THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE LIBRARY JOHIVERSITY OP n * T LOS THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS THE MARlTIMh HIS Shipping at Boston Wharves in 1832 THE MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 17831 860 BY SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Clir fUbersibr press rT. ^i^liy- ^t^ ; /-^V^,^^ | ..xV&rwW jW *r / 7 S *\i K/ftrtW^*0m 7 7 '*X -^v^jSN" J tf V^sS\ /Hl^X 7--. *sT ^.izy "r&f A, * 4-^3^ lx ^^W^^^f^^^ pfc "is 4 f*-^ ^ -*&/ ( t / l >3 \ i4-^r-rs> ..-r THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND ping, and West India trading were already com- menced. It was not the intention of the founders of Massa- chusetts-Bay to establish a predominantly maritime community. The first and foremost object of Winthrop and Dudley and Endecot and Saltonstall was to found a church and commonwealth in which Calvinist Pu- ritans might live and worship according to the Word of God, as they conceived it. They aimed to found a New England, purged of Old England's corruptions, but preserving all her goodly heritage. They intended the economic foundation of New England, as of Old England and Virginia, to be large landed estates, tilled by tenants and hired labor. In this they failed. The New England town, based on freehold and free labor, sprang up instead of the Old English manor. And for only a decade was agriculture the mainstay of Massachusetts. The constant inflow of immigrants, requiring food and bringing goods, enabled the first comers to profit by corn-growing and cattle-raising. This could not con- tinue. "For the present, we make a shift to live," wrote a pessimistic pioneer in 1637; "but hereafter, when our numbers increase, and the fertility of the soil doth decrease, if God discover not means to enrich the land, what shall become of us I will not deter- mine." God performed no miracle on the New England soil. He gave the sea. Stark necessity made seamen of would-be planters. The crisis came in 1641, when civil war in England cut short the flow of immigrants. "All foreign commodities grew scarce," wrote Gover- nor Winthrop, "and our own of no price. Corn would buy nothing; a cow which cost last year 20 might now be bought for 4 or 5 ... These straits set our people II MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS on work to provide fish, clapboards, plank, etc., . . . and to look out to the West Indies for a trade ..." In these simple sentences, Winthrop explains how maritime Massachusetts came to be. The gravelly, boulder-strewn soil was back-breaking to clear, and afforded small increase to unscientific farmers. No staple of ready sale in England, like Virginia tobacco or Canadian beaver, could be produced or readily obtained. Forest, farms, and sea yielded lumber, beef, and fish. But England was supplied with these from the Baltic, and by her own farmers and fishermen. Un- less a new market be found for them, Massachusetts must stew in her own juice. It was found in the West Indies tropical islands which applied slave labor to exotic staples like sugar-cane, but imported every ne- cessity of life. More and more they became dependent on New England for lumber, provisions, and dried fish. More and more the New England ships and mer- chants who brought these necessities, controlled the distribution of West-India products. Massachusetts went to sea, then, not of choice, but of necessity. Yet the transition was easy and natural. "Farm us!" laughed the waters of the Bay in May- time, to a weary yeoman, victim of the 'mocking spring's perpetual loss.' "Here thou may'st reap without sowing yet not without God's blessing; 't was the Apostles' calling." And with sharp scorn spake the waters to an axeman, hewing a path from river landing to new allotment: "Hither thy road! And of the oak thou wastest, make means to ride it! Southward, dull clod, and barter the logs thou would'st spend to warm thy silly body, for chinking doubloons, as golden as the sunlight that bathes the Spanish main." Materials and teachers for a maritime colony were 12 already at hand. The founders had been careful to secure artisans, and tools for all useful trades, that Massachusetts might not have the one-sided devel- opment of Virginia. Fishing had not ceased with the failure of the Gloucester experiment. Dorchester, the first community "that set upon the trade of fishing in the bay," was little more than a transference to New England soil of Dorset fishing interests. Scituate_avas settled by a similar company. The rocky peninsula of Marblehead, with its ample harbor, attracted fisher- folk from Cornwall and the Channel Islands, who cared neither for Lord Bishop nor Lord Brethren. Their descendants retained a distinct dialect, and a jealous exclusiveness for over two centuries. Marble- head obeyed or not the laws of the Great and General Court, as suited her good pleasure ; but as long as she 'made fish,' the Puritan magistrates did not interfere. Literally true was the Marblehead fisherman's reproof to an exhorting preacher: "Our ancestors came not here for religion. Their main end was to catch fish!" Equally true was Marblehead 's protest against an export tax in 1669. "Fish is the only great stapple which the Country produceth for forraine parts and is so benefitiall for making returns for what wee need." The firm-fleshed codfish of northern waters is unsur- passed for salting and drying. Colonial Massachusetts packed three grades. Dun fish, the best, was 'made' by alternately burying and drying the larger-sized cod until it mellowed sufficiently for the taste of Catho- lic Europe. Portugal and Spain, where Captain John Smith sold his first fare, Southern France and the 'Western' and 'Wine* Islands, were the markets for dun fish; and for barrel- and pipe-staves as well. In exchange, Cadiz salt; Madeira and Canary wine; Bilbao iron and pieces of eight; Malaga grapes and 13 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS Valencia oranges were carried to English and colonial markets. When Charles II began tightening up colo- nial trade, Sir George Downing, of Harvard's first graduating class, saw to it that this Mediterranean traffic was allowed to continue. The middling grade of dried codfish, easy to transport, to keep, and to prepare, was a favorite winter food of colonial farm- ers. The lowest-grade dried fish, together with pickled mackerel, bass, and alewives, was the principal me- dium in West-India trade. As John Smith predicted, "Nothing is here to be had which fishing doth hinder, but further us to obtain." Puritan Massachusetts de- rived her ideals from a sacred book; her wealth and power from the sacred cod. Shipping was the other key industry of the colony. Fishing would have brought little wealth, had Massa- chusetts depended on outside interests for vessels as she must to-day for freight-cars. Distribution, not production, brought the big returns in 1620 as in 1920. Massachusetts shipbuilding began with the launching in 1631 of Governor Winthrop's Blessing of the Bay, on the same Mystic River that later gave birth to the beautiful Medford-built East-Indiamen. By 1660 shipbuilding had become a leading industry in New- bury, Ipswich, Gloucester, Salem, and Boston. The great Puritan emigration brought many shipwrights and master builders, such as William Stephen, who "prepared to go to Spayne, but was persuaded to New England." A four-hundred-ton ship Seqfort l was built 1 The method of computing tonnage in colonial times was probably the same that prevailed in the United States from the Revolution to 1865. Tonnage meant a vessel's capacity in tons of forty cubic feet each, estimated by the following formula (L = length on deck, B = greatest breadth, D = depth of hold) : (L- 3 / 5 B)XBXD 95 THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND at Boston in 1648, but wrecked on the Spanish coast, decoyed by false lights ashore. Few Massachusetts-built vessels were so large as this; four hundred tons meant a great ship as late as 1815. The colonial fleet for the most part consisted of small single-decked sloops, the usual rig for coasters, and lateen-rigged ketches, the favorite rig for fisher- men, of twenty to thirty tons burthen, and thirty-five to fifty feet long. 1 Good oak timber and pine spars were so plentiful that building large ships on order or specu- lation for the English market soon became a recognized industry. Rope- walks were established, hempen sail- cloth was made on hand looms, anchors and coarse iron- work were forged from bog ore, and wooden 'trunnels' (tree nails) were used for fastening planking to frame. The English Navigation Act of 1651, restraining colonial commerce to English and colonial vessels, gave an increased impetus to New England ship- building; for the Dutch, with their base at New Am- sterdam, had been serious competitors. In another generation, vessels built and owned in New England were doing the bulk of the carrying trade from Chesa- peake Bay to England and southern Europe. "Many a fair ship had her framing and finishing here," wrote Edward Johnson about 1650, "besides lesser vessels, barques and ketches; many a Master, beside common Seamen, had their first learning in this Colony." Half the breadth was generally used in lieu of depth after the War of 1812, and sometimes so used as early as 1789. William Stephen in 1661 contracted to build for Salem parties a two-decked ship, 91 x 23 X 9$ at 3.5 per ton. Her tonnage would be 190. The Mayflower's was 180 (according to Bradford), but she was probably somewhat shorter and deeper. 1 See the model of the ketch Sparrow-Hawk, which brought forty passengers to Plymouth Colony in 1626, in the Peabody Museum, Salem; and her very ribs, preserved for two centuries in Cape Cod sand, now in the basement of Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth. 15 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS The shipmaster's calling has always been of high repute in Massachusetts. Only the clergy, the magis- tracy, and the shipowning merchants, most of whom were retired master mariners, enjoyed a higher social standing in colonial days. The ship Trial of two hun- dred tons, one of the first vessels built at Boston, was commanded by Mr. Thomas Coytmore, a gentleman of good estate, "a right godly man, and an expert seaman," says Governor Winthrop who made his fourth matrimonial venture with Captain Coytmore's widow. The foremast hands were recruited in part from English seaports, but mostly from the adventure- loving youth of the colonies. When Captain John Turner came back from the West Indies in a fifteen- ton pinnace, with so many pieces of eight that the neighbors hissed "Piracy!"; when the Trial "by the help of a diving tub," recovered gold and silver from a sunken Spanish galleon ; what ploughboy did not long for a sea-change from grubbing stumps and splitting staves? When gray November days succeeded the splendor of Indian summer, the clang of wild geese overhead summoned the spirit of youth to wealth and adventure "La-bas, ou les Antilles bleues Se p^&:;3^. BOSTON HARBOUR /eu<). accortforui to tA* latent *. REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION in 1788. Yet it did not entirely cease. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," prints the instructions of an owner to a slaver which left that port in 1785. Dr. Bentley, who had a keen scent for this nefarious traffic, notes in his diary the names of at least eight Salem shipmasters who engaged in it, at one time or another, between 1788 and 1802. A mutiny in the middle passage dis- posed of one ; another was killed by a negro in revenge ; one, "of a most worthy family," died at Havana, an- other cut his own throat. Only one seems to have been arrested, and he was released for lack of evidence; al- though an extant log of one of his voyages, from Salem to the Guinea coast and the West Indies, bears witness to his guilt. Salem had a regular trade with the West African coast, rum and fish for gold dust, palm oil, and ivory; and it would be surprising if an occasional ship- master did not yield to the temptation to load ' black ivory' as well. The statistics of slave imports at Charleston, be- tween 1804 and 1808, disclosed by Senator Smith, of South Carolina, in the latter year, state that seventy of the entering vessels belonged to Great Britain, sixty- one to Charleston itself, fifty-nine to Rhode Island, only one to Boston, and none to any other Massachu- setts port. But this does not include the West- Indian slave trade; and an interesting insurance policy, dated June 13, 1803, suggests how it could be carried on with- out breaking either the laws of Massachusetts or of the United States. One of the most eminent and fa- mous firms of China merchants, acting as agents for one Robert Cuming, of St. Croix (Danish West Indies), insures for $33,000 at ten per cent, his ship Hope and cargo from the coast of Africa to Havana, under Danish colors. " The assurers are liable for loss by insurrection, but not by natural mortality. Each slave is valued at 33 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS two hundred dollars." This policy is underwritten by seven of the most respectable Boston merchants, and negotiated by an eighth. William Lloyd Garrison exposed a domestic slave- trader of Newburyport in 1829, one who took slaves as freight from Baltimore to New Orleans. Even later the New Bedford whaling masters occasionally engaged in the African trade. Only a thorough examination of our court records, and of the archives of such foreign seaports as Havana, would reveal a measure of the full truth. Yet I believe the statement warranted that the slave trade, as prosecuted from Massachusetts or by Massachusetts capital after the Revolution, was occa- sional and furtive, rather than a recognized under- ground traffic. Certainly it played no prominent part in the commercial prosperity of the community; and the assertion, often disproved but as often repeated, that Massachusetts was "the nursing mother of the horrors of the middle passage," is without any founda- tion in fact. Shipbuilding came to a standstill shortly after the Revolution. With no British market for our bottoms, and British colonial ports closed to the American flag; with French, Austrians, Germans, Dutch, and Swedes competing for our carrying trade, and no gov- ernment capable of granting protection; the shipping supremacy of Massachusetts seemed forever ended. According to an official report of the French consul at Boston, about one hundred and twenty-five vessels had been launched annually in Massachusetts be- fore the war. In 1784, only forty-five vessels left the ways; and twelve of them, built for the French East- India service, were so poorly constructed that no more outside orders came. Between 1785 and 1787, only fifteen to twenty were built annually. A goodly fleet of 34 REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION merchantmen, and several new privateers like the Astrea and Grand Turk, constructed during the last year or two of the war, were on hand; but there was little employment for them. Instead of sending her fleet to all Europe, as optimists predicted, Massachu- setts found her own harbors thronged with foreign flags, and her wharves heaped high with foreign goods. Between May and December, 1783, twenty-eight French vessels, and almost the same number of English merchantmen, brought cargoes, worth almost half a million dollars, into Boston Harbor alone. Consisting largely of luxuries, they were nevertheless snapped up (on credit, of course) by the merchants of this war- stricken town of ten thousand inhabitants. Peace brought a riot of luxury such as Massachusetts never saw again until 1919. The war debt was enormous, the need of production imperative; but privateering, spec- ulation, and the continental currency had so under- mined Yankee thrift and energy that many persons thought the character of the race had completely changed. Travelers commented on the vulgar display of the profiteers, and the reckless spending of farmers and mechanics. We hear of artisans buying silk stockings, and 'jeunes paysannes' coming into Bos- ton market, wearing 'chapeaux Montgolfiers.' Worst of all, civil conflict was impending. For some years before the Revolution, central and western Massachusetts had been increasing rapidly in popula- tion, and acquiring class consciousness. The farmer no longer blessed the merchant, but cursed him as an exploiter. All classes and sections had allied to resist British imperialism; but the war brought about much friction. Mutual accusations of profiteering and slack- ing were frequent. Berkshire County refused obe- dience to the Boston government until 1780; and few 35 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS debts or taxes were paid in western Massachusetts for seven years. By 1783 the farmers had acquired a higher standard of living, and a heavy burden of debts. European creditors began to press Boston merchants ; who turned to their country storekeeper debtors, who began to distrain on the farmers, who then called upon govern- ment to establish a moratorium for debts, and to issue cheap money. But maritime Massachusetts controlled the government, by the simple device of apportioning the state senate according to taxable wealth. Every effort of the representatives to relieve the farmers died in the upper house. The merchants even shifted the burden of taxation to those who could least bear it. Forty per cent of the state expenses were raised by poll-taxes, which fell equally on rich and poor, merchant prince and plough- boy. The customs duties were low, and largely evaded ; Samuel Breck tells in his "Recollections" how the best people would smuggle in a good proportion of each cargo, as if the customs were still the King's. Owing to the dislocation of the West- India trade and the departure of the French and British armies, there was no longer a market for the farming and domestic produce of central New England. Prices and common labor fell to almost nothing. At this crisis, the state government began to distrain on tax delinquents, and the merchants on their debtors. The courts became clogged with suits. Farms which had been in one family for generations, were sold under the hammer at a fraction of their real value, to pay debts contracted at inflated prices, or a few years' overdue taxes. The situation became intolerable to men who had fought for liberty. In the summer of 1786 the storm broke. The up- 36 REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION country yeomanry, under the leadership of Revolu- tionary officers like Daniel $hays, began breaking up sessions of the courts, in the hope of a respite from confiscations until the next state election. Govern- ment ordered them to disperse, and preached "fru- gality, industry and self-denial." The yeomanry persisted, and the tide of lawlessness rolled nearer Boston. Governor Bowdoin proclaimed the rebel leaders outlaws. They then resolved to be outlaws in- deed, and attacked the Springfield arsenal in search of better weapons than pitchforks and Queen's arms. One ' whiff of grapeshot ' dispersed the ragged battal- ions to the bleak hills of western Massachusetts. Loyal militia and gentlemen volunteers from the seaboard, advancing through the deep snow of a hard winter, broke up the remaining bands, early in 1787. It was a victory of property over democracy; of maritime Massachusetts over farming Massachusetts. Notwithstanding these civil disorders, some brave efforts were made both by the Commonwealth and by private individuals, in the years near 1786, to make the state more self-sufficient. The Massachusetts Bank, first in the state, was chartered in 1784. A small manufacturing boom set in about the same time. The "Boston Glass House" was established by a group of local capitalists in 1786, and received a state monopoly for manufacturing window-glass. The Cabot family established the Beverly Cotton Manufactory in 1787. Most of these experiments closed their doors in a few years' time. But the Charles River Bridge from Boston to Charlestown, opened on the eleventh anniversary of the battle of Bunker Hill, was a financial success, and encouraged the building of several other toll-bridges that greatly increased the facilities of the seaport towns. 37 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS In the meantime, commerce was slowly reviving. Yankee skippers l were learning to outwit both Bar- bary corsairs and West India regulations. Orders in Council changed neither the Jamaican appetite for dried codfish, nor the Yankee thirst for Jamaica rum. A Massachusetts vessel putting into a British port "in distress" was likely to obtain an official permit to land its cargo and relieve the "starving population." France, thanks to Jefferson's diplomacy, gradually re- opened her insular possessions ; and Spain permitted di- rect trade with Havana, Trinidad, and New Orleans. St. Eustatius, St. Bartholomew, and the Virgin Islands became entrepots for illicit traffic. Much New England lumber and whale oil found its way to the West India and English markets by acquiring a " British " character in Nova Scotia. Despite the English disposition to "cramp us in the Cod-Fishery," as Stephen Higgin- son put it, and the bounties paid by France to her pecheurs d 'Islande, the West Indies took a greater pro- portion of our dried codfish in 1790 than in 1775. But the total exports were still far below those of the pre- Revolutionary era. By 1787 the West-India trade was in a measure re- stored. Beverly, for instance, imported about 3100 gallons of foreign rum, 7000 gallons of "other foreign distilled spirits," 400 pounds of cocoa, 3500 pounds of sugar, and 50,000 pounds of leaf tobacco, between April I and July I, 1787. The benefits of a reopened market for farm produce and wooden ware, percolating into the interior, did more to salve the wounds of Shays's Rebellion than all the measures passed by the Great and General Court. 1 This term is correctly used only for the masters of fishing vessels, coasters, and small craft such as traded with the West Indies. A docu- ment of 1775 in the Beverly Historical Society speaks of "the chuner Mary thomas Rusel Skiper & oner." 38 REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION But the general commercial situation in Massachu- setts was still most unsatisfactory. Every state, under the Confederation, had its own customs duties and tonnage laws. When Massachusetts attempted to dis- criminate against British vessels, her neighbors re- ceived them with open arms; and British goods reached Boston from other ports by coasting sloops. Not even the coasting trade was confined to the American flag ; and the port dues were constantly changed. More commercial treaties were needed with foreign powers. Federal bounties were needed to revive fishing. Shays's Rebellion, fortunately, sent such a thrill of horror through the states, that conservative forces drew to- gether to create a more perfect union. In the struggle of 1788 over the ratification of the Federal Constitution, Massachusetts was a pivotal state. The voters returned an anti-Federalist majority to her ratifying convention. By various methods, enough votes were changed to obtain ratification. A meeting of four hundred Boston mechanics (following, it is said, a promise by local merchants to order three new vessels upon ratification) drew up strong Federalist resolutions, which turned the wavering Samuel Adams. Governor Hancock was reached by methods less direct. Boston hospitality had its influence. "I most Tel you I was never Treated with So must politeness in my life as I was afterwards by the Treadesmen of Boston merchants & every other Gentlemen," wrote a backwoods member. Finally the Convention ratified, by a majority of 19 out of 355 votes. The sectional alignment was significant. The coast and island coun- ties of Massachusetts proper cast 102 votes in favor, and only 19 against, ratification. The inland counties * 1 Including Middlesex and Bristol, the bulk of whose population was agricultural at this period. 39 MAKITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS cast 60 in favor, 128 against. For the third time in ten years, maritime Massachusetts won over farming Massachusetts. On her proper element, maritime Massachusetts was already winning a cleaner fight: victory over lethargy and despair; victory over powers who would cramp her restless energy, doom her ships to decay, and her seamen to emigrate. Some subtle instinct, or maybe thwarted desire of Elizabethan ancestors who, seeking in vain the Northwest Passage, founded an empire on the barrier, was pulling the ships of Massa- chusetts east by west, into seas where no Yankee had ever ventured. Off the roaring breakers of Cape Horn, in the vast spaces of the Pacific, on savage coasts and islands, and in the teeming marts of the Far East, the intrepid shipmasters and adventurous youth of New England were reclaiming their salt sea heritage. PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC 1784-1792 MARITIME commerce was the breath of life for Massa- chusetts. When commerce languished, the common- wealth fell sick. When commerce revived even a little, the hot passions of Shays's Rebellion cooled just enough to permit a ratification of the Federal Con- stitution. Prosperity, not only of the seaport towns, but of the agricultural interior, depended as of old upon the success of seafaring Massachusetts. Without prosperity, emigration would follow, and slow decay, and death. The codfishermen must exact tribute from the Banks; the whalers must pursue their 'gigantic game' around the Horn, the merchants and trading vessels must recover their grip on the home market and the handling of Southern exports; must find substitutes for the protected trade of colonial days; must elude the Spanish guarda costas along the circumference of South America; must compete with English, Scots, and Dutchmen in the Baltic and the Indies; and must seek out new, virgin markets and sources of supply in the Pacific. All this had to be done, that Massachu- setts retain her position among the brighter stars of the American constellation. The doing of it determined her political orientation ; transformed a revolutionary com- munity, the most fecund source of political thought in the western world, into a conservative commonwealth, the spearhead of the aggressively reactionary Federal- ist party. " From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS a conversation, or a thought in the State," wrote Emerson. Speaking relatively and broadly, he was right. The Yankee mind, engrossed in the struggle for existence, neglected things spiritual and intellectual during this Federalist period of its history; and the French Revolution made thought suspicious to a com- mercial community. Yet thought there was, even though the Sage of Concord might not call it by that name ; the thought that opens up new channels of trade, sets new enterprises on foot, and erects a political system to consolidate them. By such thought, no less than the other, the grist of history is ground. Every seaport of Massachusetts proper from New- buryport to Edgartown was quickening into new activity in 1789; none more so than the capital. The Boston of massacre and tea-party, of Sam Adams and Jim Otis, of uproarious mobs and radical meetings, was in transition to that quiet, prosperous, orderly Federalist Boston, the Boston of East-India merchants and Federalist statesmen; of Thomas Handasyd Per- kins, Charles Bulfinch, and Harrison Gray Otis. In appearance, the Boston of 1790 was unchanged since 1750. Charles Bulfinch had returned from Eu- rope, but his native town had barely taken up the slack of the turbulent era ; some accumulation of wealth was needed to employ his architectural talents. The eight- een thousand inhabitants were not crowded on their peninsula of seven hundred and eighty acres about nine-tenths the area of Central Park, New York. As one approached it by the Charles River Bridge in 1790, Boston seemed "almost to stand in the water, at least to be surrounded by it, and the shipping, with the houses, trees, and churches, have a charming effect." Beacon Hill, a three-peaked grassy slope, still innocent of the gilded dome, dominated the town. From its 42 SAMUEL SHAW PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC base a maze of narrow streets paved with beach stones, wound their way seaward among ancient dwellings; dividing around Copp's and Fort Hills to meet again by the water's edge. One of them, to be sure, led to "landward to the west," but at spring tides even that, too, went "downward to the sea." Buildings crowded out to the very capsills of the wharves, which poked boldly into deep water. The uniform mass of slate and mossy shingle roofs, pointed, hipped, and gambreled, was broken by a few graceful church spires, serene elders of the masts that huddled about the wharves. As for the people, "Commerce occupies all their thought," writes Brissot de Warville in 1788, "turns all their heads, and absorbs all their speculations. Thus you find few estimable works, and few authors." But "let us not blame the Bostonians; they think of the useful before procuring themselves the agreeable. They have no brilliant monuments; but they have neat and commodious houses, superb bridges, and ex- cellent ships." To Timothy Dwight, of New Haven, the Bostonians seemed "distinguished by a lively imagination. . . . Their enterprises are sudden, bold, and sometimes rash. A general spirit of adventure prevails here." One bright summer afternoon in 1 790 saw the close of a great adventure. On August 9, Boston town heard a salute of thirteen guns down-harbor. The ship Columbia, Captain Robert Gray, with the first Ameri- can ensign to girdle the globe snapping at her peak, was greeting the Castle after an absence of three years. Coming to anchor in the inner harbor, she fired another federal salute of thirteen guns, which a "great con- course of citizens assembled on the various wharfs re- turned with three huzzas and a hearty welcome." A rumor ran through the narrow streets that a native of 43 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS "Owyhee" a Sandwich-Islander was on board; and before the day was out, curious Boston was grat- ified with a sight of him, marching ' after Captain Gray to call on Governor Hancock. Clad in a feather cloak of golden suns set in flaming scarlet, that came halfway down his brown legs; crested with a gorgeous feather helmet shaped like a Greek warrior's, this young Hawaiian moved up State Street like a living flame. The Columbia had logged 41,899 miles since her de- parture from Boston on September 30, 1787. Her voyage was not remarkable as a feat of navigation; Magellan and Drake had done the trick centuries be- fore, under far more hazardous conditions. It was the practical results that counted. The Columbia's first voyage began the Northwest fur trade, which enabled the merchant adventurers of Boston to tap the vast reservoir of wealth in China. The history of this discovery goes back to the close of hostilities, and reveals a thread of optimism and energy running through years of depression. In December, 1783, the little fifty-five-ton sloop Harriet, of Hingham, Captain Hallet, sailed from Boston with a cargo of ginseng for China. Putting in at the Cape of Good Hope, she met with some British East-Indiamen who, alarmed at this portent of Yankee competition, bought her cargo for double its weight in Hyson tea. Captain Hallet made a good bargain, but lost the honor of hoisting the first American ensign in Canton, to a New York ship, the Empress of China. Although the capital and the initiative were of New York, the direction of this voyage was entrusted 44 PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC to the supercargo l of the Empress, Major Samuel Shaw, of Boston, one of the few sons of New England mercantile families who had served through the entire war. The Empress of China arrived at Macao on August 23, 1784, six months out from New York; and despite Shaw's inexperience brought home a cargo that proved America need pay no further tribute for teas or silks to the Dutch or British. Major Shaw's report to the government was published, stimulating others to repeat the experiment; and he freely gave of his ex- perience to all who asked. After receiving the purely honorary title of American consul at Canton, he re- turned thither in 1786, on the ship Hope of New York, James Magee master, to establish the first American commercial house in China. He was also one of the first in the East-India trade. A short residence in Bombay so affected his liver, that he died on a home- ward voyage in 1794, in his fortieth year. Of Samuel Shaw it was said by that rugged shipmaster of Dux- bury, Amasa Delano, that "he was a man of fine tal- ents and considerable cultivation ; he placed so high a value upon sentiments of honor that some of his friends thought it was carried to excess. He was can- did, just and generous, faithful in his friendships, an agreeable companion, and manly in all his inter- course." Shortly after her arrival at Canton, the Hope was joined by the Grand Turk, of Salem, Captain Ebenezer West, the first Massachusetts vessel to visit the Far 1 A supercargo was the representative on shipboard of owners and consigners. He took no part in navigation, but handled the business side of the voyage. A captain often acted as supercargo, especially when a relative of the owners; in such cases he generally carried a clerk to keep the books. Promotion of a supercargo to the command of a vessel was called "coming in through the cabin window"; promotion of a foremast hand, "coming in through the hawse-hole." 45 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS East. Her return to Salem on May 22, 1787, brought fabulous profits to her owner, whetted the appetite of every Massachusetts merchant, and (what was equally important) fixed their good wives' ambition on a chest of Hyson, a China silk gown, and a set of Canton china. Although America was outstripping every other nation in China trade, save Britain, she could not long compete with Britain without a suitable medium. The Canton market accepted little but specie and eastern products. British merchants could import the spoil of India and the Moluccas opium and mummie and sharks' fins and edible birds' nests. Yet Britain paid for the major part of her teas and silks in silver. Massachusetts, on the morrow of Shays's Rebellion, could not afford to do this. Ginseng could be procured and sold only in limited quantities. Unless some new product were found to tickle the palate or suit the fancy of the finicky mandarins, the Grand Turk's voyage were a flash in the pan. To find some- thing salable in Canton, was the riddle of the China trade. Boston and Salem solved it. The ship Columbia was fitted out by a group of Boston merchants who believed the solution of the problem lay in the furs of the Northwest Coast. Cap- tain Cook's third voyage, the account of which was published in 1784, and John Ledyard's report of the Russian fur trade in Bering Sea, gave them the hint. Possibly they had also learned from Samuel Shaw that a few Anglo- Indian traders, whom Captain Gray later met on the Coast, had already sold Alaskan sea-otter at Canton. Although privately financed, with fourteen shares of $3500 each, 1 the voyage was conceived in the public 1 The shareholders were Joseph Barrell, Samuel Brown, and Captain Crowell Hatch, prominent Boston merchants; Charles Bulfinch the 4 6 CAPTAIN GRAY ASHORE AT WHAMPOA SHIP COLUMBIA ATTACKED BY INDIANS IN JUAN DE FUCA STRAIT PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC spirit of the old merchant adventurers. A medal was struck to distribute among the natives. An expert furrier, a surgeon, and (luckily for us) an artist were taken. John Kendrick, of Wareham, commanded both the expedition, and the ship Columbia, eighty- three feet long, two hundred twelve tons burthen, built at Hobart's Landing on the North River, Scitu- ate, in 1773. Robert Gray, born of Plymouth stock in Tiverton, Rhode Island, and a former officer in the Continental navy, was master of the ninety-ton sloop Lady Washington, which accompanied the Columbia as tender. Both vessels made an unusually long passage, and encountered heavy westerly gales off Cape Horn, which they were the first North American vessels to pass. On April i, 1788, in latitude 57 57' south, they parted company. Gray reached the coast of "New Albion" eleven months out of Boston, and was joined by the Columbia at Nootka Sound, the fur-trading center on Vancouver Island. It was too late to do any trading that season, so both vessels were anchored in a sheltered cove, while the crew lived ashore in log huts and built a small boat. In the summer of 1789, before a full cargo of skins had been obtained, provisions began to run low. Captain Kendrick therefore remained be- hind, but sent Gray in the Columbia to Canton, where he exchanged his cargo of peltry for tea, and returned to Boston around the world. The Columbia's first voyage, like most pioneering enterprises, was not a financial success. Fourteen American vessels preceded her to Canton, and most of them reached home before her. Four of them, belong- ing to Elias Hasket Derby, of Salem, had approached the China market from a different angle and with architect, John Derby, son of E. H. Derby, of Salem, and J. M. Pintard, a merchant of New York. 47 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS greater success. The ship Astrea, Captain James Magee, 1 carried a miscellaneous cargo, which had taken almost a year to assemble. The barques Light Horse and Atlantic exchanged provisions at Mauritius (lie de France) for bills which at Bombay, Calcutta, and Surat bought a good assortment for Canton ; the brig Three Sisters, Captain Benjamin Webb, disposed of a mixed cargo at Batavia, where she was chartered by a Dutch merchant to carry Java products to Canton. She and the Atlantic were there sold, and the entire proceeds invested in silks, chinaware, and three- quarters of a million pounds of tea, which were loaded on the two larger vessels. Elias Hasket Derby, ignorant even of the arrival of his vessels at Canton, was beginning to feel a bit nerv- ous toward the end of May, 1790, when a brig arrived with news of them. On June I, the Astrea was sighted in Salem Bay. But Mr. Derby's troubles were not yet over. On June 15, the Light Horse appeared; but for lack of wind was forced to anchor off Marblehead. In the night an easterly gale sprang up. The vessel was too close inshore to make sail and claw off. Early in the morning her crew felt that sickening sensation of dragging anchors. Astern, nearer, nearer came the granite rocks of Marblehead, where the ragged popula- tion perched like buzzards, not displeased at the pros- pect of rich wreckage at Salem's expense. "King Darby" hurried over in his post-chaise to watch half his fortune inching toward disaster on his very door- step. Finally, with but a few yards to spare between rudder and rocks, the anchors bit, and saved the Light 1 Captain James Magee (1750-1801), described as "aconvivial, noble- hearted Irishman," during the Revolution commanded the man-of-war brig General Arnold, which was wrecked in Plymouth Bay. He mar- ried Margaret Elliot, sister of Mrs. Thomas Handasyd Perkins, and lived in the old Governor Shirley mansion at Roxbury. 4 8 PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC Horse until a shift of wind brought her to the haven where she would be. Two months later, Captain Gray entered Boston with a damaged cargo to find Captain Magee adver- tising China goods in the Boston papers. But the Columbia had opened a channel to fortune that her rivals were quick to follow. As supercargo of the Astrea, Mr. Derby had chosen Captain Magee's young brother-in-law, Thomas Hand- asyd Perkins. The Boston " Herald of Freedom " for January 6, 1789, announced that all persons "wishing to adventure" aboard the Aslrea "may be assured of Mr. Perkins' assertions for their interest." Those who accepted were not disappointed; and the pedigrees of many Boston fortunes can be traced to that China voyage and its consequences. Young Perkins inherited an aptitude for the fur trade from his grandfather, Thomas Handasyd Peck, the leading fur exporter of the province; and he had learned the mercantile busi- ness at his mother's knee. The widow Perkins, one of those remarkable New England women of the Revo- lutionary period, carried on her husband's business with such success that letters used to be received from abroad addressed to "Elizabeth Perkins, Esq." No wonder that, with such forbears, Thomas Handasyd Perkins became the first of Boston merchants, both in fortune and in public spirit. On returning to Boston in 1790, young Perkins bought the little seventy-ton brigantine Hope, and sent her under Captain Gray's former mate, Joseph Ingraham, to the Northwest Coast. In a single summer she collected fourteen hundred sea-otter skins. The Columbia started on her second voyage in September, 1790, and the brigantine Hancock, one hundred fifty- seven tons, Samuel Crowell master, two months later. 49 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS Lieutenant Thomas Lamb and his brother James, merchants, joined Captain Magee in building at Bos- ton, the ship Margaret, one hundred fifty tons, which sailed under the latter's command on December 24, 1791, "bound on a voyage of observation and enter- prise to the North- Western Coast of this Continent." Others quickly followed. By 1792 the trade route Boston-Northwest Coast- Canton-Boston was fairly established. Not only the merchantmen of Massachusetts, but the whalers (of whom more anon), balked of their accustomed traffic by European exclusiveness, were swarming around the Horn in search of new markets and sources of supply. It was on May 12, 1792, that Captain Gray (according to the seventeen-year-old fifth mate of the Columbia, John Boit, Jr.) "saw an appearance of a spacious harbour abreast the Ship, haul'd our wind for it, observ'd two sand bars making off, with a passage between them to a fine river. Out pinnace and sent her in ahead and followed with the Ship under short sail, carried in from 1/2 three to 7 fm. and when over the bar had 10 fm. water, quite fresh. The River extended to the NE. as far as eye cou'd reach, and water fit to drink as far down as the Bars, at the entrance. We directed our course up this noble River in search of a Village. The beach was lin'd with Natives, who ran along shore following the Ship. Soon after, above 20 Canoes came off, and brought a good lot of Furs, and Salmon, which last they sold two for a board Nail. The furs we likewise bought cheap, for Copper and Cloth. They appear'd to view the Ship with the great- est astonishment and no doubt we was the first civ- ilized people that they ever saw. At length we arriv'd opposite to a large village, situate on the North side of the River, about 5 leagues from the entrance. . . . Capt. 50 THOMAS HANDASYD PERKINS PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC Gray named this river Columbia's and the North en- trance Cape Hancock, and the South Point, Adams. This River in my opinion, wou'd be a fine place for to set up a Factory. . . . The river abounds with excellent Salmon." On her first voyage, the Columbia had solved the riddle of the China trade. On her second, empire fol- lowed in the wake. CHAPTER V THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE 1788-1812 BEFORE the Columbia returned again, another rash enterprise of Boston merchants, an attempt to enter the Canton market through imitation of the British East India Company, had failed. The ship Massachu- setts, of almost eight hundred tons burthen, the largest vessel constructed to that date in an American ship- yard, was built at Quincy in 1789 for Samuel Shaw and other Boston merchants. Her model and dimen- sions were taken from a British East-Indiaman, and her equipment and roster, with midshipmen and cap- tain's servants, imitated the Honourable Company so far as Yankee economy permitted. Under the com- mand of Captain Job Prince, the Massachusetts sailed from Boston on March 28, 1790. She carried a gen- eral cargo, which her owners expected to exchange at Batavia for goods suitable for Canton. But the Dutch authorities (as one might have foreseen) refused a permit. When the Massachusetts arrived at Canton with an unsalable cargo, after a long and tempestuous voyage, Samuel Shaw gladly seized an opportunity to sell her for $65,000 to the Danish East India Company. This experience prejudiced American ship- owners against vessels larger than five hundred tons, and determined the merchants of Boston to concen- trate on the Northwest fur trade. "The habits and ordinary pursuits of the New Eng- landers qualified them in a peculiar manner for carry- ing on this trade," wrote one of them, "and the em- 52 THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE barrassed state of Europe gave them . . . almost a monopoly of the most lucrative part of it." Salem merchants preferred the Cape of Good Hope route, over which they attained their first success; English- men, Philadelphians, and New Yorkers soon dropped out; and by 1801, out of sixteen ships on "The Coast" (as Boston called it this early) all but two were Bos- tonian. The masters and mates, and at first the crews, were for the most part Bostonian, and the vessels of Boston registry. So it is no wonder that the Chinook jargon, the pidgin English of the Coast, names United States citizens "Boston men" as distinguished from " Kintshautsh (King George) men." The most successful vessels in the Northwest fur trade were small, well-built brigs and ships of one hundred to two hundred and fifty tons burthen (say sixty-five to ninety feet long), constructed in the ship- yards from the Kennebec to Scituate. Larger vessels were too difficult to work through the intricacies of the Northwest Coast. They were heavily manned, in case of an Indian attack; and copper-bottomed by Paul Revere's newly invented process, to prevent accumu- lating barnacles and weeds in tropic waters. The Win- ships' Albatross, which neglected this precaution, took almost six months to round Cape Horn, and found her speed reduced to two knots an hour. Clearing from Boston in the autumn, in order to pass the high lati- tudes during the Antarctic summer, they generally arrived on the Coast by spring. "The passage around Cape Horn from the East- ward I positively assert," wrote Captain Porter, of the frigate Essex, "is the most dangerous, most difficult, and attended with more hardships, than that of the same distance in any other part of the world." A passage in which many a great ship has met her death ; 53 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS in which the head winds and enormous seas put small vessels at a great disadvantage. Yet, so far as I have learned, not one of these Boston Nor'westmen failed to round the Horn in safety. To obtain fresh provisions and prevent scurvy, the Nor'west traders broke their voyage at least twice; at the Cape Verde Islands, the Falklands, sometimes Galapagos for a giant tortoise, and invariably Hawaii. For these were leisurely days in seafaring, when a homeward-bound vessel would stand by for hours while the crew of an outward-bounder wrote letters home. Captain Ingraham on his passage out in the Hope, in 1791, discovered and named the Washington group of the Marquesas Islands, whose women (so he informed the jealous officers of the Columbia) were "as much handsomer than the natives of the Sandwich Islands as the women of Boston are handsomer than a Guinea negro." After the soft embrace of South Sea Islands, the savage grandeur of the Northwest Coast threw a chill on first-comers. Behind rocks and shingle beaches, on which the long Pacific rollers broke and roared in- cessantly, spruce and fir-clad mountains rose into the clouds, which distilled the sea-borne moisture in almost daily showers. The jagged and picturesque coast-line a Maine on magnificent scale offered countless harbors; but behind every beach on the outer margin was a mass of dank undergrowth, impenetrable even for the natives, whose dugout canoes served for hunting and fishing, transport and war. On making his landfall, a Boston Nor'westman came to anchor off the nearest Indian village, bartered so long as he could do business, and then moved on to one after another of the myriad bays and coves until his 54 THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE hold was full of valuable furs. It was a difficult and hazardous trade, requiring expert discrimination in making up a cargo, the highest skill in navigation, and unceasing vigilance in all dealings with the Indians. The Northwest Indians were dangerous customers. Captain Kendrick, on parting with Gray during their pioneer voyage, wrote him, "treet the Natives with Respect where Ever you go. Cultivate frindship with them as much as possibel and take Nothing from them But what you pay them for according to a fair agree*, ment, and not suffer your peopel to affront them or treet them 111." Gray obeyed, although he found the Indians already treacherous and aggressive; the result, he believed, of English outrages. The Boston men, both from interest and humanity, endeavored by just and tactful dealings to win the natives' confidence. But their work was hampered by irresponsible fly-by- nights who would pirate a cargo of skins, and never return. In the early days, scarcely a voyage passed without a battle. Captain Kendrick lost a son, and was once driven from his own vessel by an Indian Amazon and her braves. The Columbia lost her second mate, and several members of her crew at " Murderers' Harbor." In 1803, the natives near Nootka Sound attacked the Amorys' ship Boston, Captain John Salter, and slaughtered all the ship's company but two; one of whom, John Jewitt, lived to write a narrative that thrilled generations of schoolboys. Given a firm mas- ter and stout crew, the Nor'west trading vessels could take care of themselves. Beside swivel-guns on the bulwarks, they were armed with six to twenty cannon, kept well shotted with grape, langrage or canister; and provided with boarding nettings, muskets, pistols, cutlasses and boarding pikes. The quarterdecks were 55 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS loopholed for musket fire, the hatches were veritable 'pill-boxes.' When a flotilla of dugouts surrounded the vessel, only a few natives were permitted on board at one time, and men armed with blunderbusses were sent into the cross-trees, lest the waiting customers lose patience. Even peaceably inclined, the natives were hard to please. "They do not seem to covet usefull things," writes Captain Gray's clerk, "but anything that looks pleasing to the eye, or what they call riches." They rated a fellow- Indian socially by his superfluous blankets, by copper tea-kettles that were never used, and by bunches of old keys worn like a necklace and kept bright by constant rubbing. When rebuked by Captain Sturgis for this wasteful display, an Indian chief anticipated Veblen by adverting to the Boston fashion of placing brass balls on iron fences, to tarnish every night and be polished by the housemaid every morning! The Indians evidently had more discrimination than generally acknowledged, for on her first voyage the Columbia carried large numbers of snuff-bottles, rat- traps, Jews'-harps, and pocket mirrors, which (except for the last) were a dead loss. Her second cargo, in 1790, is typical of the Northwest fur trade as long as it lasted. From Herman Brimmer were bought 143 sheets of copper, many pieces of blue, red, and green 'duffills' and scarlet coating. Solomon Cotton sold the Columbia's owners 4261 quarter-pound ' chissells ' ; Asa Hammond, 150 pairs shoes at 75 cents; Benjamin Greene, Jr., blue duffle trousers at 92 cents, pea jackets, Flushing great coats, watch-coats and 'fear- noughts'; 1 Samuel Parkman, 6 gross 'gimblets,' and 1 A stout woolen cloth, used for outside clothing at sea. The chisels were merely short strips of iron. Duffles, also a coarse woolen, had been 56 THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE 12 gross buttons; Baker & Brewer, striped duffle blanketing; Samuel Fales, 14 M 2od. nails; and the United States government, 100 old muskets and blunderbusses. 1 Very few of these articles were manu- factured in Massachusetts, and sometimes a Nor'west- man would make up a cargo in England before starting for the Coast. New England rum, that ancient medium for savage barter, is curiously absent from the North- west fur trade. Molasses and ship-biscuit were used instead of liquor to treat the natives. The principal fur sought by Boston traders was that of the sea-otter, of which the mandarins had never been able to obtain enough from Russian hunters. Next to a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, said Captain Sturgis, a prime sea-otter skin two feet by five, with its short, glossy jet-black fur, was the finest natural object in the world. Its price varied consider- ably. Captain Gray's mate obtained two hundred skins at Queen Charlotte's Island for two hundred trade chisels (mere bits of strap iron) ; but at Nootka Sound the price was ten chisels apiece, or six inches square of sheet copper. Most vessels took a metal- used by New Englanders in the beaver trade since the seventeenth century. 1 Most Boston business firms who do not figure in the invoices are found among those supplying the outfit. John Derby, part owner, fur- nished 4 cannon and 8 swivels (probably from one of his father's former privateers), and Captain D. Hathorn (great-uncle of Nathaniel Haw- thorne) freighted them from Salem. S. & S. Salisbury furnished twine and lead pencils; John Joy, one medicine chest; Thomas Amory Jr. & Co., 14 bbls. pitch and turpentine; J. & T. Lamb, 6 anchors; Josiah Bradlee, horn Mantherns,' tin kettles and a coffee pot; Samuel Whitwell, a blacksmith's bellows; J. Levering & Sons, 27 Ib. tallow; Elisha Sigourney, 71 Ib. grape shot; J. L. & B. Austin, cordage; Jonathan Winship, 135 bbls. beef; Mungo Mackay, 3 hds. N.E. rum; Lewis Hoyt, 2 hds. W.I. rum and 3 kegs essence of spruce; Wm. Boardman Jr., 3 ironbound casks; Robt. & Jos. Davis 20 bbls. cider, 6 of cranberries, 2 of barberries and 10 pigs. (Columbia MSS., 59.) 57 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS worker to make tools and weapons to order. Captain Ingraham's armorer made iron collars and bracelets, which became all the rage on the Coast and brought three otter skins each. Captain Sturgis, observing that the Indians used ermine pelts for currency, procured five thousand of them at the Leipzig fair for thirty cents apiece. On his next voyage he purchased one morning five hundred and sixty sea-otter skins, worth fifty dollars apiece in Canton, at the rate of five ermines, or a dollar and a half, each. But he so in- flated the currency that it soon lost value ! Later, not- ing that war-captives were a recognized form of wealth among the Indians, some Boston traders began buying them from tribes which were long on slaves, and selling them to tribes which were short. This form of specu- lation in foreign exchange was sternly reproved by George Lyman, and forbidden to his vessels and ship- masters. The first white men to attempt a permanent estab- lishment in the Oregon country were the Winship brothers of Brighton Abiel, the Boston merchant, Captain Jonathan, Jr., and Captain Nathan, who com- manded the family ship Albatross. On June 4, 1810, she sailed forty miles up the Columbia River and anchored off an oak grove, where her crew broke ground for a vegetable garden, and started work on a log house. But the Chinook Indians, the fur middle- men of Oregon, would brook no competition. Having no warships or marines to back them up, the Winships were forced to evacuate. It was a sad disappointment. Jonathan Winship, Jr., whose hobby was horticulture, "hoped to have planted a Garden of Eden on the shores of the Pacific, and made that wilderness to blossom like the rose." Others fulfilled his dream, bringing slips from the very rose-garden of Brighton 58 THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE where Captain Jonathan spent the long tranquil years of retirement he had earned so well. 1 Unless exceedingly lucky, vessels remained eighteen months to two years on the Coast, before proceeding to Canton, and it was commonly three years before Long Wharf saw them again. Small brigs and sloops were sent out, or built on the Coast, to continue the collection of furs during the absence of the larger vessel. The Sandwich Islands proved an ideal spot to re- fresh a scorbutic crew, and even to complete the cargo. Captain Kendrick (who plied between Canton and the Coast in the Lady Washington until his death in 1794) discovered sandalwood, an article much in demand at Canton, growing wild on the Island of Kauai. A vigorous trade with the native chiefs in this fragrant commodity was started by Boston fur- traders in "the Islands"; leading to more Hawaiian visits to New England, to the missionary effort of 1820, and even- tually to annexation. Another variation to the standard China voyage was contraband fur-trading along the coast of Spanish California. According to H. H. Bancroft, the first American vessel to anchor in California waters was the ship Otter of Boston, one hundred and sixty-eight tons, Ebenezer Dorr, Jr., master, which put in at Monterey for provisions in 1796. All trade and inter- course between Boston men and Californians was con- traband; but both seized every opportunity to flout the Laws of the Indies. 1 "Solid Men of Boston" (MS.), 70. Jonathan, Jr., founded the beef- slaughtering business at Brighton in 1775, and supplied the American army and French fleet during the Revolution. Charles Winship, another brother in this remarkable family, died at Valparaiso about 1800, when in command of the brigantine Betsy, bound for the Northwest Coast. A second Captain Charles Winship, son of a fifth brother, died at Val- paraiso in 1819 or 1820 when in command of a sealing voyage. 59 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS Boston vessels generally carried a Carta de Amistad from "Don Juan Stoughton, Consul de S.M.C. para los Estados Unidos de New Hampshire, Massachu- setts," etc. This was to be used if forced to put into one of His Catholic Majesty's ports "par mal Tiempo o otre acontecimiento imprevisto" which exigency was pretty sure to occur when the land breeze smelt sea-otterish. Richard J. Cleveland, of Salem, owner and master of the brig Lelia Byrd, tried to make off with some pelts under the very nose of Commandant Don Manuel Rodriguez, who retaliated in the blood- less "Battle of San Diego" on March 21, 1803. But untoward incidents were rare. At his next port, San Quintin, the Lelia Byrd's people got on beautifully with a group of mission fathers who came down to trade and gossip. They spent two merry weeks together on this lonely shore, dining alternately in tent and cabin, inaugurating a half-century of close and friendly rela- tions between Puritan and Padre on the California coast. Nothing like a common interest in smuggling to smooth religious differences! Captain Joseph O'Cain, of Boston, in a ship of two hundred and eighty tons named after himself and built on North River for the Winships, inaugurated a new system of otter-hunting in 1804. Putting in at New Archangel (Sitka), he persuaded Baranov, the genial Russian factor, to lend him a hundred and fifty Aleut Indians, on shares. These expert otter-hunters, putting out from the ship in their skin canoes, like Gloucester fishermen in dories, obtained eleven hun- dred sea-otter pelts for Captain O'Cain in his first California cruise. Kills were made under the very walls of the San Francisco presidio. Three years later, O'Cain chartered his ship Eclipse of Boston to the Russian-American Company, traded their furs at 60 THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE Canton, visited Nagasaki and Petropavlovsk, lost the vessel on the Aleutian Islands, built another out of the wreck, and returned to trade once more. 1 California sea-otter and fur-seal hunting, combined with contra- band mission trade, was pursued with much success for about ten years, when the Russians declined further aid to their competitors. Another class of Pacific fur-traders were the "seal- skinners." About 1783, the ship States, owned by a Boston woman, 2 was fitted out for a voyage to the Falklands in search of fur-seal and sea-elephant oil. Some of the sealskins obtained were carried on a venture to China, and the result encouraged others to follow. Although sealskins brought but a dollar or two at Canton, such quantities (even a hundred thou- sand on a single voyage) could be obtained merely by landing on a beach and clubbing the helpless animals, that vessels were especially fitted out to go in search of them, and the smaller Nor'westmen occasionally picked up a few thousand on their way to the Coast. Connecticut was more conspicuous in this trade than Massachusetts; but several vessels were commanded by Nantucketers, and others were owned there and in Boston or Salem. As in whaling, the men were gen- erally shipped on shares, and often cheated out of them. Masafuero, in the Juan Fernandez group, was the center for seal-killing; but other islands off the Chilian coast, St. Paul and Amsterdam Islands in the 1 One would like to know more of this Captain O'Cain. He was an Irishman whose parents lived in Boston, and first visited the Coast in 1795 on an English vessel, whose master, at his request, left him at Santa Barbara. He managed to return to Boston in time to be married there in 1799. * ' Lady ' or ' Madam ' Haley, as she was called in Boston, was a sister of the famous Jack Wilkes: for second husband, she married Patrick Jeffery, a Boston merchant. 6l MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS Indian Ocean, South Georgia, the Farralones and Santa Catalina off California, were visited before 1810. Gangs of sealers would be left on some lonely island in the South Pacific, while the vessel smuggled goods into Callao, Concepcion, Valparaiso, and smaller places like Coquimbo and Pisco. Amasa Delano, of Duxbury (private, U.S.A., at fourteen, privateersman at sixteen, master shipbuilder at twenty-one, second mate of the ship Massachusetts), with his brother built the sealers Perseverance and Pilgrim, and sailed as far as Tas- mania, where they matched rascalities and exchanged brutalities with one of the British convict colonies. It was a Boston sealskinner, the Dorrs' Otter, which rescued from Botany Bay Thomas Muir, one of the victims of Pitt's Sedition Act. Eighty years later, New Bedford whalers were extending the same cour- tesy to exiled Fenians. The first commercial relations between the United States and the west coast of South America, were established by sealers, Nor'westmen, and whalers putting in "under stress of weather" to obtain provi- sions, and indulge in the favorite Yankee pastime of swapping. To a certain extent they imported ideas; Richard J. Cleveland made a point of spreading republican propaganda at Valparaiso. The manner of their reception depended on the official mood. Bernard Magee in the ship Jefferson had only to present his ship's papers, signed by Washington, to receive the freedom of Valparaiso from Governor-General Don Ambrosio O'Higgins. Others were not so fortunate, and many a poor sailor, forced against his will into smuggling, spent in consequence a term of years in a South American calaboose. Whaling was another industry of maritime Massa- chusetts that renewed its strength in the Pacific. But 62 THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE we must postpone our whaling voyage lest we lose sight of the Canton market, the golden lodestone for every otter-skin, sealskin, or sandalwood log collected on Northwest Coast, California, or Pacific Islands. CHAPTER VI THE CANTON MARKET 1784-1812 THE Northwest trade, the Hawaiian trade, and the fur- seal fisheries were only a means to an end: the pro- curing of Chinese teas and textiles, to sell again at home and abroad. China was the only market for sea- otter, and Canton the only Chinese port where foreign- ers were allowed to exchange it. Major Shaw's description of the Canton trade in 1784 would fit any year to 1840. After a voyage of several weeks from Hawaii, a Yankee trader passed be- tween Luzon and Formosa, made Lintin Island, ran a gantlet of piratical junks, paused at the old Portuguese factory of Macao, and sailed up-river past the Bogue forts to Whampoa, the anchorage for all foreign mer- chantmen. There the Hoppo came aboard to receive gifts for wife, mother, and self, and measure the ship for her 'cumshaw-duty.' Thence her cargo was light- ered in chop-boats twelve miles upstream to Canton, landed at Jackass Point, and stored in a factory or hong hired from one of the twelve Chinese security merchants, who had a monopoly of foreign trade, and acted as commercial godfathers to the Fan-Kwae, or foreign devils. To Yankee seamen, fresh from the savage wilderness of the Northwest, how marvelous, bewildering was old Canton ! Against a background of terraced hongs with their great go-downs or warehouses, which screened the forbidden City of Rams from foreign devils' gaze, flowed the river, bearing a city of boats the like of 64 THE HONGS OF OLD CANTON THE PAGODA ANCHORAGE, WHAMPOA THE CANTON MARKET which he had never dreamed. Moored to the shore were flower-boats, their upper works cunningly carved into the shape of flowers and birds, and strange sounds issuing from their painted windows. Mandarin boats decorated with gay silk pennants, and propelled by double banks of oars, moved up and down in stately cadence. Great tea-deckers, with brightly lacquered topsides and square sail of brown matting, brought the Souchong, Young Hyson, and Bohea from up- river. In and out darted thousands of little sampans, housing entire families who plied their humble trades afloat. Provision dealers cried their wares from boats heaped high with colorful and deadly produce. Bar- bers' skiffs announced their coming by the twanging of tweezers, emblem of their skippers' painful profes- sion. Twilight brought the boat people to their moor- ings, a bamboo pole thrust in oozy bottom, and paper lanterns diffused a soft light over the river. For color and exotic flavor there was no trade like the old China trade, no port like Canton. Boston traders, in contrast to the arrogant officials of Honourable John, were welcomed by the Chinese; and on their part acquired an esteem for the Chinese character that has endured to this day. Russell Sturgis, who traveled and resided in many lands, said that he never knew better gentlemen than the Hong merchants. Houqua's name was a household word in Boston mer- chants' families. They never tired of describing old Houqua tearing up the $72,000 promissory note of a homesick Bostonian, with the remark, "You and I olo flen; you belong honest man only no got chance. . . . Just now have setlee counter, alia finishee; you go, you please." But trade did not always go on in this princely manner. The Chinese were able to instruct even Bostonians in the pleasant art of smuggling. There 65 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS was much clandestine trade in otter-skins from Yankee ships in Macao Roads, or the near-by Dirty Butter Bay; good training for opium-running at a later period. The strange laws and customs of the Chinese led to the creation of Boston mercantile agencies at Canton in order to ease the way for American traders. Major Shaw established the first, Shaw & Randall, on his return to Canton as American consul in 1786. The Columbia's cargo was handled by him, and a commis- sion of seven and one-half per cent charged on the re- turn lading. Competition later reduced this to two and one-half per cent, of which one was returned to the su- percargo. The most famous house of our period was Perkins & Co., a branch of J. & T. H. Perkins, of Bos- ton. Established in 1803, the illness of the chief put this concern under the charge of his sixteen-year-old clerk, John Perkins Gushing. The young man's letters were so precocious that his uncles made him permanent head man, and took him into partnership. Except for two brief visits home, Gushing remained at Canton thirty years, and became the most wealthy and highly respected foreign merchant in China. What with the commissions, duties, presents, and graft that must be yielded at every step to hoppo, comprador, or linguist, the cost of doing business at Canton was very heavy. The Columbia's first lading, of one thousand and fifty sea-otter skins, sold for $21,404.71; but after fees, expenses, and repairs were deducted, only $11,241.51 remained to invest in a homeward cargo. Even after the ropes were learned, it was a clever captain who expended less than six thou- sand dollars at Canton. Yet the American demand for tea, nankeens, crapes, and silks increased so fast, and Boston merchant-shipowners proved so efficient in the cheap handling and distribution of China goods to all 66 THE CANTON MARKET parts of the world, that the trade grew by leaps and bounds. The value of imports at Canton on American vessels rose to over five million dollars in 1805-06; of this over one million was accounted for by 17,445 sea- otter, 140,297 seal, and 34,460 beaver-skins, and 1600 piculs of sandalwood. Most of the remainder was spe- cie brought directly from Boston, New York, and Phil- adelphia. The same year American vessels exported almost ten million pounds of tea from Canton. It was a constant marvel to Europeans, who conducted the China trade in great ships owned by chartered monopolies, how the Americans managed to survive these heavy charges with their small, individually owned vessels. Yet the American, and particularly the Boston way of China trading was the more econom- ical. Free competition, and elimination of pomp and circumstance, more than made up for the small craft's disadvantage in 'overhead.' When the winter season brought favoring winds, the ships quickly completed their lading, obtained the Grand Chop that passed them down-river, and caught the northeast monsoon down the China Sea. Off the coast of Borneo began several hundred miles of danger- ous waters: shoals, reefs, and fantastic islands, baffling winds and treacherous currents, among which one had the feeling that Conrad describes, of being constantly watched. Let a vessel but touch on submerged reef, and hundreds of Malay proas come swarming to take her life's blood. Through Caspar Passage or Banka Straits the vessel reached a welcome stretch of open water, and before long the sight of Java Head. A stop for fresh provisions was made off the village of Anjer, where Java "rose from level groves of shore palms to lofty blue peaks terraced with rice and red- massed kina plantations, with shining streams and 67 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS green kananga flowers and tamarinds, and the land breeze, fragrant with clove buds and cinnamon, came off to the ship like a vaporous dusk." 1 There, the ship was quickly surrounded by a swarm of canoes plied by naked Malays, and laden with cocoanuts, oranges, mangoes and mangosteen; with Java sparrows, par- rots, monkeys, green turtles, and Malacca-joint canes. From this enchanted spot the ship threaded the Sunda Straits, full of dangerous rocks that rose out of seventy-fathom depths, toward which the currents ir- resistibly drew becalmed vessels. "Thank God we are clear of Sunda Straits," confided a Boston shipmaster to his sea journal on November 19, 1801. '"T is sur- prising to see the joy depicted on every one's counte- nance at getting clear of these horrid straits. Many of the sailors who had never been off duty was now obliged to take to their beds. Many a time they had to support themselves on a Gun while doing their duty. Still they would not give out till we got clear. Such men as these deserve my best regards." Once a vessel was clear of the straits, a quartering southeast wind stretched her across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. Simon's Town was frequently visited for a little smuggling. Then, after a last call at St. Helena, the China trader squared away for Cape Cod. "There are better ships nowadays, but no better seamen," wrote an aged Boston merchant in 1860; and his words still hold good. Of these gallant Nor'west- men, who thought no more of rounding the Horn than their descendants do of rounding Cape Cod, Captain 1 Hergesheimer, Java Head. 68 THE CANTON MARKET 'Bill' Sturgis was one of the best. A tough, beetly- browed son of a Cape Cod shipmaster, he left Boston for the Coast in 1798 as sixteen-year-old foremast hand on the ship Eliza, belonging to T. H. Perkins, his young but wealthy relative. He returned to Boston five years later as master of the Lambs' ship Caroline, and of the fur trade. On his third voyage, in command of Theodore Lyman's new ship Atahualpa with $300,- ooo in specie on board, he beat off an attack of sixteen pirate junks in Macao Roads. Returning, he formed with John Bryant, of Boston, the firm of Bryant & Sturgis, which after the War of 1812 revived the North- west fur trade, and opened the hide traffic with Cali- fornia. William Sturgis became one of the wealthiest mer- chants of Boston, and lived to hear the news of Gettys- burg; but no one dared call him a merchant prince. Owing perhaps to the caricature of leisure-class display he had seen among the Northwest Indians, Captain Sturgis refused to surround himself with paintings, bric-a-brac, and useless furniture. Throughout the worst period of interior decoration, his simple mansion on Church Green remained as neat and bare as a ship's cabin. When he occupied a Boston seat in the Great and General Court, one of the professional orators of that body got off a long Greek quotation. Captain Bill replied in one of the Indian dialects of the North- west Coast, which, he explained, was much more to the point, and probably as well understood by his col- leagues, as that of the honorable and learned gentle- man. Public-spirited without self-advertisement, writ- ing and lecturing with salty emphasis on the Oregon country, an honored member of learned societies, yet proud that he came in through the hawse-hole; Wil- liam Sturgis was the finest type of Boston merchant 69 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS created by these far-flung adventures of Federalist days. Another famous Nor'westman, who had neither the background nor the connections of William Sturgis, was Captain John Suter. Born of Scots parents near Norfolk, Virginia, in 1781, left a penniless orphan at the age of eight, he made his way to Boston on a schooner. The child was befriended by a Boston pilot, who taught him to hand, reef and steer, to read his Bible, and to live straight. At seventeen he began his deep-sea voyages. The next two years brought ad- ventures enough to have dampened any one's ardor for seafaring; privateering against France, capture, and a Brest dungeon; a West- India voyage, impressment into a British frigate, an attack of smallpox, and one of ' yellow jack/ Yet no sooner was the boy back in Bos- ton than he shipped as foremast hand on the ship Alert outward bound to the Northwest Coast and Canton. Without education, family, or anything but his own merits to recommend him, John Suter did so well on his first Northwest voyage that on his second, in 1804, he sailed as mate and "assistant trader" on the ship Pearl. On her return, he was promoted to master and supercargo, and made a most successful voyage to the Coast and Canton. The value of ship, outfit, and cargo, judging from statistics of other voyages, could not have exceeded forty thousand dollars. 1 In spite of some unpleasantness with the Indians who once had to be cleared from the Pearl's decks by cross-fire from the loopholes Captain Suter collected enough furs 1 The cargoes of twelve vessels which cleared from Boston for the Northwest Coast between 1797 and 1800 were invoiced between $7500 and $19,700. (Solid Men of Boston, 76.) The Caroline in 1803 asked only $14,000 and obtained but $13,000 insurance for ship, cargo, and outfit. The rate was seventeen per cent, covering risk "against the Natives and as well on shore as on board." 70 and sandalwood to pay all expenses at Canton, and lay out $156,743.21 in goods. His return cargo is so typical of that trade and period, that I give it in detail, from the Captain's own manuscript memoranda, with the prices realized at auction sale in Boston. SALES OF SHIP PEARL'S CARGO AT BOSTON, 1810 50 blue and white dining sets, 172 pieces each. ... $ 2 290.00 480 tea sets, 49 pieces each 2 704.80 30 boxes enameled cups and sauces, 50 dozen each I 360.00 100 boxes Superior Souchong tea 795-87 100 chests Souchong 3 834.66 235 " Hyson 13 290.65 160 Hyson Skin 5 577.40 400 " other teas 13 668.48 200 chests Cassia of 2208 "matts" each 8 585.52 170 ooo pieces ' Nankins' 1 18 850.00 14 ooo " (280 bales) blue do 24 195.00 5 ooo " (50 " ) yellow do 6 800.00 2 ooo " (50 " ) white do 2 580.00 24 bottles oil of Cassia 466.65 92 cases silks (black 'sinchaws,' black ' sattins,' white and blue striped do. dark brown plains, bottle-green and black striped 'sattins for Gentlemens ware" 56 344.61 And sundries, bring the total to 261 343.18 Expenses of sale, including auctioneer's commission, wharfage, truckage, "advertising in Centinel and Gazette, 5.50," "advertising and crying of sales, 30.31," "liquors, 5.88" 2 129.06 Captain Suter's 'primage,' 5% on balance 12 960.70 Balance to owners 246 253.42 On this were paid customs duties, within 12 months. . . 39 602.95 Net profit on voyage 206 650.47 Having proved himself both a keen trader and an able master, Captain Suter was offered by George 71 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS Lyman a 'primage' of ten per cent, with the usual ' privilege ' and salary, to succeed Captain Sturgis on the Atahualpa. He accepted, and took a sixteenth share in ship and cargo as well. Owing to his ruthless repulse of a band of Indians who had boarded the Pearl, Captain Suter returned to the Coast a marked man. One day an Indian chief came on board, ostensibly to trade. Immediately a flotilla of dugouts, containing over two thousand warriors, issued from behind a wooded point and sur- rounded the Atahualpa. They found a worthy suc- cessor to Captain Sturgis on her quarterdeck. Suter took the chief by the throat, put a pistol to his head, and told him to order the canoes away or he would blow his brains out. The order was given. Deliber- ately weighing anchor, Captain Suter made sail, and when free of the canoes released his prisoner, who turned out to be the very Indian who had successfully attacked John Jacob Astor's Tonquin. Owing to the War of 1812 and the presence of British cruisers in the Pacific, Captain Suter sold the Atahu- alpa at Hawaii at considerable sacrifice; but he got enough furs into Canton to send home, after peace was concluded, a cargo that netted the owners almost $120,000 on their original adventure of not over $40,000. Would that we could reproduce the language, ex- pressions, and motions of that extinct breed, the Nor'- westman of Boston ! Of John Suter, little survives but bare facts, and one anecdote. He was more deeply religious than most New England-born sea-captains, and read the Bible aloud daily on shipboard. One young scamp of a supercargo amused himself by put- ting back the bookmark at the conclusion of every day's reading, until the Captain remarked mildly that 72 THE CANTON MARKET he seemed to be having head winds through the Book of Daniel ! After a sixth and a seventh voyage around the world, Captain Suter settled down in Boston to the tranquil joys of home and family, church and lodge, that he had fairly won from sea and savage barter. "Sir, you'l please to let my mama know that I am well, Mr. Boit [the fifth mate, aged seventeen] also requests you'l let his parent know he is in health." This postscript to a letter of John Hoskins, clerk of the Columbia, to her principal owner, reminds us how young were the Yankee seamen of that period. It seems that the generation of Revolutionary privateers- men was so quickly absorbed in our expanding mer- chant marine as to call the youngest classes to the colors. A famous youngsters' voyage to Eastern waters, many times described, was that of the Derby ship Benjamin, of Salem, in 1792-94. Captain Na- thaniel Silsbee, later United States Senator from Massachusetts, was but nineteen when he took com- mand of this vessel; yet he had followed the sea for five years, served as Captain Magee's clerk on the Astrea, and commanded two voyages to the West In- dies. His first mate, Charles Derby, was but one year older; his clerk, Richard J. Cleveland, but eighteen. The second mate, an old salt of twenty-four, proved insubordinate and was put ashore! With a miscellaneous cargo, including hops, saddlery, window glass, mahogany boards, tobacco, and Madeira wine, these schoolboys made a most successful voyage to the Cape of Good Hope and He de France, using sound judgment as to ports, cargoes, and freight, amid embargoes and revolutions; slipping their cables at Capetown after dark in a gale of wind to escape a British frigate; drifting out of Bourbon with the ebb tide to elude a French brig-o'-war; spending a few 73 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS days fishing, shooting wild goats, and catching turtles at Ascension ; returning to Salem after nineteen months' absence, with a cargo which brought almost five hun- dred per cent profit to the owner, and enabled the young master to make a home for his mother and sisters. Captain Silsbee was by no means the youngest ship- master on record. James Rowland, 2d, of New Bed- ford, was given a merchant ship by his father on his eighteenth birthday, and as her captain went on a honeymoon voyage to the Baltic with his still younger bride, before the year elapsed. But the most remarkable youthful exploit in this bright dawn of Pacific adventure, that has come to my notice, is John Boit, Jr.'s voyage around the world, in the eighty-nine-ton sloop Union, of Boston. At the age of nineteen, on August I, 1794, he sailed from Newport as master of this sixty-foot craft and her crew of twenty-two, with ten carriage guns, eight swivels, and a full cargo and outfit for the Northwest Coast. The voyage south was pleasantly broken by catching green turtles and shooting albatross one measuring sixteen feet tip to tip ; by celebrating Christ- mas Day, and stopping at St. lago and the Falklands, to save the crew from scurvy, and to hunt wild hogs. The Union rounded the Horn safely in thick, blowy weather, reaching 57 42' south latitude on February 4, 1795. On May 16, two hundred and sixty days out, she sighted land, and the next day dropped anchor in "Columbia's cove, Bulfinch's Sound," on Vancouver Island. Here, young Boit tells us, he felt quite at home. The natives recognized him, and inquired after each and every member of the Columbia's crew. Furs were double the price of 1792, but trade was brisk, and the sloop went as far north as 54 15' to complete her cargo. 74 THE CANTON MARKET On June 20, when lying at anchor in Puget Sound, the Union was attacked by several hundred Indians under Chief Scootch-Eye. With husky savages swarm- ing around the sloop and over his bulwarks, Captain Boit and his crew kept their nerve, and without a sin- gle casualty to themselves killed the chief and forty of his warriors. When they got under weigh, and stood in toward the nearest village, the Indians came out trembling, waving green boughs and offering otter- skins in propitiation. After a fruitless attempt to cross the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River, the Union went north again to Queen Charlotte's Island, and left the Coast for Canton on September 12, 1795. One month later, Captain Boit sighted "Owhyhee," at a distance of thirty leagues. The next day, sailing alongshore, the sloop was visited by native canoes bringing hogs and pineapples, and "the females were quite amorous" On December 5, the sloop joined seven larger American vessels at Whampoa. After exchanging his sea-otter for silk and nankeens, and taking freight and passen- gers for the lie de France, he got under weigh in com- pany with the American fleet on January 12, 1796. It was a two months' sail through the China Sea, the Straits of Sunda, and the Indian Ocean to Mauritius. Completing his cargo there with coffee and pepper, Captain Boit began the last leg of his voyage at the end of March, 1796. After passing the Island of Mada- gascar, he found the sloop's mast sprung, and had to fish it and apply preventer backstays while under weigh. Then came a four days' westerly gale, which stove in part of the Union's bulwarks, and swept the hen-coops off her deck, as she lay to. Early in May she rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and caught the southeast trades. Off Georges Bank, she was brought 75 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS to by the French sloop-of-war Scipio, but allowed to pass "with the utmost politeness." Near Boston Har- bor the British frigate Reason fired a shot through the Union's staysail, and forced the young master to come aboard with his papers, but "finding they could not make a prize of the sloop, suffer'd me to pass, after treating me in a rough and ungentlemanlike manner." At last, on July 8, came the welcome gleam of Boston Light. Castle William, as seafaring men still called Fort Independence, saluted the returning sloop with fifteen guns, which she returned. Anchoring in the inner harbor, she saluted the town, and got "three huzzas of welcome" from the wharves. The Union made a "saving voyage," beat most of the fleet home, and was the first, possibly the only, sloop-rigged vessel ever to circumnavigate the globe. In view of the newspaper publicity given nowadays to men of twice Boit's age and experience for cross- ing the Atlantic in vessels no smaller than the Union and far better equipped, it is refreshing to note the scant attention he got. "Sloop Union, Boit, Canton," in small type at the end of 'Arrivals' in the "Boston Centinel." That was all ! l Many a Boston family owes its rise to fame and fortune to the old Nor'west and China trade ; and not a few of them were founded by masters who came in through the hawse-hole, like Sturgis and Suter. Emoluments were much higher than on any other trade route. Masters and mates received only twenty to twenty-five dollars monthly wages; but each officer 1 Another Boston paper reports his experience with the men-of-war, but makes no comment on his voyages. 76 THE CANTON MARKET had the 'privilege' of one-half to five tons (twenty to two hundred cubic feet) cargo space on the homeward passage for his private adventures in China goods; beside 'primage,' a commission of from one to eight per cent 1 on the net proceeds of the voyage. It was only prudent for owners to be generous with their ships' officers, on a route where the opportunities for private trading and fixing accounts were so great. Even with half the luck of John Suter, a master could clear twenty-five hundred dollars a year, and pyramid his profits by taking a share in the next voyage he commanded. These wages and allowances were sufficient to at- tract the best type of New Englander. Nor'westmen's officers were almost exclusively native-born or adopted Yankees, and the men recruited largely from Cape Cod, Boston, and ' down East.' But every forecastle contained a few foreigners. 2 No Richard Dana has told the story of the Nor'- westmen from the foremast angle. Unless the rec- ords of our admiralty courts yield something, the common seaman's side is lost. Certain it is, that the Northwest fur trade, until it existed no more, enjoyed a greater prestige and popularity among New England seamen than any other route. 3 Mutinies occurred, but 1 Suter's primage of ten per cent on the Atahualpa was exceptional. On his next voyage, in the Mentor, he received but seven and one-half. The Mentor's chief mate had twenty dollars wages, one per cent on net sales at Canton, and two and one-half tons ' privilege' home. 1 See chapter vm. 1 Dana tells a good story illustrating this, in his Two Years Before the Mast. On her homeward voyage from the California coast, with a cargo of hides, the Alert spoke a Plymouth brig, and sent a boat aboard to procure fresh provisions. Her Yankee mate leaned over the rail, and asked where they were from. "From the Nor'west Coast !" said sailor Joe, wishing to gain glory in the eyes of this humble West-India trader. "What's your cargo?" came next. "Skins!" said Joe. "Here and there a horn?" said the mate dryly, and every one laughed. 77 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS mutinies prove little. One that Captain Suter sup- pressed in Honolulu Harbor, with his strong right arm and cutlass, was caused by gambling among the crew. Many deserted in the Sandwich Islands, but who would not? Rumors have come down of unscrupulous own- ers, who in order to save money abandoned men on the Northwest Coast and substituted Kanakas. Cap- tain James Magee brought the first Chinaman to the United States, but he was a student, not a sailor. And few such made the voyage twice. As "China Jack" (the favorite Whampoa factotum for American ves- sels) remarked after essaying a round trip to Boston, "Too muchee strong gale, sea allsame high mast head no can see sky!" CHAPTER VII THE SALEM EAST INDIES 1790-1812 THE most formidable rival to Boston in the contest for Oriental wealth lay but sixteen miles "to the east'd," as we say on the Massachusetts coast when we mean north. Salem, with a little under eight thousand in- habitants, was the sixth city in the United States in I79O. 1 Her appearance was more antique even than that of Boston, and her reek of the salt water, that almost surrounded her, yet more pronounced. For half a mile along the harbor front, subtended by the long finger of Derby Wharf, ran Derby Street, the residen- tial and business center of the town. On one side were the houses of the gentry, Derbys and Princes and Crowninshields, goodly gambrel or hip-roofed brick and wooden mansions dating from the middle of the century, standing well back with tidy gardens in front. Opposite were the wharves, separated from the street by counting-rooms, warehouses, ship-chandlers' stores, pump-makers' shops, sailmakers' lofts; all against a background of spars, rigging, and furled or brailed-up sails. Crowded within three hundred yards of Derby Street, peeping between the merchants' mansions and over their garden walls like small boys behind a po- lice cordon, were some eighteen or nineteen hundred wooden buildings, including dwellings of pre-witch- craft days, with overhanging upper stories, peaked gables, small-paned windows, and hand-rifted clap- boards black with age. 1 Not including Beverly, which with three thousand, three hundred inhabitants in 1790, was combined with Salem as a port of entry in 1789. 79 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS A few steps from the merchant's mansion lies his counting-room and wharf, where his favorite vessel is loading Russia duck, West-India sugar, New-England rum and French brandy for anywhere beyond the Cape of Good Hope; to return with goodness knows what produce of Asia, Africa, and the Malay Archipel- ago, which you may then purchase at wholesale or retail from the selfsame wharf. From his front chamber the merchant may watch the progress of his new vessel in the near-by shipyard ; but unless he be a privileged character like ' King' Derby, with " an intuitive faculty in judging of models and proportions," he had best not interfere. Shipbuilding, an ancient industry in Salem, is now growing fast ; the China voyages of the Grand Turk and Astrea produced such a demand for new ton- nage that Enos Briggs, a master builder of Pembroke in the Old Colony, has come to Salem, and at the head of Derby Wharf is constructing a new Grand Turk of five hundred and sixty tons, for which the new duck manufactory is weaving sailcloth. Next year he shall astonish the natives by launching a vessel sideways from the wharf; all Salem, summoned by town crier, helping or cheering. Ebenezer Mann, another North- Riverite, has the barque Good Intent on the stocks for Simon Forrester; and a vessel is rising on every slip of the ancient yard where Retire Becket carries on the business of his ancestors. A Salem boy in those days was born to the music of windlass chanty and caulker's maul ; he drew in a taste for the sea with his mother's milk; wharves and ship- yards were his playground; he shipped as boy on a coaster in his early teens, saw Demerara and St. Petersburg before he set foot in Boston, and if he had the right stuff in him, commanded an East-Indiaman before he was twenty-five. 80 THE SALEM EAST INDIES Whenever a Salem lad could tear himself away from the wharves, he would go barefoot to Juniper Point or pull a skiff to Winter Island, and scan the bay for approaching sail. Marblehead was a better vantage- point ; but it was a lion-hearted Salem boy indeed who dared venture within the territorial waters of Marble- head in those days! The appearance of a coaster or fisherman or West-India trader caused no special emotion; but if the stately form of an East-Indiaman came in view, then 't was race back to Derby Wharf, and earn a silver Spanish dollar for good news. The word speeds rapidly through the town, which begins to swarm like an ant-hill ; counting-room clerks rush out to engage men for unloading, sailors' taverns and board- ing-houses prepare for a brisk run of trade, parrots scream and monkeys jabber, and every master of his own time makes for cap-sill, roof- tree, or other vantage- point. Let us follow one of the privileged, an old-time provincial magnate now in the East-India trade, as with powdered wig, cocked hat, and scarlet cloak, attended by Pompey or Cuff with the precious tele- scope, he puffs up garret ladder to captain's walk. What a panorama! To the east stretches the noble North Shore, Cape Ann fading in the distance. No sail in that direction, save a fisherman beating inside Baker's. Across the harbor, obscuring the southerly channel, Marblehead presents her back side of rocky pasture to the world at large, and Salem in particular. Wind is due south, tide half flood and the afternoon waning, so if the master be a Salem boy he will bring his ship around Peach's Point, inside Kettle Bottom, Endeavors, Triangles, and the Aqua Vitaes. We adjust the glass to the outer point where she must first appear, and wait impatiently. A flash of white as the sun 81 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS catches foretopgallant sails over Naugus Head; then the entire ship bursts into view, bowling along at a good eight knots. Her ensign 's apeak, so all aboard are well. A puff of smoke bursts from her starboard bow, and then another, as the first crack of a federal salute strikes the ear. Fort William replies in kind, and all Salem with a roar of cheering. Every one recognizes the smart East-Indiaman that dropped down-harbor thirty months ago. "Is the front chamber prepared for Captain Rich- ard?" asks our elderly merchant, as he descends to greet his son just in time, for the ship, hauling close to the wind, is making for Derby Wharf. Within ten minutes she has made a running moor, brailed up her sails, and warped into the best berth. The crowd parts deferentially as master and supercargo stalk ashore, gapes at a turbaned Oriental who shipped as cabin boy, exchanges good-natured if somewhat Rabelaisian banter with officers and crew, and waits to see the mysterious matting-covered bales, shouldered out of the vessel's hold. To conclude this picture of Salem at the dawn of her period of greatest prosperity, read this abstract of the entries and customs duties during a period of twenty days, from May 31 to June 18, 1790, as I found them in the old custom house on Derby Street ; and remem- ber that these are foreign entries only, not including the fishermen, and the coasters that distributed Salem's winnings to a hundred American ports. May 31. Brig William 6" Henry, B. Hodges master, from Canton. Tea, coffee, silks, spices and nankeens for Gray & Orne, Benj. Hodges, George Dodge, Jno. Apple- ton, Samuel Hewes Jr., Simon Elliot, Robt. Wyer, Mark Haskoll 9,783.81 June 2. Schooner Betsy, William Wooldridge master, 82 ' .2 H T) FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE This North-European trade was not without its cul- tural contacts. "This day my box from Hamburg arrived with the proceeds of my Coffee," writes Dr. Bentley in his Salem diary for 1806. "The good Pro- fessor has furnished me with great economy with some of the best Books which his country has yielded." Thus German erudition entered New England. Dr. Bentley was one of the American correspondents of Professor Ebeling, of Hamburg, buying for his learned friend numerous imprints of the smaller New England presses, which have disappeared in the country of their production. The books and coffee which the good Doctor cast upon the waters were indeed found after many days, and by his alma mater; for Professor Ebeling's incomparable collection of Americana was purchased by Israel Thorndike, merchant of Beverly, and presented to the Harvard College Library. If Massachusetts had the same share of the Ham- burg trade as of Baltic commerce, more than half the American entries were owned in her ports. For in 1802, out of eighty-one vessels that passed Elsinore dur- ing the open season, twenty-one belonged to Salem, fourteen to Boston, eight to Newburyport, eight to New York, seven to Providence, five to Marblehead, four to Gloucester, two to Charleston, and one each to Philadelphia, Norfolk, New Bedford, and Salisbury. 1 Many arrived not from their home port, but from Lis- bon, Cadiz, the Western Islands, the West Indies, Amsterdam, and Bremen; bringing nankeens, pepper, sugar, fruit, coffee, tea, rum, wine, cotton, indigo, to- bacco, and mahogany to Copenhagen and St. Peters- burg. They cleared, laden with iron, hemp, flax, cord- age and sailcloth, for all parts of the world. Several were schooners and brigantines under eighty tons 1 From a " Sound list " brought home by one of the shipmasters. 179 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS burthen. This type of commerce is generally called the neutral carrying trade; but it was more than a carrying trade as the term is now understood, for the vessels did not merely take freight at inflated figures ; they bought and sold goods on their owners' account, and made immense sums, which no statistics record, by the repeated turnovers. The European trade was also vitally interlocked with the East-India and China trade, that was so rap- idly expanding in the closing years of the eighteenth century. Unless an East-Indiaman made Madeira her first port of call, she generally acquired specie in Eu- rope, or a cargo suitable for Bengal, by selling the proceeds of a former voyage, together with West-India goods, salt provisions, fish, and Southern staples, at any northern or Mediterranean port. "The speedy conversion of your present lading into dollars must be a governing object in your operation," state the in- structions of J. & T. H. Perkins to one of their super- cargoes, outward-bound with East- and West- India goods to the Mediterranean and Calcutta. Hardly a port of Europe there was, from Archangel to Trieste where the Yankee trader was not as familiar as the seasons; hardly an occasion where he was not present, with something to swap. As Nelson's fleet lay licking its wounds after Trafalgar, who should heave in sight but the ship Ann Alexander of New Bedford, Captain Loum Snow, with a cargo of lumber, flour, and apples just what the fleet needed ! Super- cargoes founded mercantile houses in foreign ports. Thomas Hickling, of Boston, settled in the Azores shortly after 1780. Preble & Co. (Ebenezer and Henry, brothers of the Commodore) were soliciting consignments at Dieppe, in 1804. George Loring, of Hingham, married a beautiful Spanish girl in the 1 80 FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE seven teen-nineties; his sons formed the firm of Loring Brothers of Malaga, which fifty years later was oper- ating Massachusetts-built clipper ships under the Spanish flag. The seamen of colonial and post- Revolutionary Massachusetts thought they knew the ropes of Euro- pean trade, but the war led their sons to new ports. Smyrna, the mart of Asia Minor, became the final residence of a loyalist member of the Perkins family, with whom J. & T. H. Perkins opened profitable rela- tions before the end of the eighteenth century, obtain- ing Turkish opium for Canton. A convincing contrast of Yankee enterprise with Eastern lethargy, is the trade followed by Ebenezer Parsons for several years; loading coffee at Mocha in the Red Sea, and circum- navigating Africa to sell it at Smyrna, for three and four hundred per cent profit. The west coast of South America had already made the acquaintance of Yankee whalers and fur-traders, when the Napoleonic wars opened the east coast as well to Massachusetts vessels. The first North Ameri- can merchantman to enter the River Plate appears to have been the brig Alert of Salem, owned by Dudley L. Pickman and others, and commanded by Captain Robert Gray, of Columbia fame. She was captured by a French privateer and carried into Montevideo late in 1798. The Spanish officials fitted her out as a priva- teer under their own colors, but Captain Gray was released, and returned voluntarily in 1801 in command of the schooner James, after touching at Rio de Janeiro. Between February and July, 1802, eighteen Massa- chusetts vessels, and twenty-six from other North 181 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS American ports, brought mixed cargoes to the River Plate, and took away hides and specie ; portending the great hides and lumber traffic of later years between New England, Argentina, and Uruguay. In 1810, William Gray was reexporting " Buenos Ayres Hydes " and Peruvian bark from Boston to Tunis. Several Massachusetts men entered the service of the new republics. Dr. Franklin Rawson, of Essex County, founded a distinguished Argentinian family. The name of Benjamin Franklin Seaver, of Boston, killed in battle while second in command of the Argen- tine fleet, is commemorated in a street of Buenos Aires ; and William P. White, of Pittsfield, who established a mercantile agency there as early as 1804, gave such effective aid to the cause as to be called the "father of the Argentine Navy." A little later, Paul Delano, one of the twenty-one children of Nathan Delano, of Fair- haven, commanded the Chilean frigate Independencia, and applied his Yankee ingenuity to the construction of port works in open roadsteads. William Delano, of the same maritime family, served on the staff of Gen- eral San Martin. Both remained in Chile, where their descendants are prominent citizens to-day. Japan first saw the American flag in 1791, when the famous Boston sloop Lady Washington, Captain Ken- drick, accompanied by the Grace of New York, Cap- tain Douglas, entered a southern Japanese harbor in the hope of selling sea-otter. But the natives knew not the use of fur, and no business was done. It was the foreign policy of the French Committee of Public Safety that gained American commerce its first ex- change with the forbidden kingdom. For almost two centuries the Dutch East India Company had enjoyed the exclusive right of sending one ship a year from Batavia to trade at Nagasaki, when, in 1795, French 182 FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE arms and propaganda transformed the Netherlands into the Batavian Republic, an ally and vassal to France. Fearing capture of its vessels by British war- ships, the Dutch East India Company for four succes- sive years chartered American vessels for the annual cruise. The first, apparently, to have this honor was the ship Eliza of New York, of which there is a con- temporary Japanese painting, showing her being light- ered off a rock in Nagasaki Harbor, in 1798, by several dozen small boats. In 1799 the Perkins's ship Frank- lin of Boston, James Devereux master, was the lucky vessel ; and of her voyage from Batavia to Japan and back we have a full account, from Captain Dever- eux's clerk, George Cleveland. On entering Japanese waters she hoisted the Dutch ensign, fired prescribed salutes of seven to thirteen guns each on passing seven different points, and another on anchoring in Nagasaki Harbor. The Yankee officers had to bend almost dou- ble when Japanese officials came on board, and to com- ply with minute and rigorous harbor regulations dur- ing their four months' stay. But they were allowed, carefully guarded, to visit the town, and to bring back private adventures of cabinets, tea-trays, and carved screens which are still treasured in Salem homes. In 1800 the ship Massachusetts of Boston received the annual charter for the colossal sum of $100,000, it was rumored ; and in 1801 the ship Margaret of Salem pulled off the prize. She was apparently the last American vessel to be received in a Japanese harbor until Com- modore Perry broke the isolation of Nippon. . In 1801, with the election of Jefferson to the presi- dency, the national government fell into the hands of 183 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS a combination partial to France, and professedly un- friendly to maritime commerce. But Jefferson's mod- eration agreeably disappointed maritime Massachu- setts. The Hamiltonian system of fishing bounties, drawbacks, discriminating tonnage duties, and friend- ship with England continued unimpaired. Barbary corsairs were forced to respect the American flag. Jefferson chose his Attorney-General and his Secretary of War in Massachusetts, and but for the illness of Jacob Crowninshield, whose family had been consist- ently Republican, he would have had a Secretary of the Navy from the same state. Early in 1802 Napoleon made peace with England, and the European trade slackened somewhat; but, of course, Massachusetts could not blame this on Jeffer- son. And in 1804, despite the raving of Federalist poli- ticians, the commonwealth cast its electoral vote for the great Virginian. No doubt the maritime interests would have become reconciled to his administration had not a renewal of the war revived the passions and the difficulties of the previous decade. England and Napoleon, by a series of Orders in Council and Imperial Decrees, began attempting to drive neutral shipping from each other's ports. As British sea-power tightened, and Napoleon extended his control over continental Europe, it became no longer easy for American shipping to play both sides. Hitherto, the British prohibition of neutral trading between her enemies and their colonies had been evaded by the "broken voyage" bringing French colonial produce to Boston or Salem, paying duty, re- loading it even on the same vessel, receiving the draw- back, and proceeding to France. But in 1805 Sir Wil- liam Scott made an example of the ship Essex of Salem, 1 1 The same vessel which met a tragic fate in the Red Sea, in 1806. 184 FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE in a decision which remains a landmark in interna- tional law, so-called. Her voyage from Barcelona to Havana via Derby Wharf was declared one continuous voyage, and the cargo confiscated. The merchants of Boston and Salem loudly pro- tested. But before long they discovered that the bark of the Essex decision was worse than its bite. An old drawback book in the Plymouth custom-house records shows what indirect trade was going on in 1806 and 1807. The brig Eliza Hardy of Plymouth enters her home port from Bordeaux, on May 20, 1806, with a cargo of claret wine. Part of it is immediately ree'x- ported to Martinique in the schooner Pilgrim, which also carries a consignment of brandy that came from Alicante in the brig Commerce, and another of gin that came from Rotterdam in the barque Hannah of Ply- mouth. The rest of the Eliza Hardy's claret is taken to Philadelphia by coasters, and thence reexported in seven different vessels to Havana, Santiago de Cuba, St. Thomas, and Batavia. The brig Rufus King, about the same time, brought into Plymouth a cargo of coffee from St. Thomas. It is transferred to Boston, and thence reexported to Rotterdam and Amsterdam in four differ- ent vessels. The barque Hannah also brought wine and brandy from Tarragona, which is reexported from Bos- ton to Havana and Madeira. The schooner Honest Tom left Plymouth for Bordeaux on December 21, 1806, with sugar and coffee that another vessel had brought from the West Indies. She returned to Plymouth on May 1 8, 1807, with wine and brandy which flowed from Boston to Demerara in the ship Jason, to the East In- dies in the ship Jenny, and to San Domingo in the brig Eunice. Thus interposing a coastal voyage between the two ends of an essentially unneutral traffic evidently confused or satisfied the British admiralty. 185 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS President Jefferson stood up for neutral rights, and his representatives at London did their best to have the Essex decision rescinded. But before anything could be done, new and more stringent orders and decrees were issued by England and Napoleon ; and in 1807 the country was stirred by an impressment outrage on the U.S.S. Chesapeake. Had Jefferson then called for a declaration of war, Massachusetts would have ac- cepted war with good grace. Instead, he chose a policy which, without coercing the belligerent nations, sacrificed the commercial profits of Massachusetts and her political good-will. December 22, 1807, the date that Jefferson's embargo went into effect, begins a new period in American maritime history. CHAPTER XIII EMBARGO AND WAR 1807-1815 Our ships all in motion once whitened the ocean, They sailed and returned with a cargo; Now doomed to decay, they have fallen a prey To Jefferson worms and embargo. THUS jingled a newspaper poet at Newburyport in 1808. It was bad enough trying to feel out a channel between orders in council and imperial decrees : but to have one's fleet scuttled by act of Congress, on the pretense of protecting it, seemed outrageous and hypo- critical. The Embargo Act, which remained in force from December 22, 1807, to March 15, 1809, forbade any American vessel to clear from an American harbor for a foreign port, and placed coasting and fishing vessels under heavy bonds not to land their cargoes outside the United States. Another act, which went into effect at the same time, forbade the importation of many British goods. Nothing prevented American vessels then abroad from entering a home port, but once there, they could not legally depart for a foreign voyage. There were many leaks in the embargo. For a time, by special dispensation of the President, merchants were allowed to send abroad for property they had already purchased. An immense smuggling trade went on over the Canadian and Florida borders. Vessels al- ready abroad did not return until the embargo was repealed, if they could help it. The coast was more heavily guarded by federal officials and soldiers than 187 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS during the War of 1812, but nevertheless a number of vessels managed to slip out. Captain Charles C. Doten, of Plymouth, performed two notable feats of this sort. One dark night, in a southeast rainstorm that drove the water-front guards to cover, he re- rigged the schooner Hannah, which had been 'stripped to a girtline' by the collector of the port, with the sails and rigging of another vessel, and piloted her safely out of Plymouth Bay. Later he took the brig Hope out of Provincetown in a northeast gale, hotly pursued and fired upon by the revenue cutter; sold vessel and cargo of fish at St. Lucia for twenty-five thousand dollars, and brought it home in the form of Spanish doubloons, sewed into his clothing. The em- bargo did not kill Massachusetts commerce, then ; but suspended at least half of it, and rendered the rest more furtive, difficult, and hazardous than it ever would have been under mere orders in council and imperial decrees. At the time the embargo was laid, Massachusetts 1 was the principal shipowning commonwealth in America. Her total tonnage per capita was more than twice that of any other state. Her registered tonnage in foreign trade in 1807, 310,310 tons, was thirty- seven per cent of the total for the United States, and more than twice that of her nearest competitor, New York. In coasting trade she was also first, although her proportion was slightly less. Her fishing fleet, 62,214 tons, was eighty-eight per cent of the total; and although there was nothing in the embargo acts to prevent fishing, loss of the foreign market put the 1 See statistics in Appendix. The figures here quoted for the state include Maine; those quoted for ports include minor ports in the custom district of that name. Whaling vessels are apparently included in the foreign tonnage. 188 O oo EMBARGO AND WAR greater part of the fleet out of commission. The same applied to the whaling. In all these branches of ship- ping the gains during the profitable years of neutral trade had been tremendous. Boston had passed Phila- delphia, and become second only to New York for amount of tonnage owned. Following Baltimore and Charleston; Portland, Salem, and Newburyport were respectively the sixth, seventh, and ninth shipowning communities in the United States. The minor ports of Massachusetts, tempted by the rich freights and turnovers of neutral commerce, had increased their fleet considerably in the last few years. 1 Adopting Adam Seybert's estimate, that the American merchant marine in 1801 was earning at least fifty dollars per ton annually, the Massachusetts fleet of 1807 was bringing home about fifteen and a half million dollars a year in freight money alone, an amount far greater than the capital value of the fleet that earned it. Congress ordered the shipowners to forego this colossal income equal to the entire federal revenue in 1806 as well as the greater gains made by buying cheap and selling dear, in order to save their vessels from capture. Could the gain balance the loss? This was a burning question in 1808, and continues to divide historians to this day. There were many in Massachusetts who agreed with Jefferson, but more who did not. John Bromfield, supercargo by profes- sion and a Federalist in politics, wrote from London in 1 Plymouth tonnage, for instance, had just doubled since 1800. In 1804 Plymouth had eleven entries from Portugal, one from Spain, one from Cape Verde Islands, two from Russia, ten from Martinique, and ten from smaller West Indian Islands all schooners. In 1805 she exported almost half a million pounds of sugar to Holland. New Bedford had increased fifty per cent, to over 25,000 tons. Of her ninety to one hundred square-rigged vessels, only twelve were whalers. See chapters x and xi for the neutral trade of Marblehead and Newburyport. 189 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 1808, "It was certainly a very well-timed restriction upon our commerce, and has undoubtedly saved his political opponents from the loss of property to an immense amount." The Republican Crowninshields defended the embargo, and William Gray, a Federal- ist, and the largest individual shipowner in the United States, rallied to it as a necessary measure of self- protection. His Federalist neighbors retorted by accus- ing him of profiteering from his stock on hand. This charge he denied : and any statement from a man with the simple honesty and independence of William Gray carries weight.. He sacrificed personal comfort and social position by his stand. Yet even Mr. Gray did not see fit to order home one of his vessels, the ship Wells, which left Salem eighteen days before the em- bargo was laid, and remained abroad making money for her owner while it endured. Marblehead remained faithful to embargo and Republicanism, despite her growing commerce. As Salem was Federalist, Marble- head was naturally the contrary; 1 but it seems that Marblehead was somewhat favored during the em- bargo. The local collector continued to issue San Domingo bonds, an indication that he was allowing vessels to clear for the West Indies. 2 In general, the verdict of maritime Massachusetts was thumbs down on Jefferson and his "terrapin" 1 Frequently, throughout the Federalist period, small seaports that were rivals to a near-by prosperous and Federalist center of commerce, voted Republican; Dorchester, Weymouth, Fairhaven, and Dighton, for example. 1 Custom-house records, searched for me by Miss E. R. Trefry. The act of Feb. 28, 1806, required vessels clearing for certain parts of the West Indies to be bonded against trading with the Haytian rebels against Napoleon. But Marblehead had only twelve foreign entries dur- ing the embargo period, paying $35,000 duties, as compared with seventy for the year 1807, paying $156,000. The figures given in Dwight's Travels in New England are incorrect. EMBARGO AND WAR policy. The new British orders required some adjust- ment of trade routes, but as George Cabot said, profits were such that if only one out of three vessels escaped capture, her owner could make a handsome profit on the lot. It was still possible to ply neutral trade under British convoy, inspection, and license; a system de- grading perhaps to national honor, but very similar to that which all neutrals, including the United States, permitted during the World War. Insurance rates were not prohibitive ; and after the removal of the embargo Massachusetts shipping arose to a new high level de- spite the orders in council. As a pure business propo- sition, then, Jefferson's plea of protection made little appeal. The embargo caused greatest hardship in the smaller ports, and among small shipowners and working peo- ple dependent on shipping. Newburyport, Salem, and Plymouth never recovered their former prosperity. Jefferson hastened the inevitable absorption of their commerce by Boston. Shipbuilding, with all its sub- sidiary industries, ceased altogether. Mechanics and master mariners had to resort to the soup kitchens established in the seaport towns, or exhaust their sav- ings, or emigrate to Canada in search of work. The only consolation that Dr. Bentley, the stanch Repub- lican pastor of Salem, could find in the embargo, was the stimulus it gave to pleasure-boating in Salem Bay! But few were so fortunately circumstanced as to seek solace from business depression in yachting life. In 1807, the Federalist Party was in extremis. It had lost even the state government of Massachusetts. The embargo rescued it from the shadow of death, thrust into its palsied hands the banner of state rights, and sent it forth to rally the seafaring tribe. Politicians like Timothy Pickering hoped the embargo would re- 191 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS main in force until the "people recovered their true sight" and President Jefferson proved most accom- modating. It was not difficult to persuade people of the hypocrisy of his plea of protection, and to prove that his real wish was to coerce England. With such an object the Federalists had no sympathy. Their con- viction that France was the center of disturbance and unrest had deepened, although Napoleon did his best to prove the contrary. Yet the Federalists were right in believing that the restoration of peace and the hope of liberty in Europe depended on the overthrow of Napoleon; that any attempt to clip the British Sam- son's hair was at that time internationally immoral, and without sharp scissors, imprudent. Not content with these arguments, the Federalists asserted, with some plausibility, that Jefferson's ulti- mate object was to destroy New England's wealth and power. How else could one explain, for instance, his ban on East- India and China commerce? The orders in council permitted our Oriental trade; Napoleonic decrees were powerless in far eastern waters. Keeping Salem's East-Indiamen in port merely helped English shipowners. So abject a failure was the embargo as a measure of coercion that Jefferson's persistent faith in it could be explained only by enmity to American shipping, or by pathological causes. Fourteen months of embargo enabled the merchants to recover their political supremacy, and to organize a campaign of town-meeting resolutions that had the ring of 1776. Deserted by his northern partisans in Congress, Jefferson finally consented to sign the repeal of the embargo on his last day in office March 3, 1809. Prosperity promptly returned. But the em- bargo did a moral damage that determined New Eng- land's alignment In the coming war. It enabled the 192 EMBARGO AND WAR Essex Junto, the most bigoted group of Federalist politicians, to endoctrine maritime New England with a blind hatred for the Republican Party; to regard the administration as a greater enemy than any foreign country. It bred a spirit of narrow self-complacency, a belief in the superior virtue, enterprise, and worth of Yankees as against New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Southerners, that all but flared up into secession before the cause was removed. After the embargo was lifted, a non-intercourse act with Great Britain remained in force three months; but this did not prevent the prompt reopening of Oriental, West-Indian, Baltic, South American, and Mediterranean commerce. Fortunes were made by supplying the British army in the Peninsular War. Shipyards awoke. Fayal in the Azores, where John B. Dabney, of Boston, was American consul and leading merchant, became a new St. Eustatius, a go-between for nations forbidden to trade with one another. Russia became almost our best customer, as Napoleon closed the ports of western Europe to our vessels. Almost two hundred United States vessels were now trading with Russia, over half of them, probably, belonging in Massachusetts. 1 Yankee shipmasters quickly adapted themselves to the new conditions. Wintering at Riga in 1810-11, they took part in the open-handed social life of the Bait nobility; skating carnivals, sleigh rides at breakneck speed over the flat country, montagnes russes, brilliant balls and Gargantuan dinners. To avoid the Danish privateers which were preying on American vessels, many made the long voyage around Norway to Archangel, whence their imports went a thousand miles overland to Moscow. But the ship- 1 In 1803, fifty-four out of the ninety American arrivals in St. Peters- burg belonged in Massachusetts. See also chapters xi and xil. 193 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS masters found Archangel rather exhausting, as the Russian merchants, after hibernating, expected their American customers to stay up and drink with them through the bright summer nights. The Baltimore brig Calumet penetrated the Black Sea to Odessa in 1810; shortly followed by a vessel commanded by a Ropes of Salem. Profits in this Russian trade were immense. The ship Catherine of Boston, 281 tons, worth possibly $7000, cleared $115,000 net in one voyage of 1809. President Madison's policy, at first favorable to commerce, won away from the Federalists a part of their previous gains. In 1810 William Gray was elected lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts. His friend John Quincy Adams, who likewise had been expelled from the Federal Party for supporting the embargo, was appointed minister to Russia, went out in one of the Gray ships, and proved a useful friend at court. William Gray was the principal Russian trader In the United States. He distributed Russian duck, sheetings, cordage, and iron (which sold for $115 a ton in Boston), to Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Or- leans, there loading tobacco, sugar, and "cotton wool" for the Baltic market. Other vessels of his fleet took lumber and coffee to Algiers, and proceeded to Galli- polis to load olive oil for Russia. In addition, he was conducting a Mediterranean-Calcutta trade. Napoleon considered the American Baltic fleet essen- tially British ; and according to the British doctrine of neutral rights he was not far wrong. Certain vessels did a ferrying trade between Copenhagen and London ; and all had to conform to British regulations, and accept naval convoy through the Belts. Even William Gray, who was continually protesting his innocence of British connections, used London bankers almost 194 EMBARGO AND WAR exclusively, and on one occasion chartered a British vessel. Napoleon, to complete his continental block- ade, required the occlusion of neutral shipping from Russia, whose emperor was his nominal ally; and from Sweden, whose ruler was his former marshal. In the summer of 1810 he made the demand. Alexander and Bernadotte equivocated, and then refused. They had no intention of shutting off their subjects' supplies of West- and East-India goods. Then began Napoleon's preparations to invade Russia. Thus the Baltic trade of Massachusetts played an important if unconscious part in the chain of events that led Napoleon to Mos- cow and to St. Helena. Within a week of the Grand Army's entrance into Russia, the United States declared war on Great Brit- ain. To this War of 1812 maritime Massachusetts was flatly opposed. Her pocket and her heart were equally affected. She deemed the war immoral, be- cause waged against the "world's last hope"; unjust, because Napoleon had done her commerce greater in- jury than had England; and hypocritical, because de- clared in the name of "free trade and sailors' rights" by a sectional combination that had neither com- merce nor shipping. In Congress, a majority of the representatives from New England voted against the declaration of war, which was carried by a new group of representatives from the South and West, who were burning for a fight and anxious to conquer Canada. Reviewing the diplomatic ineptitude of Madison's administration, the opposition of Massachusetts is not surprising. Napoleon's pretended revocation of his de- crees had been exposed by Adams at St. Petersburg 195 MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS as "a trap to catch us into a war with England." Every shipmaster knew that the French confiscations and sequestrations had continued. Secretary Monroe admitted as much in 1812, after war had been declared. By his own figures, the Napoleonic system had done more damage to American commerce than had British navalism. Yet the administration, on the ground that the "national faith was pledged to France," 1 adopted successively non-intercourse, embargo, and war against Great Britain. When the administration heard that England had repealed her orders in council, two days after our declaration of war, it decided to continue the war on the ground of impressment alone. It was difficult to discover the true extent of im- pressment in 1812, and impossible now. Certain it is, however, that those seaboard communities of New England, which furnished the bulk of her merchant seamen, showed repeatedly by vote and deed their opposition to a war waged ostensibly in their behalf. Monroe's report of 1812, giving over six thousand cases of American seamen impressed into the English navy, was shot full of holes by a committee of the Gen- eral Court of Massachusetts. Fifty-one of the lead- ing shipowners of Massachusetts, who had employed annually over fifteen hundred seamen for the last twelve years, could remember but twelve cases of Americans being impressed from their vessels. Nor were all these witnesses Federalists. William Gray gave witness against his party, when he was able to recall but two cases of impressment from his great fleet in the last decade. The truth probably lies somewhere between these 1 By the Macon Act of 1810, which proposed that whenever either England or France should repeal their objectionable measures against the United States, non-intercourse should be adopted against the other. 196 Ships of the rJNE-lXo Moving MiU