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."