The Old Merchant Marine - Chapters I-III



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. The New 
Englander, hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow 
sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, was between the 
devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere in 
the colonies the forest was an enemy to be destroyed with infinite pains. 
The New England pioneer regarded it with favor as the stuff with which to 
make stout ships and step the straight masts in them. 

And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its course 
before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic trade route, 
causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and economist, to lament in 
1668 that in his opinion nothing was "more prejudicial and in prospect 
more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her 
colonies, plantations, or provinces." 

This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered in almost 
every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova Scotia to Buzzard's 
Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. It was not restricted, 
as now, to well-equipped yards with crews of trained artisans. Hard by the 
huddled hamlet of log houses was the row of keel-blocks sloping to the 
tide. In winter weather too rough for fishing, when the little farms lay 
idle, this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shape the 
timbers, and it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, a ketch, or a 
brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth to London, or Cadiz, or 
the Windward Islands--some of them not much larger and far less seaworthy 
than the lifeboat which hangs at a liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced 
him to dispense with the ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the 
foreign merchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer 
lines and less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormy coast and 
channels beset with shoals and ledges. The square-rig did well enough for 
deepwater voyages, but it was an awkward, lubberly contrivance for working 
along shore, and the colonial Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with 
her flat fore-and-aft sails which enabled her to beat to windward and 
which required fewer men in the handling. 

Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude beginnings 
foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which should one day 
comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven 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 expenses to a closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce 
beckoned in order to gain a dollar at peril of their skins. 

By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels were 
registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem already 
displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was to make her 
the most illustrious port of the New World. The first of her line of 
shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own ketch 
Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years 
he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which traded 
coastwise 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 the Grace of God in 
the good sloop called the Mayflower . . . . and by God's Grace bound to 
Virginia or Merriland." 

No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to cross to 
the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in the West 
Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or Rhode Island. 
The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of commerce in Puritan New 
England and its golden gains and exotic voyages allured high-hearted lads 
from farm and counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built at Marblehead, 
returned from the West Indies and "brought some cotton and tobacco and 
negroes, etc. from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch of Manhattan had 
employed black labor, and it was provided that the Incorporated West India 
Company should "allot to each Patroon twelve black men and women out of 
the Prizes in which Negroes should be found." 

It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most needed and, 
as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the most 
lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in "rum and 
niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle Passage. 
The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home from Guinea 
in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise: "For never 
was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not ye like of ye 
French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is full of them. 
For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, for I purchast but 
27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is very scarce. We have had 
nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, so that ships that used to 
carry pryme slaves off is now forced to take any that comes. Here is seven 
sail of us Rum men that are ready to devour one another, for our case is 
desprit." 

Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture beyond all 
computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned by governments, at 
length rending the nation asunder in civil war and bequeathing a problem 
still unsolved--all this followed in the wake of those first voyages in 
search of labor which could be bought and sold as merchandise. It belonged 
to the dark ages with piracy and witchcraft, better forgotten than 
recalled, save for its potent influence in schooling brave seamen and 
building faster ships for peace and war. 

These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers so 
manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. It was not merely a matter 
of small vessels with a few men and boys daring distant voyages and the 
mischances of foundering or stranding, but of facing an incessant plague 
of privateers, French and Spanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of 
freebooters under no flag at all. Coasts were unlighted, charts few and 
unreliable, and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the 
days of Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking in 
ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the First Church 
of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of July 25, 1677: "The Lord 
having given a Commission to the Indians to take no less than 13 of the 
Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men . . . it struck a great 
consternation into all the people here. The Pastor moved on the Lord's 
Day, and the whole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day 
following as a Fast Day, which was accordingly done . . . . The Lord was 
pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which was looked on 
as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there had been 19 wounded men sent 
into Salem a little while before; also a Ketch sent out from Salem as a 
man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches. The Lord give them Good 
Success." 

To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and often 
more sordid than picturesque. Many of these sea rogues were thieves with 
small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter. They were of the sort that 
overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from Jamaica in 1718 when he 
reported his capture by one Captain Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns and 
120 men who took him to Crooked Island, plundered him of various articles, 
stripped the brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go. In the same 
year the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they met with 
pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off their mate because 
they had no navigator. 

Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped to filch the 
stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermen of Cape Sable. He 
had a sense of dramatic values, however, and frequently brandished his 
pistols on deck, besides which, as set down by one of his prisoners, "he 
had a young child in Boston for whom he entertained such tenderness that 
on every lucid interval from drinking and revelling, I have seen him sit 
down and weep plentifully." 

A more satisfying figure was Thomas Pounds, who was taken by the sloop 
Mary, sent after him from Boston in 1689. He was discovered in Vineyard 
Sound, and the two vessels fought a gallant action, the pirate flying a 
red flag and refusing to strike. Captain Samuel Pease of the Mary was 
mortally wounded, while Pounds, this proper pirate, strode his quarter-
deck and waved his naked sword, crying, "Come on board, ye dogs, and I 
will strike YOU presently." This invitation was promptly accepted by the 
stout seamen from Boston, who thereupon swarmed over the bulwark and drove 
all hands below, preserving Thomas Pounds to be hanged in public. 

In 1703 John Quelch, a man of resource, hoisted what he called "Old Roger" 
over the Charles--a brigantine which had been equipped as a privateer to 
cruise against the French of Acadia. This curious flag of his was 
described as displaying a skeleton with an hour-glass in one hand and "a 
dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from it in the 
other." Quelch led a mutiny, tossed the skipper overboard, and sailed for 
Brazil, capturing several merchantmen on the way and looting them of rum, 
silks, sugar, gold dust, and munitions. Rashly he came sailing back to 
Marblehead, primed with a plausible yarn, but his men talked too much when 
drunk and all hands were jailed. Upon the gallows Quelch behaved 
exceedingly well, "pulling off his hat and bowing to the spectators," 
while the somber Puritan merchants in the crowd were, many of them, 
quietly dealing in the merchandise fetched home by pirates who were lucky 
enough to steer clear of the law. 

This was a shady industry in which New York took the more active part, 
sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravaged the waters of the 
Far East and made their haven at Madagascar, and disposing of the booty 
received in exchange. Governor Fletcher had dirtied his hands by 
protecting this commerce and, as a result, Lord Bellomont was named to 
succeed him. Said William III, "I send you, my Lord, to New York, because 
an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because 
I believe you to be such a man." 

Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd, respectable 
master mariner in the merchant service, was employed by Lord Bellomont, 
royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, to command 
an armed ship and harry the pirates of the West Indies and Madagascar. 
Strangest of all the sea tales of colonial history is that of Captain Kidd 
and his cruise in the Adventure-Galley. His name is reddened with crimes 
never committed, his grisly phantom. has stalked through the legends and 
literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magic to set 
treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and headland from 
Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were told, he never cut a 
throat or made a victim walk the plank. He was tried and hanged for the 
trivial offense of breaking the head of a mutinous gunner of his own crew 
with a wooden bucket. It was even a matter of grave legal doubt whether he 
had committed one single piratical act. His trial in London was a farce. 
In the case of the captured ships he alleged that they were sailing under 
French passes, and he protested that his privateering commission justified 
him, and this contention was not disproven. The suspicion is not wanting 
that he was condemned as a scapegoat because certain noblemen of England 
had subscribed the capital to outfit his cruise, expecting to win rich 
dividends in gold captured from the pirates he was sent to attack. Against 
these men a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain Kidd was 
sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorable distinction in 
earlier years, and fate has played his memory a shabby trick. 

It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonial pirates, 
who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewing wine-glasses in his 
cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem more like hell, and 
industriously scourging the whole Atlantic coast. Charleston lived in 
terror of him until Lieutenant Maynard, in a small sloop, laid him 
alongside in a hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off the head of 
Blackbeard to dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy. 

Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seaman more 
typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who became the first royal 
Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692. Born on a frontier farm of 
the Maine coast while many of the Pilgrim fathers were living, "his 
faithful mother," wrote Cotton Mather, "had no less than twenty-six 
children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to them all was 
William, one of the youngest, whom, his father dying, was left young with 
his mother, and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in Ye Wilderness until 
he was eighteen years old." Then he apprenticed himself to a neighboring 
shipwright who was building sloops and pinnaces and, having learned the 
trade, set out for Boston. As a ship-carpenter he plied his trade, spent 
his wages in the taverns of the waterside and there picked up wondrous 
yarns of the silver-laden galleons of Spain which had shivered their 
timbers on the reefs of the Bahama Passage or gone down in the hurricanes 
that beset those southerly seas. Meantime he had married a wealthy widow 
whose property enabled him to go treasure-hunting on the Spanish main. 
From his first voyage thither in a small vessel he escaped with his life 
and barely enough treasure to pay the cost of the expedition. 

In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richly ladened 
galleon which was said to have been wrecked half a century before off the 
coast of Hispaniola. Since his own funds were not sufficient for this 
exploit, he betook himself to England to enlist the aid of the Government. 
With bulldog persistence he besieged the court of James II for a whole 
year, this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster, until he was given a 
royal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up more silver from the 
sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other patrons to outfit him with 
a small merchantman, the James and Mary, in which he sailed for the coast 
of Hispaniola. This time he found his galleon and thirty-two tons of 
silver. "Besides that incredible treasure of plate, thus fetched up from 
seven or eight fathoms under water, there were vast riches of Gold, and 
Pearls, and Jewels . . . . All that a Spanish frigot was to be enriched 
withal." 

Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of 1687, 
with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as her freightage of treasure. 
Captain Phips made honest division with his backers and, because men of 
his integrity were not over plentiful in England after the Restoration, 
King James knighted him. He sailed home to Boston, "a man of strong and 
sturdy frame," as Hawthorne fancied him, "whose face had been roughened by 
northern tempests and blackened by the burning sun of the West Indies . . 
. . He wears an immense periwig flowing down over his shoulders . . . . 
His red, rough hands which have done many a good day's work with the 
hammer and adze are half-covered by the delicate lace rues at the wrist." 
But he carried with him the manners of the forecastle, a man hasty and 
unlettered but superbly brave and honest. Even after he had become 
Governor he thrashed the captain of the Nonesuch frigate of the royal 
navy, and used his fists on the Collector of the Port after cursing him 
with tremendous gusto. Such behavior in a Governor was too strenuous, and 
Sir William Phips was summoned to England, where he died while waiting his 
restoration to office and royal favor. Failing both, he dreamed of still 
another treasure voyage, "for it was his purpose, upon his dismission from 
his Government once more to have gone upon his old Fishing-Trade, upon a 
mighty shelf of rock and banks of sand that lie where he had informed 
himself." 



CHAPTER II.
THE PRIVATEERS OF '76.

The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the high 
seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century. Yet with an 
immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers increased their trade 
and multiplied their ships in the face of every manner of adversity. The 
surprising fact is that most of them were not driven ashore to earn their 
bread. What Daniel Webster said of them at a later day was true from the 
beginning: "It is not, sir, by protection and bounties, but by unwearied 
exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly and resolute spirit which 
relies on itself to protect itself. These causes alone enable American 
ships still to keep the element and show the flag of their country in 
distant seas." 

What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent eighteenth century 
may be inferred from the misfortunes of Captain Michael Driver of Salem. 
In 1759 he was in command of the schooner Three Brothers, bound to the 
West Indies on his lawful business. Jogging along with a cargo of fish and 
lumber, he was taken by a privateer under British colors and sent into 
Antigua as a prize. Unable to regain either his schooner or his two 
thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for home. Another owner gave 
him employment and he set sail in the schooner Betsy for Guadaloupe. 
During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and carried into port by a 
French privateer. On the suggestion that he might ransom his vessel on 
payment of four thousand livres, he departed for Boston in hope of finding 
the money, leaving behind three of his sailors as hostages. 

Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver 
turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag of 
truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing to the ruffian who 
commanded the English privateer Revenge. He violently seized the innocent 
Mary and sent her into New Providence. Here Captain Driver made lawful 
protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with vessel and 
cargo--an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court of the 
Bahamas. 

Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois and rescue 
his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the ransom money. As he 
was about to depart homeward bound, a French frigate snatched him and his 
crew out of their vessel and threw them ashore at Santiago, where for two 
months they existed as ragged beachcombers until by some judicial twist 
the schooner was returned to them. They worked her home and presented 
their long list of grievances to the colonial Government of Massachusetts, 
which duly forwarded them--and that was the end of it. Three years had 
been spent in this catalogue of misadventures, and Captain Driver, his 
owners, and his men were helpless against such intolerable aggression. 
They and their kind were a prey to every scurvy rascal who misused a 
privateering commission to fill his own pockets. 

Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these undaunted 
Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on blue water until 
shortly before the Revolution the New England fleet alone numbered six 
hundred sail. Its captains felt at home in Surinam and the Canaries. They 
trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and the North Sea 
or bargained thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of Nantucket, in their 
apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant seas, and the smoke of 
their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay, Guinea, and Brazil. It 
was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar eulogy: "No sea but is vexed 
by their fisheries. No climate that is not a witness to their toils. 
Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the activity of France, nor the 
dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever carried this most perilous 
mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this 
recent people--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle and 
not yet hardened into the bone of manhood." 

In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which more 
than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there were one hundred 
and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331 barrels of oil 
valued at $358,200. In size these vessels averaged no more than ninety 
tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered their way half 
around the watery globe and comfortably supported six thousand people who 
dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and having no other industries. 
Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share of the catch and aspired 
to command eventually a whaler of his own. 

Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable 
seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born Stars 
and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war, Parliament 
flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of the fishermen 
who thronged the Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to forbid the colonies to 
export fish to those foreign markets in which every seacoast village was 
vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving the fishing fleets 
from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob six thousand sturdy 
men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin among the busy ports, such 
as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which sailed hundreds of pinks, snows, 
and schooners. This measure became law notwithstanding the protests of 
twenty-one peers of the realm who declared: "We dissent because the 
attempt to coerce by famine the whole body of the inhabitants of great and 
populous provinces is without example in the history of this, or perhaps, 
of any civilized nation." 

The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without 
representation but whetted their anger with grudges more robust. They had 
been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to Barbados, 
and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue privateering 
commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up anchor and away 
to bag a Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled his arrival with a 
deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than he received orders to 
discharge with all speed and clear his decks for mounting heavier 
batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred eager privateersmen who 
had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous. The timbered warehouses were 
filled with long-toms and nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, 
cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and 
doubleheaded shot. 

In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, 
crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping recruiting 
officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied landsmen who had a 
mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious cause of their country and 
make their fortunes." Many a ship's company was mustered between noon and 
sunset, including men who had served in armed merchantmen and who in times 
of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or whipped the 
corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a race of seamen 
so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering as the crews of 
these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart square-riggers, their 
sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive to sea like hawks. 

In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd and 
sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard, mounting one 
or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold and glory, only to 
be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced to sight them. A few 
even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out of the 
first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases they 
actually did. 

The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the 
war than has been commonly recognized. This fact, however, was clearly 
perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator" candidly 
admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of assurances 
at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was able to effect 
in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred pennants were 
flying on our coast. Were we able to prevent their going in and out, or 
stop them from taking our trade and our storeships even in sight of our 
garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and Irish Channels, 
picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their prizes into French and 
Spanish ports to the great terror of our merchants and shipowners?" 

The naval forces of the Thirteen Colonies were pitifully feeble in 
comparison with the mighty fleets of the enemy whose flaming broadsides 
upheld the ancient doctrine that "the Monarchs of Great Britain have a 
peculiar and Sovereign authority upon the Ocean . . . from the Laws of God 
and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages 
past as that its Beginnings cannot be traced out."(*)

In 1776 only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes were in 
commission, and this number was swiftly diminished by capture and blockade 
until in 1782 no more than seven ships flew the flag of the American Navy. 
On the other hand, at the close of 1777, one hundred and seventy-four 
private armed vessels had been commissioned, mounting two thousand guns 
and carrying nine thousand men. During this brief period of the war they 
took as prizes 733 British merchantmen and inflicted losses of more than 
two million pounds sterling. Over ten thousand seamen were made prisoners 
at a time when England sorely needed them for drafting into her navy. To 
lose them was a far more serious matter than for General Washington to 
capture as many Hessian mercenaries who could be replaced by purchase. 

In some respects privateering as waged a century and more ago was a 
sordid, unlovely business, the ruling motive being rather a greed of gain 
than an ardent love of country. Shares in lucky ships were bought and sold 
in the gambling spirit of a stock exchange. Fortunes were won and lost 
regardless of the public service. It became almost impossible to recruit 
men for the navy because they preferred the chance of booty in a 
privateer. For instance, the State of Massachusetts bought a twenty-gun 
ship, the Protector, as a contribution to the naval strength, and one of 
her crew, Ebenezer Fox, wrote of the effort to enlist sufficient men: "The 
recruiting business went on slowly, however, but at length upwards of 
three hundred men were carried, dragged, and driven abroad; of all ages, 
kinds, and descriptions; in all the various stages of intoxication from 
that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness; with the uproar and clamor 
that may be more easily imagined than described. Such a motley group has 
never been seen since Falstaff's ragged regiment paraded the streets of 
Coventry." 

There was nothing of glory to boast of in fetching into port some little 
Nova Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and potatoes, whose 
master was also the owner and who lost the savings of a lifetime because 
he lacked the men and guns to defend his property against spoliation. The 
war was no concern of his, and he was the victim of a system now obsolete 
among civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical age whose 
spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the Government of 
the German Empire. The chief fault of the privateersman was that he sailed 
and fought for his own gain, but he was never guilty of sinking ships with 
passengers and crew aboard, and very often he played the gentleman in 
gallant style. Nothing could have seemed to him more abhorrent and 
incredible than a kind of warfare which should drown women and children 
because they had embarked under an enemy's flag. 

Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it was a 
game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and the temptation is 
to extol their audacious achievements while glossing over the heavy losses 
which their own merchant marine suffered. The weakness of privateering was 
that it was wholly offensive and could not, like a strong navy, protect 
its own commerce from depredation. While the Americans were capturing over 
seven hundred British vessels during the first two years of the war, as 
many as nine hundred American ships were taken or sunk by the enemy, a 
rate of destruction which fairly swept the Stars and Stripes from the 
tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes these vessels were sold at Liverpool 
and London for an average amount of two thousand pounds each and the loss 
to the American owners was, of course, ever so much larger. 

The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of history to 
recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy, with blockading 
squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged armies on land which 
retreated oftener than they fought, private armed ships dealt the maritime 
prestige of Great Britain a far deadlier blow than the Dutch, French, and 
Spanish were able to inflict. In England, there resulted actual distress, 
even lack of food, because these intrepid seamen could not be driven away 
from her own coasts and continued to snatch their prizes from under the 
guns of British forts and fleets. The plight of the West India Colonies 
was even worse, as witness this letter from a merchant of Grenada: "We are 
happy if we can get anything for money by reason of the quantity of 
vessels taken by the Americans. A fleet of vessels came from Ireland a few 
days ago. From sixty vessels that departed from Ireland not above twenty-
five arrived in this and neighboring islands, the others, it is thought, 
being all taken by American privateers. God knows, if this American war 
continues much longer, we shall all die of hunger." 

On both sides, by far the greater number of captures was made during the 
earlier period of the war which cleared the seas of the smaller, slower, 
and unarmed vessels. As the war progressed and the profits flowed in, 
swifter and larger ships were built for the special business of 
privateering until the game resembled actual naval warfare. Whereas, at 
first, craft of ten guns with forty or fifty men had been considered 
adequate for the service, three or four years later ships were afloat with 
a score of heavy cannon and a trained crew of a hundred and fifty or two 
hundred men, ready to engage a sloop of war or to stand up to the enemy's 
largest privateers. In those days single ship actions, now almost 
forgotten in naval tactics, were fought with illustrious skill and 
courage, and commanders won victories worthy of comparison with deeds 
distinguished in the annals of the American Navy. 

(* "The Seaman's Vade-Mecum." London, 1744.)


CHAPTER III.
OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD.

Salem was the foremost privateering port of the Revolution, and from this 
pleasant harbor, long since deserted by ships and sailormen, there filled 
away past Cape Ann one hundred and fifty-eight vessels of all sizes to 
scan the horizon for British topsails. They accounted for four hundred 
prizes, or half the whole number to the credit of American arms afloat. 
This preeminence was due partly to freedom from a close blockade and 
partly to a seafaring population which was born and bred to its trade and 
knew no other. Besides the crews of Salem merchantmen, privateering 
enlisted the idle fishermen of ports nearby and the mariners of Boston 
whose commerce had been snuffed out by the British occupation. 
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston sent some splendid armed ships to 
sea but not with the impetuous rush nor in anything like the numbers 
enrolled by this gray old town whose fame was unique. 

For the most part, the records of all these brave ships and the thousands 
of men who sailed and sweated and fought in them are dim and scanty, no 
more than routine entries in dusty log-books which read like this: "Filled 
away in pursuit of a second sail in the N. W. At 4.30 she hoisted English 
colors and commenced firing her stern guns. At 5.90 took in the steering 
sails, at the same time she fired a broadside. We opened a fire from our 
larboard battery and at 5.30 she struck her colors. Got out the boats and 
boarded her. She proved to be the British brig Acorn from Liverpool to Rio 
Janeiro, mounting fourteen cannon."(*) But now and then one finds in these 
old sea-journals an entry more intimate and human, such as the complaint 
of the master of the privateer Scorpion, cruising in 1778 and never a 
prize in sight. "This Book I made to keep the Accounts of my Voyage but 
God knows beste what that will be, for I am at this time very Impashent 
but I hope soon there will be a Change to ease my Trubled Mind. On this 
Day I was Chaced by Two Ships of War which I tuck to be Enemies, but 
coming on thick Weather I have lost site of them and so conclude myself 
escaped which is a small good Fortune in the midste of my 
Discouragements."(**) A burst of gusty laughter still echoes along the 
crowded deck of the letter-of -marque schooner Success, whose master, 
Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his humdrum 
record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail ahead. 
Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of the Sail 
which appeared to be a damn'd Comical Boat, by G-d." 

There are a few figures of the time and place which stand out, full-
length, in vivid colors against a background that satisfies the desire of 
romance and thrillingly conveys the spirit of the time and the place. Such 
a one was Captain Jonathan Haraden, Salem privateersman, who captured one 
thousand British cannon afloat and is worthy to be ranked as one of the 
ablest sea-fighters of his generation. He was a merchant mariner, a master 
at the outbreak of the Revolution, who had followed the sea since boyhood. 
But it was more to his taste to command the Salem ship General Pickering 
of 180 tons which was fitted out under a letter of marque in the spring of 
1780. She carried fourteen six-pounders and forty-five men and boys, 
nothing very formidable, when Captain Haraden sailed for Bilbao with a 
cargo of sugar. During the voyage, before his crew had been hammered into 
shape, he beat off a British privateer of twenty guns and safely tacked 
into the Bay of Biscay. 

There he sighted another hostile privateer, the Golden Eagle, larger than 
his own ship. Instead of shifting his course to avoid her, Haraden clapped 
on sail and steered alongside after nightfall, roaring through his 
trumpet: "What ship is this? An American frigate, sir. Strike, or I'll 
sink you with a broadside." 

Dazed by this unexpected summons in the gloom, the master of the Golden 
Eagle promptly surrendered, and a prize crew was thrown aboard with orders 
to follow the Pickering into Bilbao. While just outside that Spanish 
harbor, a strange sail was descried and again Jonathan Haraden cleared for 
action. The vessel turned out to be the Achilles, one of the most powerful 
privateers out of London, with forty guns and a hundred and fifty men, or 
almost thrice the fighting strength of the little Pickering. She was, in 
fact, more like a sloop of war. Before Captain Haraden could haul within 
gunshot to protect his prize, it had been recaptured by the Achilles, 
which then maneuvered to engage the Pickering. 

Darkness intervened, but Jonathan Haraden had no idea of escaping under 
cover of it. He was waiting for the morning breeze and a chance to fight 
it out to a finish. He was a handsome man with an air of serene composure 
and a touch of the theatrical such as Nelson displayed in his great 
moments. Having prepared his ship for battle, he slept soundly until dawn 
and then dressed with fastidious care to stroll on deck, where he beheld 
the Achilles bearing down on him with her crew at quarters. 

His own men were clustered behind their open ports, matches lighted, 
tackles and breechings cast off, crowbars, handspikes, and sponge-staves 
in place, gunners stripped to the waist, powder-boys ready for the word 
like sprinters on the mark. Forty-five of them against a hundred and 
fifty, and Captain Haraden, debonair, unruffled, walking to and fro with a 
leisurely demeanor, remarking that although the Achilles appeared to be 
superior in force, "he had no doubt they would beat her if they were firm 
and steady and did not throw away their fire." 

It was, indeed, a memorable sea-picture, the sturdy Pickering riding deep 
with her burden of sugar and seeming smaller than she really was, the 
Achilles towering like a frigate, and all Bilbao turned out to watch the 
duel, shore and headlands crowded with spectators, the blue harbor-mouth 
gay with an immense flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure craft. The 
stake for which Haraden fought was to retake the Golden Eagle prize and to 
gain his port. His seamanship was flawless. Vastly outnumbered if it 
should come to boarding, he handled his vessel so as to avoid the Achilles 
while he poured the broadsides into her. After two hours the London 
privateer emerged from the smoke which had obscured the combat and put out 
to sea in flight, hulled through and through, while a farewell flight of 
crowbars, with which the guns of the Pickering had been crammed to the 
muzzle, ripped through her sails and rigging. 

Haraden hoisted canvas and drove in chase, but the Achilles had the heels 
of him "with a mainsail as large as a ship of the line," and reluctantly 
he wore ship and, with the Golden Eagle again in his possession, he sailed 
to an anchorage in Bilbao harbor. The Spanish populace welcomed him with 
tremendous enthusiasm. He was carried through the streets in a holiday 
procession and was the hero of banquets and public receptions. 

Such a man was bound to be the idol of his sailors and one of them quite 
plausibly related that "so great was the confidence he inspired that if he 
but looked at a sail through his glass and told the helmsman to steer for 
her, the observation went round,'If she is an enemy, she is ours.'" 

It was in this same General Pickering, no longer sugar-laden but in 
cruising trim, that Jonathan Haraden accomplished a feat which Paul Jones 
might have been proud to claim. There lifted above the sky-line three 
armed merchantmen sailing in company from Halifax to New York, a brig of 
fourteen guns, a ship of sixteen guns, a sloop of twelve guns. When they 
flew signals and formed in line, the ship alone appeared to outmatch the 
Pickering, but Haraden, in that lordly manner of his, assured his men that 
"he had no doubt whatever that if they would do their duty he would 
quickly capture the three vessels." Here was performance very much out of 
the ordinary, naval strategy of an exceptionally high order, and yet it is 
dismissed by the only witness who took the trouble to mention it in these 
few, casual words: "This he did with great ease by going alongside of each 
of them, one after the other." 

One more story of this master sea-rover of the Revolution, sailor and 
gentleman, who served his country so much more brilliantly than many a 
landsman lauded in the written histories of the war. While in the 
Pickering he attacked a heavily armed royal mail packet bound to England 
from the West Indies, one of the largest merchant vessels of her day and 
equipped to defend herself against privateers. A tough antagonist and a 
hard nut to crack! They battered each other like two pugilists for four 
hours and even then the decision was still in the balance. Then Haraden 
sheered off to mend his damaged gear and splintered hull before closing in 
again. 

He then discovered that all his powder had been shot away excepting one 
last charge. Instead of calling it a drawn battle, he rammed home this 
last shot in the locker, and ran down to windward of the packet, so close 
that he could shout across to the other quarter-deck: "I will give you 
five minutes to haul down your colors. If they are not down at the end of 
that time, I will fire into you and sink you, so help me God." 

It was the bluff magnificent--courage cold-blooded and calculating. The 
adversary was still unbeaten. Haraden stood with watch in hand and 
sonorously counted off the minutes. It was the stronger will and not the 
heavier metal that won the day. To be shattered by fresh broadsides at 
pistol-range was too much for the nerves of the gallant English skipper 
whose decks were already like a slaughterhouse. One by one, Haraden 
shouted the minutes and his gunners blew their matches. At "four" the red 
ensign came fluttering down and the mail packet was a prize of war. 

Another merchant seaman of this muster-roll of patriots was Silas Talbot, 
who took to salt water as a cabin boy at the age of twelve and was a 
prosperous shipmaster at twenty-one with savings invested in a house of 
his own in Providence. Enlisting under Washington, he was made a captain 
of infantry and was soon promoted, but he was restless ashore and glad to 
obtain an odd assignment. As Colonel Talbot he selected sixty infantry 
volunteers, most of them seamen by trade, and led them aboard the small 
sloop Argo in May, 1779, to punish the New York Tories who were equipping 
privateers against their own countrymen and working great mischief in Long 
Island Sound. So serious was the situation that General Gates found it 
almost impossible to obtain food supplies for the northern department of 
the Continental army. 

Silas Talbot and his nautical infantrymen promptly fell in with the New 
York privateer Lively, a fair match for him, and as promptly sent her into 
port. He then ran offshore and picked up and carried into Boston two 
English privateers headed for New York with large cargoes of merchandise 
from the West Indies. But he was particularly anxious to square accounts 
with a renegade Captain Hazard who made Newport his base and had captured 
many American vessels with the stout brig King George, using her for "the 
base purpose of plundering his old neighbors and friends." 

On his second cruise in the Argo, young Silas Talbot encountered the 
perfidious King George to the southward of Long Island and riddled her 
with one broadside after another, first hailing Captain Hazard by name and 
cursing him in double-shotted phrases for the traitorous swab that he was. 
Then the seagoing infantry scrambled over the bulwarks and tumbled the 
Tories down their own hatches without losing a man. A prize crew with the 
humiliated King George made for New London, where there was much cheering 
in the port, and "even the women, both young and old, expressed the 
greatest joy." 

With no very heavy fighting, Talbot had captured five vessels and was keen 
to show what his crew could do against mettlesome foemen. He found them at 
last well out to sea in a large ship which seemed eager to engage him. 
Only a few hundred feet apart through a long afternoon, they briskly and 
cheerily belabored each other with grape and solid shot. Talbot's speaking-
trumpet was shot out of his hand, the tails of his coat were shorn off, 
and all the officers and men stationed with him on the quarter-deck were 
killed or wounded. 

His crew reported that the Argo was in a sinking condition, with the water 
flooding the gun-deck, but he told them to lower a man or two in the bight 
of a line and they pluckily plugged the holes from overside. There was a 
lusty huzza when the Englishman's mainmast crashed to the deck and this 
finished the affair. Silas Talbot found that he had trounced the privateer 
Dragon, of twice his own tonnage and with the advantage in both guns and 
men. 

While his crew was patching the Argo and pumping the water from her hold, 
the lookout yelled that another sail was making for them. Without 
hesitation Talbot somehow got this absurdly impudent one-masted craft of 
his under way and told those of his sixty men who survived to prepare for 
a second tussle. Fortunately another Yankee privateer joined the chase and 
together they subdued the armed brig Hannah. When the Argo safely convoyed 
the two prizes into New Bedford, "all who beheld her were astonished that 
a vessel of her diminutive size could suffer so much and yet get safely to 
port." 

Men fought and slew each other in those rude and distant days with a 
certain courtesy, with a fine, punctilious regard for the etiquette of the 
bloody game. There was the Scotch skipper of the Betsy, a privateer, whom 
Silas Talbot hailed as follows, before they opened fire: 

"You must now haul down those British colors, my friend." 

"Notwithstanding I find you an enemy, as I suspected," was the dignified 
reply, "yet, sir, I shall let them hang a little bit longer,--with your 
permission,--so fire away, Flanagan." 

During another of her cruises the Argo pursued an artfully disguised ship 
of the line which could have blown her to kingdom come with a broadside of 
thirty guns. The little Argo was actually becalmed within short range, but 
her company got out the sweeps and rowed her some distance before darkness 
and a favoring slant of wind carried them clear. In the summer of 1780, 
Captain Silas Talbot, again a mariner by title, was given the private 
cruiser General Washington with one hundred and twenty men, but he was 
less fortunate with her than when afloat in the tiny Argo with his sixty 
Continentals. Off Sandy Hook he ran into the British fleet under Admiral 
Arbuthnot and, being outsailed in a gale of wind, he was forced to lower 
his flag to the great seventy-four Culloden. After a year in English 
prisons he was released and made his way home, serving no more in the war 
but having the honor to command the immortal frigate Constitution in 1799 
as a captain in the American Navy. 

In several notable instances the privateersmen tried conclusions with 
ships that flew the royal ensign, and got the better of them. The hero of 
an uncommonly brilliant action of this sort was Captain George Geddes of 
Philadelphia, who was entrusted with the Congress, a noble privateer of 
twenty-four guns and two hundred men. Several of the smaller British 
cruisers had been sending parties ashore to plunder estates along the 
southern shores, and one of them, the sloop of war Savage, had even raided 
Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Later she shifted to the coast of 
Georgia in quest of loot and was unlucky enough to fall athwart Captain 
Geddes in the Congress. 

The privateer was the more formidable ship and faster on the wind, forcing 
Captain Sterling of the Savage to accept the challenge. Disabled aloft 
very early in the fight, Captain Geddes was unable to choose his position, 
for which reason they literally battled hand-to-hand, hulls grinding 
against each other, the gunners scorched by the flashes of the cannon in 
the ports of the opposing ship, with scarcely room to ply the rammers, and 
the sailors throwing missiles from the decks, hand grenades, cold shot, 
scraps of iron, belaying-pins. 

As the vessels lay interlocked, the Savage was partly dismasted and 
Captain Geddes, leaping upon the forecastle head, told the boarders to 
follow him. Before they could swing their cutlases and dash over the 
hammock-nettings, the British boatswain waved his cap and yelled that the 
Savage had surrendered. Captain Sterling was dead, eight others were 
killed, and twenty-four wounded. The American loss was about the same. 
Captain Geddes, however, was unable to save his prize because a British 
frigate swooped down and took them both into Charleston. 

When peace came in 1783, it was independence dearly bought by land and 
sea, and no small part of the price was the loss of a thousand merchant 
ships which would see their home ports no more. Other misfortunes added to 
the toll of destruction. The great fishing fleets which had been the chief 
occupation of coastwise New England were almost obliterated and their 
crews were scattered. Many of the men had changed their allegiance and 
were sailing out of Halifax, and others were impressed into British men-of-
war or returned broken in health from long confinement in British prisons. 
The ocean was empty of the stanch schooners which had raced home with lee 
rails awash to cheer waiting wives and sweethearts. 

The fate of Nantucket and its whalers was even more tragic. This colony on 
its lonely island amid the shoals was helpless against raids by sea, and 
its ships and storehouses were destroyed without mercy. Many vessels in 
distant waters were captured before they were even aware that a state of 
war existed. Of a fleet numbering a hundred and fifty sail, one hundred 
and thirty-four were taken by the enemy and Nantucket whaling suffered 
almost total extinction. These seamen, thus robbed of their livelihood, 
fought nobly for their country's cause. Theirs was not the breed to sulk 
or whine in port. Twelve hundred of them were killed or made prisoners 
during the Revolution. They were to be found in the Army and Navy and 
behind the guns of privateers. There were twenty-five Nantucket whalemen 
in the crew of the Ranger when Paul Jones steered her across the Atlantic 
on that famous cruise which inspired the old forecastle song that begins 

'Tis of the gallant Yankee ship That flew the Stripes and Stars, And the 
whistling wind from the west nor'west Blew through her pitch pine spars. 
With her starboard tacks aboard, my boys, She hung upon the gale. On an 
autumn night we raised the light Off the Old Head of Kinsale. 

Pitiful as was the situation of Nantucket, with its only industry wiped 
out and two hundred widows among the eight hundred families left on the 
island, the aftermath of war seemed almost as ruinous along the whole 
Atlantic coast. More ships could be built and there were thousands of 
adventurous sailors to man them, but where were the markets for the 
product of the farms and mills and plantations? The ports of Europe had 
been so long closed to American shipping that little demand was left for 
American goods. To the Government of England the people of the Republic 
were no longer fellow-countrymen but foreigners. As such they were subject 
to the Navigation Acts, and no cargoes could be sent to that kingdom 
unless in British vessels. The flourishing trade with the West Indies was 
made impossible for the same reason, a special Order in Council aiming at 
one fell stroke to "put an end to the building and increase of American 
vessels" and to finish the careers of three hundred West Indiamen already 
afloat. In the islands themselves the results were appalling. Fifteen 
thousand slaves died of starvation because the American traders were 
compelled to cease bringing them dried fish and corn during seasons in 
which their own crops were destroyed by hurricanes. 

In 1776, one-third of the seagoing merchant marine of Great Britain had 
been bought or built to order in America because lumber was cheaper and 
wages were lower. This lucrative business was killed by a law which denied 
Englishmen the privilege of purchasing ships built in American yards. So 
narrow and bitter was this commercial enmity, so ardent this desire to 
banish the Stars and Stripes from blue water, that Lord Sheffield in 1784 
advised Parliament that the pirates of Algiers and Tripoli really 
benefited English commerce by preying on the shipping of weaker nations. 
"It is not probable that the American States will have a very free trade 
in the Mediterranean," said he. "It will not be to the interest of any of 
the great maritime Powers to protect them from the Barbary States. If they 
know their interests, they will not encourage the Americans to be 
carriers. That the Barbary States are advantageous to maritime Powers is 
certain." 

Denied the normal ebb and flow of trade and commerce and with the imports 
from England far exceeding the value of the merchandise exported thence, 
the United States, already impoverished, was drained of its money, and a 
currency of dollars, guineas, joes, and moidores grew scarcer day by day. 
There was no help in a government which consisted of States united only in 
name. Congress comprised a handful of respectable gentlemen who had little 
power and less responsibility, quarreling among themselves for lack of 
better employment. Retaliation against England by means of legislation was 
utterly impossible. Each State looked after its commerce in its own 
peculiar fashion and the devil might take the hindmost. Their rivalries 
and jealousies were like those of petty kingdoms. If one State should 
close her ports is to English ships, the others would welcome them in 
order to divert the trade, with no feeling of national pride or federal 
cooperation. 

The Articles of Confederation had empowered Congress to make treaties of 
commerce, but only such as did not restrain the legislative power of any 
State from laying imposts and regulating exports and imports. If a foreign 
power imposed heavy duties upon American shipping, it was for the 
individual States and not for Congress to say whether the vessels of the 
offending nation should be allowed free entrance to the ports of the 
United States: It was folly to suppose, ran the common opinion, that if 
South Carolina should bar her ports to Spain because rice and indigo were 
excluded from the Spanish colonies, New Hampshire, which furnished masts 
and lumber for the Spanish Navy, ought to do the same. The idea of turning 
the whole matter over to Congress was considered preposterous by many 
intelligent Americans. 

In these thirteen States were nearly three and a quarter million people 
hemmed in a long and narrow strip between the sea and an unexplored 
wilderness in which the Indians were an ever present peril. The Southern 
States, including Maryland, prosperous agricultural regions, contained 
almost one-half the English- speaking population of America. As colonies, 
they had found the Old World eager for their rice, tobacco, indigo, and 
tar, and slavery was the means of labor so firmly established that one-
fifth of the inhabitants were black. By contrast, the Northern States were 
still concerned with commerce as the very lifeblood of their existence. 
New England had not dreamed of the millions of spindles which should hum 
on the banks of her rivers and lure her young men and women from the farms 
to the clamorous factory towns. The city of New York had not yet outgrown 
its traffic in furs and its magnificent commercial destiny was still 
unrevealed. It was a considerable seaport but not yet a gateway. From 
Sandy Hook, however, to the stormy headlands of Maine, it was a matter of 
life and death that ships should freely come and go with cargoes to 
exchange. All other resources were trifling in comparison. 

(* From the manuscript collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.)

(** From the manuscript collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.)