The Old Merchant Marine | Page 9

seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay,
Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar
eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not a
witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the
activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever
carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which
it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it
were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."
In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which
more than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there were one
hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331
barrels of oil valued at $358,200. In size these vessels averaged no
more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered
their way half around the watery globe and comfortably supported six
thousand people who dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and
having no other industries. Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or
share of the catch and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his
own.
Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable
seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born
Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war,
Parliament flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of
the fishermen who thronged the Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to
forbid the colonies to export fish to those foreign markets in which
every seacoast village was vitally concerned, and he also contemplated
driving the fishing fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was
to rob six thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin
among the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which
sailed hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This measure became
law notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one peers of the realm who
declared: "We dissent because the attempt to coerce by famine the
whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces is
without example in the history of this, or perhaps, of any civilized

nation."
The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without
representation but whetted their anger with grudges more robust. They
had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to
Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue
privateering commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up
anchor and away to bag a Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled
his arrival with a deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than he
received orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for
mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred
eager privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous.
The timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and
nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases,
boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and
doubleheaded shot.
In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and
Baltimore, crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping
recruiting officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied
landsmen who had a mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious
cause of their country and make their fortunes." Many a ship's company
was mustered between noon and sunset, including men who had served
in armed merchantmen and who in times of nominal peace had fought
the marauders of Europe or whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the
Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a race of seamen so admirably fitted for
the daring trade of privateering as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail
schooners, and smart square-riggers, their sides checkered with
gun-ports, and ready to drive to sea like hawks.
In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd
and sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard,
mounting one or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold
and glory, only to be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced
to sight them. A few even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of
taking them out of the first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and
so in some cases they actually did.

The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the
war than has been commonly recognized. This fact, however, was
clearly perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator"
candidly admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of
assurances at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was
able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred
pennants were flying