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The Old Merchant Marine; A chronicle of American ships and sailors By: Ralph Delahaye Paine (1871-1925) |
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A CHRONICLE OF AMERICAN SHIPS AND SAILORS By Ralph D. Paine
CONTENTS I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS
II. THE PRIVATEERS OF '76
III. OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD!
IV. THE FAMOUS DAYS OF SALEM PORT
V. YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES
VI. "FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS!"
VII. THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812
VIII. THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES"
IX. THE STATELY CLIPPER AND HER GLORY
X. BOUND COASTWISE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE CHAPTER I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS 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. Vanished fleets and brave memories a chronicle of America which had
written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will be other
Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like those when
skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports mysterious and
unknown. The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much to
clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing settlement.
Like the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had steered across to
harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected to wrest a livelihood
mostly from salt water. The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was
that it offered a good harbor for boats and was "a place of profitable
fishing." Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the
wilderness and the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where
they were soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the
Kennebec colony. Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the Puritans who
came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing carpenters and shipbuilders
with them to hew the pine and oak so close at hand into keelsons,
frames, and planking. Two years later, Governor John Winthrop launched
his thirty ton sloop Blessing of the Bay, and sent her to open "friendly
commercial relations" with the Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the
traffic was in furs and wampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem
were not content to voyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled,
adventurous seamen of them, and what they caught with hook and line,
when dried and salted, was readily exchanged for other merchandise in
Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe. A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives in the
ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden schooners are
fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker, took their pay
in shares. They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who
supplied stores and material; and when the ship was afloat, the master,
the mates, and even the seamen, were allowed cargo space for commodities
which they might buy and sell to their own advantage. Thus early
they learned to trade as shrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage
directly concerned a whole neighborhood. This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more interested
in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the Great Lakes and in
finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on the Hudson were similarly
engaged by means of the western trails to the country of the Iroquois,
while the planters of Virginia had discovered an easy opulence in the
tobacco crop, with slave labor to toil for them, and they were not
compelled to turn to the hardships and the hazards of the sea... Continue reading book >>
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