Ship under Sail”;
and at Setra Crue, “high and bare Trees which raise themselves in
the Air like masts of Ships laid up”; and “on a Cliff a crooked
Tree appearing like an Umbrella.” Slight landmarks for a man, less
imaginative, perhaps, than the “Pilot,” who shall sweep the coast
with his spyglass and debate with himself whether a grove looks
rather like a mizzen-sail than like a horse; and madness for the
skipper to whom a tree is but a tree, no more, no less. But here is
trading again with the Ivory or Tooth Coast and the “Gold Coast of
Guiney,” and solid English forts where “in coming off Seaward ... you
must brace your Sails to the Mast, and let it drive; firing off a
Shot as a Token of yielding before the Castle.”
Now through the great Bights of Benin and Biafra, and all along to
Cape Lopez Gonzalez, must a captain keep a sharp weather eye to
“mind which way the Travadoes drive the Water, for the Sea Flowes
from whence they arise,” and be ready to run before the tornado,
“which when you see it it is best to hand all your Sail except your
Foresail which you may keep in your Brails to command your Ship.”
But, above all, must you “weigh with all Speed and get off.” And
these are the sinister coasts where men were sold and bought; brave
John Hawkins shamed England by trading here; Spain and America loaded
the scales that must be balanced with blood. “About thirteen Leagues
up River Benin, on the East-side thereof, stands the great Town of
Gaton or Benin, ... doubly pallisado’d with huge thick Trees, and
on the other Side ’tis strongly fortified with a great Ditch and a
Hedge of Brambles. Here the King of Benin keeps his Court, having
there a stately Palace.” But the high words cloak a reality sordid
enough when the great King of Benin sat in his house of logs and
sold meat for the slavers. And peril lurks here at every turn, “for
the Ground is so very foul, and the Inhabitants such Brutes, that
there is no coming near it.” Peril, again, in possible confusion
of the rivers Forcades and Lamas: for many pilots, thinking they
are near Forcades, where there is “Fairing in twelve Fathoms good
Anchor-ground,” make for Lamas, “running into it till they become
shoal, then perceiving their error, but too late, the Ship is lost,
and the Men endeavouring to save themselves from being swallowed up
by the Sea and Mud, are devoured and eaten up by the greedy Negroes.”
Such, for a slaver, should be the proper adventure of the river
Lamas. May the dinner of his “greedy Negroes” sit light!
Slaves, slaves, and more slaves are all the “refreshment” here, and
an honest Yankee trader, who has exchanged his “silesia linnen and
basons” for ivory and gold dust, best be off for home by way of the
Amboises, Fernando Po, and Prince’s Island, high, wooded, beautiful,
and “affording good Refreshment in Abundance”; or, down by Lopez, the
“Island Annebon,” where “those that return Home from the Cape are
supplied with Abundance of choice Oranges and Pomegranates, as also
good fresh Water.”
II
The “Pilot” of Messrs. Mount & Page was contrived from the reports of
some who “put more westing into their navigation” to sail for plunder
rather than trade; and in Volume IV, on the “West India Navigation
from Hudson’s Bay to the River Amazones,” they step down easily
from Terre de Labrador, where lay, they thought, the chance of that
short-cut to Cathaia, to the treasure-house of the Spanish Main. The
Yankee captain, laying a northern course to Europe would need only to
reverse the sequence of procedure in the “Pilot’s” voyage thence.
“When a voyage is intended from the river Thames to those Northern
Parts of America, you may go out of the North Channel by Scotland or
else through the West Channel by the Lands End of England, according
as the winds may favour you.” Martin Frobisher, of will as stubborn
as the impenetrable North, had set sail by the West Channel to prove
his “plaine platte” that Frobisher’s Straits should make a broad
highway to the East by the other way round of the world. He sailed
by Greenland, where “you will have the sea of divers colours, in
some places green, in some black, and in others blue”; and there
is Cape Desolation, “the most deformed land that is supposed to be
in the whole world,” where the water is “black and thick, like a
standing pool.” It was Warwick Sound “where Sir Martin Frobisher
intended to lade his supposed gold ore,” says the “Pilot,” and within
his “Streits” lies “a whirlpool where ships are whirled about in a
moment; the waters making a great noise and are heard a great way
off.”
So much for their Meta Incognita, where the old mariners dug
worthless ore, and fished, and killed whale, and made poor trading
with the wretched natives; and never breaking through to Cathaia,
they were swept up and down, among “strange rocks and overfalls and
shoals.” Caught by winter, they bivouacked somehow in the snows, and
in June nosed their way out to free water, or, undiscouraged, beat
ahead for their Northwest Passage. The “Island of God’s Mercy” and
“Hold with Hope” tell of some cockle-shell sailor’s escape from
“many points and headlongs” and “broken ground and shoals, worse than
can be expected.” Captain Bayley, Captain Zacchary Gillam, in his
“Nonsuch Ketch,” Henry Southwood, and William Taverner cruised here,
and their findings are printed in the “Pilot.” And as to Newfoundland
and the fishing-banks, if we go astray, it is by our own obstinacy:
for the reporter here is a peppery old party who “informs those that
are bound for that coast that they may not be deceived, as I myself
had been like to have been in going to Saint John’s on the 29th day
of June, 1715, at 8 o’clock in the morning, ... having been just a
month that very day from Plymouth Sound,” by reason of “a very great
error in those charts which have hitherto been published.” And he
sets us right as to computing “the true Distance between the Lizard
and Cape Spear,” where other navigators “would still continue the old
erroneous Way; because, they say, when I argu’d with them, _it is the
custom_; they might as well have persuaded me, that old custom could
oversway Reason.”
Yankee cruisers to the southward found profitable advice, again: for
“such as are bound for Virginia or Maryland will find many times
on the coast of America various winds and weathers, and streams
and currents also, therefore they must take the more care, and not
trust with much confidence to dead reckoning.” (Mr. Rich tells us
of one Truro skipper who “could keep a better dead reckoning with
fewer figures than any sailor ever known. A few chalk marks on the
cabin door or at the head of his berth, and he knew his position on
the Western ocean, whatever wind or weather, as well as if in his
father’s cornfield.”) “For by experience,” the “Pilot” goes on to
say, “has been found sometimes in twenty-four hours such currents
as hath carried them either to the Northward or Southward, contrary
to the reckoning beyond credit.” But we are off for the Caribbees,
and as we leave “those northern parts of America,” Saint Vincent and
Domenica, Marygalante, “Guardaloupa,” and all the jewelled drops of
the Antilles, from Bermuda to the Isle of Pearls, slip by on the blue
ribbon of the summer seas; and the wind, whether or no, veers back to
the “spacious time of great Elizabeth,” when Hakluyt is the master.
Yet may we as well sail by the “Pilot,” who also knows “Franky
Drake,” and tells us that the “Islands of the Virgia Gorda were ever
accounted dangerous, but we find by the worthy Sir Francis Drake,
in his relation of them, that they were not so, who sailed through
and among them. There is good shelter, if you are acquainted with
going in among them, for many hundred sails of ships.” And here, with
Drake, sailed Martin Frobisher to recoup his fortunes blasted by the
north, and returned to England with sixty thousand pounds in gold and
two brass cannon as profit.
All is war and pillage, surprise and counter-manœuvre. On Hispaniola,
over against the two islands Granive and Foul Beard in the Bay of
Jaguana, “the Spaniards have made three or four ways through the
Krenckle woods against time of war, that they may convey their
merchandise thro’ the same woods without being discovered.” “In a
little bay near Cape Tiburon the English used to lie, waiting for the
Saint Domingo fleet, and the reason why they laid there was, because
there was refreshment to be had from the shore.” And at Veragua,
where is “good fresh water, and almost anything you want,” we hear of
Drake again: “It is said that on this island Sir Francis Drake fell
ill and died, and was there buried.” But here the “Pilot” trips, for
Drake, sick with rage and disappointment, died when the fleet lay
off Porto Bello, and was buried from his ship. There are treacherous
keys among the islands where many a great ship has laid her bones;
the Coffin Key, dreaded of sailors, where after sundown walk the
ghosts of murdered men; and quiet little bays for “cruizing ships to
anchor, when they want to heel or boot top, or to refit any of their
rigging.” Saona is “a fruitful island abounding in cassava ... so
that it hath oftentimes been to the Spaniards as a granary whereby
they have been sustained.” And practical directions for the navigator
run with the allusion to old report: at Illuthera you may look out
for two white cliffs “called the Alabasters”; “along shore you will
see a hill resembling a Dutchman’s thumb cap”; and one Captain Street
tells of the “Colloradoes” pricking out “where we saw to the eastward
of us three hommocks on Cuba,” with “flocks of pelican sitting on the
red white sand.” “Take this one more observation of the Colloradoes,”
says Captain Street, “when you think you are near them, keep then
your lead going, for there is good gradual shoaling on them, at
first coming on them, excellent sticking oazy ground and then sand.”
Down the slope of Campeachy Bay the whole coast is fever-stricken
and bare of all comfort; nor is there brook or fresh water, unless
you dig deep in the sand, save one spring about two hundred yards
from the shore, where “you may see a small dirty path that leads to
it through the mangroves.” Forests rise from the marshes, rivers
skulk behind great sandbars; the place smells of pirates, and their
light-draft brigs thread the innumerable salt lagoons, that Laguna
of the Tides, perhaps, where “small vessels, as barks, periagoes, or
canoes may sail.”
Turning, we are for “the Amazones,” and then back again, up the
great coast of the mainland. Here is the “Oronoque” and many a
lesser stream: the Wannary, “shallow, craggy and foul, the land
soft and quaggy,” and “therefore thereabouts not inhabited but with
that vermin Crocodile, of which there are in this place abundance”;
and the Caperwaka with an island in it where there is rich quarry
for fo’c’s’le hunters—“such multitudes of parrots and other fine
feathered fowls, that you cannot hear each other speak for their
noise; there are many apes on this island, and other creatures, which
I omit here to mention.” At the Roca Islands “are no beasts but some
few fowls, which they call Flamingoes, having long legs almost like
storks, with orange-coloured feathers, and great crooked bills.”
All along to Caracas a captain must be on the alert because of “the
boisterous winds that blow there,” the “Turnadoes,” that “cause a
great overflowing of water.” And “the land is very high, some say
as high as Teneriffe. You have there an extraordinary hollow sea,
therefore those that would anchor on this coast do best to run
a little westward ... where you may lie quiet and secure.” Down
through the “Gulph of Venezula” “the country is full of brooks and
rivulets; the people, ugly, thin, and ill-favoured, going naked, are
frightful to behold.” But “there is much gold brought from thence,
and some costly stones of several virtues,” and “in the country are
many tygers and bears.” Rio de la Hacha, as we know, was “formerly a
rich place by reason of the pearl fishing and other trading. On the
east side of the river lies a bank which must be shunned,” as was
successfully accomplished by Captain John Hawkins when he outwitted
the Don and watered his ship at the enemy’s wells—perhaps that Jesus
of Lubec he was to lose by Spanish treachery at San Juan d’Ulloa.
And the river Trato, with its mouth blocked by “march land and Sea
Cows,” runs “South a long way into the bowels of the country near
the golden mines of Canea.” Gold and more gold, and here, in the old
days, was bloody work done by Spain which, in turn, was pillaged by
England and France. One Captain Long made a smug show of setting up
“English colours by consent of the Indian natives,” but on a certain
reef “Captain Long had like to have lost His Majesty’s Ship the
Rupert prize.” And between the keys called the Sambello and main
“used to be the rendezvous of the French buccaneers,” as off Andero
and Catalina “the French used to lie with their privateers and plague
the Spaniards to leeward, especially those at Porto Bello and Nombre
de Dios.” At Lake Nicaragua “is a thing may be called a wonder;
some of the trees can scarcely be fathomed by fifteen men; that is
the body of the tree; which thing is confirmed by many.” And it was
such a tree that Drake climbed when first he looked upon the slow
surge of the Pacific and swore the oath that was to disturb Spain’s
comfortable looting of the South Seas.
Mexico is coasted about in short order. An island off Vera Cruz
comes in chiefly for “extraordinary remarks”; for “in this place the
Spanish fleet used to lie, and bring their loading from all parts,
until the month of March, from whence they sail to the Havannah,
where they always make their fleet to depart for Spain.” And “now
we come to the wild coast of Florida, of which take brief account,”
says the “Pilot,” because, forsooth, there was then little trade or
plunder to be had. Even the mighty Mississippi appears only as the
Bay of Spirito Sancto, with, inland, a shadowy “mishisipi.” Steering
out by Florida, we discover the Gulf Stream, “an extraordinary strong
current, without rippling or whirling, or any other distinction than
in the main ocean, always setting to the northward, occasioned by the
northeast winds, which there always blow, not altering till you come
as far as the Canaries or Salt Islands or thereabouts.”
But we turn back toward the “Northern Parts of America,” and the
good ports of Baltimore or Boston or New York, and leave John
Hawkins and Francis Drake and their mates who, after all, were only
seeking gold at as good a bargain in blood or adventure as fortune
sent, and were traders no less than the man who owned our “Pilot”
and pored over its charts and quaint letterpress while the shores
of Africa thundered in the offing or, down by the Spanish Main, his
lookout watched sharp for the lurch of a pirate brig. Nor was he
less adventurer than they, though he travelled the Western Ocean by
roads that were as undeviating, for a good seaman, as those built by
Rome, and knew the way of the currents there and the steady sweep of
the trades. More than once he had anchored at Prince’s Island for a
cargo of sugar and oil, more than once he had weighed and run before
the “Turnado” and crept back to his anchorage when the commotion was
past. He had traded at Matanzas and Surinam; he knew the trick of
the Spaniard at “the Havannah” and Cadiz; and down at Rio he rode
fast horses on the beach and steved his hold full of precious woods.
He was no scholar, yet could calculate his position at sea by the
latest mode of the navigator; he was no linguist, yet could bend
Frenchman, or Russian, or the wily Chinese hong to his will. Like the
Elizabethans, he loved gold: for that meant home and honor and dry
land under foot. And he plunged into seafaring with all the strength
in him only to win through to that career ashore when he should own
the ships that other men sailed. He showed an unaffected, outspoken
piety that would be impossible to the young blood of to-day, and he
and his calling are no more. Yet the type persists, the type of all
true adventurers old and new: the men who steer for free waters, but
first of all are masters of the ship.