Old Merchant Marine; A chronicle of American ships and sailors , livre ebook

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous from father to son had fought with pike and cannonade to defend the freedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a different destiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and rich cargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag.

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History of the Americas

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819945635
Langue	English

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THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE,
A CHRONICLE OF AMERICAN SHIPS AND SAILORS
By Ralph D. Paine
THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE
CHAPTER I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLESHIPS
The story of American ships and sailors is an epicof blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to thelater generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring wonand held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and thenforsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was nomore extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime racewhose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous fromfather to son had fought with pike and cannonade to defend thefreedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a different destiny andtook no more thought for the tall ships and rich cargoes which hadearned so much renown for its flag.
Vanished fleets and brave memories— a chronicle ofAmerica which had written its closing chapters before the CivilWar! There will be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, butnever days like those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted inquest of ports mysterious and unknown.
The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward oftheir intended destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of CapeCod not so much to clear the forest and till the soil as toestablish a fishing settlement. Like the other Englishmen who longbefore 1620 had steered across to harvest the cod on the GrandBank, they expected to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water.The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was that it offered agood harbor for boats and was “a place of profitable fishing. ”Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the wildernessand the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where they weresoon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with theKennebec colony.
Even more energetic in taking profit from the seawere the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringingcarpenters and shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak soclose at hand into keelsons, frames, and planking. Two years later,Governor John Winthrop launched his thirty-ton sloop Blessing ofthe Bay, and sent her to open “friendly commercial relations” withthe Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the traffic was in furs andwampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem were not content tovoyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled, adventurous seamenof them, and what they caught with hook and line, when dried andsalted, was readily exchanged for other merchandise in Bermuda,Barbados, and Europe.
A vessel was a community venture, and the customstill survives in the ancient ports of the Maine coast where theshapely wooden schooners are fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger,the calker, took their pay in shares. They became part owners, asdid likewise the merchant who supplied stores and material; andwhen the ship was afloat, the master, the mates, and even theseamen, were allowed cargo space for commodities which they mightbuy and sell to their own advantage. Thus early they learned totrade as shrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage directlyconcerned a whole neighborhood.
This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New Englandbecause other resources were lacking. To the westward the Frenchwere more interested in exploring the rivers leading to the regionof the Great Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. TheDutch on the Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the westerntrails to the country of the Iroquois, while the planters ofVirginia had discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, withslave labor to toil for them, and they were not compelled to turnto the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander,hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to growsufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, wasbetween the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose thelatter. Elsewhere in the colonies the forest was an enemy to bedestroyed with infinite pains. The New England pioneer regarded itwith favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and step thestraight masts in them.
And so it befell that the seventeenth century hadnot run its course before New England was hardily afloat on everyAtlantic trade route, causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchantand economist, to lament in 1668 that in his opinion nothing was“more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any motherkingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations,or provinces. ”
This absorbing business of building wooden vesselswas scattered in almost every bay and river of the indented coastfrom Nova Scotia to Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of LongIsland Sound. It was not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yardswith crews of trained artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of loghouses was the row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winterweather too rough for fishing, when the little farms lay idle, thisYankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shape thetimbers, and it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, aketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth toLondon, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands— some of them not muchlarger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at aliner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with theornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreignmerchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer linesand less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormy coast andchannels beset with shoals and ledges. The square-rig did wellenough for deepwater voyages, but it was an awkward, lubberlycontrivance for working along shore, and the colonial Yankeetherefore evolved the schooner with her flat fore-and-aft sailswhich enabled her to beat to windward and which required fewer menin the handling.
Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers intheir rude beginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchantmarine which should one day comprise the noblest, swiftest shipsdriven by the wind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck.Even then these early vessels were conspicuously efficient,carrying smaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expensesto a closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned inorder to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.
By the end of the seventeenth century more than athousand vessels were registered as built in the New Englandcolonies, and Salem already displayed the peculiar talent formaritime adventure which was to make her the most illustrious portof the New World. The first of her line of shipping merchants wasPhilip English, who was sailing his own ketch Speedwell in 1676 andso rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years he was therichest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which tradedcoastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St.Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading,flavored in this manner: “Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by theGrace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower. . . . and byGod's Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland. ”
No less devout were the merchants who ordered theirskippers to cross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold withnegroes to be sold in the West Indies before returning with sugarand molasses to Boston or Rhode Island. The slave-trade flourishedfrom the very birth of commerce in Puritan New England and itsgolden gains and exotic voyages allured high-hearted lads from farmand counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built at Marblehead, returnedfrom the West Indies and “brought some cotton and tobacco andnegroes, etc. from thence. ” Earlier than this the Dutch ofManhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that theIncorporated West India Company should “allot to each Patroontwelve black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroesshould be found. ”
It was in the South, however, that this kind oflabor was most needed and, as the trade increased, Virginia and theCarolinas became the most lucrative markets. Newport and Bristoldrove a roaring traffic in “rum and niggers, ” with a hundred sailto be found in the infamous Middle Passage. The master of one ofthese Rhode Island slavers, writing home from Guinea in 1736,portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise: “For never wasthere so much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not ye like ofye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is fullof them. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, forI purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is veryscarce. We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, sothat ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is now forced totake any that comes. Here is seven sail of us Rum men that areready to devour one another, for our case is desprit. ”
Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable andhuman torture beyond all computation, justified by Christian menand sanctioned by governments, at length rending the nation asunderin civil war and bequeathing a problem still unsolved— all thisfollowed in the wake of those first voyages in search of laborwhich could be bought and sold as merchandise. It belonged to thedark ages with piracy and witchcraft, better forgotten thanrecalled, save for its potent influence in schooling brave seamenand building faster ships for peace and war.
These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survivalamid dangers so manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. Itwas not merely a matter of small vessels with a few men and boysdaring distant voyages and the mischances of foundering orstranding, but of facing an incessant plague of privateers, Frenchand Spanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of freebooters under noflag at all. Coasts were unlighted, charts few and unreliable, andthe instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the days ofColumbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking inambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the FirstChurch of Salem contain