MARINE***


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THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE


      *      *      *      *      *      *

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

      *      *      *      *      *      *


[Illustration: SOUTH STREET, NEW YORK; FROM MAIDEN LANE, 1834

From a print in the possession of the Lenox Library]


THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE

by

JOHN R. SPEARS

Author of "Story of the New England
Whalers," etc.

Illustrated







New York
The Macmillan Company
1910
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910,
By The Macmillan Company.

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1910.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                                          PAGE

     I. In the Beginning                                              1

    II. Early Growth                                                 22

   III. Evolution of the Smuggler and the Pirate                     40

    IV. Before the War of the Revolution                             59

     V. Merchantmen in Battle Array                                  85

    VI. Early Enterprise of the United States Merchant Marine       100

   VII. French and Other Spoliations                                119

  VIII. The British Aggressions                                     132

    IX. The Beginnings of Steam Navigation                          150

     X. Privateers, Pirates, and Slavers of the Nineteenth Century  177

    XI. The Harvest of the Sea before the Civil War                 197

   XII. The Packet Lines and the Clippers                           214

  XIII. Deep-water Steamships--Part I                               240

   XIV. Deep-water Steamships--Part II                              258

    XV. The Critical Period                                         277

   XVI. During a Half Century of Depression                         298




ILLUSTRATIONS

  South Street, New York; from Maiden Lane, 1834         _Frontispiece_

                                                                   PAGE
  An Early View of Charleston Harbor                                 38

  Captain Kidd's House at Pearl and Hanover Streets, New
    York, 1691                                                       70

  Custom House, Salem                                               100

  Elias Hasket Derby                                                108

  An Early Type of Clipper Ship: _Maria_, of New Bedford, built
    1782                                                            122

  A Virginia Pilot-boat, with a Distant View of Cape Henry, at
    the Entrance of the Chesapeake                                  148

  Engines of the _Clermont_                                         158

  Clipper Ship _Syren_                                              220

  Captain Samuel Samuels                                            222

  Clipper Ship _Witch of the Wave_                                  232

  Sailing of _Britannia_, February 3, 1844                          254

  Four-master _Dirigo_, First Steel Ship built in the United
    States                                                          298

  Seven-masted Schooner _Thomas Lawson_                             312

  A Modern Clipper Ship and a Modern Brig                           318

  Cunard S. S. _Lusitania_                                          334




    THE STORY OF THE MERCHANT MARINE




CHAPTER I

IN THE BEGINNING


The first vessel built within the limits of the United States for
commercial uses was a sea-going pinnace of thirty tons named the
_Virginia_. Her keel was laid at the mouth of the Kennebec River,
in Maine, on an unnamed day in the fall of 1607. The story of this
vessel, though brief, is of great interest because, in part, of certain
peculiarities of rig and hull which, in connection with a sea-going
vessel, now seem astounding, but chiefly because it portrays something of
the character of the men who, a little later, laid the foundations of the
American Republic.

The adventure which led to the building of the _Virginia_ grew out
of that wonderful harvest of the sea, the cod fishery on the banks of
Newfoundland. For more than a hundred years before she was built many
fishermen of Europe had been sailing to the Banks in early spring and
returning home each fall. Throughout the sixteenth century there were from
100 to 300 fishing vessels there every year, excepting only those years
when wars raged the hardest. In 1577, for instance, as the records show,
350 vessels sailed for the Banks, gathered their harvest, went ashore
in the bay where St. John, Newfoundland, now stands, cured the catch on
flakes built on the beach, and then sailed for home well satisfied.

Though dimly seen now, those fishermen, as they flocked across the sea in
the spring, form one of the most striking pictures in history. For no one
had ever charted the western limits of that waste of waters. The Banks lay
beyond a belt of the sea famous, or infamous, as the "roaring forties."
And yet in ships so rude that the hulls were sometimes bound with hawsers
to hold them together these men anchored where black fogs shut them in,
where sleet-laden gales were a part of their common life, where bergs
and fields of ice assaulted them, and where irresistible hurricanes from
the unknown wilds beyond came to overwhelm them. To these real dangers
they added others that, though born of the imagination, were still more
terrifying. They saw evil spirits in the storm clouds, and demons came
shrieking in the gales to carry their souls to eternal torment.

Even in pleasant weather life was hard. Masters ruled their crews by
torture. To punish an obstinate sailor they wrapped a stout cord around
his forehead and then set it taut until his eyes were popped from
the sockets. The food brought from home spoiled. In the best vessels
the crew slept in leaking, unwarmed forecastles, while in some of the
vessels--those that were but partly decked over--they slept unsheltered.
The brine of the sea covered them with sores called sea boils, and their
hands dripped blood as they hauled in their cod lines.

Consider further that these fishermen came from four nations that were
always at war with each other, either openly or in an underhanded way. And
yet the English, the French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese anchored side
by side on the Banks, built their flakes side by side on the Newfoundland
beach, and when a ship opened her seams as she wallowed in the gale, the
crews of the others within reach eagerly lowered their boats to rescue
the drowning.

In courage, fortitude, sea skill, and resourcefulness those Banks
fishermen had never been surpassed.

This is by no means to say that the fishermen never fought each other.
Good fair fighting was a part of the comfort of life as they saw it. But
the conditions that eliminated the weaklings naturally created in their
minds a standard of justice under which all who survived could work.

Let it be noted now that with all their hardships they were not without
compensating rewards. Good digestion waited on appetite. The life ashore
while curing the catch--a life where venison and wild fowl replaced their
salted meats, and the red people of the region came to visit them--was a
time for jollification. But more important than all else they had leisure
as well as hard work. For having a share in the catch instead of wages,
they obtained enough money, on reaching home, to enable them to pass the
winter beside the hearthstone, where they told tales of adventures that
stirred the blood. So the love of the sea was cultivated and the race was
perpetuated.

Into the midst of these fishermen, as they worked among their flakes upon
the Newfoundland beach, came Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on August 5, 1583,
who was the forerunner of the New England colonists. He told them he had
come to take possession of the country and establish an English colony
there. The fishermen saw that such a settlement would interfere with
their business, but no resistance was made while he erected a monument and
did such other things as the customs of the day required of those taking
possession of a new land. One may fancy they saw in Sir Humphrey a man
of their own sort. For he had crossed the sea in the ten-ton _Squirrel_,
and although she was, as they said, "too small a bark to pass through the
ocean sea at that season of the year," he sailed in her when bound for
home; he would not ask his men to take a risk which he would not share.
And when the storm that overwhelmed him came, he sat down at the stern of
the little bark with a book in his hand, and shouted in a cheerful voice
to the crew of the _Hind_, which was close alongside:--

"We are as near to heaven by sea as by land."

The sailors of Gilbert's expedition have been called "no better than
pirates" (Bancroft), but at worst they were able to cherish the abiding
faith of their master as expressed in those words. The seamen who sailed
(1530) with William Hawkins in that "tall and goodlie ship of his own,"
the _Paul_, to the coasts of Africa and Brazil, and with Drake in the
_Pelican_ in that famous voyage around the world, and with Raleigh's
expedition to the coast of North Carolina, were recruited from among these
fishermen, to whom adventure was as the breath of life. And the men who
did the actual work of building the _Virginia_ were of the same class.

As the reader remembers, the first charter of Virginia as a colony
provided for two colony-planting companies. One, the London Company,
settled its colonists in what is now the State of Virginia, while the
other, the West-of-England or Plymouth Company, was to people the northern
coast. In May, 1607, the Plymouth Company sent two vessels to establish a
fishing colony on what is now the coast of Maine. One of the vessels was
a "fly-boat" called the _Gift of God_. A fly-boat was a flat-bottomed,
shoal-draft vessel handy for exploring inland waters. The other was "a
good ship" named the _Mary and John_. These ships shaped their course to
an island off the coast then well known to the fishermen, and now called
Monhegan, "a round high Ile," where they arrived on August 9. On the 18th
they located their settlement on a peninsula, on the west side of the
mouth of the Kennebec, which was "almost an island." There they erected
dwellings, a storehouse, and a church, with a fort enclosing all. Then
"the carpenters framed a pretty pinnace of about 30 tons, which they
called the _Virginia_, the chief shipwright being one Digby of London."
A plan of the fort as "taken by John Hunt, the VIII day of October in the
yeere of our Lorde 1607," is reproduced in Brown's _Genesis of the United
States_. This chart is important because it shows under the guns of the
fort a small vessel which was, no doubt, the "pretty pinnace" _Virginia_.

While the dimensions of the _Virginia_ were not recorded, we can get a
fair idea of her size from Charnock's _History of Marine Architecture_
(II, 431), where a smack named the _Escape Royal_, in 1660, was of 34 tons
burden and 30 feet 6 inches long by 14 feet 3 inches wide, and 7 feet 9
inches deep. The 30-ton _Virginia_ was not far from these dimensions. She
carried a spritsail and a jib. As the sail spread was insufficient for
driving the vessel in light airs and confined waters, oars were provided.
The hull was partly decked, enough to protect the cargo.

The crew had to be content with an awning when the wind was light. When
the wind was heavy, they had to face the gale, as was the custom on the
Banks. And yet the _Virginia_ was built by men who intended to use her
not only in the fishery and the coasting trade with the Indians, but for
oversea trade as well. It is a matter of record, too, that she made at
least one voyage from England to the Chesapeake, and it is believed that
some of the Kennebec colonists sailed in her upon that voyage.

Curiously enough, however, the Kennebec colony failed somewhat
ingloriously. The winter was long and severe. A fire destroyed the
storehouse and the provisions that had been brought from England. The
unexplored wilderness oppressed them. In fact, while they would face a
hurricane at sea in an open boat, the terrors of the wilderness, though
chiefly of their own imagining, drove them away, and they were hard
pressed at home to find excuses for what they had done.

In the meantime a settlement was made at Jamestown, Virginia. Of the 105
colonists at Jamestown, 48 were described as gentlemen, 12 as laborers,
4 as carpenters, and the others as servants and soldiers. The servants
were white slaves, who were not, however, held for life. The ships with
this oddly assorted colony arrived in the Chesapeake on April 20, 1607.
Of the things done at Jamestown two only need be considered here. They
began creating a merchant marine in 1611 by building a shallop of twelve
or thirteen tons' burden. A Spaniard who visited the colony at that
time noted that the iron used in the boat had been taken from a wreck at
Bermuda--a fact that shows the colonists had not had enough interest in
ship-building to bring iron for that purpose from home.

The truth is the Virginia colonists never had much interest in shipping,
save only as they built many vessels of small size for use in local
transportation on their inland waters. The reason for this condition of
affairs is pointed out in Bruce's _Economic History of Virginia_. The
money crop was, as it is now, in many parts of the State, tobacco. Tobacco
had been introduced into England in 1586. The settlers found the Indians
cultivating it on the James River, but they gave little heed to it until
1612, when John Rolfe, the first American "squaw man," began producing
it partly for his own use and partly because he was trying to find some
product that could be exported to England with profit. Thus Rolfe's garden
was the first American agricultural experiment station. Under cultivation
the leaf produced was of better quality than that obtained from the
Indians, and when a trial shipment was sent to England the success of the
venture was great. Thereupon the colonists became so eager to produce it
that the authorities felt obliged to prohibit the crop unless at least
two acres of grain were grown at the same time by each planter.

The demand for Virginia tobacco increased until the merchants sent their
agents to the colony to buy and pay for the crop long before it was
harvested; they even sent ships to lie there for months before the harvest
in order to have first chance to secure it. Why should the Virginians
build or buy ships under such circumstances?

Now consider some of the conditions surrounding the first New England
settlers. Many fishermen had visited the New England coast before a
settlement was made there. These adventurers found full fares and they
looked upon the coast at a season when it was not "stern."

It was to this coast that the Pilgrims came.

Of the well-known story of the Pilgrims it seems necessary to recall
here, first of all, the fact that they were Englishmen who had lived for
several years among the Dutch, a people who described themselves upon
their coinage as a nation whose "way is on the sea." More than a thousand
ships were built every year in Holland where the Pilgrims were sojourning,
and everybody lived in a seafaring atmosphere. Though a distinct people,
the Pilgrims necessarily absorbed, as one may say, something of the Dutch
aptitude for trade and sea life. Thus, when ready to migrate to America,
they were able to secure the capital they needed for the venture from
merchants who were acquainted with the success that had attended the
fishing voyages to the coast.

It is worth noting, too, that Captain Thomas Jones, of the _Mayflower_,
had fished in Greenland waters, and that Mate Robert Coppin was carried
as the pilot of the ship because he had been on the parts of the coast to
which the expedition was bound. The Pilgrims intended to settle somewhere
near the Hudson River, but on November 11, 1620, the _Mayflower_ was
found at anchor under Cape Cod. While lying there a number of the company
came to think that a settlement there would serve their purpose well, and
the reasons given in support of this proposition are of interest because
they show what business ideas animated these Pilgrims. The location, they
said, "afforded a good harbor for boats." It was "a place of profitable
fishing." "The master and his mate and others experienced in fishing"
preferred it to the Greenland fishery where whaling made large profits.
Moreover, the situation was "healthy, secure and defensible." While the
desire for "freedom to worship God" was perhaps uppermost in their talk,
as it was in their writings, the Pilgrims were "intensely practical in
applying their theories of Providence and Divine control to the immediate
business in hand," as Weeden says