American Merchant Ships and Sailors | Page 5

thither in the rough. But American resourcefulness before long went

even further. As the forests receded from the banks of the streams
before the woodman's axe, the shipwrights followed. In the depths of
the woods, miles perhaps from water, snows, pinnaces, ketches, and
sloops were built. When the heavy snows of winter had fallen, and the
roads were hard and smooth, runners were laid under the little ships,
great teams of oxen--sometimes more than one hundred yoke--were
attached, and the craft dragged down to the river, to lie there on the ice
until the spring thaw came to gently let it down into its proper element.
Many a farmer, too, whose lands sloped down to a small harbor, or
stream, set up by the water side the frame of a vessel, and worked
patiently at it during the winter days when the flinty soil repelled the
plough and farm work was stopped. Stout little craft were thus put
together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the
farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her to the fishing
banks, or took her through Hell Gate to the great and thriving city of
New York. The world has never seen a more amphibious populace.
[Illustration: "THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE
HELM"]
The cost of the little vessels of colonial times we learn from old letters
and accounts to have averaged four pounds sterling to the ton. Boston,
Charleston, Salem, Ipswich, Salisbury, and Portsmouth were the chief
building places in Massachusetts; New London in Connecticut, and
Providence in Rhode Island. Vessels of a type not seen to-day made up
the greater part of the New England fleet. The ketch, often referred to
in early annals, was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails,
but more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a ship's foremast,
and the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square
topsail surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail. The foremast was set very
much aft--often nearly amidships. The snow was practically a brig,
carrying a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, with a square sail directly
above it. A pink was rigged like a schooner, but without a bowsprit or
jib. For the fisheries a multitude of smaller types were
constructed--such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye,
the smack. Some of these survive to the present day, and in many cases
the name has passed into disuse, while the type itself is now and then to

be met with on our coasts.
The importance of ship-building as a factor in the development of New
England did not rest merely upon the use of ships by the Americans
alone. That was a day when international trade was just beginning to be
understood and pushed, and every people wanted ships to carry their
goods to foreign lands and bring back coveted articles in exchange. The
New England vessel seldom made more than two voyages across the
Atlantic without being snapped up by some purchaser beyond seas. The
ordinary course was for the new craft to load with masts or spars,
always in demand, or with fish; set sail for a promising market, dispose
of her cargo, and take freight for England. There she would be sold, her
crew making their way home in other ships, and her purchase money
expended in articles needed in the colonies. This was the ordinary
practice, and with vessels sold abroad so soon after their completion the
shipyards must have been active to have fitted out, as the records show,
a fleet of fully 280 vessels for Massachusetts alone by 1718. Before
this time, too, the American shipwrights had made such progress in the
mastery of their craft that they were building ships for the royal navy.
The "Falkland," built at Portsmouth about 1690, and carrying 54 guns,
was the earliest of these, but after her time corvettes, sloops-of-war,
and frigates were launched in New England yards to fight for the king.
It was good preparation for building those that at a later date should
fight against him.
Looking back over the long record of American maritime progress, one
cannot but be impressed with the many and important contributions
made by Americans--native or adopted--to marine architecture. To an
American citizen, John Ericsson, the world owes the screw propeller.
Americans sent the first steamship across the ocean--the "Savannah," in
1819. Americans, engaged in a fratricidal war, invented the ironclad in
the "Monitor" and the "Merrimac," and, demonstrating the value of iron
ships for warfare, sounded the knell of wooden ships for peaceful trade.
An American first demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the
steamboat, and if history denies to Fulton entire precedence with his
"Clermont," in 1807, it may still be claimed for John Fitch, another
American, with his imperfect boat on the