[Footnote 20: From _The Old Merchant Marine_, by Ralph D. Paine, in _The
Chronicles of America_ Series. Copyright, 1919, by the Yale University
Press. By permission of the author and of the publishers.]
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.[21] 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.
[Footnote 21: 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
1713 or 1714. [Author's note.]]
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.
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 Gloucester-man 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
"Blue-noses" 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.[22]
[Footnote 22: In 1862, the tonnage amounted to 193,459; in 1866, to 89,386.
[Author's note.]]
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. Deep-water
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
salt-water 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
sea-board 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 deep-water 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, weather-worn 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 the sun clouded over. Expect to
navigate to 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 dwell 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.