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THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF OLD SALEM
[Illustration: The _Panay_, one of the last of the Salem fleet bound
out from Boston to Manila twenty-five years ago]
THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF
OLD SALEM
_THE RECORD OF A BRILLIANT ERA OF
AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT_
BY
RALPH D. PAINE
_Author of “The Greater America,”
“The Romance of an Old-Time Shipmaster,” etc._
NEW EDITION
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration: A·C·M^cCLURG & CO]
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1912
Copyright, 1908, by
THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
Copyright, 1912, by
A. C. McCLURG & CO., CHICAGO
_All Rights Reserved_
The Lakeside Press
R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY
CHICAGO
“THE MERCHANTMEN”
“Beyond all outer charting
We sailed where none have sailed,
And saw the land-lights burning
On islands none have hailed;
Our hair stood up for wonder,
But when the night was done,
There danced the deep to windward
Blue-empty ’neath the sun.”
RUDYARD KIPLING.
“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.”
(_From a chantey sung while sheeting home topsails._)
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The Panama Canal has strongly revived interest in the American merchant
marine. A nation, long indifferent to the fact that it had lost its
prestige on blue water, now discovers that after digging a ditch
between two oceans at a cost of hundred of millions, there are almost
no American ships to use it.
In other days, Yankee ships and sailors were able to win the commerce
of the world against the competition of foreign flags because of native
enterprise, brains, and seamanship. Nor is it impossible that such an
era shall come again. It was not so much the lack of subsidies and the
lower cost of foreign ships and crews that drove the American ensign
from the high seas as the greater attraction which drew capital and
energy to the tasks of building cities and railroads and opening to
civilization the inland areas of the West.
If these records of maritime Salem hold any lessons for to-day, if
they are worth while as something more than stirring tales of bygone
generations, it is because those seafarers achieved success without
counting the odds. They were enormously hampered by the policy of
England which deliberately endeavored to crush Colonial shipping by
means of numberless tonnage, customs, and neutrality regulations.
It was a merciless jealousy that sought to confiscate every Yankee
merchant vessel and ruin her owners.
There were the risks of the sea, of uncharted, unlighted coasts and
reefs and islands, and a plague of ferocious pirates and lawless
privateers who haunted the trade routes from the Spanish Main to
Madagascar. The vessel lucky enough to escape all these perils might
run afoul of another menace in the cruiser or customs officer of the
King, and many an American merchantmen, hundreds of them, were seized
in their own harbors and carried off before the eyes of their owners
who could only stand by in speechless rage and sorrow at the loss of
their labor and investment.
Notwithstanding all these grievous handicaps, American ships and
sailors prospered and multiplied, nor did they stay at home and whine
that they could not compete with the more favored merchant navies of
England and the Continent. They took and held their commanding share of
the world’s trade because they had to have it. They wanted it earnestly
enough to go out and get it.
Whenever the United States shall really desire to regain her proud
place among the maritime nations, the minds of her captains of industry
will find a way to achieve it and her legislators will solve their
share of the problem. And our people will cease paying over to English
and German shipowners enough money in freight and passage bills every
year to defray the cost of building a Panama Canal.
From log books, sea journals and other manuscripts hitherto unpublished
(most of them written during the years between the Revolution and the
War of 1812), are herein gathered such narratives as those of the first
American voyages to Japan, India, the Philippines, Guam, the Cape of
Good Hope, Sumatra, Arabia and the South Seas. These and other records,
as written by the seamen who made Salem the most famous port of the New
World a century ago, are much more than local annals. They comprise a
unique and brilliant chapter of American history and they speak for
themselves.
This era, vanished this closed chapter of American achievement which
reached its zenith a full century ago, belongs not alone to Salem, but
also to the nation. East and west, north and south, runs the love of
the stars and stripes, and the desire to do honor to those who have
helped win for this flag prestige and respect among other peoples in
other climes. The seamen of this old port were traders, it is true, but
they lent to commerce an epic quality, and because they steered so many
brave ships to ports where no other American topsails had ever gleamed,
they deserve to be remembered among those whose work left its imprint
far beyond the limits of the town or coast they called home.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A PORT OF VANISHED FLEETS. 3
II PHILIP ENGLISH AND HIS ERA. (1680-1750.) 21
III SOME EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PIRATES.
(1670-1725.) 39
IV THE PRIVATEERSMEN OF ’76. 58
V JONATHAN HARADEN, PRIVATEERSMAN. (1776-1782.) 78
VI CAPTAIN LUTHER LITTLE’S OWN STORY. (1771-1799.) 98
VII THE JOURNAL OF WILLIAM RUSSELL. (1776-1783.) 117
VIII THE JOURNAL OF WILLIAM RUSSELL (_concluded_).
(1779-1783.) 134
IX RICHARD DERBY AND HIS SON JOHN. (1774-1792.) 149
X ELIAS HASKET DERBY AND HIS TIMES. (1770-1800.) 173
XI PIONEERS IN DISTANT SEAS. (1775-1817.) 197
XII THE BUILDING OF THE _ESSEX_. (1799.) 228
XIII THE FIRST AMERICAN VOYAGERS TO JAPAN.
(1799-1801.) 250
XIV THE FIRST YANKEE SHIP AT GUAM. (1801.) 270
XV NATHANIEL BOWDITCH AND HIS “PRACTICAL
NAVIGATOR.” (1802.) 288
XVI THE VOYAGES OF NATHANIEL SILSBEE. (1792-1800.) 310
XVII THE VOYAGES OF RICHARD CLEVELAND. (1791-1820.) 329
XVIII THE PRIVATEERS OF 1812. 353
XIX THE TRAGEDY OF THE _FRIENDSHIP_. (1831.) 378
XX EARLY SOUTH SEA VOYAGES. (1832.) 406
XXI THE LAST PIRATES OF THE SPANISH MAIN.
(1832.) 431
XXII GENERAL FREDERICK TOWNSEND WARD. (1859-1862.) 451
XXIII THE EBBING OF THE TIDE. 482
APPENDIX. 499
ILLUSTRATIONS
The _Panay_, one of the last of the Salem fleet bound out
from Boston to Manila twenty-five years ago _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel
Hawthorne as surveyor 6
Page from the illustrated log of the _Eolus_ 6
A corner in the Marine Room of the Peabody Museum 14
The Marine Room, Peabody Museum 14
Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society 18
Title page of the log of Capt Nathaniel Hawthorne 18
The Roger Williams house 24
The Philip English “Great House” 30
A bill of lading of the time of Philip English, dated 1716 36
The log of a Salem whaler 36
A page from Falconer’s Marine Dictionary (18th Century) 44
Agreement by which a Revolutionary privateer seaman
sold his share of the booty in advance of his cruise 66
Proclamation posted in Salem during the Revolution calling
for volunteers aboard Paul Jones’ _Ranger_ 70
Schooner _Baltic_ 76
Derby Wharf, Salem, Mass., as it appears to-day 86
Captain Luther Little 108
The East India Marine Society’s hall, now the home of
the Peabody Museum 120
Page from the records of the East India Marine Society 120
The Salem Custom House, built in 1818 140
Richard Derby 152
“Leslie’s Retreat” 158
The _Grand Turk_, first American ship to pass the Cape of
Good Hope 176
Nathaniel West 180
William Gray 188
Elias Hasket Derby 188
The Ship _Mount Vernon_ 192
Elias Hasket Derby mansion (1790-1816) 194
Prince House. Home of Richard Derby. Built about 1750 194
Joseph Peabody 200
Hon. Jacob Crowninshield 204
Benjamin Crowninshield 208
Ship _Ulysses_ 212
Yacht _Cleopatra’s Barge_ 212
Log of the good ship _Rubicon_ 214
The frigate _Essex_ 230
Broadside ballad published in Salem after the news was
received of the loss of the _Essex_ 248
Page from the log of the _Margaret_ 252
The good ship _Franklin_ 252
View of Nagasaki before Japan was opened to commerce 260
Salem Harbor as it is to-day 274
The old-time sailors used to have their vessels painted on
pitchers and punch bowls 284
Title page from the journal of the _Lydia_ 284
Nathaniel Bowditch, author of “The Practical Navigator” 294
Nathaniel Bowditch’s chart of Salem harbor 304
Captain Benjamin Carpenter of the _Hercules_, 1792 306
From the log of the _Hercules_ 308
Pages from the log of the ship _Hercules_, 1792 312
Captain Nathaniel Silsbee 318
Captain Richard Cleveland 334
Captain James W. Chever 358
The privateer _America_ under full sail 358
Captain Holten J. Breed 370
The privateer _Grand Turk_ 370
An old broadside, relating the incidents of the battle of
Qualah Battoo 380
The _Glide_ 390
The _Friendship_ 390
Captain Driver 408
Letter to Captain Driver from the “Bounty” Colonists 408
Captain Thomas Fuller 432
The brig _Mexican_ attacked by pirates, 1832 432
Frederick T. Ward 454
Captain John Bertram 486
Ship _Sooloo_ 494
THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF OLD SALEM
The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem
CHAPTER I
A PORT OF VANISHED FLEETS
American ships and sailors have almost vanished from the seas that lie
beyond their own coasts. The twentieth century has forgotten the era
when Yankee topsails, like flying clouds, flecked every ocean, when
tall spars forested every Atlantic port from Portland to Charleston,
and when the American spirit of adventurous enterprise and rivalry
was in its finest flower on the decks of our merchant squadrons. The
last great chapter of the nation’s life on blue water was written in
the days of the matchless clippers which swept round the Horn to San
Francisco or fled homeward from the Orient in the van of the tea fleets.
The Cape Horn clipper was able to survive the coming of the Age of
Steam a few years longer than the Atlantic packet ships, such as the
_Dreadnought_, but her glory departed with the Civil War and thereafter
the story of the American merchant marine is one of swift and sorrowful
decay. The boys of the Atlantic coast, whose fathers had followed the
sea in legions, turned inland to find their careers, and the sterling
qualities which had been bred in the bone by generations of salty
ancestry now helped to conquer the western wilderness.
It is all in the past, this noble and thrilling history of American
achievement on the deep sea, and a country with thousands of miles
of seacoast has turned its back toward the spray-swept scenes of its
ancient greatness to seek the fulfillment of its destiny in peopling
the prairie, reclaiming the desert and feeding its mills and factories
with the resources of forest, mine and farm.
For more than two centuries, however, we Americans were a maritime
race, in peace and war, and the most significant deeds and spectacular
triumphs of our seafaring annals were wrought long before the era of
the clipper ship. The fastest and most beautiful fabric ever driven by
the winds, the sky-sail clipper was handled with a superb quality of
seamanship which made the mariners of other nations doff their caps to
the ruddy Yankee masters of the _Sovereign of the Seas_, the _Flying
Cloud_, the _Comet_, the _Westward Ho_, or the _Swordfish_. Her routes
were well traveled, however, and her voyages hardly more eventful than
those of the liner of to-day. Islands were charted, headlands lighted,
and the instruments and science of navigation so far perfected as
to make ocean pathfinding no longer a matter of blind reckoning and
guesswork. Pirates and privateers had ceased to harry the merchantmen
and to make every voyage a hazard of life and death from the Bahama
Banks to the South Seas.
Through the vista of fifty years the Yankee clipper has a glamour of
singularly picturesque romance, but it is often forgotten that two
hundred years of battling against desperate odds and seven generations
of seafaring stock had been required to evolve her type and to breed
the men who sailed her in the nineteenth century. It is to this much
older race of American seamen and the stout ships they built and manned
that we of to-day should be grateful for many of the finest pages in
the history of our country’s progress. The most adventurous age of
our merchant mariners had reached its climax at the time of the War of
1812, and its glory was waning almost a hundred years ago. For the most
part its records are buried in sea-stained log books and in the annals
and traditions of certain ancient New England coastwise towns,[1] of
which Salem was the most illustrious.
This port of Salem is chiefly known beyond New England as the scene
of a wicked witchcraft delusion which caused the death of a score
of poor innocents in 1692, and in later days as the birthplace of
Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is not so commonly known that this old town
of Salem, nestled in a bight of the Massachusetts coast, was once the
most important seat of maritime enterprise in the New World. Nor when
its population of a century ago is taken into consideration can any
foreign port surpass for adventure, romance and daring the history of
Salem during the era of its astonishing activity. Even as recently as
1854, when the fleets of Salem were fast dwindling, the _London Daily
News_, in a belated eulogy of our American ships and sailors, was moved
to compare the spirit of this port with that of Venice and the old
Hanse towns and to say: “We owe a cordial admiration of the spirit of
American commerce in its adventurous aspects. To watch it is to witness
some of the finest romance of our time.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem in
1848-49, after the prestige of the port had been well-nigh lost.
He was descended from a race of Salem shipmasters and he saw daily
in the streets of his native town the survivors of the generations
of incomparable seamen who had first carried the American flag to
Hindoostan, Java, Sumatra, and Japan, who were first to trade with the
Fiji Islands and with Madagascar, who had led the way to the west coast
of Africa and to St. Petersburg, who had been pioneers in opening the
commerce of South America and China to Yankee ships. They had “sailed
where no other ships dared to go, they had anchored where no one
else dreamed of looking for trade.” They had fought pirates and the
privateers of a dozen races around the world, stamping themselves as
the Drakes and the Raleighs and Gilberts of American commercial daring.
In the Salem of his time, however, Hawthorne perceived little more than
a melancholy process of decay, and a dusky background for romances
of a century more remote. It would seem as if he found no compelling
charm in the thickly clustered memories that linked the port with its
former greatness on the sea. Some of the old shipmasters were in the
Custom House service with him and he wrote of them as derelicts “who
after being tost on every sea and standing sturdily against life’s
tempestuous blast had finally drifted into this quiet nook where with
little to disturb them except the periodical terrors of a Presidential
election, they one and all acquired a new lease of life.”
They were simple, brave, elemental men, hiding no tortuous problems of
conscience, very easy to analyze and catalogue, and perhaps not apt,
for this reason, to make a strong appeal to the genius of the author of
“The Scarlet Letter.”
[Illustration: Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel
Hawthorne as surveyor]
[Illustration: Page from the illustrated log of the _Eolus_. Her
captain drew such pictures as these of the ships he sighted at sea]
“They spent a good deal of time asleep in their accustomed corners,” he
also wrote of them, “with their chairs tilted back against the wall;
awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon to bore one another
with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories and mouldy
jokes that had grown to be passwords and counter-signs among them.”
One of the sea journals or logs of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,[2]
father of the author, possesses a literary interest in that its title
page was lettered by the son when a lad of sixteen. With many an
ornamental flourish the inscription runs:
Nathaniel Hathorne’s
Book—1820—Salem.
A Journal of a Passage from Bengall to America
In the Ship _America_ of
Salem, 1798.
This is almost the only volume of salty flavored narrative to which
Nathaniel Hawthorne may be said to have contributed, although he was
moved to pay this tribute to his stout-hearted forebears:
“From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the
quarterdeck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the
hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the
gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.”
Even to-day there survive old shipmasters and merchants of Salem who
in their own boyhood heard from the lips of the actors their stories
of shipwrecks on uncharted coasts; of captivity among the Algerians
and in the prisons of France, England and Spain; of hairbreadth
escapes from pirates on the Spanish Main and along Sumatran shores; of
ship’s companies overwhelmed by South Sea cannibals when Salem barks
were pioneers in the wake of Captain Cook; of deadly actions fought
alongside British men-of-war and private armed ships, and of steering
across far-distant seas when “India was a new region and only Salem
knew the way thither.”
Such men as these were trained in a stern school to fight for their
own. When the time came they were also ready to fight for their
country. Salem sent to sea one hundred and fifty-eight privateers
during the Revolution. They carried two thousand guns and were
manned by more than six thousand men, a force equal in numbers to
the population of the town. These vessels captured four hundred and
forty-four prizes, or more than one-half the total number taken by all
the Colonies during the war.
In the War of 1812 Salem manned and equipped forty privateers and
her people paid for and built the frigate _Essex_ which under the
command of David Porter swept the Pacific clean of British commerce
and met a glorious end in her battle with the _Phoebe_ and _Cherub_
off the harbor of Valparaiso. Nor among the sea fights of both wars
are there to be found more thrilling ship actions than were fought
by Salem privateersmen who were as ready to exchange broadsides or
measure boarding pikes with a “king’s ship” as to snap up a tempting
merchantman.
But even beyond these fighting merchant sailors lay a previous century
of such stress and hazard in ocean traffic as this age cannot imagine.
One generation after another of honest shipmasters had been the prey of
a great company of lawless rovers under many flags or no flag at all.
The distinction between privateers and pirates was not clearly drawn in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the tiny American brigs
and sloops which bravely fared to the West Indies and Europe were fair
marks for the polyglot freebooters that laughed at England’s feeble
protection of her colonial trade.
The story of the struggles and heroisms of the western pioneers has
been told over and over again. Every American schoolboy is acquainted
with the story of the beginnings of the New England Colonies and of
their union. But the work of the seafaring breed of Americans has
been somewhat suffered to remain in the background. Their astonishing
adventures were all in the day’s work and were commonplace matters to
their actors. The material for the plot of a modern novel of adventure
may be found condensed into a three-line entry of many an ancient
log-book.
High on the front of a massive stone building in Essex Street, Salem,
is chiseled the inscription, “East India Marine Hall.” Beneath this are
the obsolete legends, “Asiatic Bank,” and “Oriental Insurance Office.”
Built by the East India Marine Society eighty-four years ago, this
structure is now the home of the Peabody Museum and a storehouse for
the unique collections which Salem seafarers brought home from strange
lands when their ships traded in every ocean. The East India Marine
Society still exists. The handful of surviving members meet now and
then and spin yarns of the vanished days when they were masters of
stately square-riggers in the deep-water trade. All of them are gray
and some of them quite feeble and every little while another of this
company slips his cable for the last long voyage.
The sight-seeing visitor in Salem is fascinated by its quaint and
picturesque streets, recalling as they do no fewer than three centuries
of American life, and by its noble mansions set beneath the elms in
an atmosphere of immemorial traditions. But the visitor is not likely
to seek the story of Salem as it is written in the records left by
the men who made it great. For those heroic seafarers not only made
history but they also wrote it while they lived it. The East India
Marine Society was organized in 1799 “to assist the widows and children
of deceased members; to collect such facts and observations as tended
to the improvement and security of navigation, and to form a museum
of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be
found beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn.”[3]
The by-laws provided that “any person shall be eligible as a member of
this society who shall have actually navigated the seas near the Cape
of Good Hope or Cape Horn, either as master or commander or as factor
or supercargo in any vessel belonging to Salem.”
From its foundation until the time when the collections of the Society
were given in charge of the Peabody Academy of Science in 1867, three
hundred and fifty masters and supercargoes of Salem had qualified for
membership as having sailed beyond Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope.
More than a century ago, therefore, these mariners of Salem began
to write detailed journals of their voyages, to be deposited with
this Society in order that their fellow shipmasters might glean from
them such facts as might “tend to the improvement and security of
navigation.” Few seas were charted, and Salem ships were venturing
along unknown shores. The journal of one of these pioneer voyages
was a valuable aid to the next shipmaster who went that way. These
journals were often expanded from the ship’s logs, and written after
the captains came home. The habit of carefully noting all incidents of
trade, discovery, and dealings with primitive races taught these seamen
to make their logs something more than routine accounts of wind and
weather. Thus, year after year and generation after generation, there
was accumulating a library of adventurous first-hand narrative, written
in stout manuscript volumes.
It was discovered that a pen and ink drawing of the landfall of
some almost unknown island would help the next captain passing that
coast to identify its headlands. Therefore many of these quarterdeck
chroniclers developed an astonishing aptitude for sketching coast
line, mountains and bays. Some of them even made pictures in water
color of the ships they saw or spoke, and their logs were illustrated
descriptions of voyages to the South Seas or Mauritius or China. In
this manner the tradition was cherished that a shipmaster of Salem owed
it to his fellow mariners and townspeople to bring home not only all
the knowledge he could gather but also every kind of curious trophy to
add to the collections of the East India Marine Society. And as the
commerce over seas began to diminish in the nineteenth century, this
tradition laid fast hold upon many Salem men and women whose fathers
had been shipmasters. They took pride in gathering together all the old
log books they could find in cobwebby attics and battered seachests and
in increasing this unique library of blue water.
Older than the East India Marine Society is the Salem Marine Society,
which was founded in 1766 by eighteen shipmasters, and which
still maintains its organization in its own building. Its Act of
Incorporation, dated 1772, stated that “whereas a considerable number
of persons who are or have been Masters of ships or other vessels,
have for several years past associated themselves in the town of
Salem; and the principal end of said Society being to improve the
knowledge of this coast, by the several members, upon their arrival
from sea communicating their observations, inwards and outwards, of
the variation of the needle, soundings, courses and distances, and
all other remarkable things about it, in writing, to be lodged with
the Society, for the making of the navigation more safe; and also to
relieve one another and their families in poverty or other adverse
accidents of life, which they are more particularly liable to,” etc.
Most of these records, together with those belonging to the East
India Marine Society and many others rescued from oblivion, have been
assembled and given in care of the Essex Institute of Salem as the
choicest treasure of its notable historical library. It has come to
pass that a thousand of these logs and sea-journals are stored in one
room of the Essex Institute, comprising many more than this number of
voyages made between 1750 and 1890, a period of a century and a half,
which included the most brilliant era of American sea life. Privateer,
sealer, whaler, and merchantman, there they rest, row after row of
canvas-covered books, filled with the day’s work of as fine a race of
seamen as ever sailed; from the log of the tiny schooner _Hopewell_
on a voyage to the West Indies amid perils of swarming pirates and
privateers a generation before the Revolution, down to the log of the
white-winged _Mindoro_ of the Manila fleet which squared away her yards
for the last time only fifteen years ago.
There is no other collection of _Americana_ which can so vividly recall
a vanished epoch and make it live again as these hundreds upon hundreds
of ancient log books. They are complete, final, embracing as they do
the rise, the high-tide and the ebb of the commerce of Salem, the
whole story of those vikings of deep-water enterprise who dazzled the
maritime world. These journals reflect in intimate and sharply focused
detail that little world which Harriet Martineau discerned when she
visited Salem seventy-five years ago and related:
“Salem, Mass., is a remarkable place. This ‘city of peace’ will be
better known hereafter for its commerce than for it’s witch tragedy.
It has a population of fourteen thousand and more wealth in proportion
to its population than perhaps any town in the world. Its commerce is
speculative but vast and successful. It is a frequent circumstance that
a ship goes out without a cargo for a voyage around the world. In such
a case the captain puts his elder children to school, takes his wife
and younger children and starts for some semi-barbarous place where
he procures some odd kind of cargo which he exchanges with advantage
for another somewhere else; and so goes trafficking around the world,
bringing home a freight of the highest value.
“These enterprising merchants of Salem are hoping to appropriate a
large share of the whale fishery and their ships are penetrating the
northern ice. They speak of Fayal and the Azores as if they were close
at hand. The fruits of the Mediterranean are on every table. They
have a large acquaintance at Cairo. They know Napoleon’s grave at St.
Helena, and have wild tales to tell of Mozambique and Madagascar, and
stores of ivory to show from there. They speak of the power of the king
of Muscat, and are sensible of the riches of the southeast coast of
Arabia. Anybody will give you anecdotes from Canton and descriptions of
the Society and Sandwich Islands. They often slip up the western coast
of their two continents, bringing furs from the back regions of their
own wide land, glance up at the Andes on their return; double Cape
Horn, touch at the ports of Brazil and Guiana, look about them in the
West Indies, feeling almost at home there, and land some fair morning
in Salem and walk home as if they had done nothing remarkable.”
Within sight of this Essex Institute is the imposing building of the
Peabody Academy of Science and Marine Museum, already mentioned. Here
the loyal sons of Salem, aided by the generous endowment of George
Peabody, the banker and philanthropist, have created a notable memorial
to the sea-born genius of the old town. One hall is filled with models
and paintings of the stout ships which made Salem rich and famous.
These models were built and rigged with the most painstaking accuracy
of detail, most of them the work of mariners of the olden time, and
many of them made on shipboard during long voyages. Scores of the
paintings of ships were made when they were afloat, their cannon and
checkered ports telling of the dangers which merchantmen dared in those
times; their hulls and rigging wearing a quaint and archaic aspect.
Beneath them are displayed the tools of the seaman’s trade long ere
steam made of him a paint-swabber and mechanic. Here are the ancient
quadrants, “half-circles,” and hand log lines, timed with sandglasses,
with which our forefathers found their way around the world. Beside
them repose the “colt” and the “cat-o’-nine-tails” with which those
tough tars were flogged by their skippers and mates. Cutlasses such as
were wielded in sea fights with Spanish, French and English, boarding
axes and naval tomahawks, are flanked by carved whales-teeth, whose
intricate designs of ships, cupids and mermaids whiled away the
dogwatches under the Southern Cross. Over yonder is a notched limb of
a sea-washed tree on which a sailor tallied the days and weeks of five
months’ solitary waiting on a desert island where he had been cast by
shipwreck.
[Illustration: A corner in the Marine Room of the Peabody Museum,
showing portraits of the shipmasters and merchants of Salem]
[Illustration: The Marine Room, Peabody Museum, showing the ships of
Salem during a period of one hundred and fifty years]
Portraits of famous shipping merchants and masters gaze at portraits
of Sultans of Zanzibar, Indian Rajahs and hong merchants of Canton
whose names were household words in the Salem of long ago. In
other spacious halls of this museum are unique displays of the
tools, weapons, garments and adornments of primitive races, gathered
generations before their countries and islands were ransacked by the
tourist and the ethnologist. They portray the native arts and habits
of life before they were corrupted by European influences. Some of
the tribes which fashioned these things have become extinct, but
their vanquished handiwork is preserved in these collections made
with devoted loyalty by the old shipmasters who were proud of their
home town and of their Marine Society. From the Fiji and Gilbert and
Hawaiian Islands, from Samoa, Arabia, India, China, Africa and Japan,
and every other foreign shore where ships could go, these trophies were
brought home to lay the foundation of collections which to-day are
visited by scientists from abroad in order to study many rare objects
which can be no longer obtained.[4]
The catalogue of ports from which the deep-laden argosies rolled home
to Salem is astonishing in its scope. From 1810 to 1830, for example,
Salem ships flew the American flag in these ports:
Sumatra, Malaga, Naples, Liverpool, St. Domingo, Baracoa, Cadiz,
Cayenne, Gothenburg, La Guayra, Havana, Canton, Smyrna, Matanzas,
Valencia, Turk’s Island, Pernambuco, Rio Janeiro, Messina, St.
Pierre’s, Point Petre, Cronstadt, Archangel, St. Lucia, Trinidad,
Surinam, St. Petersburg, Calcutta, Porto Rico, Palermo, Algeciras,
Constantinople, Cumana, Kiel, Angostura, Jacquemel, Gustavia, Malta,
Exuma, Buenos Ayres, Christiana, Stralsund, Guadaloupe, Nevis, Riga,
Madras, St. Vincent’s, Pillau, Amsterdam, Maranham, Para, Leghorn,
Manila, Samarang, Java, Mocha, South Sea Islands, Africa, Padang, Cape
de Verde, Zanzibar and Madagascar.
In these days of huge ships and cavernous holds in which freight is
stowed to the amount of thousands of tons, we are apt to think that
those early mariners carried on their commerce over seas in a small
way. But the records of old Salem contain scores of entries for the
early years of the last century in which the duties paid on cargoes
of pepper, sugar, indigo, and other Oriental wares swelled the custom
receipts from twenty-five thousand to sixty thousand dollars. In ten
years, from 1800 to 1810, when the maritime prosperity of the port was
at flood-tide, the foreign entries numbered more than one thousand
and the total amount of duties more than seven million dollars. And
from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the ships of Salem
vanished from blue water, a period of seventy years, roughly speaking,
more than twenty million dollars poured into the Custom House as duties
on foreign cargoes.
Old men now living remember when the old warehouses along the wharves
were full of “hemp from Luzon; pepper from Sumatra; coffee from Arabia;
palm oil from the west coast of Africa; cotton from Bombay; duck and
iron from the Baltic; tallow from Madagascar; salt from Cadiz; wine
from Portugal and the Madeiras; figs, raisins and almonds from the
Mediterranean; teas and silks from China; sugar, rum and molasses from
the West Indies; ivory and gum-copal from Zanzibar; rubber, hides and
wool from South America; whale oil from the Arctic and Antarctic, and
sperm from the South Seas.”
In 1812 one hundred and twenty-six Salem ships were in the deep-water
trade, and of these fifty-eight were East Indiamen. Twenty years
later this noble fleet numbered one hundred and eleven. They had been
pioneers in opening new routes of commerce, but the vessels of the
larger ports were flocking in their wake. Boston, with the development
of railway transportation, New York with the opening of the Erie Canal,
Philadelphia and Baltimore with their more advantageous situations for
building up a commerce with the great and growing hinterland of the
young United States, were creating their ocean commerce at the expense
of old Salem. Bigger ships were building and deeper harbors were needed
and Salem shipowners dispatched their vessels from Boston instead of
the home port. Then came the Age of Steam on the sea, and the era of
the sailing vessel was foredoomed.
The Custom House which looks down at crumbling Derby Wharf where the
stately East Indiamen once lay three deep, awakes from its drowsy
idleness to record the entries of a few lumber-laden schooners from
Nova Scotia. Built in 1819, when the tide of Salem commerce had already
begun to ebb, its classic and pillared bulk recalls the comment of its
famous officer, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “It was intended to accommodate
an hoped for increase in the commercial prosperity of the place, hopes
destined never to be realized, and was built a world too large for any
necessary purpose.”
Yet in the records left by these vanished generations of seamen; in the
aspect of the stately mansions built from the fortunes won by their
ships; in the atmosphere of the old wharves and streets, there has been
preserved, as if caught in amber, the finished story of one of the most
romantic and high-hearted periods of American achievement.
Salem was a small city during her maritime career, numbering hardly
more than ten thousand souls at a time when her trade had made her
famous in every port of the world. Her achievements were the work of
an exceedingly bold and vigorous population in whom the pioneering
instinct was fostered and guided by a few merchants of rare sagacity,
daring and imagination. It must not be forgotten that from the early
part of the seventeenth century to the latter year of the eighteenth
century when this seafaring genius reached its highest development, the
men of Salem had been trained and bred to wrest a livelihood from salt
water. During this period of one hundred and fifty years before the
Revolution the sea was the highway of the Colonists whose settlements
fringed the rugged coast line of New England. At their backs lay
a hostile wilderness and a great part of the population toiled at
fishing, trading and shipbuilding.
Roger Conant, who, in 1626, founded the settlement later called Salem,
had left his fellow Pilgrims at Plymouth because he would not agree
to “separate” from the Church of England. Pushing along the coast to
Nantasket, where Captain Miles Standish had built an outpost, Roger
Conant was asked by the Dorchester Company of England to take charge
of a newly established fishing station on Cape Ann. This enterprise
was unsuccessful and Conant aspired to better his fortunes by founding
a colony or plantation on the shore of the sheltered harbor of the
Naumkeag Peninsula. This was the beginning of the town of Salem, so
named by the first governor, John Endicott, who ousted Roger Conant in
1629, when this property of the Dorchester Company passed by purchase
into the hands of the New England Company.
[Illustration: Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society,
used in 1790, showing wharves and harbor]
[Illustration: Title page of the log of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,
father of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This lettering at the top of the page
was done by the author when a boy]
The first settlers who had fought famine, pestilence and red men
were not consulted in the transaction but were transferred along
with the land. They had established a refuge for those oppressed for
conscience’s sake, and Roger Conant, brave, resolute and patient, had
fought the good fight with them. But although they held meetings
and protested against being treated as “slaves,” they could make no
opposition to the iron-handed zealot and aristocrat, John Endicott, who
came to rule over them. Eighty settlers perished of hunger and disease
during Governor Endicott’s first winter among them, and when Winthrop,
Saltonstall, Dudley and Johnson brought over a thousand people in
seventeen ships in the year of 1629, they passed by afflicted Salem and
made their settlements at Boston, Charlestown and Watertown.
“The homes, labors and successes of the first colonists of Salem would
be unworthy of our attention were they associated with the lives of
ordinary settlers in a new country. But small though the beginnings
were these men were beginning to store up and to train the energy which
was afterward to expand with tremendous force in the opening of the
whole world to commerce and civilization, and in the establishment
of the best things in American life.”[5] They were the picked men of
England, yeomanry for the most part, seeking to better their condition,
interested in the great problems of religion and government. Dwelling
along the harbor front, or on the banks of small rivers near at hand,
they at once busied themselves cutting down trees and hewing planks
to fashion pinnaces and shallops for traversing these waterways. Fish
was a staple diet and the chief commodity of trade, and often averted
famine while the scanty crops were being wrested from the first
clearings. Thus these early sixteenth century men of Salem were more
at home upon the water than upon the less friendly land, and it was
inevitable that they should build larger craft for coastwise voyaging
as fast as other settlements sprang into being to the north and south
of them.
No more than ten years after the arrival of John Endicott,
shipbuilding was a thriving industry of Salem, and her seamen had begun
to talk of sending their ventures as far away as the West Indies.
In 1640 the West Indiaman _Desire_ brought home cotton, tobacco and
negroes from the Bahamas and salt from Tortugas. This ship _Desire_ was
a credit to her builders, for after opening the trade with the West
Indies she made a passage to England in the amazingly brief time of
twenty-three days, which would have been considered rapid sailing for
a packet ship two hundred years later. In 1664 a local historian was
able to record that “in this town are some very rich merchants.” These
merchants, most of them shipmasters as well, were destined to build
up for their seaport a peculiar fame by reason of their genius for
discovering new markets for their trading ventures and staking their
lives and fortunes on the chance of finding rich cargoes where no other
American ships had dreamed of venturing.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In 1810 Newburyport merchants owned forty-one ships, forty-nine
brigs and fifty schooners, and was the seat of extensive commerce with
the East Indies and other ports of the Orient. Twenty-one deep-water
sailing ships for foreign trade were built on the Merrimac River in
that one year. The fame of Newburyport as a shipbuilding and shipowning
port was carried far into the last century and culminated in the
building of the Atlantic packet _Dreadnought_, the fastest and most
celebrated sailing ship that ever flew the American flag. She made a
passage from New York to Queenstown in nine days and thirteen hours in
1860. Her famous commander, the late Captain Samuel Samuels, wrote of
the _Dreadnought_:
“She was never passed in anything over a four-knot breeze. She was what
might be termed a semi-clipper and possessed the merit of being able to
bear driving as long as her sails and spars would stand. By the sailors
she was called the ‘Wild Boat of the Atlantic,’ while others called her
‘The Flying Dutchman.’”
[2] Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author, chose to insert a “w” in the
family name of _Hathorne_ borne by his father.
“The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne,
who now adopted the fanciful spelling of his name after his personal
whim, was man grown.” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, by George E. Woodberry, in
American Men of Letters Series.)
[3] (1799) “Oct. 22. It is proposed by the new marine society, called
the East India Marine Society, to make a cabinet. This society has been
lately thought of. Captain Gibant first mentioned the plan to me this
summer and desired me to give him some plan of articles or a sketch.
The first friends of the institution met and chose a committee to
compare and digest articles from the sketches given to them. Last week
was informed that in the preceding week the members met and signed the
articles chosen by the committee.
“Nov. 7. Captain Carnes has presented his curiosities to the new-formed
East India Marine Society and they are providing a museum and
cabinet.... Rooms were obtained for their meetings and a place for the
deposit of books, charts, etc., and in July of the following year glass
cases were provided to arrange therein the specimens that had been
accumulated.” (Diary of Rev. William Bentley.)
[4] A costly new hall has been recently added to the Museum to contain
the Japanese and Chinese collections. This building was the gift of
Dr. Charles G. Weld of Boston. Its Japanese floor contains the most
complete and valuable ethnological collections, portraying the life of
the Japanese people of the feudal age, that exists to-day. Japanese
scientists and students have visited Salem in order to examine many
objects of this unique collection which are no longer to be found in
their own country. Professor Edward S. Morse, director of the Museum,
and curator of the Japanese pottery section of the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, has sifted and arranged these collections with singular
patience, expert knowledge, and brilliantly successful results. The
South Sea collections are also unequaled in many important particulars,
especially in the field of weapons and ornaments from the Fiji and
Marquesas Islands.
[5] History of Essex County.
CHAPTER II
PHILIP ENGLISH AND HIS ERA
(1680-1750)
In the decade from 1685 to 1695 the infant commerce of Salem was
fighting for its life. This period was called “the dark time when ye
merchants looked for ye vessells with fear and trembling.” Besides the
common dangers of the sea, they had to contend with savage Indians who
attacked the fishing fleet, with the heavy restrictions imposed by the
Royal Acts of Trade, with the witchcraft delusion which turned every
man’s hand against his neighbor, and with French privateers which so
ravaged the ventures of the Salem traders to the West Indies that the
shipping annals of the time are thickly strewn with such incidents as
these:
(1690)—“The ketch _Fellowship_, Captain Robert Glanville, _via_ the
Vineyard for Berwick on the Tweed, was taken by two French privateers
and carried to Dunkirk.”
(1695)—“The ship _Essex_ of Salem, Captain John Beal, from Bilboa in
Spain, had a battle at sea and loses John Samson, boatswain. This man
and Thomas Roads, the gunner, had previously contracted that whoever
of the two survived the other he should have all the property of the
deceased.”
Soon after this the tables were turned by the _Salem Packet_ which
captured a French ship off the Banks of Newfoundland. In the same year
the ketch _Exchange_, Captain Thomas Marston, was taken by a French
ship off Block Island. She was ransomed for two hundred and fifty
pounds and brought into Salem. “The son of the owner was carried to
Placentia as a hostage for the payment of the ransom.”
The ancient records of the First Church of Salem contain this quaint
entry under date of July 25, 1677:
“The Lord having given a Comission to the Indians to take no less
than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men (though
divers of them cleared themselves and came home) 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 and the work
carried on by the Pastor, Mr. Hale, Mr. Chevers, and Mr. Gerrish, the
higher ministers helping in prayer. 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 with 40 men sent out from Salem
as a man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches. The Lord give them
Good Success.”
In those very early and troublous times the Barbary pirates or Corsairs
had begun to vex the New England skippers who boldly crossed the
Atlantic in vessels that were much smaller than a modern canal boat
or brick barge. These “Sallee rovers” hovered from the Mediterranean
to the chops of the English Channel. Many a luckless seaman of Salem
was held prisoner in the cities of Algiers while his friends at home
endeavored to gather funds for his ransom. It was stated in 1661 that
“for a long time previous the commerce of Massachusetts was much
annoyed by Barbary Corsairs and that many of its seamen were held in
bondage. One Captain Cakebread or Breadcake had two guns to cruise
in search of Turkish pirates.” In 1700 Benjamin Alford of Boston and
William Bowditch of Salem related that “their friend Robert Carver of
the latter port was taken nine years before, a captive into Sally;
that contributions had been made for his redemption; that the money was
in the hands of a person here; that if they had the disposal of it,
they could release Carver.”
The end of the seventeenth century found the wilderness settlement
of Salem rapidly expanding into a seaport whose commercial interests
were faring to distant oceans. The town had grown along the water’s
edge beside which its merchants were beginning to build their spacious
and gabled mansions. Their countinghouses overlooked the harbor, and
their spyglasses were alert to sweep the distant sea line for the
homecoming of their ventures to Virginia, the West Indies and Europe.
Their vessels were forty and sixty tons burden, mere cockleshells
for deep-water voyaging, but they risked storm and capture while
they pushed farther and farther away from Salem as the prospect of
profitable trade lured them on.
The sailmaker, the rigger, the ship chandler, and the shipwright had
begun to populate the harbor front, and among them swarmed the rough
and headlong seamen from Heaven knew where, who shocked the godly
Puritans of the older régime. Jack ashore was a bull in a china shop
then as now, and history has recorded the lamentable but deserved fate
of “one Henry Bull and companions in a vessel in our harbor who derided
the Church of Christ and were afterward cast away among savage Indians
by whom they were slain.”
Now there came into prominence the first of a long line of illustrious
shipping merchants of Salem, Philip English, who makes a commanding
figure in the seafaring history of his time. A native of the Isle
of Jersey, he came to Salem before 1670. He made voyages in his own
vessels, commanded the ketch[6] _Speedwell_ in 1676, and ten years
later had so swiftly advanced his fortunes that he built him a mansion
house on Essex Street, a solid, square-sided structure with many
projecting porches and with upper stories overhanging the street. It
stood for a hundred and fifty years, long known as “English’s Great
House,” and linked the nineteenth century with the very early chapters
of American history. In 1692, Philip English was perhaps the richest
man of the New England Colonies, owning twenty-one vessels which
traded with Bilboa, Barbados, St. Christopher’s, the Isle of Jersey
and the ports of France. He owned a wharf and warehouses, and fourteen
buildings in the town.
One of his bills of lading, dated 1707, shows the pious imprint of his
generation and the kind of commerce in which he was engaged. It reads
in part:
“Shipped by the Grace of God, in good order and well conditioned, by
Sam’ll Browne, Phillip English, Capt. Wm. Bowditch, Wm. Pickering, and
Sam’ll Wakefield, in and upon the Good sloop called the _Mayflower_
whereof is master under God for this present voyage Jno. Swasey, and
now riding at anchor in the harbor of Salem, and by God’s Grace bound
for Virginia or Merriland. To say, twenty hogshats of Salt.... In
witness whereof the Master or Purser of the said Sloop has affirmed to
Two Bills of Lading ... and so God send the Good Sloop to her desired
port in Safety. Amen.”
Another merchant of Philip English’s time wrote in 1700 of the foreign
commerce of Salem:
“Dry Merchantable codfish for the Markets of Spain and Portugal and
the Straits. Refuse fish, lumber, horses and provisions for the West
Indies. Returns made directly hence to England are sugar, molasses,
cotton, wool and logwood for which we depend on the West Indies. Our
own produce, a considerable quantity of whale and fish oil, whalebone,
furs, deer, elk and bear skins are annually sent to England. We have
much Shipping here and freights are low.”
[Illustration: The Roger Williams house, built before 1635. Tradition
asserts that preliminary examinations of those accused of witchcraft in
1692 were held here.
(This photograph was made before a drug store was built in front of
the house, and shows an old “town pump”)]
To Virginia the clumsy, little sloops and ketches of Philip English
carried “Molasses, Rum, Salt, Cider, Mackerel, Wooden Bowls, Platters,
Pails, Kegs, Muscavado Sugar, and Codfish and brought back to Salem
Wheat, Pork, Tobacco, Furs, Hides, old Pewter, Old Iron, Brass, Copper,
Indian Corn and English Goods.” The craft which crossed the Atlantic
and made the West Indies in safety to pile up wealth for Philip English
were no larger than those sloops and schooners which ply up and down
the Hudson River to-day. Their masters made their way without sextant
or “Practical Navigator,” and as an old writer has described in a
somewhat exaggerated vein:
“Their skippers kept their reckoning with chalk on a shingle, which
they stowed away in the binnacle; and by way of observation they held
up a hand to the sun. When they got him over four fingers they knew
they were straight for Hole-in-the-Wall; three fingers gave them their
course to the Double-headed Shop Key and two carried them down to
Barbados.”
The witchcraft frenzy invaded even the stately home of Philip
English, the greatest shipowner of early Salem. His wife, a proud
and aristocratic lady, was “cried against,” examined and committed
to prison in Salem. It is said that she was considered haughty and
overbearing in her manner toward the poor, and that her husband’s
staunch adherence to the Church of England had something to do with her
plight. At any rate, Mary English was arrested in her bedchamber and
refused to rise, wherefore “guards were placed around the house and
in the morning she attended the devotions of her family, kissed her
children with great composure, proposed her plan for their education,
took leave of them and then told the officer she was ready to die.”
Alas, poor woman, she had reason to be “persuaded that accusation
was equal to condemnation.” She lay in prison six weeks where “her
firmness was memorable. But being visited by a fond husband, her
husband was also accused and confined in prison.” The intercession
of friends and the plea that the prison was overcrowded caused their
removal to Arnold’s jail in Boston until the time of trial. It brings
to mind certain episodes of the French Reign of Terror to learn that
they were taken to Boston on the same day with Giles Corey, George
Jacobs, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, and Bridget Bishop, all of whom
perished except Philip and Mary English. Both would have been executed
had they not escaped death by flight from the Boston jail and seeking
refuge in New York.
In his diary, under date of May 21, 1793, Rev. William Bentley, of
Salem, pastor of the East Church from 1783 to 1819, wrote of the
witchcraft persecution of this notable shipping merchant and his wife:
“May 21st, 1793. Substance of Madam Susannah Harthorne’s account of
her grandfather English, etc. Mr. English was a Jerseyman, came young
to America and lived with Mr. W. Hollingsworth, whose only child he
married. He owned above twenty sail of vessels. His wife had the best
education of her times. Wrote with great ease, and has left a specimen
of her needlework in her infancy or youth. She had already owned her
Covenant and was baptised with her children and now intended to be
received at the Communion on the next Lord’s Day. On Saturday night
she was cried out upon. The Officers, High Sheriff, and Deputy with
attendants came at eleven at night. When the servant came up Mr.
English imagined it was upon business, not having had the least notice
of the suspicions respecting his wife. They were to bed together in
the western chamber of their new house raised in 1690, and had a large
family of servants.
“The Officers came in soon after the servant who so alarmed Mr. English
that with difficulty he found his cloathes which he could not put
on without help. The Officers came into the chamber, following the
servant, and opening the curtains read the Mittimus. She was then
ordered to rise but absolutely refused. Her husband continued walking
the chamber all night, but the Officers contented themselves with a
guard upon the House till morning. In the morning they required of her
to rise, but she refused to rise before her usual hour. After breakfast
with her husband and children, and seeing all the servants, of whom
there were twenty in the House, she concluded to go with the officers
and she was conducted to the Cat and Wheel, a public house east of the
present Centre Meeting House on the opposite side of the way. Six weeks
she was confined in the front chamber, in which she received the visits
of her husband three times a day and as the floor was single she kept
a journal of the examinations held below which she constantly sent to
Boston.
“After six weeks her husband was accused, and their friends obtained
that they should be sent on to Boston till their Trial should come
on. In Arnold’s custody they had bail and liberty of the town, only
lodging in the Gaol. The Rev. Moody and Williard of Boston visited
them and invited them to the public worship on the day before they
were to return to Salem for Trial. Their text was that they that are
persecuted in one city, let them flee to another. After Meeting the
Ministers visited them at the Gaol, and asked them whether they took
notice of the discourse, and told them their danger and urged them to
escape since so many had suffered. Mr. English replied, ‘God will not
permit them to touch me.’ Mrs. English said: ‘Do you not think the
sufferers innocent?’ He (Moody) said ‘Yes.’ She then added, ‘Why may we
not suffer also?’ The Ministers then told him if he would not carry his
wife away they would.
“The gentlemen of the town took care to provide at midnight a
conveyance, encouraged by the Governor, Gaoler, etc., and Mr. and Mrs.
English with their eldest child and daughter, were conveyed away, and
the Governor gave letters to Governor Fletcher of New York who came out
and received them, accompanied by twenty private gentlemen, and carried
them to his house.
“They remained twelve months in the city. While there they heard of the
wants of the poor in Salem and sent a vessel of corn for their relief,
a bushel for each child. Great advantages were proposed to detain them
at New York, but the attachment of the wife to Salem was not lost by
all her sufferings, and she urged a return. They were received with
joy upon their return and the Town had a thanksgiving on the occasion.
Noyes, the prosecutor, dined with him on that day in his own house.”
That a man of such solid station should have so narrowly escaped death
in the witchcraft fury indicates that no class was spared. While his
sturdy seamen were fiddling and drinking in the taverns of the Salem
waterfront, or making sail to the roaring chorus of old-time chanties,
their employer, a prince of commerce for his time, was dreading a
miserable death for himself and that high-spirited dame, his wife, on
Gallows Hill, at the hands of the stern-faced young sheriff of Salem.
Philip English returned to Salem after the frenzy had passed and
rounded out a shipping career of fifty years, living until 1736. His
instructions to one of his captains may help to picture the American
commerce of two centuries ago. In 1722 he wrote to “Mr. John Tauzel”:
“Sir, you being appointed Master of my sloop _Sarah_, now Riding in ye
Harbor of Salem, and Ready to Saile, my Order is to you that you take
ye first opportunity of wind and Weather to Saile and make ye best of
yr. way for Barbadoes or Leew’d Island, and there Enter and Clear yr
vessel and Deliver yr Cargo according to Orders and Bill of Lading and
Make Saile of my twelve Hogsh’d of fish to my best advantage, and make
Returne in yr Vessel or any other for Salem in such Goods as you shall
see best, and if you see Cause to take a freight to any port or hire
her I lieve it with your Best Conduct, Managem’t or Care for my best
advantage. So please God to give you a prosperous voyage, I remain yr
Friend and Owner.
“PHILIP ENGLISH.”
England had become already jealous of the flourishing maritime commerce
of the Colonies and was devising one restrictive Act of Parliament
after another to hamper what was viewed as a dangerous rivalry. In
1668, Sir Joshua Child, once chairman of the East India Company,
delivered himself of this choleric and short-sighted opinion:
“Of all the American plantations His Majesty has none so apt for the
building of ships as New England, nor none comparably so qualified for
the breeding of seamen, not only by reason of the natural industry
of the people, but principally by reason of their cod and mackerel
fisheries, and in my opinion there is nothing more prejudicial and in
prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of
shipping in her colonies, plantations or provinces.”
This selfish view-point sought not only to prevent American shipowners
from conducting a direct trade with Europe but tried also to cripple
the prosperous commerce between the Colonies and the West Indies.
The narrow-minded politicians who sacrificed both the Colonies and
the Mother country could not kill American shipping even by the most
ingenious restrictive acts, and the hardy merchants of New England
violated or evaded these unjust edicts after the manner indicated in
the following letter of instructions given to Captain Richard Derby of
Salem, for a voyage to the West Indies as master and part owner of the
schooner _Volante_ in 1741:
“If you should go among the French endeavour to get salt at St.
Martins, but if you should fall so low as Statia, and any Frenchman
should make you a good Offer with good security, or by making your
Vessel a Dutch bottom, or by any other means practicable in order to
your getting among ye Frenchmen, embrace it. Among whom if you should
ever arrive, be sure to give strict orders amongst your men not to sell
the least trifle unto them on any terms, lest they should make your
Vessel liable to a seizure. Also secure a permit so as for you to trade
there next voyage, which you may undoubtedly do through your factor or
by a _little greasing_ some others. Also make a proper Protest at any
port you stop at.”
This means that if needs be, Captain Derby is to procure a Dutch
registry and make the _Volante_ a Dutch vessel for the time being, and
thus not subject to the British Navigation Acts. It was easy to buy
such registries for temporary use and to masquerade under English,
French, Spanish or Dutch colors, if a “little greasing” was applied to
the customs officers in the West Indies.
On the margin of Captain Derby’s sailing orders is scrawled the
following memorandum:
“Capt. Derby: If you trade at Barbadoes buy me a negroe boy about
siventeen years old, which if you do, advise Mr. Clarke of yt so he
may not send one.
(Signed) BENJ. GERRISH, JR.”
[Illustration:
By permission of the Essex Institute
The Philip English “Great House,” built in 1685 and torn down in 1833.
The home of the first great shipping merchant of the colonies]
Such voyages as these were risky ventures for the eighteenth century
insurance companies, whose courage is to be admired for daring to
underwrite these vessels at all. For a voyage of the _Lydia_ from Salem
to Madeira in 1761, the premium rate was 11 per cent., and in the
following year 14 per cent. was demanded for a voyage to Jamaica.
The _Three Sisters_, bound to Santo Domingo, was compelled to pay 23
per cent. premium, and 14 per cent. for the return voyage. The lowest
rate recorded for this era was 8 per cent. on the schooner _Friendship_
of Salem to Quebec in 1760. For a Madeira voyage from Salem to-day the
insurance rate would be 1¾ per cent. as compared with 11 per cent.
then; to Jamaica 1½ per cent. instead of 14 per cent. in the days when
the underwriters had to risk confiscation, violation of the British
Navigation Acts, and capture by privateers, or pirates, in addition to
the usual dangers of the deep.
Among the biographical sketches in the records of the Salem Marine
Society is that of Captain Michael Driver. It is a concise yet crowded
narrative and may serve to show why insurance rates were high. “In the
year 1759, he commanded the schooner _Three Brothers_, bound to the
West Indies,” runs the account. “He was taken by a privateer under
English colors, called the _King of Russia_, commanded by Captain James
Inclicto, of nine guns, and sent into Antigua. Her cargo was value at
£550. Finding no redress he came home. He sailed again in the schooner
_Betsey_ for Guadaloupe; while on his passage was taken by a French
frigate and sent into above port. He ransomed the vessel for four
thousand livres and left three hostages and sailed for home November,
1761, and took command of schooner _Mary_, under a flag of truce, to go
and pay the ransom and bring home the hostages.
“He was again captured, contrary to the laws of nations, by the English
privateer _Revenge_, James McDonald, master, sent to New Providence,
Bahama. He made protest before the authorities and was set at liberty
with vessel and cargo. He pursued his voyage to Cape Francois, redeemed
the hostages, and Sept. 6, 1762, was ready to return, but Monsieur
Blanch, commanding a French frigate, seized the vessel, took out
hostages and crew and put them on board the frigate bound to St.
Jago, Cuba. He was detained till December, and vessel returned. Worn
out and foodless he was obliged to go to Jamaica for repairs. On his
arrival home his case was represented to the Colonial Government and
transmitted to Governor Shirley at New Providence, but no redress was
made.”
Many of these small vessels with crews of four to six men were lost
by shipwreck and now and then one can read between the lines of some
scanty chronicle of disaster astonishing romances of maritime suffering
and adventure. For example in 1677, “a vessel arrived at Salem which
took Captain Ephriam How of New Haven, the survivor of his crew, from a
desolate island where _eight months_ he suffered exceedingly from cold
and hunger.”
In the seventeenth century Cape Cod was as remote as and even more
inaccessible than Europe. A bark of thirty tons burden, Anthony Dike
master, was wrecked near the end of the Cape and three of the crew were
frozen to death. The two survivors “got some fire and lived there by
such food as they had saved for _seven weeks_ until an Indian found
them. Dike was of the number who perished.”
Robinson Crusoe could have mastered difficulties no more courageously
than the seamen of the ketch _Providence_, wrecked on a voyage to the
West Indies. “Six of her crew were drowned, but the Master, mate and
a sailor, who was badly wounded, reached an island half a mile off
where they found another of the company. They remained there eight
days, living on salt fish and cakes made from a barrel of flour washed
ashore. They found a piece of touch wood after four days which the
mate had in his chest and a piece of flint with which, having a small
knife they struck a fire. They framed a boat with a tarred mainsail and
some hoops and then fastened pieces of board to them. With a boat so
constructed they sailed ten leagues to Anquila and St. Martins where
they were kindly received.”
There was also Captain Jones of the brig _Adventure_ which foundered
at sea while coming home from Trinidad. All hands were lost except the
skipper, who got astride a wooden or “Quaker” gun which had broken
adrift from the harmless battery with which he had hoped to intimidate
pirates. “He fought off the sharks with his feet” and clung to his
buoyant ordnance until he was picked up and carried into Havana.
In 1759 young Samuel Gardner of Salem, just graduated from Harvard
College, made a voyage to Gibraltar with Captain Richard Derby.
The lad’s diary[7] contains some interesting references to the
warlike hazards of a routine trading voyage, besides revealing, in
an attractive way, the ingenuous nature of this nineteen-year-old
youngster of the eighteenth century. His daily entries read in part:
1759. Oct. 19—Sailed from Salem. Very sick.
20—I prodigious sick, no comfort at all.
21—I remain very sick, the first Sabbath I have spent from Church this
long time. Little Sleep this Night.
24—A little better contented, but a Sailor’s life is a poor life.
31—Fair pleasant weather, if it was always so, a sea life would be
tolerable.
... Nov. 11—This makes the fourth Sunday I have been out. Read Dr.
Beveridge’s “Serious Thoughts.”
12—Saw a sail standing to S.W. I am quartered at the aftermost gun and
its opposite with Captain Clifford. We fired a shot at her and she
hoisted Dutch colors.
13—I have entertained myself with a Romance, _viz._, “The History of
the Parish Girl.”
14—Quite pleasant. Here we may behold the Works of God in the Mighty
Deep. Happy he who beholds aright.
15—Between 2 and 3 this morning we saw two sail which chased us, the
ship fired 3 shots at us which we returned. They came up with us by
reason of a breeze which she took before we did. She proved to be the
ship _Cornwall_ from Bristol.
21—Bishop Beveridge employed my time.
23—We now begin to approach to land. May we have a good sight of it. At
eight o’clock two Teriffa (Barbary) boats came out after us, they fired
at us which we returned as merrily. They were glad to get away as well
as they could. We stood after one, but it is almost impossible to come
up with the piratical dogs.
28—Gibraltar—Went on shore. Saw the soldiers in the Garrison
exercise. They had a cruel fellow for an officer for he whipt them
barbarously.... After dinner we went out and saw the poor soldiers
lickt again.
... Dec. 10—Benj. Moses, a Jew, was on board. I had some discourse
with him about his religion.... Poor creature, he errs greatly. I
endeavored to set him right, but he said for a conclusion that his
Father and Grandfather were Jews and if they were gone to Hell he would
go there, too, by choice, which I exposed as a great piece of Folly and
Stupidity. In the morning we heard a firing and looked out in the Gut
and there was a snow attacked by 3 of the piratical Teriffa boats. Two
cutters in the Government service soon got under sail, 3 men-of-war
that lay in the Roads manned their barges and sent them out as did a
Privateer. We could now perceive her (the snow) to have struck, but
they soon retook her. She had only four swivels and 6 or 8 men.... They
got some prisoners (of the pirates) but how many I cannot learn, which
it is to be hoped will meet with their just reward which I think would
be nothing short of hanging.... Just at dusk came on board of us two
Gentlemen, one of which is an Officer on board a man-of-war, the other
belongs to the _Granada_ in the King’s Service. The former (our people
say) was in the skirmish in some of the barges. He could have given us
a relation of it, but we, not knowing of it, prevented what would have
been very agreeable to me.... It is now between 9 and 10 o’clock at
night which is the latest I have set up since I left Salem.”
This Samuel Gardner was a typical Salem boy of his time, well brought
up, sent to college, and eager to go to sea and experience adventures
such as his elders had described. Of a kindred spirit in the very human
quality of the documents he left for us was Francis Boardman, a seaman,
who rose to a considerable position as a Salem merchant. His ancient
log books contain between their battered and discolored canvas covers
the records of his voyages between 1767 and 1774. Among the earliest
are the logs of the ship _Vaughan_ in which Francis Boardman sailed
as mate. He kept the log and having a bent for scribbling on whatever
blank paper his quill could find, he filled the fly-leaves of these sea
journals with more interesting material than the routine entries of
wind, weather and ship’s daily business. Scrawled on one ragged leaf in
what appears to be the preliminary draft of a letter:
“Dear Polly—thes lines comes with My Love to you. Hoping thes will find
you in as good Health as they Leave me at this Time, Blessed be God for
so Great a Massey (mercy).”
Young Francis Boardman was equipped with epistolary ammunition for all
weathers and conditions, it would seem, for in another log of a hundred
and fifty years ago, he carefully wrote on a leaf opposite his personal
expense account:
“Madam:
“Your Late Behavour towards me, you are sensible cannot have escaped
my Ear. I must own you was once the person of whom I could Not have
formed such an Opinion. For my part, at present I freely forgive you
and only blame myself for putting so much confidence in a person so
undeserving. I have now conquered my pashun so much (though I must
confess at first it was with great difficulty), that I never think of
you, nor I believe never shall without despising the Name of a person
who dared to use me in so ungrateful a manner. I shall now conclude
myself, though badley used, not your Enemy.”
It may be fairly suspected that Francis Boardman owned a copy of some
early “Complete Letter Writer,” for on another page he begins but does
not finish. “A Letter from One Sister to Another to Enquire of Health.”
Also he takes pains several times to draft these dutiful but far from
newsy lines:
“Honored Father and Mother—Thes lines comes with my Deuty to you.
Hoping They will find you in as good Health as they Leave me at this
Time. Blessed be God for so Great a Massey—Honored Father and Mother.”
In a log labeled “From London Toward Cadiz, Spain, in the good ship
_Vaughan_, Benj. Davis, Master, 1767,” Francis Boardman became mightily
busy with his quill and the season being spring, he began to scrawl
poetry between the leaves which were covered with such dry entries as
“Modt. Gales and fair weather. Set the jibb. Bent topmast stay sail.”
One of these pages of verse begins in this fashion:
“One Morning, one Morning in May,
The fields were adorning with Costlay Array.
I Chanced for To hear as I walked By a Grove
A Shepyard Laymenting for the Loss of his Love.”
But the most moving and ambitious relic of the poetic taste of this
long vanished Yankee seaman is a ballad preserved in the same log of
the _Vaughan_. Its spelling is as filled with fresh surprises as its
sentiment is profoundly tragic. It runs as follows:
1 “In Gosport[8] of Late there a Damsil Did Dwell,
for Wit and for Beuty Did she maney Exsel.
2 A Young man he Corted hir to be his Dear
And By his Trade was a Ship Carpentir.
3 he ses “My Dear Molly if you will agrea
And Will then Conscent for to Marey me
4 Your Love it will Eas me of Sorro and Care
If you will But Marey a ship Carpentir.”
5 With blushes mor Charming then Roses in June,
She ans’red (“) Sweet William for to Wed I am to young.
6 Young Men thay are fickle and so Very Vain,
If a Maid she is Kind thay will quickly Disdane.
7 the Most Beutyfullyst Woman that ever was Born,
When a man has insnared hir, hir Beuty he scorns. (”)
8 (He) (“) O, My Dear Molly, what Makes you Say so?
Thi Beuty is the Haven to wich I will go.
9 If you Will consent for the Church for to Stear
there I will Cast anchor and stay with my Dear.
10 I ne’re Shall be Cloyedd with the Charms of thy Love,
this Love is as True as the tru Turtle Dove.
11 All that I do Crave is to marey my Dear
And arter we are maried no Dangers we will fear. (”)
12 (She) “The Life of a Virgen, Sweet William, I Prize
for marrying Brings Trouble and sorro Like-wise. (”)
13 But all was in Vane tho His Sute she did Denie,
yet he did Purswade hir for Love to Comeply.
14 And by his Cunneng hir Hart Did Betray
and with Too lude Desire he led hir Astray.
15 This Past on a while and at Length you will hear,
the King wanted Sailors and to Sea he must Stear.
16 This Greved the fare Damsil allmost to the Hart
To think of Hir True Love so soon she must Part.
17 She ses (“) my Dear Will as you go to sea
Remember the Vows that you made unto me. (”)
18 With the Kindest Expresens he to hir Did Say
(“) I will marey my Molly air I go away.
19 That means to-morrow to me you will Come.
then we will be maried and our Love Carried on. (”)
20 With the Kindest Embraces they Parted that Nite
She went for to meet him next Morning by Lite.
21 he ses (“) my Dear Charmer, you must go with me
Before we are married a friend for to see. (”)
22 he Led hir thru Groves and Valleys so deep
That this fare Damsil Began for to Weep.
23 She ses (“) My Dear William, you Lead me Astray
on Purpos my innocent Life to be BeTray. (”)
24 (He) (“) Those are true Words and none can you save, (”)
for all this hole Nite I have Been digging your grave.”
25 A Spade Standing By and a Grave thare she See,
(She) (“) O, Must this Grave Be a Bride Bed to Me? (”)
[Illustration: A bill of lading of the time of Philip English, dated
1716]
[Illustration: The log of a Salem whaler, showing how he recorded the
number of whales he took]
In 1774 we find Francis Boardman as captain of the sloop _Adventure_,
evidently making his first voyage as master. He was bound for the West
Indies, and while off the port of St. Pierre in Martinique he penned
these gloomy remarks in his log:
“This Morning I Drempt that 2 of my upper teeth and one Lower Dropt out
and another Next the Lower one wore away as thin as a wafer and Sundry
other fritful Dreams. What will be the Event of it I can’t tell.”
Other superstitions seem to have vexed his mind, for in the same log he
wrote as follows:
“this Blot I found the 17th. I can’t tell but Something Very bad is
going to Hapen to me this Voyage. I am afeard but God onley Noes What
may hapen on board the Sloop _Adventure_—the first Voyage of being
Master.”
Sailing “From Guardalopa Toward Boston,” Captain Francis Boardman made
this final entry in his log:
“The End of this Voyage for wich I am Very thankfull on Acct. of a
Grate Deal of Truble by a bad mate. His name is William Robson of
Salem. He was Drunk most Part of the Voyage.”
FOOTNOTES:
[6] The ketch of the eighteenth century was two-masted with square
sails on her foremast, and a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, which
was shorter than the foremast. The schooner rig was not used until
1720 and is said to have been originated by Captain Andrew Robinson of
Gloucester.
[7] Historical Collections of the Essex Institute.
[8] Gosport Navy Yard, England.