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.