American Merchant Ships and Sailors | Page 9

of the privateering business more will be said in the chapter devoted to that subject. It is enough to note here that it made the American merchantman essentially a fighting man.
The growth of American shipping during the years 1794-1810 is almost incredible in face of the obstacles put in its path by hostile enactments and the perils of the war. In 1794 United States ships, aggregating 438,863 tons, breasted the waves, carrying fish and staves to the West Indies, bringing back spices, rum, cocoa, and coffee. Sometimes they went from the West Indies to the Canaries, and thence to the west coast of Africa, where very valuable and very pitiful cargoes of human beings, whose black skins were thought to justify their treatment as dumb beasts of burden, were shipped. Again the East Indies opened markets for buying and selling both. But England and almost the whole of Western Europe were closed.
It is not possible to understand the situation in which the American sailor and shipowner of that day was placed, without some knowledge of the navigation laws and belligerent orders by which the trade was vexed. In 1793 the Napoleonic wars began, to continue with slight interruptions until 1815. France and England were the chief contestants, and between them American shipping was sorely harried. The French at first seemed to extend to the enterprising Americans a boon of incalculable value to the maritime interest, for the National Convention promulgated a decree giving to neutral ships--practically to American ships, for they were the bulk of the neutral shipping--the rights of French ships. Overjoyed by this sudden opening of a rich market long closed, the Yankee barks and brigs slipped out of the New England harbors in schools, while the shipyards rung with the blows of the hammers, and the forest resounded with the shouts of the woodsmen getting out ship-timbers. The ocean pathway to the French West Indies was flecked with sails, and the harbors of St. Kitts, Guadaloupe, and Martinique were crowded. But this bustling trade was short-lived. The argosies that set forth on their peaceful errand were shattered by enemies more dreaded than wind or sea. Many a ship reached the port eagerly sought only to rot there; many a merchant was beggared, nor knew what had befallen his hopeful venture until some belated consular report told of its condemnation in some French or English admiralty court.
[Illustration: EARLY TYPE OF SMACK]
For England met France's hospitality with a new stroke at American interests. The trade was not neutral, she said. France had been forced to her concession by war. Her people were starving because the vigilance of British cruisers had driven French cruisers from the seas, and no food could be imported. To permit Americans to purvey food for the French colonies would clearly be to undo the good work of the British navy. Obviously food was contraband of war. So all English men-of-war were ordered to seize French goods on whatever ship found; to confiscate cargoes of wheat, corn, or fish bound for French ports as contraband, and particularly to board all American merchantmen and scrutinize the crews for English-born sailors. The latter injunction was obeyed with peculiar zeal, so that the State Department had evidence that at one time, in 1806, there were as many as 6000 American seamen serving unwillingly in the British navy.
France, meanwhile, sought retaliation upon England at the expense of the Americans. The United States, said the French government, is a sovereign nation. If it does not protect its vessels against unwarrantable British aggressions it is because the Americans are secretly in league with the British. France recognizes no difference between its foes. So it is ordered that any American vessel which submitted to visitation and search from an English vessel, or paid dues in a British port, ceased to be neutral, and became subject to capture by the French. The effect of these orders and decrees was simply that any American ship which fell in with an English or French man-of-war or privateer, or was forced by stress of weather to seek shelter in an English or French port, was lost to her owners. The times were rude, evidence was easy to manufacture, captains were rapacious, admiralty judges were complaisant, and American commerce was rich prey. The French West Indies fell an easy spoil to the British, and at Martinique and Basseterre American merchantmen were caught in the harbor. Their crews were impressed, their cargoes, not yet discharged, seized, the vessels themselves wantonly destroyed or libelled as prizes. Nor were passengers exempt from the rigors of search and plunder. The records of the State Department and the rude newspapers of the time are full of the complaints of shipowners, passengers, and shipping merchants. The robbery was prodigious in its amount, the indignity