American Merchant Ships and Sailors | Page 7

and it came in quantities far
in excess of any possible demand from the colonial sweet tooth. But it
could be made into rum, and in those days rum was held an innocent
beverage, dispensed like water at all formal gatherings, and used as a
matter of course in the harvest fields, the shop, and on the deck at sea.
Moreover, it had been found to have a special value as currency on the
west coast of Africa. The negro savages manifested a more than
civilized taste for it, and were ready to sell their enemies or their
friends, their sons, fathers, wives, or daughters into slavery in exchange
for the fiery fluid. So all New England set to turning the good molasses
into fiery rum, and while the slave trade throve abroad the rum trade
prospered at home.
Of course the rapid advance of the colonies in shipbuilding and in
maritime trade was not regarded in England with unqualified pride. The
theory of that day--and one not yet wholly abandoned--was that a
colony was a mine, to be worked for the sole benefit of the mother
country. It was to buy its goods in no other market. It was to use the
ships of the home government alone for its trade across seas. It must
not presume to manufacture for itself articles which merchants at home
desired to sell. England early strove to impress such trade regulations
upon the American colonies, and succeeded in embarrassing and
handicapping them seriously, although evasions of the navigation laws
were notorious, and were winked at by the officers of the crown. The
restrictions were sufficiently burdensome, however, to make the
ship-owners and sailors of 1770 among those most ready and eager for
the revolt against the king.
The close of the Revolution found American shipping in a reasonably
prosperous condition. It is true that the peaceful vocation of the seamen
had been interrupted, all access to British ports denied them, and their
voyages to Continental markets had for six years been attended by the
ever-present risk of capture and condemnation. But on the other hand,
the war had opened the way for privateering, and out of the ports of
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut the privateers swarmed

like swallows from a chimney at dawn. To the adventurous and not
over-scrupulous men who followed it, privateering was a congenial
pursuit--so much so, unhappily, that when the war ended, and a treaty
robbed their calling of its guise of lawfulness, too many of them still
continued it, braving the penalties of piracy for the sake of its gains.
But during the period of the Revolution privateering did the struggling
young nation two services--it sorely harassed the enemy, and it kept
alive the seafaring zeal and skill of the New Englanders.
For a time it seemed that not all this zeal and skill could replace the
maritime interests where they were when the Revolution began. For
most people in the colonies independence meant a broader scope of
activity--to the shipowner and sailor it meant new and serious
limitations. England was still engaged in the effort to monopolize
ocean traffic by the operation of tariffs and navigation laws. New
England having become a foreign nation, her ships were denied
admittance to the ports of the British West Indies, with which for years
a nourishing trade had been conducted. Lumber, corn, fish, live stock,
and farm produce had been sent to the islands, and coffee, sugar, cotton,
rum, and indigo brought back. This commerce, which had come to
equal £3,500,000 a year, was shut off by the British after American
independence, despite the protest of Pitt, who saw clearly that the West
Indians would suffer even more than the Americans. Time showed his
wisdom. Terrible sufferings came upon the West Indies for lack of the
supplies they had been accustomed to import, and between 1780 and
1787 as many as 15,000 slaves perished from starvation.
Another cause held the American merchant marine in check for several
years succeeding the declaration of peace. If there be one interest which
must have behind it a well-organized, coherent national government,
able to protect it and to enforce its rights in foreign lands, it is the
shipping interest. But American ships, after the Treaty of Paris, hailed
from thirteen independent but puny States. They had behind them the
shadow of a confederacy, but no substance. The flags they carried were
not only not respected in foreign countries--they were not known.
Moreover, the States were jealous of each other, possessing no true
community of interest, and each seeking advantage at the expense of its

neighbors. They were already beginning to adopt among themselves the
very tactics of harassing and crippling navigation laws which caused
the protest against Great Britain. This "Critical Period of American
History,"