American Merchant Ships and Sailors | Page 4

over the time and place of the
beginning of ship-building in America. The first vessel of which we

have record was the "Virginia," built at the mouth of the Kennebec
River in 1608, to carry home a discontented English colony at Stage
Island. She was a two-master of 30 tons burden. The next American
vessel recorded was the Dutch "yacht" "Onrest," built at New York in
1615. Nowadays sailors define a yacht as a vessel that carries no cargo
but food and champagne, but the "Onrest" was not a yacht of this type.
She was of 16 tons burden, and this small size explains her description.
The first ship built for commercial purposes in New England was "The
Blessing of the Bay," a sturdy little sloop of 60 tons. Fate surely
designed to give a special significance to this venture, for she was
owned by John Winthrop, the first of New England statesmen, and her
keel was laid on the Fourth of July, 1631--a day destined after the lapse
of one hundred and forty-five years to mean much in the world's
calendar. Sixty tons is not an awe-inspiring register. The pleasure yacht
of some millionaire stock-jobber to-day will be ten times that size,
while 20,000 tons has come to be an every-day register for an ocean
vessel; but our pleasure-seeking "Corsairs," and our castellated "City of
New York" will never fill so big a place in history as this little sloop,
the size of a river lighter, launched at Mistick, and straightway
dispatched to the trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Long before
her time, however, in 1526, the Spanish adventurer, Lucas Vasquez de
Ayllon, losing on the coast of Florida a brigantine out of the squadron
of three ships which formed his expedition, built a small craft called a
gavarra to replace it.
From that early Fourth of July, for more than two hundred years
shipyards multiplied and prospered along the American coast. The
Yankees, with their racial adaptability, which long made them jacks of
all trades and good at all, combined their shipbuilding with other
industries, and to the hurt of neither. Early in 1632, at Richmond Island,
off the coast of Maine, was built what was probably the first regular
packet between England and America. She carried to the old country
lumber, fish, furs, oil, and other colonial products, and brought back
guns, ammunition, and liquor--not a fortunate exchange. Of course
meanwhile English, Dutch, and Spanish ships were trading to the
colonies, and every local essay in shipbuilding meant competition with

old and established ship-yards and ship owners. Yet the industry throve,
not only in the considerable yards established at Boston and other large
towns, but in a small way all along the coast. Special privileges were
extended to ship-builders. They were exempt from military and other
public duties. In 1636 the "Desire," a vessel of 120 tons, was built at
Marblehead, the largest to that time. By 1640 the port records of
European ports begin to show the clearings of American-built vessels.
[Illustration: THE KETCH]
In those days of wooden hulls and tapering masts the forests of New
England were the envy of every European monarch ambitious to
develop a navy. It was a time, too, of greater naval activity than the
world had ever seen--though but trivial in comparison with the present
expenditures of Christian nations for guns and floating steel fortresses.
England, Spain, Holland, and France were struggling for the control of
the deep, and cared little for considerations of humanity, honor, or
honesty in the contest. The tall, straight pines of Maine and New
Hampshire were a precious possession for England in the work of
building that fleet whose sails were yet to whiten the ocean, and whose
guns, under Drake and Rodney, were to destroy successfully the
maritime prestige of the Dutch and the Spaniards. Sometimes a colony,
seeking royal favor, would send to the king a present of these pine
timbers, 33 to 35 inches in diameter, and worth £95 to £115 each. Later
the royal mark, the "broad arrow," was put on all white pines 24 inches
in diameter 3 feet from the ground, that they might be saved for masts.
It is, by the way, only about fifteen years since our own United States
Government has disposed of its groves of live oaks, that for nearly a
century were preserved to furnish oaken knees for navy vessels.
[Illustration: "THE BROAD ARROW WAS PUT ON ALL WHITE
PINES 24 INCHES IN DIAMETER"]
The great number of navigable streams soon led to shipbuilding in the
interior. It was obviously cheaper to build the vessel at the edge of the
forest, where all the material grew ready to hand, and sail the
completed craft to the seaboard, than to first transport the material