American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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It will be interesting to chronicle here some of the characteristics of
the most modern of ocean steamships, and to show by the use of some
figures, the enormous proportions to which their business has attained.
For this purpose it will be necessary to use figures drawn from the
records of foreign lines, and from such vessels as the "Deutschland" and
the "Celtic," although the purpose of this book is to tell the story of
the American merchant marine. But the figures given will be approximately
correct for the great American ships now building, while there are not at
present in service any American passenger ships which are fairly
representative of the twentieth century liner.

The "Celtic," for example, will carry 3,294 persons, of whom 2,859 will be
passengers. That is, it could furnish comfortable accommodations, heated
and lighted, with ample food for all the students in Harvard University,
or the University of Michigan, or Columbia University, or all in Amherst,
Dartmouth, Cornell, and Williams combined. If stood on end she would
almost attain the height of the Washington monument placed on the roof of
the Capitol at Washington. She has nine decks, and a few years ago, if
converted into a shore edifice, might fairly have been reckoned in the
"skyscraper" class. Her speed, as she was built primarily for capacity is
only about seventeen knots, and to attain that she burns about 260 tons of
coal a day. The "Deutschland," which holds the ocean record for speed,
burns nearly 600 tons of coal a day, and with it carries through the seas
only 16,000 tons as against the "Celtic's" 20,000. But she is one of the
modern vessels built especially to carry passengers. In her hold, huge as
it is, there is room for only about 600 tons of cargo, and she seldom
carries more than one-sixth of that amount. One voyage of this great ship
costs about $45,000, and even at that heavy expense, she is a profit
earner, so great is the volume of transatlantic travel and so ready are
people to pay for speed and luxury. Her coal alone costs $5,000 a trip,
and the expenses of the table, laundry, etc., equal those of the most
luxurious hotel.

But will ever these great liners, these huge masses of steel, guided by
electricity and sped by steam, build up anew the race of American sailors?
Who shall say now? To-day they are manned by Scandinavians and officered,
in the main, by the seamen of the foreign nations whose flags they float.
But the American is an adaptable type. He at once attends upon changing
conditions and conquers them. He turned from the sea to the railroads when
that seemed to be the course of progress; he may retrace his steps now
that the pendulum seems to swing the other way. And if he finds under the
new regime less chance for the hardy topman, no opportunity for the shrewd
trader to a hundred ports, the gates closed to the man of small capital,
yet be sure he will conquer fate in some way. We have seen it in the armed
branch of the seafaring profession only within a few months. When the fine
old sailing frigates vanished from the seas, when the "Constitution" and
the "Hartford" became as obsolete as the caravels of Columbus, when a navy
officer found that electricity and steam were more serious problems in his
calling than sails and rigging, and a bluejacket could be with the best in
his watch without ever having learned to furl a royal, then said
everybody: "The naval profession has gone to the dogs. Its romance has
departed. Our ships should be manned from our boiler shops, and officered
from our institutions of technology. There will be no more Decaturs,
Somerses, Farraguts, Cushings." And then came on the Spanish war and the
rush of the "Oregon" around Cape Horn, the cool thrust of Dewey's fleet
into the locked waters of Manila Bay, the plucky fight and death of Bagley
at Cardenas, the braving of death by Hobson at Santiago, and the complete
destruction of Cervera's fleet by Schley showed that Americans could fight
as well in steel ships as in wooden ones. Nor can we doubt that the
history of the next half-century will show that the new order at sea will
breed a new race of American seamen able as in the past to prove
themselves masters of the deep.

CHAPTER III

AN UGLY FEATURE OF EARLY SEAFARING--THE SLAVE TRADE AND ITS
PROMOTERS--PART PLAYED BY EMINENT NEW ENGLANDERS--HOW THE TRADE GREW
UP--THE PIOUS AUSPICES WHICH SURROUNDED THE TRAFFIC--SLAVE-STEALING AND
SABBATH-BREAKING--CONDITIONS OF THE TRADE--SIZE OF THE VESSELS--HOW THE
CAPTIVES WERE TREATED--MUTINIES, MAN-STEALING, AND MURDER--THE REVELATIONS
OF THE ABOLITION SOCIETY--EFFORTS TO BREAK UP THE TRADE--AN AWFUL
RETRIBUTION--ENGLAND LEADS THE WAY--DIFFICULTY OF ENFORCING THE
LAW--AMERICA'S SHAME--THE END OF THE EVIL--THE LAST SLAVER.

At the foot of Narragansett Bay, with the surges of the open ocean
breaking fiercely on its eastward side, and a sheltered harbor crowded
with trim pleasure craft, leading up to its rotting wharves, lies the old
colonial town of Newport. A holiday place it is to-day, a spot of splendor
and of wealth almost without parallel in the world. From the rugged cliffs
on its seaward side great granite palaces stare, many-windowed, over the
Atlantic, and velvet lawns slope down to the rocks. These are the homes of
the people who, in the last fifty years, have brought new life and new
riches to Newport. But down in the old town you will occasionally come
across a fine old colonial mansion, still retaining some signs of its
former grandeur, while scattered about the island to the north are stately
old farmhouses and homesteads that show clearly enough the existence in
that quiet spot of wealth and comfort for these one hundred and fifty
years.

Looking upon Newport to-day, and finding it all so fair, it seems hard to
believe that the foundation of all its wealth and prosperity rested upon
the most cruel, the most execrable, the most inhuman traffic that ever was
plied by degraded men--the traffic in slaves. Yet in the old days the
trade was far from being held either cruel inhuman--indeed, vessels often
set sail for the Bight of Benin to swap rum for slaves, after their owners
had invoked the blessing of God upon their enterprise. Nor were its
promoters held by the community to be degraded. Indeed, some of the most
eminent men in the community engaged in it, and its receipts were so
considerable that as early as 1729 one-half of the impost levied on slaves
imported into the colony was appropriated to pave the streets of the town
and build its bridges--however, we are not informed that the streets were
very well paved.

It was not at Newport, however, nor even in New England that the
importation of slaves first began, though for reasons which I will
presently show, the bulk of the traffic in them fell ultimately to New
Englanders. The first African slaves in America were landed by a Dutch
vessel at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The last kidnapped Africans were
brought here probably some time in the latter part of 1860--for though the
traffic was prohibited in 1807, the rigorous blockade of the ports of the
Confederacy during the Civil War was necessary to bring it actually to an
end. The amount of human misery which that frightful traffic entailed
during those 240 years almost baffles the imagination. The bloody Civil
War which had, perhaps, its earliest cause in the landing of those twenty
blacks at Jamestown, was scarcely more than a fitting penalty, and there
was justice in the fact that it fell on North and South alike, for if the
South clung longest to slavery, it was the North--even abolition New
England--which had most to do with establishing it on this continent.

However, it is not with slavery, but with the slave trade we have to do.
Circumstances largely forced upon the New England colonies their unsavory
preeminence in this sort of commerce. To begin with, their people were as
we have already seen, distinctively the seafaring folk of North America.
Again, one of their earliest methods of earning a livelihood was in the
fisheries, and that curiously enough, led directly to the trade in slaves.
To sell the great quantities of fish they dragged up from the Banks or
nearer home, foreign markets must needs be found. England and the European
countries took but little of this sort of provender, and moreover England,
France, Holland, and Portugal had their own fishing fleets on the Banks.
The main markets for the New Englanders then were the West India Islands,
the Canaries, and Madeira. There the people were accustomed to a fish diet
and, indeed, were encouraged in it by the frequent fastdays of the Roman
Catholic church, of which most were devout members. A voyage to the
Canaries with fish was commonly prolonged to the west coast of Africa,
where slaves were bought with rum. Thence the vessel would proceed to the
West Indies where the slaves would be sold, a large part of the purchase
price being taken in molasses, which, in its turn, was distilled into rum
at home, to be used for buying more slaves--for in this traffic little of
actual worth was paid for the hapless captives. Fiery rum, usually
adulterated and more than ever poisonous, was all the African chiefs
received for their droves of human cattle. For it they sold wives and
children, made bloody war and sold their captives, kidnapped and sold
their human booty.

Nothing in the history of our people shows so strikingly the progress of
man toward higher ideals, toward a clearer sense of the duties of humanity
and the rightful relation of the strong toward the weak, than the changed
sentiment concerning the slave trade. In its most humane form the thought
of that traffic to-day fills us with horror. The stories of its worst
phases seem almost incredible, and we wonder that men of American blood
could have been such utter brutes. But two centuries ago the foremost men
of New England engaged in the trade or profited by its fruits. Peter
Fanueil, who-built for Boston that historic hall which we call the Cradle
of Liberty, and which in later years resounded with the anti-slavery
eloquence of Garrison and Phillips, was a slave owner and an actual
participant in the trade. The most "respectable" merchants of Providence
and Newport were active slavers--just as some of the most respectable
merchants and manufacturers of to-day make merchandise of white men,
women, and children, whose slavery is none the less slavery because they
are driven by the fear of starvation instead of the overseer's lash.
Perhaps two hundred years from now our descendants will see the
criminality of our industrial system to-day, as clearly as we see the
wrong in that of our forefathers. The utmost piety was observed in setting
out a slave-buying expedition. The commissions were issued "by the Grace
of God," divine guidance was implored for the captain who was to swap
fiery rum for stolen children, and prayers were not infrequently offered
for long delayed or missing slavers. George Dowing, a Massachusetts
clergyman, wrote of slavery in Barbadoes: "I believe they have bought this
year no less than a thousand negroes, and the more they buie, the better
able they are to buie, for in a year and a half they will earne _with
God's blessing_, as much as they cost." Most of the slaves brought from
the coast of Guinea in New England vessels were deported again--sent to
the southern States or to the West Indies for a market. The climate and
the industrial conditions of New England were alike unfavorable to the
growth there of slavery, and its ports served chiefly as clearing-houses
for the trade. Yet there was not even among the most enlightened and
leading people of the colony any moral sentiment against slavery, and from
Boston to New York slaves were held in small numbers and their prices
quoted in the shipping lists and newspapers like any other merchandise.
Curiously enough, the first African slaves brought to Boston were sent
home again and their captors prosecuted--not wholly for stealing men, but
for breaking the Sabbath. It happened in this way: A Boston ship, the
"Rainbow," in 1645, making the usual voyage to Madeira with staves and
salt fish, touched on the coast of Guinea for a few slaves. Her captain
found the English slavers on the ground already, mightily discontented,
for the trade was dull. It was still the time when there was a pretense of
legality about the method of procuring the slaves; they were supposed to
be malefactors convicted of crime, or at the very least, prisoners taken
by some native king in war. In later years the native kings, animated by
an ever-growing thirst for the white man's rum, declared war in order to
secure captives, and employed decoys to lure young men into the commission
of crime. These devices for keeping the man-market fully supplied had not
at this time been invented, and the captains of the slavers, lying off a
dangerous coast in the boiling heat of a tropical country, grew restive at
the long delay. Perhaps some of the rum they had brought to trade for
slaves inflamed their own blood. At any rate, dragging ashore a small
cannon called significantly enough a "murderer," they attacked a village,
killed many of its people, and brought off a number of blacks, two of
whom fell to the lot of the captain of the "Rainbow," and were by him
taken to Boston. He found no profit, however, in his piratical venture,
for the story coming out, he was accused in court of "murder,
man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking," and his slaves were sent home. It was
wholly as merchandise that the blacks were regarded. It is impossible to
believe that the brutalities of the traffic could have been tolerated so
long had the idea of the essential humanity of the Africa been grasped by
those who dealt in them. Instead, they were looked upon as a superior sort
of cattle, but on the long voyage across the Atlantic were treated as no
cattle are treated to-day in the worst "ocean tramps" in the trade. The
vessels were small, many of them half the size of the lighters that ply
sluggishly up and down New York harbor. Sloops, schooners, brigantines,
and scows of 40 or 50 tons burden, carrying crews of nine men including
the captain and mates, were the customary craft in the early days of the
eighteenth century.

In his work on "The American Slave-Trade," Mr. John R. Spears gives the
dimensions of some of these puny vessels which were so heavily freighted
with human woe. The first American slaver of which we have record was the
"Desire," of Marblehead, 120 tons. Later vessels, however, were much
smaller. The sloop, "Welcome," had a capacity of 5000 gallons of molasses.
The "Fame" was 79 feet long on the keel--about a large yacht's length. In
1847, some of the captured slavers had dimensions like these: The
"Felicidade" 67 tons; the "Maria" 30 tons; the "Rio Bango" 10 tons. When
the trade was legal and regulated by law, the "Maria" would have been
permitted to carry 45 slaves--or one and one-half to each ton register. In
1847, the trade being outlawed, no regulations were observed, and this
wretched little craft imprisoned 237 negroes. But even this 10-ton slaver
was not the limit. Mr. Spears finds that open rowboats, no more than 24
feet long by 7 wide, landed as many as 35 children in Brazil out of say 50
with which the voyage began. But the size of the vessels made little
difference in the comfort of the slaves. Greed packed the great ones
equally with the small. The blacks, stowed in rows between decks, the roof
barely 3 feet 10 inches above the floor on which they lay side by side,
sometimes in "spoon-fashion" with from 10 to 16 inches surface-room for
each, endured months of imprisonment. Often they were so packed that the
head of one slave would be between the thighs of another, and in this
condition they would pass the long weeks which the Atlantic passage under
sail consumed. This, too, when the legality of the slave trade was
recognized, and nothing but the dictates of greed led to overcrowding.
Time came when the trade was put under the ban of law and made akin to
piracy. Then the need for fast vessels restricted hold room and the
methods of the trade attained a degree of barbarity that can not be
paralleled since the days of Nero.

[Illustration: "A FAVORITE TRICK OF THE FLEEING SLAVER WAS TO THROW OVER
SLAVES"]

Shackled together "spoon-wise," as the phrase was, they suffered and
sweltered through the long middle passage, dying by scores, so that often
a fifth of the cargo perished during the voyage. The stories of those who
took part in the effort to suppress the traffic give some idea of its
frightful cruelty.

The Rev. Pascoa Grenfell Hill, a chaplain in the British navy, once made a
short voyage on a slaver which his ship, the "Cleopatra," had captured.
The vessel had a full cargo, and when the capture was effected, the
negroes were all brought on deck for exercise and fresh air. The poor
creatures quite understood the meaning of the sudden change in their
masters, and kissed the hands and clothing of their deliverers. The ship
was headed for the Cape of Good Hope, where the slaves were to be
liberated; but a squall coming on, all were ordered below again. "The
night," enters Mr. Hill in his journal, "being intensely hot, four hundred
wretched beings thus crammed into a hold twelve yards in length, seven
feet in breadth, and only three and one-half feet in height, speedily
began to make an effort to reissue to the open air. Being thrust back and
striving the more to get out, the afterhatch was forced down upon them.
Over the other hatchway, in the fore part of the vessel, a wooden grating
was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of
the hold and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made
them flock, and thus a great part of the space below was rendered useless.
They crowded to the grating and clinging to it for air, completely barred
its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length
fourteen inches and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances
succeeded. The cries, the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke
of their torment which ascended can be compared to nothing earthly. One of
the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be 'many deaths;'
this prediction was fearfully verified, for the next morning 54 crushed
and mangled corpses were brought to the gangway and thrown overboard. Some
were emaciated from disease, many bruised and bloody. Antoine tells me
that some were found strangled; their hands still grasping each others'
throats."

It is of a Brazilian slaver that this awful tale is told, but the event
itself was paralleled on more than one American ship. Occasionally we
encounter stories of ships destroyed by an exploding magazine, and the
slaves, chained to the deck, going down with the wreck. Once a slaver went
ashore off Jamaica, and the officers and crew speedily got out the boats
and made for the beach, leaving the human cargo to perish. When dawn broke
it was seen that the slaves had rid themselves of their fetters and were
busily making rafts on which the women and children were put, while the
men, plunging into the sea, swam alongside, and guided the rafts toward
the shore. Now mark what the white man, the supposed representative of
civilization and Christianity, did. Fearing that the negroes would
exhaust the store of provisions and water that had been landed, they
resolved to destroy them while still in the water. As soon as the rafts
came within range, those on shore opened fire with rifles and muskets with
such deadly effect that between three hundred and four hundred blacks were
murdered. Only thirty-four saved themselves--and for what? A few weeks
later they were sold in the slave mart at Kingston.

[Illustration: DEALERS WHO CAME ON BOARD WERE THEMSELVES KIDNAPPED]

In the early days of the trade, the captains dealt with recognized chiefs
along the coast of Guinea, who conducted marauding expeditions into the
interior to kidnap slaves. Rum was the purchase price, and by skillful
dilution, a competent captain was able to double the purchasing value of
his cargo. The trade was not one calculated to develop the highest
qualities of honor, and to swindling the captains usually added theft and
murder. Any negro who came near the ship to trade, or through motives of
curiosity, was promptly seized and thrust below. Dealers who came on board
with kidnapped negroes were themselves kidnapped after the bargain was
made. Never was there any inquiry into the title of the seller. Any slave
offered was bought, though the seller had no right--even under legalized
slavery--to sell.

A picturesque story was told in testimony before the English House of
Commons. To a certain slaver lying off the Windward coast a girl was
brought in a canoe by a well-known black trader, who took his pay and
paddled off. A few moments later another canoe with two blacks came
alongside and inquired for the girl. They were permitted to see her and
declared she had been kidnapped; but the slaver, not at all put out by
that fact, refused to give her up. Thereupon the blacks paddled swiftly
off after her seller, overtook, and captured him. Presently they brought
him back to the deck of the ship--an article of merchandise, where he had
shortly before been a merchant.

"You won't buy me," cried the captive. "I a grand trading man! I bring you
slaves."

But no scruples entered the mind of the captain of the slaver. "If they
will sell you I certainly will buy you," he answered, and soon the
kidnapped kidnapper was in irons and thrust below in the noisome hold with
the unhappy being he had sent there. A multitude of cases of negro
slave-dealers being seized in this way, after disposing of their human
cattle, are recorded.

It is small wonder that torn thus from home and relatives, immured in
filthy and crowded holds, ill fed, denied the two great gifts of God to
man--air and water--subjected to the brutality of merciless men, and
wholly ignorant of the fate in store for them, many of the slaves should
kill themselves. As they had a salable value the captains employed every
possible device to defeat this end--every device, that is, except kind
treatment, which was beyond the comprehension of the average slaver.
Sometimes the slaves would try to starve themselves to death. This the
captains met by torture with the cat and thumbscrews. There is a horrible
story in the testimony before the English House of Commons about a captain
who actually whipped a nine-months-old child to death trying to force it
to eat, and then brutally compelled the mother to throw the lacerated
little body overboard. Another captain found that his captives were
killing themselves, in the belief that their spirits would return to their
old home. By way of meeting this superstition, he announced that all who
died in this way should have their heads cut off, so that if they did
return to their African homes, it would be as headless spirits. The
outcome of this threat was very different from what the captain had
anticipated. When a number of the slaves were brought on deck to witness
the beheading of the body of one of their comrades, they seized the
occasion to leap overboard and were drowned. Many sought death in this
way, and as they were usually good swimmers, they actually forced
themselves to drown, some persistently holding their heads under water,
others raising their arms high above their heads, and in one case two who
died together clung to each other so that neither could swim. Every
imaginable way in which death could be sought was employed by these
hopeless blacks, though, indeed, the hardships of the voyage were such as
to bring it often enough unsought.

When the ship's hold was full the voyage was begun, while from the
suffering blacks below, unused to seafaring under any circumstances, and
desperately sick in their stifling quarters, there arose cries and moans
as if the cover were taken off of purgatory. The imagination recoils from
the thought of so much human wretchedness.

The publications of some of the early anti-slavery associations tell of
the inhuman conditions of the trade. In an unusually commodious ship
carrying over six hundred slaves, we are told that "platforms, or wide
shelves, were erected between the decks, extending so far from the side
toward the middle of the vessel as to be capable of containing four
additional rows of slaves, by which means the perpendicular height between
each tier was, after allowing for the beams and platforms, reduced to
three feet, six inches, so that they could not even sit in an erect
posture, besides which in the men's apartment, instead of four rows, five
were stowed by putting the head of one between the thighs of another." In
another ship, "In the men's apartment the space allowed to each is six
feet length by sixteen inches in breadth, the boys are each allowed five
feet by fourteen inches, the women five feet, ten by sixteen inches, and
the girls four feet by one foot each."

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