The Old Merchant Marine - Chapters VI-VIII



CHAPTER VI.
"FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS".

When the first Congress under the new Federal Constitution assembled in 
1789, a spirit of pride was manifested in the swift recovery and the 
encouraging growth of the merchant marine, together with a concerted 
determination to promote and protect it by means of national legislation. 
The most imperative need was a series of retaliatory measures to meet the 
burdensome navigation laws of England, to give American ships a fair field 
and no favors. The Atlantic trade was therefore stimulated by allowing a 
reduction of ten per cent of the customs duties on goods imported in 
vessels built and owned by American citizens. The East India trade, which 
already employed forty New England ships, was fostered in like manner. 
Teas brought direct under the American flag paid an average duty of twelve 
cents a pound while teas in foreign bottoms were taxed twenty-seven cents. 
It was sturdy protection, for on a cargo of one hundred thousand pounds of 
assorted teas from India or China, a British ship would pay $27,800 into 
the custom house and a Salem square-rigger only $10,980. 

The result was that the valuable direct trade with the Far East was 
absolutely secured to the American flag. Not content with this, Congress 
decreed a system of tonnage duties which permitted the native owner to pay 
six cents per ton on his vessel while the foreigner laid down fifty cents 
as an entry fee for every ton his ship measured, or thirty cents if he 
owned an American-built vessel. In 1794, Congress became even more 
energetic in defense of its mariners and increased the tariff rates on 
merchandise in foreign vessels. A nation at last united, jealous of its 
rights, resentful of indignities long suffered, and intelligently alive to 
its shipping as the chief bulwark of prosperity, struck back with peaceful 
weapons and gained a victory of incalculable advantage. Its Congress, no 
longer feeble and divided, laid the foundations for American greatness 
upon the high seas which was to endure for more than a half century. Wars, 
embargoes, and confiscations might interrupt but they could not seriously 
harm it. 

In the three years after 1789 the merchant shipping registered for the 
foreign trade increased from 123,893 tons to 411,438 tons, presaging a 
growth without parallel in the history of the commercial world. Foreign 
ships were almost entirely driven out of American ports, and ninety-one 
per cent of imports and eighty-six per cent of exports were conveyed in 
vessels built and manned by Americans. Before Congress intervened, English 
merchantmen had controlled three-fourths of our commerce overseas. When 
Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, fought down Southern opposition 
to a retaliatory shipping policy, he uttered a warning which his 
countrymen were to find still true and apt in the twentieth century: "If 
we have no seamen, our ships will be useless, consequently our ship 
timber, iron, and hemp; our shipbuilding will be at an end; ship 
carpenters will go over to other nations; our young men have no call to 
the sea; our products, carried in foreign bottoms, will be saddled with 
war-freight and insurance in time of war--and the history of the last 
hundred years shows that the nation which is our carrier has three years 
of war for every four years of peace." 

The steady growth of an American merchant marine was interrupted only once 
in the following decade. In the year 1793 war broke out between England 
and France. A decree of the National Convention of the French Republic 
granted neutral vessels the same rights as those which flew the tricolor. 
This privilege reopened a rushing trade with the West Indies, and hundreds 
of ships hastened from American ports to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. 
Lucia. 

Like a thunderbolt came the tidings that England refused to look upon this 
trade with the French colonies as neutral and that her cruisers had been 
told to seize all vessels engaged in it and to search them for English-
born seamen. This ruling was enforced with such barbarous severity that it 
seemed as if the War for Independence had been fought in vain. Without 
warning, unable to save themselves, great fleets of Yankee merchantmen 
were literally swept from the waters of the West Indies. At St. Eustatius 
one hundred and thirty of them were condemned. The judges at Bermuda 
condemned eleven more. Crews and passengers were flung ashore without food 
or clothing, were abused, insulted, or perhaps impressed in British 
privateers. The ships were lost to their owners. There was no appeal and 
no redress. At Martinique an English fleet and army captured St. Pierre in 
February, 1794. Files of marines boarded every American ship in the 
harbor, tore down the colors, and flung two hundred and fifty seamen into 
the foul holds of a prison hulk. There they were kept, half-dead with 
thirst and hunger while their vessels, uncared for, had stranded or sunk 
at their moorings. Scores of outrages as abominable as this were on record 
in the office of the Secretary of State. Shipmasters were afraid to sail 
to the southward and, for lack of these markets for dried cod, the fishing 
schooners of Marblehead were idle. 

For a time a second war with England seemed imminent. An alarmed Congress 
passed laws to create a navy and to fortify the most important American 
harbors. President Washington recommended an embargo of thirty days, which 
Congress promptly voted and then extended for thirty more. It was a 
popular measure and strictly enforced by the mariners themselves. The 
mates and captains of the brigs and snows in the Delaware River met and 
resolved not to go to sea for another ten days, swearing to lie idle 
sooner than feed the British robbers in the West Indies. It was in the 
midst of these demonstrations that Washington seized the one hope of peace 
and recommended a special mission to England. 

The treaty negotiated by John Jay in 1794 was received with an outburst of 
popular indignation. Jay was damned as a traitor, while the sailors of 
Portsmouth burned him in effigy. By way of an answer to the terms of the 
obnoxious treaty, a seafaring mob in Boston raided and burned the British 
privateer Speedwell, which had put into that port as a merchantman with 
her guns and munitions hidden beneath a cargo of West India produce. 

The most that can be said of the commercial provisions of the treaty is 
that they opened direct trade with the East Indies but at the price of 
complete freedom of trade for British shipping in American ports. It must 
be said, too, that although the treaty failed to clear away the gravest 
cause of hostility--the right of search and impressment--yet it served to 
postpone the actual dash, and during the years in which it was in force 
American shipping splendidly prospered, freed of most irksome handicaps. 

The quarrel with France had been brewing at the same time and for similar 
reasons. Neutral trade with England was under the ban, and the Yankee 
shipmaster was in danger of losing his vessel if he sailed to or from a 
port under the British flag. It was out of the frying-pan into the fire, 
and French privateers welcomed the excuse to go marauding in the Atlantic 
and the Caribbean. What it meant to fight off these greedy cutthroats is 
told in a newspaper account of the engagement of Captain Richard 
Wheatland, who was homeward bound to Salem in the ship Perseverance in 
1799. He was in the Old Straits of Bahama when a fast schooner came up 
astern, showing Spanish colors and carrying a tremendous press of canvas. 
Unable to run away from her, Captain Wheatland reported to his owners: 

"We took in steering sails, wore ship, hauled up our courses, piped all 
hands to quarters and prepared for action. The schooner immediately took 
in sail, hoisted an English Union flag and passed under our lee at a 
considerable distance. We wore ship, she did the same, and we passed each 
other within half a musket. A fellow hailed us in broken English and 
ordered the boat hoisted out and the captain to come aboard, which he 
refused. He again ordered our boat out and enforced his orders with a 
menace that in case of refusal he would sink us, using at the same time 
the vilest and most infamous language it is possible to conceive of. . . . 
We hauled the ship to wind and as he passed poured a whole broadside into 
him with great success. Sailing faster than we, he ranged considerably 
ahead, tacked and again passed, giving us a broadside and furious 
discharge of musketry, which he kept up incessantly until the latter part 
of the engagement. His musket balls reached us in every direction but his 
large shot either fell short or went considerably over us while our guns 
loaded with round shot and square bars of iron were plied so briskly and 
directed with such good judgment that before he got out of range we had 
cut his mainsail and foretopsail all to rags and cleared his decks so 
effectively that when he bore away from us there were scarcely ten men to 
be seen. He then struck his English flag and hoisted the flag of The 
Terrible Republic and made off with all the sail he could carry, much 
disappointed, no doubt, at not being able to give us a fraternal embrace. 
We feel confidence that we have rid the world of some infamous pests of 
society." 

By this time, the United States was engaged in active hostilities with 
France, although war had not been declared. The news of the indignities 
which American commissions had suffered at the hands of the French 
Directory had stirred the people to war pitch. Strong measures for 
national defense were taken, which stopped little short of war. The 
country rallied to the slogan, "Millions for defense but not one cent for 
tribute," and the merchants of the seaports hastened to subscribe funds to 
build frigates to be loaned to the Government. Salem launched the famous 
Essex, ready for sea six months after the keel was laid, at a cost of $75,
000. Her two foremost merchants, Elias Hasket Derby and William Gray, led 
the list with ten thousand dollars each. The call sent out by the master 
builder, Enos Briggs, rings with thrilling effect: 

"To Sons of Freedom! All true lovers of Liberty of your Country! Step 
forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French 
insolence and piracy. Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be 
ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to Salem where the 
noble structure is to be fabricated to maintain your rights upon the seas 
and make the name of America respected among the nations of the world. 
Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms of them for knees 
and rising timber. Four trees are wanted for the keel which altogether 
will measure 146 feet in length, and hew sixteen inches square." 

This handsome frigate privately built by patriots of the republic 
illuminates the coastwise spirit and conditions of her time. She was a 
Salem ship from keel to truck. Captain Jonathan Haraden, the finest 
privateersman of the Revolution, made the rigging for the mainmast at his 
ropewalk in Brown Street. Joseph Vincent fitted out the foremast and 
Thomas Briggs the mizzenmast in their lofts at the foot of the Common. 
When the huge hemp cables were ready for the frigate, the workmen carried 
them to the shipyard on their shoulders, the parade led by fife and drum. 
Her sails were cut from duck woven in Daniel Rust's factory in Broad 
Street and her iron work was forged by Salem shipsmiths. It was not 
surprising that Captain Richard Derby was chosen to command the Essex, but 
he was abroad in a ship of his own and she sailed under Captain Edward 
Preble of the Navy. 

The war cloud passed and the merchant argosies overflowed the wharves and 
havens of New England, which had ceased to monopolize the business on blue 
water. New York had become a seaport with long ranks of high-steeved 
bowsprits soaring above pleasant Battery Park and a forest of spars 
extending up the East River. In 1790 more than two thousand ships, brigs, 
schooners, and smaller craft had entered and cleared, and the merchants 
met in the coffee-houses to discuss charters, bills-of-lading, and 
adventures. Sailors commanded thrice the wages of laborers ashore. 
Shipyards were increasing and the builders could build as large and swift 
East Indiamen as those of which Boston and Salem boasted. 

Philadelphia had her Stephen Girard, whose wealth was earned in ships, a 
man most remarkable and eccentric, whose career was one of the great 
maritime romances. Though his father was a prosperous merchant of Bordeaux 
engaged in the West India trade, he was shifting for himself as a cabin-
boy on his father's ships when only fourteen years old. With no schooling, 
barely able to read and write, this urchin sailed between Bordeaux and the 
French West Indies for nine years, until he gained the rank of first mate. 
At the age of twenty-six he entered the port of Philadelphia in command of 
a sloop which had narrowly escaped capture by British frigates. There he 
took up his domicile and laid the foundation of his fortune in small 
trading ventures to New Orleans and Santo Domingo. 

In 1791 he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China and 
India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau, 
revealing his ideas of religion and liberty. So successfully did he 
combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be the 
wealthiest merchant in the United States. In that year one of his ships 
from China was captured off the Capes of the Delaware by a British 
privateer. Her cargo of teas, nankeens, and silks was worth half a million 
dollars to him but he succeeded in ransoming it on the spot by counting 
out one hundred and eighty thousand Spanish milled dollars. No 
privateersman could resist such strategy as this. 

Alone in his old age, without a friend or relative to close his eyes in 
death, Stephen Girard, once a penniless, ignorant French cabin-boy, 
bequeathed his millions to philanthropy, and the Girard College for orphan 
boys, in Philadelphia, is his monument. 

The Treaty of Amiens brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful 
interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips 
again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the 
only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on 
land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the Stars and 
Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and merchantmen, 
from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased to carry cargoes 
beneath their own ensigns. Spain was afraid to send her galleons to Mexico 
and Peru. All the Continental ports were begging for American ships to 
transport their merchandise. It was a maritime harvest unique and 
unexpected. 

Yankee skippers were dominating the sugar trade of Cuba and were rolling 
across the Atlantic with the coffee, hides, and indigo of Venezuela and 
Brazil. Their fleets crowded the roadsteads of Manila and Batavia and 
packed the warehouses of Antwerp, Lisbon, and Hamburg. It was a situation 
which England could not tolerate without attempting to thwart an immense 
traffic which she construed as giving aid and comfort to her enemies. 
Under cover of the so-called Rule of 1756 British admiralty courts began 
to condemn American vessels carrying products from enemies' colonies to 
Europe, even when the voyage was broken by first entering an American 
port. It was on record in September, 1805, that fifty American ships had 
been condemned in England and as many more in the British West Indies. 

This was a trifling disaster, however, compared with the huge calamity 
which befell when Napoleon entered Berlin as a conqueror and proclaimed 
his paper blockade of the British Isles. There was no French navy to 
enforce it, but American vessels dared not sail for England lest they be 
snapped up by French privateers. The British Government savagely 
retaliated with further prohibitions, and Napoleon countered in like 
manner until no sea was safe for a neutral ship and the United States was 
powerless to assert its rights. Thomas Jefferson as President used as a 
weapon the Embargo of 1807, which was, at first, a popular measure, and 
which he justified in these pregnant sentences: "The whole world is thus 
laid under interdict by these two nations, and our own vessels, their 
cargoes, and crews, are to be taken by the one or the other for whatever 
place they may be destined out of our limits. If, therefore, on leaving 
our harbors we are certainly to lose them, is it not better as to vessels, 
cargoes, and seamen, to keep them at home?" 

A people proud, independent, and pugnacious, could not long submit to a 
measure of defense which was, in the final sense, an abject surrender to 
brute force. New England, which bore the brunt of the embargo, was first 
to rebel against it. Sailors marched through the streets clamoring for 
bread or loaded their vessels and fought their way to sea. In New York the 
streets of the waterside were deserted, ships dismantled, countinghouses 
unoccupied, and warehouses empty. In one year foreign commerce decreased 
in value from $108,000,000 to $22,000,000. 

After fifteen months Congress repealed the law, substituting a Non-
Intercourse Act which suspended trade with Great Britain and France until 
their offending orders were repealed. All such measures were doomed to be 
futile. Words and documents, threats and arguments could not intimidate 
adversaries who paid heed to nothing else than broadsides from line-of-
battle ships or the charge of battalions. With other countries trade could 
now be opened. Hopefully the hundreds of American ships long pent-up in 
harbor winged it deep-laden for the Baltic, the North Sea, and the 
Mediterranean. But few of them ever returned. Like a brigand, Napoleon 
lured them into a trap and closed it, advising the Prussian Government, 
which was under his heel: "Let the American ships enter your ports. Seize 
them afterward. You shall deliver the cargoes to me and I will take them 
in part payment of the Prussian war debt." 

Similar orders were executed wherever his mailed fist reached, the pretext 
being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act. More than two hundred American 
vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar robbery for which 
France paid an indemnity of five millions after twenty years. It was the 
grand climax of the exploitation which American commerce had been 
compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult and bloodshed afloat. 
There lingers today in many a coastwise town an inherited dislike for 
France. It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe which beggared many a 
household and filled the streets with haggard, broken shipmasters. 

It was said of this virile merchant marine that it throve under pillage 
and challenged confiscation. Statistics confirm this brave paradox. In 
1810, while Napoleon was doing his worst, the deep-sea tonnage amounted to 
981,019; and it is a singular fact that in proportion to population this 
was to stand as the high tide of American foreign shipping until thirty-
seven years later. It ebbed during the War of 1812 but rose again with 
peace and a real and lasting freedom of the seas. 

This second war with England was fought in behalf of merchant seamen and 
they played a nobly active part in it. The ruthless impressment of seamen 
was the most conspicuous provocation, but it was only one of many. Two 
years before hostilities were openly declared, British frigates were 
virtually blockading the port of New York, halting and searching ships as 
they pleased, making prizes of those with French destinations, stealing 
sailors to fill their crews, waging war in everything but name, and 
enjoying the sport of it. A midshipman of one of them merrily related: 
"Every morning at daybreak we set about arresting the progress of all the 
vessels we saw, firing off guns to the right and left to make every ship 
that was running in heave to or wait until we had leisure to send a boat 
on board to see, in our lingo, what she was made of. I have frequently 
known a dozen and sometimes a couple of dozen ships lying a league or two 
off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and worse than all, 
their market for many hours, sometimes the whole day, before our search 
was completed." 

The right of a belligerent to search neutral vessels for contraband of war 
or evidence of a forbidden destination was not the issue at stake. This 
was a usage sanctioned by such international law as then existed. It was 
the alleged right to search for English seamen in neutral vessels that 
Great Britain exercised, not only on the high seas but even in territorial 
waters, which the American Government refused to recognize. In vain the 
Government had endeavored to protect its sailors from impressment by means 
of certificates of birth and citizenship. These documents were jeered at 
by the English naval lieutenant and his boarding gang, who kidnapped from 
the forecastle such stalwart tars as pleased their fancy. The victim who 
sought to inform an American consul of his plight was lashed to the 
rigging and flogged by a boatswain's mate. The files of the State 
Department, in 1807, had contained the names of six thousand American 
sailors who were as much slaves and prisoners aboard British men-of-war as 
if they had been made captives by the Dey of Algiers. One of these 
incidents, occurring on the ship Betsy, Captain Nathaniel Silsbee, while 
at Madras in 1795, will serve to show how this brutal business was done. 

"I received a note early one morning from my chief mate that one of my 
sailors, Edward Hulen, a fellow townsman whom I had known from boyhood, 
had been impressed and taken on board of a British frigate then being in 
port .... I immediately went on board my ship and having there learned all 
the facts in the case, proceeded to the frigate, where I found Hulen and 
in his presence was informed by the first lieutenant of the frigate that 
he had taken Hulen from my ship under a peremptory order from his 
commander to visit every American ship in port and take from each of them 
one or more of their seamen .... I then called upon Captain Cook, who 
commanded the frigate, and sought first by all the persuasive means that I 
was capable of using and ultimately by threats to appeal to the Government 
of the place to obtain Hulen's release, but in vain . . . . It remained 
for me only to recommend Hulen to that protection of the lieutenant which 
a good seaman deserves, and to submit to the high-handed insult thus 
offered to the flag of my country which I had no means either of 
preventing or resisting." 

After several years' detention in the British Navy, Hulen returned to 
Salem and lived to serve on board privateers in the second war with 
England. 

Several years' detention! This was what it meant to be a pressed man, 
perhaps with wife and children at home who had no news of him nor any 
wages to support them. At the time of the Nore Mutiny in 1797, there were 
ships in the British fleet whose men had not been paid off for eight, ten, 
twelve, and in one instance fifteen years. These wooden walls of England 
were floating hells, and a seaman was far better off in jail. He was 
flogged if he sulked and again if he smiled flogged until the blood ran 
for a hundred offenses as trivial as these. His food was unspeakably bad 
and often years passed before he was allowed to set foot ashore. Decent 
men refused to volunteer and the ships were filled with the human scum and 
refuse caught in the nets of the press-gangs of Liverpool, London, and 
Bristol. 

It is largely forgotten or unknown that this system of recruiting was as 
intolerable in England as it was in the United States and as fiercely 
resented. Oppressive and unjust, it was nevertheless endured as the 
bulwark of England's defense against her foes. It ground under its heel 
the very people it protected and made them serfs in order to keep them 
free. No man of the common people who lived near the coast of England was 
safe from the ruffianly press-gangs nor any merchant ship that entered her 
ports. It was the most cruel form of conscription ever devised. Mob 
violence opposed it again and again, and British East Indiamen fought the 
King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their crews and left helpless. 
Feeling in America against impressment was never more highly inflamed, 
even on the brink of the War of 1812, than it had long been in England 
itself, although the latter country was unable to rise and throw it off. 
Here are the words, not of an angry American patriot but of a modern 
English historian writing of his own nation:* "To the people the impress 
was an axe laid at the foot of the tree. There was here no question, as 
with trade, of the mere loss of hands who could be replaced. Attacking the 
family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the octopus 
system of which the gangs were the tentacles, struck at the very 
foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of households a 
poverty as bitter and a grief as poignant as death . . . . The mutiny at 
the Nore brought the people face to face with the appalling risks 
attendant on wholesale pressing while the war with America, incurred for 
the sole purpose of upholding the right to press, taught them the lengths 
to which their rulers were still prepared to go in order to enslave 
them."(*)

(* The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore, by J. R. Hutchinson.)



CHAPTER VII.
THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812.

American privateering in 1812 was even bolder and more successful than 
during the Revolution. It was the work of a race of merchant seamen who 
had found themselves, who were in the forefront of the world's trade and 
commerce, and who were equipped to challenge the enemy's pretensions to 
supremacy afloat. Once more there was a mere shadow of a navy to protect 
them, but they had learned to trust their own resources. They would send 
to sea fewer of the small craft, slow and poorly armed, and likely to meet 
disaster. They were capable of manning what was, in fact, a private navy 
comprised of fast and formidable cruisers. The intervening generation had 
advanced the art of building and handling ships beyond all rivalry, and 
England grudgingly acknowledged their ability. The year of 1812 was indeed 
but a little distance from the resplendent modern era of the Atlantic 
packet and the Cape Horn clipper. 

Already these Yankee deep-water ships could be recognized afar by their 
lofty spars and snowy clouds of cotton duck beneath which the slender hull 
was a thin black line. Far up to the gleaming royals they carried sail in 
winds so strong that the lumbering English East Indiamen were hove to or 
snugged down to reefed topsails. It was not recklessness but better 
seamanship. The deeds of the Yankee privateers of 1812 prove this 
assertion to the hilt. Their total booty amounted to thirteen hundred 
prizes taken over all the Seven Seas, with a loss to England of forty 
million dollars in ships and cargoes. There were, all told, more than five 
hundred of them in commission, but New England no longer monopolized this 
dashing trade. Instead of Salem it was Baltimore that furnished the 
largest fleet- fifty-eight vessels, many of them the fast ships and 
schooners which were to make the port famous as the home of the Baltimore 
clipper model. All down the coast, out of Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, 
Savannah, and New Orleans, sallied the privateers to show that theirs was, 
in truth, a seafaring nation ardently united in a common cause. 

Again and more vehemently the people of England raised their voices in 
protest and lament, for these saucy sea-raiders fairly romped to and fro 
in the Channel, careless of pursuit, conducting a blockade of their own 
until London was paying the famine price of fifty-eight dollars a barrel 
for flour, and it was publicly declared mortifying and distressing that "a 
horde of American cruisers should be allowed, unresisted and unmolested, 
to take, burn, or sink our own vessels in our own inlets and almost in 
sight of our own harbors." It was Captain Thomas Boyle in the Chasseur of 
Baltimore who impudently sent ashore his proclamation of a blockade of the 
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which he requested should be 
posted in Lloyd's Coffee House. 

A wonderfully fine figure of a fighting seaman was this Captain Boyle, 
with an Irish sense of humor which led him to haunt the enemy's coast and 
to make sport of the frigates which tried to catch him. His Chasseur was 
considered one of the ablest privateers of the war and the most beautiful 
vessel ever seen in Baltimore. A fleet and graceful schooner with a 
magical turn for speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders and 
carried a hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never outsailed 
in fair winds or foul. "Out of sheer wantonness," said an admirer, "she 
sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of far superior force." 
Once when surrounded by two frigates and two naval brigs, she slipped 
through and was gone like a phantom. During his first cruise in the 
Chasseur, Captain Boyle captured eighteen valuable merchantmen. It was 
such defiant rovers as he that provoked the "Morning Chronicle" of London 
to splutter "that the whole coast of Ireland from Wexford round by Cape 
Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under the 
unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the blockaded 
ports of the United States is a grievance equally intolerable and 
disgraceful." 

This was when the schooner Syren had captured His Majesty's cutter 
Landrail while crossing the Irish Sea with dispatches; when the Governor 
Tompkins burned fourteen English vessels in the English Channel in quick 
succession; when the Harpy of Baltimore cruised for three months off the 
Irish and English coasts and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned to Boston 
filled with spoils, including a half million dollars of money; when the 
Prince de Neuchatel hovered at her leisure in the Irish Channel and made 
coasting trade impossible; and when the Young Wasp of Philadelphia cruised 
for six months in those same waters. 

Two of the privateers mentioned were first-class fighting ships whose 
engagements were as notable, in their way, as those of the American 
frigates which made the war as illustrious by sea as it was ignominious by 
land. While off Havana in 1815, Captain Boyle met the schooner St. 
Lawrence of the British Navy, a fair match in men and guns. The Chasseur 
could easily have run away but stood up to it and shot the enemy to pieces 
in fifteen minutes. Brave and courteous were these two commanders, and 
Lieutenant Gordon of the St. Lawrence gave his captor a letter which read, 
in part: "In the event of Captain Boyle's becoming a prisoner of war to 
any British cruiser I consider it a tribute justly due to his humane and 
generous treatment of myself, the surviving officers, and crew of His 
Majesty's late schooner St. Lawrence, to state that his obliging attention 
and watchful solicitude to preserve our effects and render us comfortable 
during the short time we were in his possession were such as justly 
entitle him to the indulgence and respect of every British subject." 

The Prince de Neuchatel had the honor of beating off the attack of a forty-
gun British frigate--an exploit second only to that of the General 
Armstrong in the harbor of Fayal. This privateer with a foreign name 
hailed from New York and was so fortunate as to capture for her owners 
three million dollars' worth of British merchandise. With Captain J. 
Ordronaux on the quarterdeck, she was near Nantucket Shoals at noon on 
October 11, 1814, when a strange sail was discovered. As this vessel 
promptly gave chase, Captain Ordronaux guessed-and as events proved 
correctly--that she must be a British frigate. She turned out to be the 
Endymion. The privateer had in tow a prize which she was anxious to get 
into port, but she was forced to cast off the hawser late in the afternoon 
and make every effort to escape. 

The breeze died with the sun and the vessels were close inshore. Becalmed, 
the privateer and the frigate anchored a quarter of a mile apart. Captain 
Ordronaux might have put his crew on the beach in boats and abandoned his 
ship. This was the reasonable course, for, as he had sent in several prize 
crews, he was short-handed and could muster no more than thirty-seven men 
and boys. The Endymion, on the other hand, had a complement of three 
hundred and fifty sailors and marines, and in size and fighting power she 
was in the class of the American frigates President and Constitution. 
Quite unreasonably, however, the master of the privateer decided to await 
events. 

The unexpected occurred shortly after dusk when several boats loaded to 
the gunwales with a boarding party crept away from the frigate. Five of 
them, with one hundred and twenty men, made a concerted attack at 
different points, alongside and under the bow and stern. Captain Ordronaux 
had told his crew that he would blow up the ship with all hands before 
striking his colors, and they believed him implicitly. This was the hero 
who was described as "a Jew by persuasion, a Frenchman by birth, an 
American for convenience, and so diminutive in stature as to make him 
appear ridiculous, in the eyes of others, even for him to enforce 
authority among a hardy, weatherbeaten crew should they do aught against 
his will." He was big enough, nevertheless, for this night's bloody work, 
and there was no doubt about his authority. While the British tried to 
climb over the bulwarks, his thirty-seven men and boys fought like raging 
devils, with knives, pistols, cutlases, with their bare fists and their 
teeth. A few of the enemy gained the deck, but the privateersmen turned 
and killed them. Others leaped aboard and were gradually driving the 
Americans back, when the skipper ran to the hatch above the powder 
magazine, waving a lighted match and swearing to drop it in if his crew 
retreated one step further. Either way the issue seemed desperate. But 
again they took their skipper's word for it and rallied for a bloody 
struggle which soon swept the decks. 

No more than twenty minutes had passed and the battle was won. The enemy 
was begging for quarter. One boat had been sunk, three had drifted away 
filled with dead and wounded, and the fifth was captured with thirty-six 
men in it of whom only eight were unhurt. The American loss was seven 
killed and twenty-four wounded, or thirty-one of her crew of thirty-seven. 
Yet they had not given up the ship. The frigate Endymion concluded that 
once was enough, and next morning the Prince de Neuchatel bore away for 
Boston with a freshening breeze. 

Those were merchant seamen also who held the General Armstrong against a 
British squadron through that moonlit night in Fayal Roads, inflicting 
heavier losses than were suffered in any naval action of the war. It is a 
story Homeric, almost incredible in its details and so often repeated that 
it can be only touched upon in this brief chronicle. The leader was a 
kindly featured man who wore a tall hat, side-whiskers, and a tail coat. 
His portrait might easily have served for that of a New England deacon of 
the old school. No trace of the swashbuckler in this Captain Samuel Reid, 
who had been a thrifty, respected merchant skipper until offered the 
command of a privateer. 

Touching at the Azores for water and provisions in September, 1814, he was 
trapped in port by the great seventy-four-gun ship of the line 
Plantagenet, the thirty-eight-gun frigate Rota, and the warbrig Carnation. 
Though he was in neutral water, they paid no heed to this but determined 
to destroy a Yankee schooner which had played havoc with their shipping. 
Four hundred men in twelve boats, with a howitzer in the bow of each boat, 
were sent against the General Armstrong in one flotilla. But not a man of 
the four hundred gained her deck. Said an eyewitness: "The Americans 
fought with great firmness but more like bloodthirsty savages than 
anything else. They rushed into the boats sword in hand and put every soul 
to death as far as came within their power. Some of the boats were left 
without a single man to row them, others with three or four. The most that 
any one returned with was about ten. Several boats floated ashore full of 
dead bodies . . . . For three days after the battle we were employed in 
burying the dead that washed on shore in the surf." 

This tragedy cost the British squadron one hundred and twenty men in 
killed and one hundred and thirty in wounded, while Captain Reid lost only 
two dead and had seven wounded. He was compelled to retreat ashore next 
day when the ships stood in to sink his schooner with their big guns, but 
the honors of war belonged to him and well-earned were the popular 
tributes when he saw home again, nor was there a word too much in the 
florid toast: "Captain Reid--his valor has shed a blaze of renown upon the 
character of our seamen, and won for himself a laurel of eternal bloom." 

It is not to glorify war nor to rekindle an ancient feud that such 
episodes as these are recalled to mind. These men, and others like them, 
did their duty as it came to them, and they were sailors of whom the whole 
Anglo-Saxon race might be proud. In the crisis they were Americans, not 
privateersmen in quest of plunder, and they would gladly die sooner than 
haul down the Stars and Stripes. The England against which they fought was 
not the England of today. Their honest grievances, inflicted by a 
Government too intent upon crushing Napoleon to be fair to neutrals, have 
long ago been obliterated. This War of 1812 cleared the vision of the 
Mother Country and forever taught her Government that the people of the 
Republic were, in truth, free and independent. 

This lesson was driven home not only by the guns of the Constitution and 
the United States, but also by the hundreds of privateers and the forty 
thousand able seamen who were eager to sail in them. They found no great 
place in naval history, but England knew their prowess and respected it. 
Every schoolboy is familiar with the duels of the Wasp and the Frolic, of 
the Enterprise and the Boxer; but how many people know what happened when 
the privateer Decatur met and whipped the Dominica of the British Navy to 
the southward of Bermuda? 

Captain Diron was the man who did it as he was cruising out of Charleston, 
South Carolina, in the summer of 1813. Sighting an armed schooner slightly 
heavier than his own vessel, he made for her and was unperturbed when the 
royal ensign streamed from her gaff. Clearing for action, he closed the 
hatches so that none of his men could hide below. The two schooners fought 
in the veiling smoke until the American could ram her bowsprit over the 
other's stern and pour her whole crew aboard. In the confined space of the 
deck, almost two hundred men and lads were slashing and stabbing and 
shooting amid yells and huzzas. Lieutenant Barrette, the English 
commander, only twenty-five years old, was mortally hurt and every other 
officer, excepting the surgeon and one midshipman, was killed or wounded. 
Two-thirds of the crew were down but still they refused to surrender, and 
Captain Diron had to pull down the colors with his own hands. Better 
discipline and marksmanship had won the day for him and his losses were 
comparatively small. 

Men of his description were apt to think first of glory and let the 
profits go hang, for there was no cargo to be looted in a King's ship. 
Other privateersmen, however, were not so valiant or quarrelsome, and 
there was many a one tied up in London River or the Mersey which had been 
captured without very savage resistance. Yet on the whole it is fair to 
say that the private armed ships outfought and outsailed the enemy as 
impressively as did the few frigates of the American Navy. 

There was a class of them which exemplified the rapid development of the 
merchant marine in a conspicuous manner--large commerce destroyers too 
swift to be caught, too powerful to fear the smaller cruisers. They were 
extremely profitable business ventures, entrusted to the command of the 
most audacious and skillful masters that could be engaged. Of this type 
was the ship America of Salem, owned by the Crowninshields, which made 
twenty-six prizes and brought safely into port property which realized 
more than a million dollars. Of this the owners and shareholders received 
six hundred thousand dollars as dividends. She was a stately vessel, built 
for the East India trade, and was generally conceded to be the fastest 
privateer afloat. For this service the upper deck was removed and the 
sides were filled in with stout oak timber as an armored protection, and 
longer yards and royal masts gave her a huge area of sail. Her crew of one 
hundred and fifty men had the exacting organization of a man-of-war, 
including, it is interesting to note, three lieutenants, three mates, a 
sailingmaster, surgeon, purser, captain of marines, gunners, seven prize 
masters, armorer, drummer, and a fifer. Discipline was severe, and 
flogging was the penalty for breaking the regulations. 

During her four cruises, the America swooped among the plodding 
merchantmen like a falcon on a dovecote, the sight of her frightening most 
of her prey into submission, with a brush now and then to exercise the 
crews of the twenty-two guns, and perhaps a man or two hit. Long after the 
war, Captain James Chever, again a peaceful merchant mariner, met at 
Valparaiso, Sir James Thompson, commander of the British frigate Dublin, 
which had been fitted out in 1813 for the special purpose of chasing the 
America. In the course of a cordial chat between the two captains the 
Briton remarked: 

"I was once almost within gun-shot of that infernal Yankee skimming-dish, 
just as night came on. By daylight she had outsailed the Dublin so 
devilish fast that she was no more than a speck on the horizon. By the 
way, I wonder if you happen to know the name of the beggar that was master 
of her." 

"I'm the beggar," chuckled Captain Chever, and they drank each other's 
health on the strength of it. 

Although the Treaty of Ghent omitted mention of the impressment of 
sailors, which had been the burning issue of the war, there were no more 
offenses of this kind. American seafarers were safe against kidnapping on 
their own decks, and they had won this security by virtue of their own 
double-shotted guns. At the same time England lifted the curse of the 
press-gang from her own people, who refused longer to endure it. 

There seemed no reason why the two nations, having finally fought their 
differences to a finish, should not share the high seas in peaceful 
rivalry; but the irritating problems of protection and reciprocity 
survived to plague and hamper commerce. It was difficult for England to 
overcome the habit of guarding her trade against foreign invasion. 
Agreeing with the United States to waive all discriminating duties between 
the ports of the two countries--this was as much as she was at that time 
willing to yield. She still insisted upon regulating the trade of her West 
Indies and Canada. American East Indiamen were to be limited to direct 
voyages and could not bring cargoes to Europe. Though this discrimination 
angered Congress, to which it appeared as lopsided reciprocity, the old 
duties were nevertheless repealed; and then, presto! the British colonial 
policy of exclusion was enforced and eighty thousand tons of American 
shipping became idle because the West India market was closed. 

There followed several years of unhappy wrangling, a revival of the old 
smuggling spirit, the risk of seizure and confiscations, and shipping 
merchants with long faces talking ruin. The theory of free trade versus 
protection was as debatable and opinions were as conflicting then as now. 
Some were for retaliation, others for conciliation; and meanwhile American 
shipmasters went about their business, with no room for theories in their 
honest heads, and secured more and more of the world's trade. Curiously 
enough, the cries of calamity in the United States were echoed across the 
water, where the "London Times" lugubriously exclaimed: "The shipping 
interest, the cradle of our navy, is half ruined. Our commercial monopoly 
exists no longer; and thousands of our manufacturers are starving or 
seeking redemption in distant lands. We have closed the Western Indies 
against America from feelings of commercial rivalry. Its active seamen 
have already engrossed an important branch of our carrying trade to the 
Eastern Indies. Her starred flag is now conspicuous on every sea and will 
soon defy our thunder." 

It was not until 1849 that Great Britain threw overboard her long 
catalogue of protective navigation laws which had been piling up since the 
time of Cromwell, and declared for free trade afloat. Meanwhile the United 
States had drifted in the same direction, barring foreign flags from its 
coastwise shipping but offering full exemption from all discriminating 
duties and tonnage duties to every maritime nation which should respond in 
like manner. This latter legislation was enacted in 1828 and definitely 
abandoned the doctrine of protection in so far as it applied to American 
ships and sailors. For a generation thereafter, during which ocean rivalry 
was a battle royal of industry, enterprise, and skill, the United States 
was paramount and her merchant marine attained its greatest successes. 

There is one school of modern economists who hold that the seeds of decay 
and downfall were planted by this adoption of free trade in 1828, while 
another faction of gentlemen quite as estimable and authoritative will 
quote facts and figures by the ream to prove that governmental policies 
had nothing whatever to do with the case. These adversaries have written 
and are still writing many volumes in which they almost invariably lose 
their tempers. Partisan politics befog the tariff issue afloat as well as 
ashore, and one's course is not easy to chart. It is indisputable, 
however, that so long as Yankee ships were better, faster, and more 
economically managed, they won a commanding share of the world's trade. 
When they ceased to enjoy these qualities of superiority, they lost the 
trade and suffered for lack of protection to overcome the handicap. 

The War of 1812 was the dividing line between two eras of salt water 
history. On the farther side lay the turbulent centuries of hazard and 
bloodshed and piracy, of little ships and indomitable seamen who pursued 
their voyages in the reek of gunpowder and of legalized pillage by the 
stronger, and of merchant adventurers who explored new markets wherever 
there was water enough to float their keels. They belonged to the rude and 
lusty youth of a world which lived by the sword and which gloried in 
action. Even into the early years of the nineteenth century these mariners 
still sailed--Elizabethan in deed and spirit. 

On the hither side of 1812 were seas unvexed by the privateer and the 
freebooter. The lateen-rigged corsairs had been banished from their lairs 
in the harbors of Algiers, and ships needed to show no broadsides of 
cannon in the Atlantic trade. For a time they carried the old armament 
among the lawless islands of the Orient and off Spanish-American coasts 
where the vocation of piracy made its last stand, but the great trade 
routes of the globe were peaceful highways for the white-winged fleets of 
all nations. The American seamen who had fought for the right to use the 
open sea were now to display their prowess in another way and in a romance 
of achievement that was no less large and thrilling. 



CHAPTER VIII.
THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES".

It was on the stormy Atlantic, called by sailormen the Western Ocean, that 
the packet ships won the first great contest for supremacy and knew no 
rivals until the coming of the age of steam made them obsolete. Their era 
antedated that of the clipper and was wholly distinct. The Atlantic packet 
was the earliest liner: she made regular sailings and carried freight and 
passengers instead of trading on her owners' account as was the ancient 
custom. Not for her the tranquillity of tropic seas and the breath of the 
Pacific trades, but an almost incessant battle with swinging surges and 
boisterous winds, for she was driven harder in all weathers and seasons 
than any other ships that sailed. In such battering service as this the 
lines of the clipper were too extremely fine, her spars too tall and 
slender. The packet was by no means slow and if the list of her record 
passages was superb, it was because they were accomplished by masters who 
would sooner let a sail blow away than take it in and who raced each other 
every inch of the way. 

They were small ships of three hundred to five hundred tons when the 
famous Black Ball Line was started in 1816. From the first they were the 
ablest vessels that could be built, full-bodied and stoutly rigged. They 
were the only regular means of communication between the United States and 
Europe and were entrusted with the mails, specie, government dispatches, 
and the lives of eminent personages. Blow high, blow low, one of the Black 
Ball packets sailed from New York for Liverpool on the first and sixteenth 
of every month. Other lines were soon competing--the Red Star and the 
Swallow Tail out of New York, and fine ships from Boston and Philadelphia. 
With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 the commercial greatness of 
New York was assured, and her Atlantic packets increased in size and 
numbers, averaging a thousand tons each in the zenith of their glory. 

England, frankly confessing herself beaten and unable to compete with such 
ships as these, changed her attitude from hostility to open admiration. 
She surrendered the Atlantic packet trade to American enterprise, and 
British merchantmen sought their gains in other waters. The Navigation 
Laws still protected their commerce in the Far East and they were content 
to jog at a more sedate gait than these weltering packets whose skippers 
were striving for passages of a fortnight, with the forecastle doors 
nailed fast and the crew compelled to stay on deck from Sandy Hook to 
Fastnet Rock. 

No blustering, rum-drinking tarpaulin was the captain who sailed the 
Independence, the Ocean Queen, or the Dreadnought but a man very careful 
of his manners and his dress, who had been selected from the most highly 
educated merchant service in the world. He was attentive to the comfort of 
his passengers and was presumed to have no other duties on deck than to 
give the proper orders to his first officer and work out his daily 
reckoning. It was an exacting, nerve-racking ordeal, however, demanding a 
sleepless vigilance, courage, and cool judgment of the first order. The 
compensations were large. As a rule, he owned a share of the ship and 
received a percentage of the freights and passage money. His rank when 
ashore was more exalted than can be conveyed in mere words. Any normal New 
York boy would sooner have been captain of a Black Ball packet than 
President of the United States, and he knew by heart the roaring chantey 

It is of a flash packet, A packet of fame. She is bound to New York And 
the Dreadnought's her name. She is bound to the west'ard Where the stormy 
winds blow. Bound away to the west'ard, Good Lord, let her go. 

There were never more than fifty of these ships afloat, a trifling 
fraction of the American deep-water tonnage of that day, but the laurels 
they won were immortal. Not only did the English mariner doff his hat to 
them, but a Parliamentary committee reported in 1837 that "the American 
ships frequenting the ports of England are stated by several witnesses to 
be superior to those of a similar class among the ships of Great Britain, 
the commanders and officers being generally considered to be more 
competent as seamen and navigators and more uniformly persons of education 
than the commanders and officers of British ships of a similar size and 
class trading from England to America." 

It was no longer a rivalry with the flags of other nations but an 
unceasing series of contests among the packets of the several lines, and 
their records aroused far more popular excitement than when the great 
steamers of this century were chipping off the minutes, at an enormous 
coal consumption, toward a five-day passage. Theirs were tests of real 
seamanship, and there were few disasters. The packet captain scorned a 
towboat to haul him into the stream if the wind served fair to set all 
plain sail as his ship lay at her wharf. Driving her stern foremost, he 
braced his yards and swung her head to sea, clothing the masts with 
soaring canvas amid the farewell cheers of the crowds which lined the 
waterfront. 

A typical match race was sailed between the Black Ball liner Columbus, 
Captain De Peyster, and the Sheridan, Captain Russell, of the splendid 
Dramatic fleet, in 1837. The stake was $10,000 a side, put up by the 
owners and their friends. The crews were picked men who were promised a 
bonus of fifty dollars each for winning. The ships sailed side by side in 
February, facing the wild winter passage, and the Columbus reached 
Liverpool in the remarkable time of sixteen days, two days ahead of the 
Sheridan. 

The crack packets were never able to reel off more than twelve or fourteen 
knots under the most favorable conditions, but they were kept going night 
and day, and some of them maintained their schedules almost with the 
regularity of the early steamers. The Montezuma, the Patrick Henry, and 
the Southampton crossed from New York to Liverpool in fifteen days, and 
for years the Independence held the record of fourteen days and six hours. 
It remained for the Dreadnought, Captain Samuel Samuels, in 1859, to set 
the mark for packet ships to Liverpool at thirteen days and eight hours. 

Meanwhile the era of the matchless clipper had arrived and it was one of 
these ships which achieved the fastest Atlantic passage ever made by a 
vessel under sail. The James Baines was built for English owners to be 
used in the Australian trade. She was a full clipper of 2515 tons, twice 
the size of the ablest packets, and was praised as "the most perfect 
sailing ship that ever entered the river Mersey." Bound out from Boston to 
Liverpool, she anchored after twelve days and six hours at sea. 

There was no lucky chance in this extraordinary voyage, for this clipper 
was the work of the greatest American builder, Donald McKay, who at the 
same time designed the Lightning for the same owners. This clipper, sent 
across the Atlantic on her maiden trip, left in her foaming wake a twenty-
four hour run which no steamer had even approached and which was not 
equaled by the fastest express steamers until twenty-five years later when 
the greyhound Arizona ran eighteen knots in one hour on her trial trip. 
This is a rather startling statement when one reflects that the Arizona of 
the Guion line seems to a generation still living a modern steamer and 
record-holder. It is even more impressive when coupled with the fact that, 
of the innumerable passenger steamers traversing the seas today, only a 
few are capable of a speed of more than eighteen knots. 

This clipper Lightning did her 436 sea miles in one day, or eighteen and a 
half knots, better than twenty land miles an hour, and this is how the 
surpassing feat was entered in her log, or official journal: "March 1. 
Wind south. Strong gales; bore away for the North Channel, carrying away 
the foretopsail and lost jib; hove the log several times and found the 
ship going through the water at the rate of 18 to 18 1/2 knots; lee rail 
under water and rigging slack. Distance run in twenty-four hours, 436 
miles." The passage was remarkably fast, thirteen days and nineteen and a 
half hours from Boston Light, but the spectacular feature was this day's 
work. It is a fitting memorial of the Yankee clipper, and, save only a 
cathedral, the loveliest, noblest fabric ever wrought by man's handiwork. 

The clipper, however, was a stranger in the Atlantic and her chosen 
courses were elsewhere. The records made by the James Baines and the 
Lightning were no discredit to the stanch, unconquerable packet ships 
which, year in and year out, held their own with the steamer lines until 
just before the Civil War. It was the boast of Captain Samuels that on her 
first voyage in 1853 the Dreadnought reached Sandy Hook as the Cunarder 
Canada, which had left Liverpool a day ahead of her, was passing in by 
Boston Light. Twice she carried the latest news to Europe, and many 
seasoned travelers preferred her to the mail steamers. 

The masters and officers who handled these ships with such magnificent 
success were true-blue American seamen, inspired by the finest traditions, 
successors of the privateersmen of 1812. The forecastles, however, were 
filled with English, Irish, and Scandinavians. American lads shunned these 
ships and, in fact, the ambitious youngster of the coastwise towns began 
to cease following the sea almost a century ago. It is sometimes forgotten 
that the period during which the best American manhood sought a maritime 
career lay between the Revolution and the War of 1812. Thereafter the 
story became more and more one of American ships and less of American 
sailors, excepting on the quarter-deck. 

In later years the Yankee crews were to be found in the ports where the 
old customs survived, the long trading voyage, the community of interest 
in cabin and forecastle, all friends and neighbors together, with 
opportunities for profit and advancement. Such an instance was that of the 
Salem ship George, built at Salem in 1814 and owned by the great merchant, 
Joseph Peabody. For twenty-two years she sailed in the East India trade, 
making twenty-one round voyages, with an astonishing regularity which 
would be creditable for a modern cargo tramp. Her sailors were native-
born, seldom more than twenty-one years old, and most of them were 
studying navigation. Forty-five of them became shipmasters, twenty of them 
chief mates, and six second mates. This reliable George was, in short, a 
nautical training-school of the best kind and any young seaman with the 
right stuff in him was sure of advancement. 

Seven thousand sailors signed articles in the counting-room of Joseph 
Peabody and went to sea in his eighty ships which flew the house-flag in 
Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, and the ports of Europe until 1844. These were 
mostly New England boys who followed in the footsteps of their fathers 
because deep-water voyages were still "adventures" and a career was 
possible under a system which was both congenial and paternal. Brutal 
treatment was the rare exception. Flogging still survived in the merchant 
service and was defended by captains otherwise humane, but a skipper, no 
matter how short-tempered, would be unlikely to abuse a youth whose 
parents might live on the same street with him and attend the same church. 

The Atlantic packets brought a different order of things, which was to be 
continued through the clipper era. Yankee sailors showed no love for the 
cold and storms of the Western Ocean in these foaming packets which were 
remorselessly driven for speed. The masters therefore took what they could 
get. All the work of rigging, sail-making, scraping, painting, and keeping 
a ship in perfect repair was done in port instead of at sea, as was the 
habit in the China and California clippers, and the lore and training of 
the real deep-water sailor became superfluous. The crew of a packet made 
sail or took it in with the two-fisted mates to show them how. 

From these conditions was evolved the "Liverpool packet rat," hairy and 
wild and drunken, the prey of crimps and dive-keepers ashore, brave and 
toughened to every hardship afloat, climbing aloft in his red shirt, 
dungaree breeches, and sea-boots, with a snow-squall whistling, the 
rigging sheathed with ice, and the old ship burying her bows in the 
thundering combers. It was the doctrine of his officers that he could not 
be ruled by anything short of violence, and the man to tame and hammer him 
was the "bucko" second mate, the test of whose fitness was that he could 
whip his weight in wild cats. When he became unable to maintain discipline 
with fists and belaying-pins, he was deposed for a better man. 

Your seasoned packet rat sought the ship with a hard name by choice. His 
chief ambition was to kick in the ribs or pound senseless some invincible 
bucko mate. There was provocation enough on both sides. Officers had to 
take their ships to sea and strain every nerve to make a safe and rapid 
passage with crews which were drunk and useless when herded aboard, half 
of them greenhorns, perhaps, who could neither reef nor steer. Brutality 
was the one argument able to enforce instant obedience among men who 
respected nothing else. As a class the packet sailors became more and more 
degraded because their life was intolerable to decent men. It followed 
therefore that the quarterdeck employed increasing severity, and, as the 
officer's authority in this respect was unchecked and unlimited, it was 
easy to mistake the harshest tyranny for wholesome discipline. 

Reenforcing the bucko mate was the tradition that the sailor was a dog, a 
different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to 
protect him. This was a tradition which, for centuries, had been fostered 
in the naval service, and it survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy 
anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was 
reluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of existence enjoyed by 
the poorest laborer ashore. 

It is in the nature of a paradox that the brilliant success of the packet 
ships in dominating the North Atlantic trade should have been a factor in 
the decline of the nation's maritime prestige and resources. Through a 
period of forty years the pride and confidence in these ships, their 
builders, and the men who sailed them, was intense and universal. They 
were a superlative product of the American genius, which still displayed 
the energies of a maritime race. On other oceans the situation was no less 
gratifying. American ships were the best and cheapest in the world. The 
business held the confidence of investors and commanded an abundance of 
capital. It was assumed, as late as 1840, that the wooden sailing ship 
would continue to be the supreme type of deep-water vessel because the 
United States possessed the greatest stores of timber, the most skillful 
builders and mechanics, and the ablest merchant navigators. No industry 
was ever more efficiently organized and conducted. American ships were 
most in demand and commanded the highest freights. The tonnage in foreign 
trade increased to a maximum of 904,476 in 1845. There was no doubt in the 
minds of the shrewdest merchants and owners and builders of the time that 
Great Britain would soon cease to be the mistress of the seas and must 
content herself with second place. 

It was not considered ominous when, in 1838, the Admiralty had requested 
proposals for a steam service to America. This demand was prompted by the 
voyages of the Sirius and Great Western, wooden-hulled sidewheelers which 
thrashed along at ten knots' speed and crossed the Atlantic in fourteen to 
seventeen days. This was a much faster rate than the average time of the 
Yankee packets, but America was unperturbed and showed no interest in 
steam. In 1839 the British Government awarded an Atlantic mail contract, 
with an annual subsidy of $425,000 to Samuel Cunard and his associates, 
and thereby created the most famous of the Atlantic steamship companies. 

Four of these liners began running in 1840--an event which foretold the 
doom of the packet fleets, though the warning was almost unheeded in New 
York and Boston. Four years later Enoch Train was establishing a new 
packet line to Liverpool with the largest, finest ships built up to that 
time, the Washington Irving, Anglo-American, Ocean Monarch, Anglo-Saxon, 
and Daniel Webster. Other prominent shipping houses were expanding their 
service and were launching noble packets until 1853. Meanwhile the Cunard 
steamers were increasing in size and speed, and the service was no longer 
an experiment. 

American capital now began to awaken from its dreams, and Edward K. 
Collins, managing owner of the Dramatic line of packets, determined to 
challenge the Cunarders at their own game. Aided by the Government to the 
extent of $385,000 a year as subsidy, he put afloat the four magnificent 
steamers, Atlantic, Pacific, Baltic, and Arctic, which were a day faster 
than the Cunarders in crossing, and reduced the voyage to nine and ten 
days. The Collins line, so auspiciously begun in 1850, and promising to 
give the United States the supremacy in steam which it had won under sail, 
was singularly unfortunate and short-lived. The Arctic and the Pacific 
were lost at sea, and Congress withdrew its financial support after five 
years. Deprived of this aid, Mr. Collins was unable to keep the enterprise 
afloat in competition with the subsidized Cunard fleet. In this manner and 
with little further effort by American interests to compete for the prize, 
the dominion of the Atlantic passed into British hands. 

The packet ships had held on too long. It had been a stirring episode for 
the passengers to cheer in mid-ocean when the lofty pyramids of canvas 
swept grandly by some wallowing steamer and left her far astern, but in 
the fifties this gallant picture became less frequent, and a sooty banner 
of smoke on the horizon proclaimed the new era and the obliteration of all 
the rushing life and beauty of the tall ship under sail. Slow to realize 
and acknowledge defeat, persisting after the steamers were capturing the 
cabin passenger and express freight traffic, the American ship-owners 
could not visualize this profound transformation. Their majestic clippers 
still surpassed all rivals in the East India and China trade and were 
racing around the Horn, making new records for speed and winning fresh 
nautical triumphs for the Stars and Stripes. 

This reluctance to change the industrial and commercial habits of 
generations of American shipowners was one of several causes for the 
decadence which was hastened by the Civil War. For once the astute 
American was caught napping by his British cousin, who was swayed by no 
sentimental values and showed greater adaptability in adopting the iron 
steamer with the screw propeller as the inevitable successor of the wooden 
ship with arching topsails. 

The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of the square-
rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in her beauty, with forty 
nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that of the metal trough with an 
engine in the middle and mechanics sweating in her depths. When the 
Atlantic packet was compelled to abdicate, it was the beginning of the 
end. After all, her master was the fickle wind, for a slashing outward 
passage might be followed by weeks of beating home to the westward. 
Steadily forging ahead to the beat of her paddles or the thrash of her 
screw, the steamer even of that day was far more dependable than the 
sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a hundred miles farther in 
twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done, but she could not maintain 
this meteoric burst of speed. Upon the heaving surface of the Western 
Ocean there was enacted over again the fable of the hare and the tortoise. 

Most of the famous chanteys were born in the packet service and shouted as 
working choruses by the tars of this Western Ocean before the chanteyman 
perched upon a capstan and led the refrain in the clipper trade. You will 
find their origin unmistakable in such lines as these: 

As I was a-walking down Rotherhite Street, 'Way, ho, blow the man down; A 
pretty young creature I chanced for to meet, Give me some time to blow the 
man down. Soon we'll be in London City, Blow, boys, blow, And see the gals 
all dressed so pretty, Blow, my bully boys, blow. 

Haunting melodies, folk-song as truly as that of the plantation negro, 
they vanished from the sea with a breed of men who, for all their faults, 
possessed the valor of the Viking and the fortitude of the Spartan. 
Outcasts ashore--which meant to them only the dance halls of Cherry Street 
and the grog-shops of Ratcliffe Road--they had virtues that were as great 
as their failings. Across the intervening years, with a pathos 
indefinable, come the lovely strains of Shenandoah, I'll ne'er forget you,
Away, ye rolling river, Till the day I die I'll love you ever, Ah, ha,
we're bound away.