The Old Merchant Marine | Page 5

too rough for fishing,
when the little farms lay idle, this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his
axe and adze to shape the timbers, and it was a routine task to peg

together a sloop, a ketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare
forth to London, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them not
much larger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at a
liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the ornate,
top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign merchantmen, while
invention, bred of necessity, molded finer lines and less clumsy models
to weather the risks of a stormy coast and channels beset with shoals
and ledges. The square-rig did well enough for deepwater voyages, but
it was an awkward, lubberly contrivance for working along shore, and
the colonial Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat
fore-and-aft sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which
required fewer men in the handling.
Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude beginnings
foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which should one day
comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the wind and the finest
sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then these early vessels were
conspicuously efficient, carrying smaller crews than the Dutch or
English, paring expenses to a closer margin, daring to go wherever
commerce beckoned in order to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.
By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels
were registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem
already displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was
to make her the most illustrious port of the New World. The first of her
line of shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own
ketch Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a
few years he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels
which traded coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao,
Barbados, St. Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of
lading, flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by
the Grace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower . . . . and by
God's Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland."
No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to cross
to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in the
West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or

Rhode Island. The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of
commerce in Puritan New England and its golden gains and exotic
voyages allured high-hearted lads from farm and counter. In 1640 the
ship Desire, built at Marblehead, returned from the West Indies and
"brought some cotton and tobacco and negroes, etc. from thence."
Earlier than this the Dutch of Manhattan had employed black labor, and
it was provided that the Incorporated West India Company should
"allot to each Patroon twelve black men and women out of the Prizes in
which Negroes should be found."
It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most needed
and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the most
lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in "rum
and niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle
Passage. The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home
from Guinea in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise:
"For never was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before.
Not ye like of ye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole
coast is full of them. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get
away, for I purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is
very scarce. We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, so
that ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is now forced to take any
that comes. Here is seven sail of us Rum men that are ready to devour
one another, for our case is desprit."
Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture
beyond all computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned by
governments, at length rending the nation asunder in civil war and
bequeathing a problem still unsolved--all this followed in the wake of
those first voyages in search of labor which could be bought and sold
as merchandise. It belonged to the dark ages with piracy and witchcraft,
better forgotten than recalled, save for its potent influence in schooling
brave seamen and building faster ships for peace and war.
These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers so
manifold as