American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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The importance of ship-building as a factor in the development of New
England did not rest merely upon the use of ships by the Americans alone.
That was a day when international trade was just beginning to be
understood and pushed, and every people wanted ships to carry their goods
to foreign lands and bring back coveted articles in exchange. The New
England vessel seldom made more than two voyages across the Atlantic
without being snapped up by some purchaser beyond seas. The ordinary
course was for the new craft to load with masts or spars, always in
demand, or with fish; set sail for a promising market, dispose of her
cargo, and take freight for England. There she would be sold, her crew
making their way home in other ships, and her purchase money expended in
articles needed in the colonies. This was the ordinary practice, and with
vessels sold abroad so soon after their completion the shipyards must have
been active to have fitted out, as the records show, a fleet of fully 280
vessels for Massachusetts alone by 1718. Before this time, too, the
American shipwrights had made such progress in the mastery of their craft
that they were building ships for the royal navy. The "Falkland," built at
Portsmouth about 1690, and carrying 54 guns, was the earliest of these,
but after her time corvettes, sloops-of-war, and frigates were launched in
New England yards to fight for the king. It was good preparation for
building those that at a later date should fight against him.

Looking back over the long record of American maritime progress, one
cannot but be impressed with the many and important contributions made by
Americans--native or adopted--to marine architecture. To an American
citizen, John Ericsson, the world owes the screw propeller. Americans sent
the first steamship across the ocean--the "Savannah," in 1819. Americans,
engaged in a fratricidal war, invented the ironclad in the "Monitor" and
the "Merrimac," and, demonstrating the value of iron ships for warfare,
sounded the knell of wooden ships for peaceful trade. An American first
demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the steamboat, and if history
denies to Fulton entire precedence with his "Clermont," in 1807, it may
still be claimed for John Fitch, another American, with his imperfect boat
on the Delaware in 1787. But perhaps none of these inventions had more
homely utility than the New England schooner, which had its birth and its
christening at Gloucester in 1713. The story of its naming is one of the
oldest in our marine folk-lore.

"See how she schoons!" cried a bystander, coining a verb to describe the
swooping slide of the graceful hull down the ways into the placid water.

[Illustration: SCHOONER-RIGGED SHARPIE]

"A schooner let her be!" responded the builder, proud of his handiwork,
and ready to seize the opportunity to confer a novel title upon his novel
creation. Though a combination of old elements, the schooner was in effect
a new design. Barks, ketches, snows, and brigantines carried fore-and-aft
rigs in connection with square sails on either mast, but now for the first
time two masts were rigged fore and aft, and the square sails wholly
discarded. The advantages of the new rig were quickly discovered. Vessels
carrying it were found to sail closer to the wind, were easier to handle
in narrow quarters, and--what in the end proved of prime importance--could
be safely manned by smaller crews. With these advantages the schooner made
its way to the front in the shipping lists. The New England shipyards
began building them, almost to the exclusion of other types. Before their
advance brigs, barks, and even the magnificent full-rigged ship itself
gave way, until now a square-rigged ship is an unusual spectacle on the
ocean. The vitality of the schooner is such that it bids fair to survive
both of the crushing blows dealt to old-fashioned marine architecture--the
substitution of metal for wood, and of steam for sails. To both the
schooner adapted itself. Extending its long, slender hull to carry four,
five, and even seven masts, its builders abandoned the stout oak and pine
for molded iron and later steel plates, and when it appeared that the huge
booms, extending the mighty sails, were difficult for an ordinary crew to
handle, one mast, made like the rest of steel, was transformed into a
smokestack--still bearing sails--a donkey engine was installed in the
hold, and the booms went aloft, or the anchor rose to the peak to the tune
of smoky puffing instead of the rhythmical chanty songs of the sailors. So
the modern schooner, a very leviathan of sailing craft, plows the seas,
electric-lighted, steering by steam, a telephone system connecting all
parts of her hull--everything modern about her except her name. Not as
dignified, graceful, and picturesque as the ship perhaps--but she lasts,
while the ship disappears.

But to return to the colonial shipping. Boston soon became one of the
chief building centers, though indeed wherever men were gathered in a
seashore village ships were built. Winthrop, one of the pioneers in the
industry, writes: "The work was hard to accomplish for want of money,
etc., but our shipwrights were content to take such pay as the country
could make," and indeed in the old account books of the day we can read of
very unusual payments made for labor, as shown, for example, in a contract
for building a ship at Newburyport in 1141, by which the owners were bound
to pay "L300 in cash, L300 by orders on good shops in Boston; two-thirds
money; four hundred pounds by orders up the river for tim'r and plank, ten
bbls. flour, 50 pounds weight of loaf sugar, one bagg of cotton wool, one
hund. bushels of corn in the spring; one hhd. of Rum, one hundred weight
of cheese * * * whole am't of price for vessel L3000 lawful money."

By 1642 they were building good-sized vessels at Boston, and the year
following was launched the first full-rigged ship, the "Trial," which went
to Malaga, and brought back "wine, fruit, oil, linen and wool, which was a
great advantage to the country, and gave encouragement to trade." A year
earlier there set out the modest forerunner of our present wholesale
spring pilgrimages to Europe. A ship set sail for London from Boston "with
many passengers, men of chief rank in the country, and great store of
beaver. Their adventure was very great, considering the doubtful estate of
affairs of England, but many prayers of the churches went with them and
followed after them."

By 1698 Governor Bellomont was able to say of Boston alone, "I believe
there are more good vessels belonging to the town of Boston than to all
Scotland and Ireland." Thereafter the business rapidly developed, until in
a map of about 1730 there are noted sixteen shipyards. Rope walks, too,
sprung up to furnish rigging, and presently for these Boston was a centre.
Another industry, less commendable, grew up in this as in other shipping
centres. Molasses was one of the chief staples brought from the West
Indies, and it came in quantities far in excess of any possible demand
from the colonial sweet tooth. But it could be made into rum, and in those
days rum was held an innocent beverage, dispensed like water at all formal
gatherings, and used as a matter of course in the harvest fields, the
shop, and on the deck at sea. Moreover, it had been found to have a
special value as currency on the west coast of Africa. The negro savages
manifested a more than civilized taste for it, and were ready to sell
their enemies or their friends, their sons, fathers, wives, or daughters
into slavery in exchange for the fiery fluid. So all New England set to
turning the good molasses into fiery rum, and while the slave trade throve
abroad the rum trade prospered at home.

Of course the rapid advance of the colonies in shipbuilding and in
maritime trade was not regarded in England with unqualified pride. The
theory of that day--and one not yet wholly abandoned--was that a colony
was a mine, to be worked for the sole benefit of the mother country. It
was to buy its goods in no other market. It was to use the ships of the
home government alone for its trade across seas. It must not presume to
manufacture for itself articles which merchants at home desired to sell.
England early strove to impress such trade regulations upon the American
colonies, and succeeded in embarrassing and handicapping them seriously,
although evasions of the navigation laws were notorious, and were winked
at by the officers of the crown. The restrictions were sufficiently
burdensome, however, to make the ship-owners and sailors of 1770 among
those most ready and eager for the revolt against the king.

The close of the Revolution found American shipping in a reasonably
prosperous condition. It is true that the peaceful vocation of the seamen
had been interrupted, all access to British ports denied them, and their
voyages to Continental markets had for six years been attended by the
ever-present risk of capture and condemnation. But on the other hand, the
war had opened the way for privateering, and out of the ports of
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut the privateers swarmed like
swallows from a chimney at dawn. To the adventurous and not
over-scrupulous men who followed it, privateering was a congenial
pursuit--so much so, unhappily, that when the war ended, and a treaty
robbed their calling of its guise of lawfulness, too many of them still
continued it, braving the penalties of piracy for the sake of its gains.
But during the period of the Revolution privateering did the struggling
young nation two services--it sorely harassed the enemy, and it kept alive
the seafaring zeal and skill of the New Englanders.

For a time it seemed that not all this zeal and skill could replace the
maritime interests where they were when the Revolution began. For most
people in the colonies independence meant a broader scope of activity--to
the shipowner and sailor it meant new and serious limitations. England was
still engaged in the effort to monopolize ocean traffic by the operation
of tariffs and navigation laws. New England having become a foreign
nation, her ships were denied admittance to the ports of the British West
Indies, with which for years a nourishing trade had been conducted.
Lumber, corn, fish, live stock, and farm produce had been sent to the
islands, and coffee, sugar, cotton, rum, and indigo brought back. This
commerce, which had come to equal L3,500,000 a year, was shut off by the
British after American independence, despite the protest of Pitt, who saw
clearly that the West Indians would suffer even more than the Americans.
Time showed his wisdom. Terrible sufferings came upon the West Indies for
lack of the supplies they had been accustomed to import, and between 1780
and 1787 as many as 15,000 slaves perished from starvation.

Another cause held the American merchant marine in check for several years
succeeding the declaration of peace. If there be one interest which must
have behind it a well-organized, coherent national government, able to
protect it and to enforce its rights in foreign lands, it is the shipping
interest. But American ships, after the Treaty of Paris, hailed from
thirteen independent but puny States. They had behind them the shadow of a
confederacy, but no substance. The flags they carried were not only not
respected in foreign countries--they were not known. Moreover, the States
were jealous of each other, possessing no true community of interest, and
each seeking advantage at the expense of its neighbors. They were already
beginning to adopt among themselves the very tactics of harassing and
crippling navigation laws which caused the protest against Great Britain.
This "Critical Period of American History," as Professor Fiske calls it,
was indeed a critical period for American shipping.

The new government, formed under the Constitution, was prompt to recognize
the demands of the shipping interests upon the country. In the very first
measure adopted by Congress steps were taken to encourage American
shipping by differential duties levied on goods imported in American and
foreign vessels. Moreover, in the tonnage duties imposed by Congress an
advantage of almost 50 per cent. was given ships built in the United
States and owned abroad. Under this stimulus the shipping interests
throve, despite hostile legislation in England, and the disordered state
of the high seas, where French and British privateers were only a little
less predatory than Algierian corsairs or avowed pirates. It was at this
early day that Yankee skippers began making those long voyages that are
hardly paralleled to-day when steamships hold to a single route like a
trolley car between two towns. The East Indies was a favorite trading
point. Carrying a cargo suited to the needs of perhaps a dozen different
peoples, the vessel would put out from Boston or Newport, put in at
Madeira perhaps, or at some West Indian port, dispose of part of its
cargo, and proceed, stopping again and again on its way, and exchanging
its goods for money or for articles thought to be more salable in the East
Indies. Arrived there, all would be sold, and a cargo of tea, coffee,
silks, spices, nankeen cloth, sugar, and other products of the country
taken on. If these goods did not prove salable at home the ship would make
yet another voyage and dispose of them at Hamburg or some other
Continental port. In 1785 a Baltimore ship showed the Stars and Stripes in
the Canton River, China. In 1788 the ship "Atlantic," of Salem, visited
Bombay and Calcutta. The effect of being barred from British ports was
not, as the British had expected, to put an abrupt end to American
maritime enterprise. It only sent our hardy seamen on longer voyages, only
brought our merchants into touch with the commerce of the most distant
lands. Industry, like men, sometimes thrives upon obstacles.

[Illustration: "AFTER A BRITISH LIEUTENANT HAD PICKED THE BEST OF HER
CREW"]

For twenty-five years succeeding the adoption of the Constitution the
maritime interest--both shipbuilding and shipowning--thrived more,
perhaps, than any other gainful industry pursued by the Americans. Yet it
was a time when every imaginable device was employed to keep our people
out of the ocean-carrying trade. The British regulations, which denied us
access to their ports, were imitated by the French. The Napoleonic wars
came on, and the belligerents bombarded each other with orders in council
and decrees that fell short of their mark, but did havoc among neutral
merchantmen. To the ordinary perils of the deep the danger of
capture--lawful or unlawful--by cruiser or privateer, was always to be
added. The British were still enforcing their so-called "right of search,"
and many an American ship was left short-handed far out at sea, after a
British naval lieutenant had picked the best of her crew on the pretense
that they were British subjects. The superficial differences between an
American and an Englishman not being as great as those between an albino
and a Congo black, it is not surprising that the boarding officer should
occasionally make mistakes--particularly when his ship was in need of
smart, active sailors. Indeed, in those years the civilized--by which at
that period was meant the warlike--nations were all seeking sailors.
Dutch, Spanish, French, and English were eager for men to man their
fighting ships; hired them when they could, and stole them when they must.
It was the time of the press gang, and the day when sailors carried as a
regular part of their kit an outfit of women's clothing in which to escape
if the word were passed that "the press is hot to-night." The United
States had never to resort to impressment to fill its navy ships'
companies, a fact perhaps due chiefly to the small size of its navy in
comparison with the seafaring population it had to draw from.

As for the American merchant marine, it was full of British seamen. Beyond
doubt inducements were offered them at every American port to desert and
ship under the Stars and Stripes. In the winter of 1801 every British ship
visiting New York lost the greater part of its crew. At Norfolk the entire
crew of a British merchantman deserted to an American sloop-of-war. A
lively trade was done in forged papers of American citizenship, and the
British naval officer who gave a boat-load of bluejackets shore leave at
New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up.
Other nations looked covetously upon our great body of able-bodied seamen,
born within sound of the swash of the surf, nurtured in the fisheries,
able to build, to rig, or to navigate a ship. They were fighting sailors,
too, though serving only in the merchant marine. In those days the men
that went down to the sea in ships had to be prepared to fight other
antagonists than Neptune and AEolus. All the ships went armed. It is
curious to read in old annals of the number of cannon carried by small
merchantmen. We find the "Prudent Sarah" mounting 10 guns; the "Olive
Branch," belied her peaceful name with 3, while the pink "Friendship"
carried 8. These years, too, were the privateers' harvest time. During the
Revolution the ships owned by one Newburyport merchant took 23,360 tons of
shipping and 225 men, the prizes with their cargoes selling for
$3,950,000. But of the size and the profits of the privateering business
more will be said in the chapter devoted to that subject. It is enough to
note here that it made the American merchantman essentially a fighting
man.

The growth of American shipping during the years 1794-1810 is almost
incredible in face of the obstacles put in its path by hostile enactments
and the perils of the war. In 1794 United States ships, aggregating
438,863 tons, breasted the waves, carrying fish and staves to the West
Indies, bringing back spices, rum, cocoa, and coffee. Sometimes they went
from the West Indies to the Canaries, and thence to the west coast of
Africa, where very valuable and very pitiful cargoes of human beings,
whose black skins were thought to justify their treatment as dumb beasts
of burden, were shipped. Again the East Indies opened markets for buying
and selling both. But England and almost the whole of Western Europe were
closed.

It is not possible to understand the situation in which the American
sailor and shipowner of that day was placed, without some knowledge of the
navigation laws and belligerent orders by which the trade was vexed. In
1793 the Napoleonic wars began, to continue with slight interruptions
until 1815. France and England were the chief contestants, and between
them American shipping was sorely harried. The French at first seemed to
extend to the enterprising Americans a boon of incalculable value to the
maritime interest, for the National Convention promulgated a decree giving
to neutral ships--practically to American ships, for they were the bulk of
the neutral shipping--the rights of French ships. Overjoyed by this sudden
opening of a rich market long closed, the Yankee barks and brigs slipped
out of the New England harbors in schools, while the shipyards rung with
the blows of the hammers, and the forest resounded with the shouts of the
woodsmen getting out ship-timbers. The ocean pathway to the French West
Indies was flecked with sails, and the harbors of St. Kitts, Guadaloupe,
and Martinique were crowded. But this bustling trade was short-lived. The
argosies that set forth on their peaceful errand were shattered by enemies
more dreaded than wind or sea. Many a ship reached the port eagerly sought
only to rot there; many a merchant was beggared, nor knew what had
befallen his hopeful venture until some belated consular report told of
its condemnation in some French or English admiralty court.

[Illustration: EARLY TYPE OF SMACK]

For England met France's hospitality with a new stroke at American
interests. The trade was not neutral, she said. France had been forced to
her concession by war. Her people were starving because the vigilance of
British cruisers had driven French cruisers from the seas, and no food
could be imported. To permit Americans to purvey food for the French
colonies would clearly be to undo the good work of the British navy.
Obviously food was contraband of war. So all English men-of-war were
ordered to seize French goods on whatever ship found; to confiscate
cargoes of wheat, corn, or fish bound for French ports as contraband, and
particularly to board all American merchantmen and scrutinize the crews
for English-born sailors. The latter injunction was obeyed with peculiar
zeal, so that the State Department had evidence that at one time, in 1806,
there were as many as 6000 American seamen serving unwillingly in the
British navy.

France, meanwhile, sought retaliation upon England at the expense of the
Americans. The United States, said the French government, is a sovereign
nation. If it does not protect its vessels against unwarrantable British
aggressions it is because the Americans are secretly in league with the
British. France recognizes no difference between its foes. So it is
ordered that any American vessel which submitted to visitation and search
from an English vessel, or paid dues in a British port, ceased to be
neutral, and became subject to capture by the French. The effect of these
orders and decrees was simply that any American ship which fell in with an
English or French man-of-war or privateer, or was forced by stress of
weather to seek shelter in an English or French port, was lost to her
owners. The times were rude, evidence was easy to manufacture, captains
were rapacious, admiralty judges were complaisant, and American commerce
was rich prey. The French West Indies fell an easy spoil to the British,
and at Martinique and Basseterre American merchantmen were caught in the
harbor. Their crews were impressed, their cargoes, not yet discharged,
seized, the vessels themselves wantonly destroyed or libelled as prizes.
Nor were passengers exempt from the rigors of search and plunder. The
records of the State Department and the rude newspapers of the time are
full of the complaints of shipowners, passengers, and shipping merchants.
The robbery was prodigious in its amount, the indignity put upon the
nation unspeakable. And yet the least complaint came from those who
suffered most. The New England seaport towns were filled with idle seamen,
their harbors with pinks, schooners, and brigs, lying lazily at anchor.
The sailors, with the philosophy of men long accustomed to submit
themselves to nature's moods and the vagaries of breezes, cursed British
and French impartially, and joined in the general depression and idleness
of the towns and counties dependent on their activity.

It was about this period (1794) that the American navy was begun; though,
curiously enough, its foundation was not the outcome of either British or
French depredations, but of the piracies of the Algerians. That fierce and
predatory people had for long years held the Mediterranean as a sort of a
private lake into which no nation might send its ships without paying
tribute. With singular cowardice, all the European peoples had acquiesced
in this conception save England alone. The English were feared by the
Algerians, and an English pass--which tradition says the illiterate
Corsairs identified by measuring its enscrolled border, instead of by
reading--protected any vessel carrying it. American ships, however, were
peculiarly the prey of the Algerians, and many an American sailor was sold
by them into slavery until Decatur and Rodgers in 1805 thrashed the
piratical states of North Africa into recognition of American power. In
1794, however, the Americans were not eager for war, and diplomats strove
to arrange a treaty which would protect American shipping, while Congress
prudently ordered the beginning of six frigates, work to be stopped if
peace should be made with the Dey. The treaty--not one very honorable to
us--was indeed made some months later, and the frigates long remained
unfinished.

It has been the fashion of late years to sneer at our second war with
England as unnecessary and inconclusive. But no one who studies the
records of the life, industry, and material interests of our people during
the years between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of
that war can fail to wonder that it did not come sooner, and that it was
not a war with France as well as England. For our people were then
essentially a maritime people. Their greatest single manufacturing
industry was ship-building. The fisheries--whale, herring, and
cod--employed thousands of their men and supported more than one
considerable town. The markets for their products lay beyond seas, and for
their commerce an undisputed right to the peaceful passage of the ocean
was necessary. Yet England and France, prosecuting their own quarrel,
fairly ground American shipping as between two millstones. Our sailors
were pressed, our ships seized, their cargoes stolen, under hollow forms
of law. The high seas were treated as though they were the hunting
preserves of these nations and American ships were quail and rabbits. The
London "Naval Chronicle" at that time, and for long after, bore at the
head of its columns the boastful lines:

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