Part 1 (1/2)
American Merchant s.h.i.+ps and Sailors.
by Willis J. Abbot.
Preface
In an earlier series of books the present writer told the story of the high achievements of the men of the United States Navy, from the day of Paul Jones to that of Dewey, Schley, and Sampson. It is a record Americans may well regard with pride, for in wars of defense or offense, in wars just or unjust, the American blue jacket has discharged the duty allotted to him cheerfully, gallantly, and efficiently.
But there are triumphs to be won by sea and by land greater than those of war, dangers to be braved, more menacing than the odds of battle. It was a glorious deed to win the battle of Santiago, but Fulton and Ericsson influenced the progress of the world more than all the heroes of history.
The daily life of those who go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps is one of constant battle, and the whaler caught in the ice-pack is in more direful case than the blockaded cruiser; while the captain of the ocean liner, guiding through a dense fog his colossal craft freighted with two thousand human lives, has on his mind a weightier load of responsibility than the admiral of the fleet.
In all times and ages, the deeds of the men who sail the deep as its policemen or its soldiery have been sung in praise. It is time for chronicle of the high courage, the reckless daring, and oftentimes the n.o.ble self-sacrifice of those who use the Seven Seas to extend the markets of the world, to bring nations nearer together, to advance science, and to cement the world into one great interdependent whole.
WILLIS JOHN ABBOT.
Ann Arbor, Mich., May 1, 1902.
CHAPTER I.
THE AMERICAN s.h.i.+P AND THE AMERICAN SAILOR--NEW ENGLAND'S LEAD ON THE OCEAN--THE EARLIEST AMERICAN s.h.i.+P-BUILDING--HOW THE s.h.i.+PYARDS MULTIPLIED--LAWLESS TIMES ON THE HIGH SEAS--s.h.i.+P-BUILDING IN THE FORESTS AND ON THE FARM--SOME EARLY TYPES--THE COURSE OF MARITIME TRADE--THE FIRST SCHOONER AND THE FIRST FULL-RIGGED s.h.i.+P--JEALOUSY AND ANTAGONISM OF ENGLAND--THE PEST OF PRIVATEERING--ENCOURAGEMENT FROM CONGRESS--THE GOLDEN DAYS OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE--FIGHTING CAPTAINS AND TRADING CAPTAINS--GROUND BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND--CHECKED BY THE WARS--SEALING AND WHALING--INTO THE PACIFIC--HOW YANKEE BOYS MOUNTED THE QUARTER-DECK--SOME STORIES OF EARLY SEAMEN--THE PACKETS AND THEIR EXPLOITS.
When the Twentieth Century opened, the American sailor was almost extinct.
The nation which, in its early and struggling days, had given to the world a race of seamen as adventurous as the Norse Vikings had, in the days of its greatness and prosperity turned its eyes away from the sea and yielded to other people the mastery of the deep. One living in the past, reading the newspapers, diaries and record-books of the early days of the Nineteenth Century, can hardly understand how an occupation which played so great a part in American life as seafaring could ever be permitted to decline. The dearest ambition of the American boy of our early national era was to command a clipper s.h.i.+p--but how many years it has been since that ambition entered into the mind of young America! In those days the people of all the young commonwealths from Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. Without railroads, and with only the most wretched excuses for post-roads, the States were linked together by the sea; and coastwise traffic early began to employ a considerable number of craft and men. Three thousand miles of ocean separated Americans from the market in which they must sell their produce and buy their luxuries. Immediately upon the settlement of the seaboard the Colonists themselves took up this trade, building and manning their own vessels and speedily making their way into every nook and corner of Europe. We, who have seen, in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, the American flag the rarest of all ensigns to be met on the water, must regard with equal admiration and wonder the zeal for maritime adventure that made the infant nation of 1800 the second seafaring people in point of number of vessels, and second to none in energy and enterprise.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SHALLOP]
New England early took the lead in building s.h.i.+ps and manning them, and this was but natural since her coasts abounded in harbors; navigable streams ran through forests of trees fit for the s.h.i.+p-builder's adze; her soil was hard and obdurate to the cultivator's efforts; and her people had not, like those who settled the South, been drawn from the agricultural cla.s.ses. Moreover, as I shall show in other chapters, the sea itself thrust upon the New Englanders its riches for them to gather. The cod-fishery was long pursued within a few miles of Cape Ann, and the New Englanders had become well habituated to it before the growing scarcity of the fish compelled them to seek the teeming waters of Newfoundland banks.
The value of the whale was first taught them by great carca.s.ses washed up on the sh.o.r.e of Cape Cod, and for years this gigantic game was pursued in open boats within sight of the coast. From neighborhood seafaring such as this the progress was easy to coasting voyages, and so to Europe and to Asia.
There is some conflict of historians over the time and place of the beginning of s.h.i.+p-building in America. The first vessel of which we have record was the ”Virginia,” built at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1608, to carry home a discontented English colony at Stage Island. She was a two-master of 30 tons burden. The next American vessel recorded was the Dutch ”yacht” ”Onrest,” built at New York in 1615. Nowadays sailors define a yacht as a vessel that carries no cargo but food and champagne, but the ”Onrest” was not a yacht of this type. She was of 16 tons burden, and this small size explains her description.
The first s.h.i.+p built for commercial purposes in New England was ”The Blessing of the Bay,” a st.u.r.dy little sloop of 60 tons. Fate surely designed to give a special significance to this venture, for she was owned by John Winthrop, the first of New England statesmen, and her keel was laid on the Fourth of July, 1631--a day destined after the lapse of one hundred and forty-five years to mean much in the world's calendar. Sixty tons is not an awe-inspiring register. The pleasure yacht of some millionaire stock-jobber to-day will be ten times that size, while 20,000 tons has come to be an every-day register for an ocean vessel; but our pleasure-seeking ”Corsairs,” and our castellated ”City of New York” will never fill so big a place in history as this little sloop, the size of a river lighter, launched at Mistick, and straightway dispatched to the trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Long before her time, however, in 1526, the Spanish adventurer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, losing on the coast of Florida a brigantine out of the squadron of three s.h.i.+ps which formed his expedition, built a small craft called a gavarra to replace it.
From that early Fourth of July, for more than two hundred years s.h.i.+pyards multiplied and prospered along the American coast. The Yankees, with their racial adaptability, which long made them jacks of all trades and good at all, combined their s.h.i.+pbuilding with other industries, and to the hurt of neither. Early in 1632, at Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, was built what was probably the first regular packet between England and America. She carried to the old country lumber, fish, furs, oil, and other colonial products, and brought back guns, ammunition, and liquor--not a fortunate exchange. Of course meanwhile English, Dutch, and Spanish s.h.i.+ps were trading to the colonies, and every local essay in s.h.i.+pbuilding meant compet.i.tion with old and established s.h.i.+p-yards and s.h.i.+p owners. Yet the industry throve, not only in the considerable yards established at Boston and other large towns, but in a small way all along the coast. Special privileges were extended to s.h.i.+p-builders. They were exempt from military and other public duties. In 1636 the ”Desire,” a vessel of 120 tons, was built at Marblehead, the largest to that time. By 1640 the port records of European ports begin to show the clearings of American-built vessels.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE KETCH]
In those days of wooden hulls and tapering masts the forests of New England were the envy of every European monarch ambitious to develop a navy. It was a time, too, of greater naval activity than the world had ever seen--though but trivial in comparison with the present expenditures of Christian nations for guns and floating steel fortresses. England, Spain, Holland, and France were struggling for the control of the deep, and cared little for considerations of humanity, honor, or honesty in the contest. The tall, straight pines of Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re were a precious possession for England in the work of building that fleet whose sails were yet to whiten the ocean, and whose guns, under Drake and Rodney, were to destroy successfully the maritime prestige of the Dutch and the Spaniards. Sometimes a colony, seeking royal favor, would send to the king a present of these pine timbers, 33 to 35 inches in diameter, and worth 95 to 115 each. Later the royal mark, the ”broad arrow,” was put on all white pines 24 inches in diameter 3 feet from the ground, that they might be saved for masts. It is, by the way, only about fifteen years since our own United States Government has disposed of its groves of live oaks, that for nearly a century were preserved to furnish oaken knees for navy vessels.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE BROAD ARROW WAS PUT ON ALL WHITE PINES 24 INCHES IN DIAMETER”]
The great number of navigable streams soon led to s.h.i.+pbuilding in the interior. It was obviously cheaper to build the vessel at the edge of the forest, where all the material grew ready to hand, and sail the completed craft to the seaboard, than to first transport the material thither in the rough. But American resourcefulness before long went even further. As the forests receded from the banks of the streams before the woodman's axe, the s.h.i.+pwrights followed. In the depths of the woods, miles perhaps from water, snows, pinnaces, ketches, and sloops were built. When the heavy snows of winter had fallen, and the roads were hard and smooth, runners were laid under the little s.h.i.+ps, great teams of oxen--sometimes more than one hundred yoke--were attached, and the craft dragged down to the river, to lie there on the ice until the spring thaw came to gently let it down into its proper element. Many a farmer, too, whose lands sloped down to a small harbor, or stream, set up by the water side the frame of a vessel, and worked patiently at it during the winter days when the flinty soil repelled the plough and farm work was stopped. Stout little craft were thus put together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her to the fis.h.i.+ng banks, or took her through h.e.l.l Gate to the great and thriving city of New York. The world has never seen a more amphibious populace.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE HELM”]
The cost of the little vessels of colonial times we learn from old letters and accounts to have averaged four pounds sterling to the ton. Boston, Charleston, Salem, Ipswich, Salisbury, and Portsmouth were the chief building places in Ma.s.sachusetts; New London in Connecticut, and Providence in Rhode Island. Vessels of a type not seen to-day made up the greater part of the New England fleet. The ketch, often referred to in early annals, was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails, but more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a s.h.i.+p's foremast, and the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square topsail surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail. The foremast was set very much aft--often nearly amids.h.i.+ps. The snow was practically a brig, carrying a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, with a square sail directly above it. A pink was rigged like a schooner, but without a bowsprit or jib. For the fisheries a mult.i.tude of smaller types were constructed--such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack. Some of these survive to the present day, and in many cases the name has pa.s.sed into disuse, while the type itself is now and then to be met with on our coasts.
The importance of s.h.i.+p-building as a factor in the development of New England did not rest merely upon the use of s.h.i.+ps by the Americans alone.
That was a day when international trade was just beginning to be understood and pushed, and every people wanted s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+pyards must have been active to have fitted out, as the records show, a fleet of fully 280 vessels for Ma.s.sachusetts alone by 1718. Before this time, too, the American s.h.i.+pwrights had made such progress in the mastery of their craft that they were building s.h.i.+ps 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 steams.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps for warfare, sounded the knell of wooden s.h.i.+ps 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.