THE MERCHANT MARINE
A full account of the merchant marine of Cape Cod would require not
a chapter but a volume. Its tentative beginnings, its gradual rise
to the glory of the forties and fifties, and its inevitable decline,
comprise too vast and varied a subject for a condensed narrative. So
in this chapter no mention can be made of many names that in their day
were great, or of many ships that spread their masters’ greatness from
sea to sea. No foreign voyage is insignificant; every captain is in a
very real sense his country’s ambassador. Especially was this true in
the early days of our nation, when we were yet a people unknown and
untested, with the world before us to antagonize or conciliate, and no
one but our shipmasters to represent us. These men neither antagonized
nor conciliated. Instead, by their shrewdness, resourcefulness,
and vigor, they won for their country the reluctant and sometimes
acidulated respect of the world.
The Cape has so long been associated in men’s minds with the sea and
with those that come and go in ships, so large a part of her population
has until very recently been composed of master mariners, either active
or retired, and such a wealth of salty tradition has clustered about
her name, that the casual observer is deceived with false pictures.
He sees the Pilgrim Fathers themselves sailing the Mayflower into
Provincetown Harbor with their own hands, and shouting orders to each
other in a language of tarry technicalities. He sees the very earliest
settlements that our forefathers made on the Cape as busy seaports,
their harbors white with sails, and the settlers themselves, whenever
they happened to be ashore, walking with a nautical roll. But the
facts--it cannot be too often emphasized--were very different. It
was not until years later that, with their houses built, their mills
grinding, and their crops growing, Cape men turned their attention
to the two most intricate arts that they ever mastered: the art of
building ships and the art of sailing them. The first vessels that
they built--aside from fishermen and whalers--were packets to run
between Cape towns and Boston and New York. And naturally enough, for
the discomforts of overland travel in stage-coaches were so great that
only philosophers, like Thoreau, or men of God, like Timothy Dwight,
dared face them. Most wise men on the Cape knew the way to China by
sea better than they did the way to Boston by land. The Cape-Codder
who had once undergone this journey, and who again found it necessary
to visit Boston, would wait, if necessary, a month until a chance
lumber schooner or fisherman could carry him by water. One man, who by
a ghastly accident had been harpooned on a whaler off Provincetown,
was rushed to Boston in a whaleboat rowed by a double crew working
in relays. It became (and this is a happier motive for the trip) a
common practice for young Provincetown and Truro fishermen to carry
their sweethearts to Boston in their schooners when the time came for
selecting a trousseau. Another incentive for starting packet lines
was the enormous quantity of salt that was being made everywhere
on the Cape. Much of this was used by local fishermen, but there
remained a surplus for export, and the water route was the only way
to carry it. There were also occasional cargoes of onions and flax.
Thus the appearance of packets was inevitable. They were needed for
both passengers and freight, and, with the prospect of sure returns on
their investment, local merchants began to build them and to operate
them. Framed by townsmen from timber growing near by, commanded and
manned by Cape men and boys, these craft were as complete and absolute
products of the region as anything made by man can be. The inhabitants
regarded them with far more than a business interest. They looked on
them with a pride and affection that was curiously allied to the pride
and affection that they felt for their husbands, brothers, and sons who
sailed them.
There were often two or three packets hailing from a village, and
they usually made, among them, three trips a week to Boston and back.
One, the Northern Light, of Provincetown, about 1830, ran to and
from Boston three times a week from March to December--a performance
unparalleled by sail before or since. No vessels of their size were
ever kept more immaculate or were more promptly refitted or discarded
when they began to show signs of age. Their beauty and comfort were
almost as important in their owners’ eyes as their speed and safety.
One in particular, the schooner Postboy, of Truro, has been called
‘the finest specimen of naval architecture and passenger accommodation
ever seen in Bay waters.’ Her cabin was finished in solid mahogany and
bird’s-eye maple; her draperies were of silk. She was at once fast and
comfortable, the pride of her captain, Zoeth Rich.
There is no keener rivalry than the rivalry between towns of any
district, and no more exciting sport than boat-racing. When these
two factors combine, when the men concerned are Yankees, and when
the question of pecuniary investment is also involved, the cords of
competition will be stretched extremely taut. This was the situation
that existed between the Cape Cod packets, their owners, and their
captains. No sooner did the Postboy appear at Provincetown than the
merchants of Eastham would see what they could do to go her one better.
If Truro appeared with a new flier, Wellfleet within a month was laying
the keel of a bigger and faster craft. If local timber and local talent
were thought unequal to the task, vessels were ordered from other
places where it was supposed newer methods obtained, for it is with
shipbuilders even as it is with prophets.
The best example of this sort of rivalry occurred between the towns
of Barnstable and Yarmouth. Yarmouth, about 1840, had a sloop, the
Commodore Hull, that was rightly considered the finest and fastest on
the coast. There was not a packet captain on the Bay who had not been
chagrined by having her boil up from astern, pass him to windward, and
beat him to Boston by a margin that was measured in hours. Barnstable
stood this as long as she could, and then two of her leading citizens,
Captains Matthias Hinckley and Thomas Percival, went up the Hudson
River to contract for a new packet that would beat the Yarmouth wonder.
The result was the sloop Mail. On their first rival voyage for Boston,
the two vessels crossed Barnstable Bar abreast, leaving behind them two
villages wild with excitement, and many wagers between the inhabitants
of each. The watchers from the shore could see no change in their
relative positions; neck and neck they tore along before a fresh
southerly breeze until they were hull down and lost to sight. The new
Barnstable vessel, however, fulfilled her destiny and nosed out the
Commodore Hull, sliding into Central Wharf a bare three lengths ahead
of her rival. But the Yarmouth citizens were loyal and declared that
the Mail’s victory was an accident, or was perhaps due to the fact
that both Captains Hinckley and Percival had sailed her; and that the
Commodore Hull was still the faster sailer.
This famous packet had other rivals right at home--chief among them
being the Eagle’s Flight, commanded by Captain Ansel Hallett. The
competition between these two Yarmouth vessels was almost as keen as
that between the neighboring towns. No records exist to show which was
the faster; but there was no doubt in the mind of the bard who composed
this lively stanza:
‘O! the Commodore Hull, she sails so dull
It made all the crew look sour,
While the Eagle’s Flight was out of sight
In less than half an hour.’
A trip to Boston by packet, even when there was no one to race against,
was by no means a dull affair. For one thing, there was the uncertainty
how long the passage would take; it might last anywhere from six hours
to two days, and the passengers made the most of their holiday. High
and low, rich and poor, were on an equal footing, for the crowded decks
and cabins (there were anywhere from twenty-five to fifty passengers on
these little vessels) prohibited all exclusiveness. There might be a
deep-water captain on his way to Boston to take his ship out to China;
he kept the ship’s company entertained with tales of deep waters,
while others talked of record fares of cod, great schools of stranded
blackfish, of local politics and national policy. The meals were plain,
but abundant, and cost twenty-five cents. The fare for a round trip was
$1.50.
As soon as a returning packet was sighted at Barnstable or Dennis or
Wellfleet, a flag was run up, on a pole perched inland on the highest
available hill, to notify the South-Siders. Since oftener than not the
vessel was bringing home a shipmaster who had left his vessel in Boston
and who was returning to the Cape after a year’s voyaging on the other
side of the world, it is easy to imagine the excitement that attended
the hoisting of this signal and the scenes that took place at the
little wharves along the Bay shore. Joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy
they saw, and healthy activity and moderate profits.
The importance of the packets to the Cape, however, was
farther-reaching than the mere profits to their owners and convenience
to the chance traveler or salt-maker. To be sure, they kept business
brisk alongshore with plenty of work for the rigger and ship-chandler
and an active turnover for the general storekeeper; so much so that
when the railroad finally stretched its way to Provincetown, and
the packets by the same token vanished forever, the opinion of one
longshoreman, who found himself idle and the wharves empty, was,
‘George, the railroad is a cuss!’ But their real importance was that
they served as the primary school for seafaring, and that, unlike some
schools, they furnished their pupils with incentive to fare farther
and reach higher, until many a youngster who began his career coiling
halyards on a Dennis packet, finished on the quarterdeck of a clipper
ship, establishing a new record across the Atlantic.
Such a _cursus honorum_ is neither theoretical nor imaginary. Captain
Joseph H. Sears, of East Dennis, left the little packet Combine to
command full-rigged ships on foreign voyages. So did Captain Dean
Sears, of the same town. Mr. Edgar Jones, of West Barnstable, an
ex-seafaring man who spent his last years sailing parties around Nine
Mile Pond in a jaunty little sloop, and who was in his day first mate
of such ships as the Radiant, Comet, and Royal Arch, told the author
that his first desire to go to sea came to him when, as a boy, he
watched the sloop Mail leaving her wharf in Barnstable for Boston. How
could it be otherwise? What youngster could sail into Boston Harbor on
the Mail or Modena or Young Tell, and there see the spars of tall ships
cutting the sky with their intricate tracery of rigging, or watch the
strange and varied cargoes derricked up through their hatches, without
longing to join the ranks of the conquerors and command those towering
ships that would carry him to the ends of the earth?
So the packets, before they died and became history, opened the eyes
of the young Cape-Codders to the roadsteads of the world; and this,
if it had been all, would have justified their existence. As to their
death, it was inevitable, and was due in the main to two causes.
Salt-making began to be abandoned, for salt mines supplanted the old
way of evaporation. Then came the railroad, which reached village after
village along the Cape until it came roaring into Provincetown and
steamed out with everything, passengers and freight, that the packets
had carried.
The little vessels themselves fared variously. Some became fishermen;
others continued a losing struggle with the railroad until they
grew old and were condemned. One, the famous Northern Light, of
Provincetown, was sold to owners on the Pacific Coast and was wrecked
on her way round, in the Straits of Magellan. Another was sold for a
pilot boat in New Orleans.
But steam in another form had already cut heavily into the business
of the pioneer packets. The steamboat Naushon in 1857 ran from
Provincetown to Boston and touched at other points on the north shore
of the Cape. The steamer Acorn, of Sandwich, followed a few years later
and plied back and forth until she was sold for a blockade-runner in
the Civil War and was sunk by accident off the Carolinas. The George
Shattuck and the Longfellow continued until the eighties, when the
silting up of all the Cape harbors except that of Provincetown, the
increasing efficiency of the railway, and the general depression of all
business on the Cape, sounded their knell.
The wider horizons that young Cape sailors had caught glimpses of
from the decks of the packets lured them in increasing numbers into
deep water. Even before the Revolution, a few had followed the gleam.
Timothy Thornton had grown rich by foreign trade as early as 1671, and
Chatham boasted a far voyager or two in 1740. But most of the colonial
seafaring was for codfish or whales. After the Revolution, however, the
case was different. As soon as the new country got her bearings, she
started out with energy, tripped over the Embargo of 1807, stagnated
through the War of 1812, and then started afresh toward the great
decade of the fifties. And from 1815 to 1860, it is safe to say that no
part of the Atlantic Coast prospered more mightily than Cape Cod.
One should realize at the outset of this period the fundamental
difference so far as the Cape is concerned, between deep-water
navigation and the point-to-point work of the packets. The packets
sailed from every little creek and harbor alongshore. Such harbors were
impossible to vessels of deeper draught; nowhere along the Cape, except
at Provincetown, was there a harbor fit for sheltering big ships, nor
were there any facilities for loading and unloading them. Our merchant
captains, therefore, sailed from other ports--from Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore--and returned to their homes on the Cape
between voyages only. No Cape town ever saw the graceful hulls and
rakish masts of clipper ships tied up alongside her wharves or swinging
at anchor in her roadsteads.
On the other hand, the shipowners of every port on both coasts of the
United States were eager to get Cape men to command their vessels and
transact their business in the far corners of the world. From 1815 to
the decline of American shipping in the eighties, her captains carried
every sort of cargo to every sort of port; encountered everything that
can be encountered at sea (mutinous crews, calms, typhoons) and every
sort of trickery that can be encountered on land, from the barefaced
shanghaiing of crews to the devious business practices of the Orient.
And, to the credit of Yankee resource and valor, it may truthfully be
said that they seldom came off losers. It will be worth while to follow
some of them to sea.
One of the early long-voyage Cape-Codders was Captain John Kendrick,
who was born in Harwich in 1740. He is a proper figure to begin with,
not because he was an example of the best the Cape produced, but
because he was active at the outset of American seafaring, and, in
fact, had helped to create it by commanding the privateers Fanny and
Marianne during the Revolutionary War. Four years after the war, a
group of Boston merchants, fired by a chance remark of the celebrated
Captain Cook, of South Sea fame, decided, since Britain had slammed
her doors against us, to take a financial flier by opening a Northwest
fur trade. The scheme involved gigantic distances over a route much of
which was uncharted. The first leg of the voyage was round the Horn and
up to Nootka Sound off the Oregon Coast; thence the course lay across
the Pacific to the China Coast, where the adventurers traded their furs
for silk; then south and west through the China Sea and across the
Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, and northwest across the
Atlantic to Boston.
The men who invested their money in so hazardous an enterprize
naturally wanted the hardiest and most courageous seaman they could
find to take command. They selected Captain Kendrick. He set sail
from Boston in 1787 in a stumpy little ship, eighty-three feet long,
named the Columbia; with him as first lieutenant, in command of the
little sloop Lady Washington, sailed Robert Gray, of Boston. They beat
their way round Cape Horn, with flooded decks, the crews rotten with
scurvy, cruised north by the west coast of South America, skirted the
long coast of California (San Francisco was not then in existence),
and finally dropped anchor in Nootka Sound near what is now Vancouver
Island.
Kendrick ordered all hands ashore, and built a big shack in which to
spend the winter while trading for sea otter with the Indians. At this
point the Captain’s character began to disintegrate. He had not shown
himself a ‘nimble leader’ (to quote Gray’s phrase) on the way out,
but had wasted a month at the Cape Verde Islands and ten days more at
the Falklands. Having now at last reached Nootka, he stayed there in
idleness all winter, allowing Gray to do all the cruising for skins. In
the early summer, when enough had been collected to fill the Columbia,
Kendrick, instead of sailing with his cargo to China, turned the
command of the larger vessel over to Gray, who promptly set out across
the Pacific, leaving the nominal commander of the expedition to his own
devices in the Lady Washington.
Kendrick spent the summer pleasantly enough in exploring and trading,
and went as far north as Barrell Sound in Queen Charlotte Islands,
where the Indians stole some clothing from him. As punishment, he
seized two of their chiefs, bound one leg of each down the barrel of
a cannon, and pretended that he was about to set them off. The cruel
bluff succeeded; the other Indians in terror returned the stolen goods,
but the Captain was not satisfied. Realizing that he had burned his
bridges so far as trading with these Indians was concerned, he demanded
all the skins in the village, paid the usual trade price for them,
and headed for China. He took his time, as usual, stopping at one of
the Hawaiian Islands, where he found sandalwood growing wild. This
suggested possibilities; he left three men there to cut enough for a
cargo, and reached China in January, 1790.
Here he spent a year and two months disposing of his skins, and
rerigged the Lady Washington as an hermaphrodite brig. Neither a fever
which he contracted, nor the hostility of Chinese officials, who made
things as hard as they could for him, can account for such a waste of
time. Clearly he was becoming demoralized. When (in March, 1791) he
finally did leave the China Coast, he was heavily in debt. He headed
east and very foolishly visited Barrell Sound again, supposing that the
two years which had elapsed had given the Indians time to forget his
previous treatment of them. Under pretense of friendly trading, they
sprang a surprise attack on his vessel and very nearly took her. But
they were finally repulsed, and Kendrick, with wanton malignity, killed
as many as he could even while they were retreating in canoes. That he
had abandoned all idea of returning home appears from the fact that he
bought a great tract of wild land on Vancouver Island from the Indians,
and built himself a log house which he called Fort Washington. Here
Gray, who again arrived from Boston via Cape Horn, found him living at
ease.
After this the Captain made only one more voyage to China. He started
another, but got no farther than the Hawaiian Islands, where he found
life so agreeable that he spent the last half of the winter loafing
about Kauai, where the sandalwood grew. Returning there the next fall,
after another summer on the Northwest Coast, Kendrick met Captain
Brown, of the British navy, at Oahu, and was killed in an exchange of
salutes. The Englishman’s cannon, by some ghastly accident, was loaded.
So died a man who had left Boston seven years before a respected
merchant captain, and had degenerated into little more than a South Sea
trader.
Such was the beginning of the Northwest fur trade, one of the earliest
branches of our country’s maritime activity. Other Cape men were
quick to follow the long wake of Kendrick--notably Captain William
Sturgis, of Barnstable, and his mate and fellow townsman Daniel Bacon.
Captain Sturgis forms the sharpest contrast to Kendrick. At sixteen
he sailed to the Northwest Coast as foremast hand on the Eliza, of
Boston, and returned as third mate. A few years later, after bringing
the Caroline back to Boston from the Hawaiian Islands, he was given
command of the Atahualpa, one of Theodore Lyman’s vessels, and with
Bacon as mate, he made another voyage to the Northwest coast. In 1820,
Captain Sturgis retired from the sea to start the firm of Bryant and
Sturgis, one of the oldest and soundest Northwest trading houses of
Boston. Captain Sturgis’s experiences with the Indians were always of
the friendliest kind. He learned their language, and it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that there was as much of the missionary as of the
trader in his dealings with them. Apropos of their occasional attacks
on American ships, he writes: ‘It would be easy to show that these
fatal disasters might have been averted by a different treatment of
the natives and by prudence and proper precaution on the part of their
civilized visitors.’ But though Captain Sturgis never had any trouble
with Indians, he once had a battle with a fleet of Chinese pirates that
makes Kendrick’s brush with the natives of the Queen Charlotte Islands
look like a cockfight.
It was the Captain’s last voyage in the Atahualpa. She lay one day in
August anchored in the Macao Roads. Bacon had been sent ashore on some
business or other, and hardly had he landed when a fleet of piratical
junks--sixteen in number--swooped down upon the ship. Sturgis, a cigar
clenched in his teeth, put up a terrific fight, for every merchantman
went armed, and the Captain, although short-handed owing to the absence
of Bacon and his boat’s crew, had firearms aplenty and poured out shot
after shot from his howitzers, while the crew peppered the decks of
the pirates with musket balls. Knowing well enough the character of
his assailants, he placed a barrel of powder on deck and announced to
his crew that if the pirates once got possession of the ship, he would
touch it off and blow them all to eternity together--yellow men and
white.
Bacon heard the guns and rushed to the shore with his boat’s crew,
where he shoved off, despite the advice of his friends, who told him
that it was suicide. How he got through the swarm of pirates and
reached the side of the blood-streaked Atahualpa is a mystery; but
he succeeded, and owing very largely to this reënforcement, Captain
Sturgis was able to keep the Chinamen at bay until he had worked his
vessel up to a place of safety under the guns of Macao forts. The
commander of the pirate fleet was afterwards captured and executed by
the Chinese process of hacking to death, known as ‘the thousand cuts.’
The moral effect of this episode on the pirates was as beneficial as
its immediate effect was disastrous to their leader, and American
vessels and American masters were from then on regarded with no small
respect by the inhabitants of Canton and Macao.
Just before the turn of the century, European wars switched some Yankee
shipowners, who were willing to take a long chance for big profits,
away from the Northwest Coast, into neutral trade with France. Food
was so scarce in that beleaguered country that a cargo of provisions
was worth almost any price, but the difficulties involved were
twofold--first, to get across the Atlantic without being picked up by
a hostile frigate, and second, to collect from the starving Frenchmen.
The business called for very different qualifications from those
demanded in the Northwest and China trade. Open powder barrels had no
effect on naval officers; patience and diplomacy were of more avail
than cutlasses in extracting payment from revolutionary Frenchmen; and
patience and diplomacy are attributes which we do not always associate
with the American temper, least often of all, perhaps, with the temper
of American shipmasters. But consider the account that Captain Elijah
Cobb, of Brewster, gives us of his difficulties with the French
Government and his subsequent visit to Paris.
Captain Cobb was born in 1768 in what is now Brewster, but was then a
part of Harwich. At the age of twenty-six he sailed out of Boston in
command of the brig Jane bound for Cadiz. This was during the Reign of
Terror, when Robespierre was supreme. Cobb’s vessel was captured by a
French frigate and taken into Brest. His situation looked hopeless,
for his papers had been seized, and without papers his claim to the
ship was worthless. He appealed, as a matter of form, to the _chargé
d’affaires_, and was told that he must exercise patience and that in
time the Government would do the right thing. The officials were as
good as their word, for in six weeks Cobb was allowed to sell his
cargo, receiving payment in bills of exchange on Hamburg, payable in
fifty days. He went to Paris to get back his papers, riding three
days and nights without sleep, and passing the remains of a butchered
courier strewn about the road, together with fragments of master,
postilion, and horses. This was a mild prologue, however, to the scenes
he was to witness, for he subsequently watched a thousand persons mount
the scaffold to be guillotined.
But the young Yankee captain had something else to do besides standing
round at executions. He had to recover his papers, and these were
not forthcoming. He pestered the office of what was called ‘the 23rd
department,’ until he was forbidden the premises. Then by chance some
one told him to try the great Robespierre himself. Cobb, nothing
daunted, followed this advice, explained his predicament to the great
man, secured the papers, and reached Hamburg just before the French
agent there stopped payment.
For the next fifteen years or so Cobb sailed various vessels to various
ports, now and then smuggling Medford rum ashore on the Irish Coast,
but meeting with no startling adventures until, one August morning in
1812, while returning from Cadiz to Boston, he was captured on the edge
of the Grand Banks by an armed British schooner and carried to St.
Johns. Here he found about twenty other American captains living in
comfortable captivity, and twenty-seven American prize vessels. This
was the first he knew of the War of 1812. In the course of a week an
exchange of prisoners was made, and all the Americans sailed out of St.
Johns, landing two days later in New York, whence Cobb made his way to
Harwich and walked in on his wife at midnight. He found her sitting up
in bed, reading his last letter and conjuring up in her imagination the
horrors of his life in a British dungeon.
It is quite possible that during his comfortable sojourn as prisoner
of war at St. Johns, Cobb fell in with another deep-water shipmaster
from the Cape--Captain Isaiah Crowell, of Dennis. At all events Captain
Crowell was held at St. Johns at about the same time, and, like Cobb,
was soon released by exchange. Captain Crowell’s exploits are worth
telling, for they typify the sort of experiences that half the Yankee
sailors met with during this frenzied epoch in our maritime history.
The British Orders in Council, which declared any neutral vessel that
cleared from a French port lawful game for His Majesty’s navy, found
Crowell and his ship in the harbor of Marseilles. To get out into the
broad Atlantic through the bottle-neck of Gibraltar was ticklish work,
but doubtless the Dennis captain and his crew enjoyed it--all the more
so as they were successful in eluding the British frigates.
[Illustration: ELIJAH COBB]
But troubles at home were almost as great as dangers abroad. In April,
1812, when Madison’s Embargo was expected at any moment, Crowell was
loading at Boston for Lisbon. If the paralyzing decree should arrive
before he could clear, his voyage would be lost. Just before the blow
fell, therefore, Crowell, with only half a cargo, slipped out of Boston
with clearance papers coastwise for Eastport. He arrived there still
one jump ahead of the Embargo, dropped across to Campo Bello in British
waters, finished loading at his leisure, and set sail for Lisbon. While
he was there, war was declared, and on his return trip an English
cruiser made a prize of his vessel, and his voyage ended at St. Johns
instead of Boston.
Such misadventures were part and parcel of seafaring at this unsettled
period. Crowell’s adventures were duplicated by a score of others,
for profits were so great that Yankee sailors were determined to make
voyages whether or no. They set sail, Madison or no Madison, Embargo
or no Embargo. The adventures of Captain Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth,
another neutral trader, furnish a good case in point. To call him a
neutral trader is to do him scant justice, for in fact there were few
experiences that he did not meet sooner or later in the course of his
life. He was a whaleman, privateer, merchant captain, Liverpool packet
commander, and State Representative; a musket ball had gone in one side
of his body and out the other; he had shaken Napoleon by the hand; he
had been captured by the French, and rewarded by Lloyds’ for navigating
a wreck through a gale. The exploit last mentioned took place in 1807.
The ship was the Otis. She lay in the Downs ready to weigh anchor, with
a cargo worth £100,000 under her hatches. A sudden gale sprang up; the
anchors let go, and the vessel crashed into a frigate that was lying
close aboard her. She was badly shattered--so badly that the pilot and
a good many of the crew, believing her lost, took to the boats and went
ashore. Captain Crocker, with what was left of his crew, got the Otis
under way and, crippled as she was, worked her through the gale into
Dover. Lloyds’ did not exaggerate when they presented him with a silver
cup inscribed with the motto, ‘Forti et fideli nil difficile.’ Perhaps
the five hundred pounds that accompanied this mark of esteem was as
acceptable to Captain Crocker as the Latin dictum. It was the Cape’s
misfortune that this energetic citizen, like many others of her sons,
spent most of his life away from his native town.
[Illustration: ROWLAND R. CROCKER]
It is no wonder that the War of 1812, which clipped the wings of our
lusty young merchant marine just as it had learned to fly far and
fearlessly, was gall and wormwood to Cape-Codders. But they forgot
their resentment in the fresh activity that came with the signing of
the treaty of peace. To trace the courses that Dennis, Barnstable,
and Truro navigators pricked off between 1815 and 1850, would be to
draw a network over all the oceans of the globe. Apparently haphazard,
these voyages were in truth systematic and very rational, for though
the Yankee trader was as ready a gambler as any man, he never crossed
the sea on a fool’s errand. Out of the tangled lines of trade that
followed the war, there emerged as early as 1816 the glorious but
grueling routine of the Liverpool packets. These vessels were built
especially for trans-Atlantic work in all weathers--stout craft with
more staterooms for passengers than any ships had had before, ample
stowage room below decks, and lines that gave them as much speed as
could be safely combined with these prerequisites. Their captains were
confronted with a task that was new to seafaring men: they had to keep
the passengers happy and the line popular. One way to do this was by
making quick passages; another was by playing the genial host. There
were plenty of drivers to be had in every Atlantic seaport, but to find
a driver with the manners of a deep-sea Chesterfield was not so easy.
Any swaggering bully who was a good sailor would do to carry cargo. But
the commander of a Liverpool packet had to be able to move gracefully
among a ship’s company, leaving affability and serenity in his wake.
And let no one suppose that the nicest seamanship was not also required
of him. If an ordinary merchantman held on till a topsail was blown
from the bolt-ropes, nobody knew it except the owner. But if a Black
Ball packet lost a sail or sprung a spar, a horde of eager passengers
spread the glad tidings to wide-eyed folk on shore, who solemnly vowed
that they ‘would never book on a Black Baller, the captains were so
reckless!’ If, on the other hand, a cautious commander lengthened his
passage by shortening sail, the tongues of the passengers were equally
busy. None but the most expert and genteel were fit for the command
of an ocean packet, and they must be men of iron as well, for their
forecastles were infested with the wildest crews that ever sailed
under the flag of a civilized nation. The Liverpool ‘packet rat’ was
the incarnation of all the toughness and evil and malice that have
clustered throughout the ages about the reputation of sailors. True,
the captain no longer donned knuckle-dusters or swung belaying pins
himself; he had mates to do such work for him. But he had to be a
graduate of the belaying-pin school, for on him rested the ultimate
responsibility for the obedience of the crew. Only men of parts need
apply.
Such men--to name a few among many Cape-Codders--were John Collins, of
Truro, Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth, and Ira Bursley, of Barnstable.
From Yarmouth came Allen Knowles and the three Eldridge brothers, John,
Oliver, and Asa. None of these men rested content with the Liverpool
run. The packet service was only one step in the giant’s stride of
their careers.
Bursley was a veteran of more lines than one. He commanded everything
in the way of ocean-going packets, from the little Dover, built in 1827
for a short-lived Boston-Liverpool Line, to the Hottinger, of the New
York Swallowtail Line, a ship of twice the size, which he was driving
back and forth across the Western Ocean twenty years later. Crocker, as
has already been seen, figured in every branch of maritime activity,
from whaling to the New York-Liverpool trade in what a contemporary
newspaper calls ‘the floating palaces’ of the packet lines. He
retired after having crossed the Atlantic a hundred and sixty-four
times without the loss of a ship. Allen H. Knowles, who lived just
across the street from the Eldridges, was given the command of the
two-thousand-ton Chariot of Fame, one of Donald McKay’s creations,
built in 1853 for the Boston owner Enoch Train. Captain Knowles
received her as she left the stocks and took her on her maiden voyage
to Liverpool. She remained his vessel for about ten years, the first
two of which were spent in the packet trade, the rest as a general
merchantman.
One of Captain Knowles’s passages from Liverpool to Boston will give an
idea of what a commander might expect in winter. He sailed on January
11, 1854, with a cargo worth half a million dollars and a passenger
list of over eighty, most of them in the steerage. The first night out
he lost his jibboom in a collision. Ten days later, in mid-Atlantic,
the main topsail was blown from the bolt-ropes, and the main yard
broken. Knowles had hardly got the yard lowered and the vessel snug
when a sea came aboard which carried away four boats and a section of
the bulwarks and flooded the cabin. The gale increased until it blew
several furled sails out of their gaskets and raised a sea that carried
away the figurehead. By Herculean efforts the crew got a new yard
slung and new sails bent, but in spite of everything the Chariot made
not a mile of progress westward from January 22 to February 7. Again,
off Boston, a northwester carried off the last of her spare sails;
but Captain Knowles piloted her through a terrific snowstorm into
Provincetown, where he got his first night’s sleep for six weeks.
Late in the thirties, E. K. Collins, a nephew of John Collins, of
Truro, started the famous Dramatic Line of Liverpool packets. It is not
surprising that he gave the command of his flagship, the Roscius, to
his able and energetic Uncle John. Captain John showed himself worthy
of his vessel. It was during his years in her that he effected the
rescue of the fishing schooner Garnet, quite as dramatic as anything in
the career of the celebrated actor for whom his ship was named.
Collins later took command of the Shakespeare of the same line, and
Asa Eldridge received the Roscius, in which vessel he learned, as will
appear presently, all there was to know about trans-Atlantic work under
sail. His brother John was at the same time captain of the Liverpool,
with Oliver, the third brother of this illustrious family, serving with
him as mate. Thus had these men of the Cape--from Falmouth, Barnstable,
Yarmouth, and Truro--reached what was then the pinnacle of maritime
ambition, the command of crack Liverpool packets. They trod their
quarterdecks the lords of creation, taking back-wash from no man alive.
To be sure, they admitted Captain Nat Palmer, the young Stonington
sailor who was to become the dean of clipper-ship commanders, as an
equal, albeit his ship, the Siddons, was not the vessel that the
Roscius or the Shakespeare was. But this they did in recognition of
Palmer’s sheer greatness.
Mighty as they were, these Cape-Codders were to become yet mightier
before they died. They were still unsatisfied and kept looking ahead
for new worlds to conquer. They had long to wait, for the dawn of the
clipper-ship era was at hand. Space is lacking to discuss the evolution
of these wonderful vessels. Suffice it to say that they revolutionized
the naval architecture of two nations, ourselves and the British, and
became at once the envy and the despair of the other maritime countries
of the world. The bows of the clippers, instead of being the bluff,
apple-cheeked affairs of the earlier type, were sharp, tapering, and
concave, and cut deep into the waves instead of beating flat against
them. Then the flare of the hull at the fore-rigging lifted them over
the waves and prevented them from being flooded too often. The stems,
too, tapered gracefully and no longer squatted flat in the water. The
alterations in the design of the hull were hardly greater than the
changes in rigging and top-hamper. The masts of the clippers towered to
a height hitherto undreamed of, and spread one and in some cases two
more courses of sails. These sails fitted as sails had never fitted
before, with the result that the clippers, when it came to windward
work, sailed like yachts, and would lie closer to the wind than
anything of their size afloat. Supplied with such ships from the yards
of New York and Boston by such builders as Webb and Westervelt, Hall,
Curtis, and McKay, the American captains sailed forth in the fifties
and in a year or two had captured the commerce of the world.
The clippers were the most beautifully finished and expensive vessels
that had ever been built and were the pride of their owners’ hearts--a
pride nicely blended with anxiety when they considered the investment
that each ship represented. Handling these wild beauties was ticklish
business, requiring far more dexterity, nerve, and experience than
was needful for the old-style barrel-bottomed craft that bobbed along
comfortably under stumpy masts and seldom came to grief. Even the
stalwart packets were eclipsed by these glorious vessels. The owners
wanted the best men in the business for commanders, and they got them.
Hence the clipper-ship captains became the aristocrats of an already
aristocratic profession--the conquerors of the conquerors of the
world--and scores of Cape men strode proudly in their ranks.
There was Baker, of the Flying Dragon and Shooting Star; Burgess,
of the Whirlwind and Challenger; Kelly, of the Fleetwing; Sears, of
the Wild Hunter; Jenkins, of the Raven; Crowell, of the Robin Hood;
Sprague, of the Gravina; Dillingham, of the Snow Squall; Stevens,
of the Southern Cross; Bearse, of the Winged Arrow; Hallett, of the
Phantom; Baxter, of the Flying Scud; Hatch, of the Northern Light. The
list might be doubled and trebled, and every name, whether of ship or
master, would be of the first magnitude. And it must be emphasized
once more that the first magnitude in this case means not merely
first among Cape captains nor even among American masters. It means
of first magnitude in the world--men who commanded the finest ships
afloat--extreme clippers that could leave any other vessel of any other
type hull down in half a day.
Before going into particulars about such men as Sears or Dillingham or
Hatch, it will be interesting to follow a few of our friends of the
packets--like Oliver Eldridge, Asa, his brother, and Ira Bursley--as
they forsook the stormy Atlantic and drove their new commands, the
clippers, through the wild waters of Cape Horn and into the balmy
trades of the Pacific. Even before the full splendor of the era of
clipper ships arrived, these men were pacing the quarterdecks of the
early medium clippers, which ushered in the extremely sharp models of
the fifties. Oliver Eldridge turned his energies to the China trade,
and in 1844 was given the command of Russell and Company’s beautiful
clipper bark Coquette, built by Samuel Hall in East Boston. Captain
Eldridge took her from Boston to Canton in ninety-nine days. Four years
later he commanded Warren Delano’s new clipper ship Memnon on her
maiden voyage to China. Owners, it seems, had a habit of entrusting
their new vessels to Captain Eldridge, for in 1855 Daniel C. Bacon,
the retired shipmaster of Barnstable and Boston and President of
the American Navigation Club, invited him to take command of the
big clipper Titan, which had just taken the water from the yard of
Roosevelt and Joyce in New York. Clearly Captain Oliver had profited
from his experience as mate of the Liverpool under his brother, Captain
John.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN OLIVER ELDRIDGE]
[Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN ELDRIDGE]
Meanwhile, Ira Bursley, having learned as much as he cared to learn
about the rigors of Atlantic packet lines, took command of the
Maine-built clipper Alert and tried his luck in the California trade.
She was a small vessel, and her owners, Crocker and Warren, realizing
that Bursley was too good for her, gave him in 1853 a new and larger
ship, the Archer. The fact that Captain Cressy, of the Flying Cloud,
later commanded the Archer is sufficient indication of her quality. She
was a fast sailer even for a clipper. Captain Bursley also commanded on
her first voyages the Snow Squall--an extremely sharp little clipper,
one of whose voyages will be mentioned anon, when she was captained by
another Cape-Codder.
The last graduate of the packets who claims attention as a clipper-ship
commander is Asa Eldridge--the most distinguished shipmaster that the
Cape ever produced. His career is a varied one. As has been said, he
commanded the Dramatic Liner Roscius for a time, and later (after a
vacation in 1853, during which he piloted Commodore Vanderbilt’s steam
yacht North Star in foreign waters), he returned to this country in
time to receive command of a new extreme clipper ship Red Jacket, one
of the four fastest sailing ships ever launched. She was designed by
Samuel Pook, of Boston, and built during the winter of 1853 by George
Thomas at Rockland, Maine. Her owners were Seacomb and Taylor, of
Boston. Sharp, lean, and rakish, the Red Jacket was a vessel worthy
of Captain Eldridge, and it must have been with deep satisfaction
that he stepped on board a real ship again after his profitable but
inconclusive sojourn with Vanderbilt’s toy steamer. He cleared from
New York on January 11, 1854, for Liverpool, and drove the Red Jacket
through rain, snow, and hail to a record passage of thirteen days and
one hour from dock to dock. No ship has ever duplicated this run
of Captain Eldridge’s, but, as though this were not enough, he had
logged four hundred and thirteen miles on one day of the passage, a
distance which has been surpassed by only three other sailing vessels
in maritime history, the Lightning, the James Baines, and the Donald
McKay.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN ASA ELDRIDGE]
If the thirteen days during which the Red Jacket was crossing the
Atlantic are epoch-making in the history of American sail, it may
easily be imagined of what importance they are in the maritime annals
of the Cape. They place Captain Eldridge at the very summit of his
profession and put his name among the world’s half-dozen greatest
shipmasters.
Another distinguished commander of this epoch was James S. Dillingham,
Jr., of Brewster. At the time of the Civil War he was Captain of the
clipper Snow Squall, leaving Penang for New York. He made good time
across the Indian Ocean, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was on
his way across the Atlantic when he sighted an American auxiliary
bark, the Tuskaloosa, which sailed up to windward and partly blanketed
him. The vessels lay so close that no speaking trumpet was necessary,
and the captain of the Tuskaloosa called out, ‘What ship is that?’
Dillingham replied, ‘Ship Snow Squall, Penang to New York; what ship
is that?’ ‘Heave to,’ replied the other, ‘and I will send some one on
board to tell you.’ With that a row of portholes in the stranger’s side
flew open, presenting a line of cannon; at the same moment the Stars
and Stripes was lowered and the Confederate flag run up in its place.
Captain Dillingham did some quick thinking. Without a moment’s
hesitation he sang out, ‘Aye, aye!’ but, instead of heaving to, he
worked his ship far enough ahead of the Confederate to catch some wind
in his forward sails; and, before the Tuskaloosa knew what was going
on, the Snow Squall had squared away and was off at a speed worthy
of her name and commander. Thanks to a rolling sea, the shots that
followed her from the rebel went wild, and every minute increased the
distance between the two vessels. The Tuskaloosa hung on till dark,
firing all the time, but finally had to abandon the chase. The Snow
Squall brought her cargo safe into New York Harbor.
It was for qualities like these that owners entrusted their finest
ships to Cape-Codders; and such incidents, of themselves of no great
historical importance, become significant for what they reveal of
Cape character: a rare mixture of good judgment and daring, with
experience and skill enough to carry through an apparently reckless
maneuver successfully. It must be remembered, however, that seafaring
was not all thrills and adventures, even in clipper ships. Much of it
was steady, hard, and discouraging work--sometimes slatting about in
the doldrums, sometimes trying for a week to get westward of the Horn
when it blew so hard that vessels could not carry sail enough to make
anything to windward. There is truth in the remark that Captain Joshua
Sears, of East Dennis, made toward the end of his life to a young man
who was just beginning his career at sea. ‘Well, my boy,’ he said, ‘I
am getting through, and you are just starting in. You have chosen a
tough life, but it will make a man of you.’ It certainly had made a man
of Captain Sears, for he had risen to the command of the Wild Hunter, a
beautiful little clipper that proved to be a gold mine for her owners.
This vessel, it will be remembered, was one of those built by the
Shivericks at East Dennis.
Another quality which helped to make clipper captains remarkable, was
loyalty to their owners--a loyalty that induced them to run grave
personal risk, and to perform with their own hands, if necessary, work
that even the hardy breed of stevedores or wreckers refused to tackle.
An anecdote regarding Captain Daniel Bacon will illustrate this point.
He left the sea before the era of clippers began, but was among the
first Boston merchants to become their owners when he ordered the
famous clipper ship Game Cock to be built for him by Samuel Hall, of
East Boston. One of the Captain’s vessels came ashore on Nantasket
Beach in a winter gale. Her hull was still sound enough to keep her
cargo dry if it was unloaded quickly. Bacon tried in vain to find some
one who would undertake the job. It promised to be too cold and wet a
business. So he hired an ox-team and went to the beach himself, where
he spent the day driving in and out of the water to unload the stranded
vessel. The underwriters presented him with the traditional silver tea
service.
But it will never do to conclude this account of the clippers and their
captains on any such low note as is suggested by a hull stranded on
Nantasket Beach. The proper tune is that which the brave westerlies
sing through taut rigging, or the music of the surge and swish of the
sea as it leaps along a ship’s topsides in the roaring forties. Such
was the song in the ears of Captain Freeman Hatch, of Eastham, during
his famous voyage from San Francisco to Boston in the Northern Light
in 1852. His ship was designed by the celebrated Samuel Pook--the same
who had drawn the lines of Captain Eldridge’s Red Jacket--and she was
built by the Briggs Brothers in South Boston. Her figurehead was a
full-length angel bearing aloft ‘a torch with a golden flame.’ Captain
Hatch made the voyage in seventy-six days, a record which stands to
this day. His epitaph, which may still be read in the Eastham burying
ground, is as follows:
Freeman Hatch, 1820-1889
He became famous making the astonishing passage in the clipper ship
Northern Light from San Francisco in 76 days 6 hours--an achievement
won by no mortal before or since.
In fairness to the memory of Captain Hatch, let the reader reflect that
it was the Captain who made the passage and his relatives who composed
the epitaph.
It may be asked why the name of Captain John Collins has not been
mentioned in connection with the clippers. The reason is not that he
lost interest in maritime affairs, but that, inspired by his brilliant
nephew, Edward K. Collins, of New York, he was a whole generation ahead
of his time. Foreseeing that the days of sail were numbered, he jumped
clear over the greatest of our salt-water epochs and landed among the
paddle-wheels and side-lever engines of the early days of steam. Edward
Collins was a man of parts and imagination. Realizing before most
Americans that sailing packets would soon be out of date, he turned his
energies toward the organization of a line of passenger steamers that
should eclipse the plodding Cunarders. One of his first moves was to
make his uncle, Captain John, a partner, and these two were the guiding
spirits of the enterprise. In 1847 they secured from the Government
the contract to carry the mails for $385,000 a year. Thus encouraged,
they proceeded to lay the keels for a fleet of steamers which were to
the Cunarders what the McKay clippers were to the sailing packets. They
were named appropriately for the oceans of the world, The Arctic,
Atlantic, Baltic, and Pacific. Captain Asa Eldridge, whose performance
in the Red Jacket was a byword in shipping circles, accepted the
Collinses’ invitation to command the Pacific, and all went well until
1855. Then came a series of disasters. The Arctic was rammed in a fog
by a Frenchman off Cape Race and went to the bottom in a desperate
attempt to reach the Newfoundland shore. Next year the Pacific and
Captain Asa Eldridge met an unknown fate somewhere in the North
Atlantic. By this tragedy the Company lost a fine ship and the Nation
one of its greatest shipmasters. With half their fleet destroyed,
the Collinses set to work to rebuild. But a more insidious blow was
to come. Economic readjustments led Congress to withdraw part of the
mail subsidy that had been keeping the line afloat. This was the thin
edge of the wedge which in the course of the next two years was driven
steadily into the seafaring interests of the country until by 1858, it
struck the heart. The Collins Line went out of business, leaving Great
Britain supreme in the Atlantic.
The Collinses were not the only shipowners who, in the late fifties,
began to realize uneasily that economic changes were taking place.
The successful opposition of British steam, adverse legislation in
Congress, the opening up of the West and the accompanying railway
expansion that drew capital into a new field where there was no foreign
competition--all played their part in driving the American flag from
the sea. Our great merchant marine was doomed before the sixties, and
would have vanished just as completely, though perhaps not so quickly,
if there had never been a Civil War, a Semmes, or an Alabama.
The change crept slowly over the water-front like a long twilight.
Merchants and shipmasters alike were at first not quite aware that
their day was done. Cape men in particular were incredulous and sailed
away as bravely as ever through the lengthening shadows into the
sunset. Captain Benjamin P. Howes, one of Dennis’s many shipmasters,
was in command of Baker and Morrill’s fine clipper Southern Cross when
she was burned by the Florida in 1863. After the war he decided to try
his luck in a smaller vessel. Accordingly, he had the little clipper
brig Lubra built for him and sailed off with his wife to become a
South Sea trader. The Lubra was his last command. She was captured by
Chinese pirates in 1866, and Captain Howes was murdered in his own
cabin.
Another Cape man, Captain Edmund Burke, of Truro, commanded the bark
Azor most of the time from 1854, when she was built, until 1870, when
she was sold. This vessel, the most beautiful of Charles Dabney’s
Azores packets, sailed back and forth between Boston and the Western
Islands with great regularity, carrying passengers, oranges, and
wine. A large part of her popularity was owing to Captain Burke, for
he was always ready either to crack a joke or to heave to and rescue
passengers from a vessel in distress, as he did those of the sinking
ship Gratitude in 1865. The maneuver meant trans-shipping three hundred
and twenty people in a high sea; to make room for them, Captain Burke
threw overboard a large part of his cargo of oranges.
In 1869, when Donald McKay launched the Glory of the Seas, the last of
his great fleet of clippers, Cape men were on hand again to command
her. Josiah Knowles, of Eastham, was her first captain; Elisha F.
Sears, of Brewster, had her for a time; but another Brewster man,
Captain Joshua Freeman, Jr., has the record of eighteen years as
her commander. As long as there was a living in it, Cape-Codders
followed the sea. Scores of them might be mentioned as commanders of
the capacious barks and occasional ships that sailed to Calcutta or
Hongkong in the lean decades between 1870 and 1890. Captain Frank
Hinckley, of the ships Star of Peace and Leading Wind, and Captain
Ansel Lothrop, of the Pilgrim, Conqueror, and Agenor, were both
Barnstable men. So were John Turner Hall, of the ship Abelino, and
Joseph Bursley, of the Victory. Not long ago Captain Howard Allen, who
still lives in Hyannis, made six consecutive voyages round the world
in his ship the Importer. Even as late as 1897, during the rush to
the Klondike, his fellow townsman, Captain Ezekiel C. Baker, took the
steamer City of Columbia from New York to the Yukon gold fields. But
it is idle to continue; one is overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers.
Captain Lothrop, who died in 1927, recently compiled a list of the
captains whom he could remember from Barnstable village alone. This
list, which is in the author’s possession, contains sixty-three names,
including both deep-water voyagers and coasters. Similar statistics
could undoubtedly be procured from half a dozen other towns on the
Cape. Enough surely has been said to show that, as long as it could be
made to pay, Cape men continued the losing battle against British steam
and sail.
Each year brought them fewer and lighter cargoes. The wealth of
the West was making itself felt more and more in Congress, and the
Westerner had no interest beyond the fences that bounded his own farm.
We ceased to be a maritime nation, and one by one the Cape commanders
furled their sails and squared their yards for the last time, left
their vessels to the mercy of the ship-breaker, and came home to live.
Here, though retired, their influence was almost as beneficial to the
Cape as their remoter activities had been. One such man could make
village affairs hum, and there used to be not one but scores in most of
the Cape towns. Town meetings in those days were handled in quarterdeck
style. Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two
houses out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports
of the world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign
countries. They had gained a perspective that measured matters against
far horizons, and they kept the Cape mentally alert as long as they
lived. When they died, they bequeathed it a salty tradition that has
not yet quite lost its savor.