The Old Merchant Marine | Page 4

is an epic of blue water which
seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A
people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant
supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of
theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was
its swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every
ocean, whose captains courageous from father to son had fought with

pike and cannonade to defend the freedom of the seas, turned inland to
seek a different destiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and
rich cargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag.
Vanished fleets and brave memories--a chronicle of America which had
written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will be other
Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like those when
skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports mysterious and
unknown.
The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much to
clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing settlement. Like
the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had steered across to
harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected to wrest a livelihood
mostly from salt water. The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth
was that it offered a good harbor for boats and was "a place of
profitable fishing." Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers
whom the wilderness and the red Indian confined to the water's edge,
where they were soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with
the Kennebec colony.
Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the Puritans
who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing carpenters and
shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak so close at hand into
keelsons, frames, and planking. Two years later, Governor John
Winthrop launched his thirty-ton sloop Blessing of the Bay, and sent
her to open "friendly commercial relations" with the Dutch of
Manhattan. Brisk though the traffic was in furs and wampum, these
mariners of Boston and Salem were not content to voyage coastwise.
Offshore fishing made skilled, adventurous seamen of them, and what
they caught with hook and line, when dried and salted, was readily
exchanged for other merchandise in Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe.
A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives in the
ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden schooners
are fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker, took their pay in
shares. They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who

supplied stores and material; and when the ship was afloat, the master,
the mates, and even the seamen, were allowed cargo space for
commodities which they might buy and sell to their own advantage.
Thus early they learned to trade as shrewdly as they navigated, and
every voyage directly concerned a whole neighborhood.
This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more
interested in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the Great
Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on the
Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trails to the
country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginia had discovered
an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slave labor to toil for them,
and they were not compelled to turn to the hardships and the hazards of
the sea. The New Englander, hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard
put to it to grow sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear,
was between the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the
latter. Elsewhere in the colonies the forest was an enemy to be
destroyed with infinite pains. The New England pioneer regarded it
with favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and step the
straight masts in them.
And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its course
before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic trade route,
causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and economist, to lament in
1668 that in his opinion nothing was "more prejudicial and in prospect
more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping
in her colonies, plantations, or provinces."
This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered in
almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova Scotia to
Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. It was
not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with crews of trained
artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log houses was the row of
keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter weather