The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, Vol. XXXV, Jan., 1889. Biographical Notes: By Nathaniel Silsbee. (A paper written by him, “for the perusal of his family,” between 1836 and 1850, and from which most of the material for this chapter was obtained.)

CHAPTER XVII
THE VOYAGES OF CAPTAIN RICHARD CLEVELAND
(1791-1820)

Perhaps the finest type of the Salem shipmaster of the age when her seamen were the vikings of American commerce, was Captain Richard Cleveland who wrote as capably as he sailed and fought and whose own record of his voyages inspired the London Literary Examiner to comment in 1842:[39]

“Few things in De Foe, Dana, or any other truth teller are more characteristic than Mr. Cleveland’s account of his voyage from Havre to the Cape of Good Hope. Surely never before was there such an Indiaman and with such a cargo and such a crew.”

Captain Cleveland was born in 1773 and he reached manhood and the height of his career of the most romantic adventure when Salem commerce was also at the zenith of its prosperity. He was the eldest son of a father worthy to have such a son, Captain Stephen Cleveland, whose life at sea began when at the age of sixteen he was kidnapped by a British press gang in the streets of Boston, in 1756. This redoubtable sire served for several years on board a British frigate, was promoted to the rank of midshipman and fought the French fleet off the Channel ports. He had returned to live in Salem when the Revolution began and became active in fitting out privateers to harry the British flag which he hated most heartily for having been compelled to serve under it. He built the Pilgrim brig which alone captured more than fifty British prizes and was one of the fastest armed ships sent out of Salem. From the Continental Congress he received a commission only a month after the Declaration of Independence to command the brig Despatch[40] in a voyage to Bordeaux after military stores and guns for the patriotic forces. His was the first government vessel to fly the new American flag in a harbor of Europe and he returned in safety with a cargo which greatly helped the struggling cause in his country in the early days of the war.

His son, Richard, hero of this narrative, followed the sea as a matter of course, being an ambitious Salem lad as well as the son of his father. At the age of fourteen he entered the counting house of Elias Hasket Derby, as told in a previous chapter. He learned the mercantile side of a seafaring life and with the other lads in the employ of that famous old house, risked his little savings as “adventures” in the vessels which were sailing to the Far East. His education, beyond the counting house, was limited to a few years in the public schools of Salem before he had much more than passed into his teens. Yet this Richard Cleveland, mariner, by virtue of his native ability and the influences of the times that bred him, made himself a man of the most liberal education, in the finest sense of the phrase, and in addition to this, he could lay claim to more genuine culture than most college university graduates of to-day.

He was only eighteen when his father thought him old enough to go to sea. As captain’s clerk, he sailed his first voyage with Captain Nathaniel Silsbee, and became second mate before the ship returned to Salem. This was the East Indiaman whose captain was not twenty years old; the chief mate, nineteen; and Richard Cleveland, second mate, at the same age. These rosy-cheeked lads carried the Herald to the Cape of Good Hope, thence into the Indian Ocean when warring powers and their privateers menaced every neutral vessel. Well might Richard Cleveland write of this remarkable beginning of his sea life:

“The voyage, thus happily accomplished, may be regarded, when taken in all its bearings, as a very remarkable one; first, from the extreme youth of all to whom its management had been entrusted; secondly, from the foresight, ingenuity, and adroitness manifested in averting and escaping dangers; in perceiving advantages and turning them to the best account; and thirdly from the great success attending this judicious management, as demonstrated by the fact of returning to the owner four or five times the amount of the original capital. Mr. Derby used to call us his boys, and boast of our achievements, and well might he do so, for it is not probable that the annals of the world can furnish another example of an enterprise, of such magnitude, requiring the exercise of so much judgment and skill, being conducted by so young a man, (Nathaniel Silsbee), aided only by still younger advisers, and accomplished with the most entire success.”

In 1797, at the age of twenty-three, Richard Cleveland was in command of the bark Enterprise of Salem, bound for Mocha after a cargo of coffee. He had to abandon this plan, however, after reaching Havre, and his ship was ordered home. Her young master had no mind to lose the profits which he had hoped to reap from this venture, wherefore he decided to remain abroad, to send the ship home in command of the mate, and not to go back to Salem until he had played for high stakes with the fortunes of the sea. Thus began a series of voyages and adventures which were to take him around the globe through seven long years before he should see home and friends again. At Havre he bought on two years’ credit, a “cutter-sloop” of only forty-three tons, in size no larger than the yachts whose owners think it venturesome to take them beyond the sheltered reaches of Long Island Sound on summer cruises.

His plan was, in short, to fit out and freight the absurd cockle shell of a merchantman for a voyage from Europe to the Cape of Good Hope and thence to the Isle of France, in the Indian Ocean, a fertile and prosperous colony which at that time was a Mecca for Yankee ships.

His cutter, the Caroline, was driven ashore and wrecked before the coast of France was passed on his outbound voyage. The dauntless skipper got her off, however, worked her back to Havre and made repairs for a second attempt. This experience ought to have convinced any ordinary mariner that his little craft was not fit for a voyage half round the world, but Richard Cleveland, turning loss into profit, was able to note of this disaster:

“My credit, however, has not suffered in the least on this account, for I have not only found enough to repair the damages, but shall put in $1,000 more, so that my cargo, although in a vessel of only forty tons, will amount to $7,000. I now wait only for a wind to put to sea again.”

While at sea during the three months’ voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, Captain Cleveland described in his journal the crew with which he had undertaken to navigate the Caroline to her faraway destination. “It was not until the last hour I was at Havre,” said he, “that I finally shipped my crew. Fortunately they were all so much in debt as not to want any time to spend their advance, but were ready at the instant, and with this motley crew, (who, for aught I knew, were robbers and pirates), I put to sea.

“At the head of my list is my mate, a Nantucket lad, whom I persuaded the captain of a ship to discharge from before the mast, and who knew little or nothing of navigation, but is now capable of conducting the vessel in case of accident to me. The first of my foremast hands is a great, surly, crabbed, raw-boned, ignorant Prussian, who is so timid aloft that the mate has frequently been obliged to do his duty there. I believe him to be more of a soldier than a sailor, though he has often assured me that he has been a boatswain’s mate of a Dutch Indiaman, which I do not believe as he hardly knows how to put two ends of a rope together. He speaks enough English to be tolerably understood.

“The next in point of consequence is my cook, a good-natured negro and a tolerable cook, so unused to a vessel that in the smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding onto something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact that he is so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro race (he is a native of Savannah), nor did I ever see such a perfect simpleton. It is impossible to teach him anything, and notwithstanding the frequency with which we have been obliged to take in and make sail on this long voyage, he can hardly tell the main-halliards from the mainstay. He one day took it into his head to learn the compass, and not being permitted to come on the quarterdeck to learn by the one in the binnacle, he took off the cover of the till of his chest and with his knife cut out something that looked like a cartwheel, and wanted me to let him nail it on the deck to steer by, insisting that he could ‘’teer by him better ’n tudder one.’

“Next is an English boy of seventeen years old, who from having lately had the small-pox is feeble and almost blind, a miserable object, but pity for his misfortunes induces me to make his duty as easy as possible. Finally I have a little ugly French boy, the very image of a baboon, who from having served for some time on different privateers, has all the tricks of a veteran man-of-war’s man, though only thirteen years old, and by having been in an English prison, has learned enough of the language to be a proficient in swearing.

“To hear all these fellows quarrelling, (which from not understanding each other, they are very apt to do) serves to give one a realizing conception of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Nobody need envy me my four months’ experience with such a set, though they are now far better than when I first took hold of them.... Absence has not banished home from my thoughts; indeed I should be worse than a savage were I to forget such friends as I have, yet such is now my roving disposition that were it not for meeting them, I doubt if I should ever return.”

In the last lines quoted, Richard Cleveland, with such a crew on such a venture, was able to find contentment with his lot. It is evident from his graphic description that he was the only capable officer or seaman on board his cutter, yet he navigated her without serious accident to the Cape of Good Hope, and would not have touched there except for the urgent need of fresh water. The French Directory had given him official dispatches to carry to the Isles of France and Bourbon, and while this private mission might protect him against capture by French privateers, it laid him open to the grave risk of confiscation by whatever English authorities he chanced to fall athwart of. He successfully concealed these dispatches, but the officials of the Cape viewed him with suspicions for other reasons. They could not but believe that so hazardous a voyage in so small a craft must be somehow in the secret behalf of the French government, and although they could find no evidence after thoroughly overhauling the Caroline and her papers, they decided to make an end of this audacious voyage by purchasing the vessel. Of the excitement caused by his arrival at the Cape, Captain Cleveland relates:

Captain Richard Cleveland

“The arrival of such a vessel from Europe naturally excited the curiosity of the inhabitants of the Cape; and the next morning being calm, we had numerous visitors on board, who could not disguise their astonishment at the size of the vessel, the boyish appearance of the master and mate, the queer and unique characters of the two men and boy who composed the crew, and the length of the passage we had accomplished. Various were the conjectures of the good people of the Cape as to the real object of our enterprise. While some viewed it in its true light as a commercial speculation, others believed that under a mask we were employed by the French government for the conveyance of their dispatches, and some even went so far as to declare their belief that we were French spies, and as such deserving immediate arrest and confinement. Indeed our enterprise formed the principal theme of conversation at the Cape during the week after our arrival.”

Captain Cleveland’s private letters, log, and all other documents found on board were taken ashore to the English admiral by whom he was treated very politely, “but the extreme importance of the blustering lieutenants was in the highest degree disgusting.” After much parleying, the young skipper was given permission to export ten thousand dollars worth of cargo in another venture. He had realized a profit on his vessel without going to the Isle of France and was inclined to think himself well out of an awkward situation when fresh trouble arose because the merchant to whom he sold his cargo fell afoul of the Custom House regulations, which entanglement resulted in the seizure both of the cutter and the goods on board.

Facing ruin through no fault of his own, Captain Cleveland determined to appeal directly to Lord McCartney, governor of the Cape, explaining that the loss must fall on him as the luckless merchant could not make good the losses. “But how to write a suitable letter (to Lord McCartney) embarrassed me,” said he. “I had no friends with whom to advise. I was entirely ignorant of the proper manner of addressing a nobleman, and at the same time was aware of the necessity of conforming to customary rules. In this dilemma I remembered to have seen, in an old magazine aboard my vessel, some letters addressed to noblemen. These I sought as models and they were a useful guide to me. After completing my letter in my best hand I enclosed it in a neat envelope and showed it to the admiral’s secretary who appeared to be friendly to me. He approved of it and advised my taking it myself to his lordship immediately. As the schoolboy approached his master after having played truant, so did I approach Lord McCartney on this occasion.”

The frank and straightforward appeal of the boyish American ship master moved the autocratic governor to interfere and the matter was decided in favor of the petitioner with trifling loss. “The success of my letter was the theme of public conversation in the town,” he commented, “and was the means of procuring me the acquaintance of several individuals of the first respectability.”

Four months passed before he was able to get passage on a merchant vessel bound for Batavia, where he intended looking about for another venture upon which to stake his capital. Finding nothing to his liking in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Cleveland proceeded to Canton. At this port he made up his mind to attempt a voyage to the northwest coast of America to buy furs from the Indians. As soon as this daring project was fairly under way he wrote home in a much more optimistic vein than the circumstances warranted:

“We have every possible advantage, a vessel well calculated for inland navigation, the best articles of trade that can be carried, a linguist who speaks the Indian language as well as his own, and officers experienced in the business. Should we fail of success with all these advantages, it will be very extraordinary ill-fortune, and such as I don’t choose to expect.”

As a matter of fact, his vessel was a small cutter no larger than the Caroline, and his crew as worthless a set of beachcombing ruffians as ever disgraced a forecastle. The captain was twenty-five years old when he set sail from Canton in the winter of 1799, with a cargo of merchandise worth almost $20,000, representing all his cash and credit. His only chart for beating up the Chinese coast was a map drawn by a navigator whom he chanced to meet in port. Until he could weather the northern end of Formosa his course lay directly in the teeth of the northwest monsoon, with imminent danger of being stranded or battered to pieces by the wind. He paid his crew this handsome compliment:

“Having all hands on board twenty-one persons, consisting—except two Americans—of English, Irish, Swedes and French, but principally the first, who were runaways from the men-of-war and Indiamen, and two from a Botany Bay ship who had made their escape, for we were obliged to take such as we could get, served to complete a list of as accomplished villains as ever disgraced any country.”

For a month on end the cutter fought her way up the Chinese coast, her company weary, drenched, and wretched, until the sailors had enough of such an infernal enterprise, and broke out in a full-fledged mutiny. With a handful who remained loyal, including the ungainly black cook previously described, Captain Cleveland locked up the provisions, mounted two four-pounders on the quarterdeck, crammed them with grape-shot, and armed his squad with flint-lock muskets and pistols. A man with a lighted match was stationed beside each cannon, and the skipper told the mutineers that if they attempted to get provisions or to come above the hatches, he would blow them overboard. For one whole day the hostile companies were at a dead-lock, until hunger gnawing, the mutineers asked that they be put ashore believing that once out of the vessel they could dictate their own terms.

Captain Cleveland landed and marooned them. For two days the cutter lay off shore while the mutineers tried to patch up a truce. One man weakened and was taken aboard. Of what happened as the final chapter of this grim episode, Captain Cleveland wrote in his journal:

“At nine o’clock (A. M.) we hoisted the colors, fired a 4-pound cannon, and weighed anchor when they all came out from behind a rock, where they had doubtless been watching our motions. I then ordered the boat out, and with my second officer and four hands, well armed, went as near the beach as the surf would permit. I called them all down to the water side and told them I was then going away; that I knew there were several of them desirous of returning to their duty, but were deterred by the others; that if they would come forward I would protect them, and would fire at any one that tried to prevent them.

“They replied that they were all ready and willing to return to their duty, but the ringleaders (whom I had determined not to take on any account) were more ready than the others, and when they were rejected they swore none of the others should go, and presented their knives at the breasts of two of them, and threatened to stab them if they attempted to do so; a third seemed indifferent and a fourth was lying drunk on the beach. Having secured three, and one yesterday, which was four of them, and which, with a little additional precaution, was securing the success of the expedition, I did not think proper to put into execution my threat of firing on them.

“After dinner I sent the second officer with four hands, well armed, to make a last effort, but by this time those whose fate was decided, had persuaded the others to share it with them, and had carried the drunken man out of reach, declaring that we dare not go on the coast of America with so feeble a crew, and we should take them all or none.

“Having now a light breeze from the westward and a favorable current, I concluded to have no further altercation with them, and immediately hoisted in the boat and made sail, leaving on the island of Kemoy, (which is about three hundred and fifty miles northeast of Canton) six of my most able men. This was such a reduction of our numbers as would require unceasing vigilance, and extraordinary caution to counteract, as the risk of being attacked by the Indians was of course increased in proportion to our diminished power of resistance.”

The mariners in Canton had told Captain Cleveland that he could never win his way clear of Formosa and into the Pacific during the winter or monsoon season, but the staunch cutter, after mutiny, stranding, and fighting her way inch by inch for thirty-one days steered out across the open ocean. On her northerly course the weather was so heavy that the seas washed over her day after day, and Captain Cleveland scarcely knew what it was to wear dry clothes, have a meal cooked in the wave-drenched galley, or snatch a whole night’s sleep.

After fifty-odd days of racking hardships the cutter fetched the Northwest coast and anchored in Norfolk Sound. Bulwarks or screens of hides were rigged along the decks in order to hide from the Indians the scanty muster-roll of the ship’s company, lest they take her by boarding. For two months Captain Cleveland cruised among the bays and inlets along this wilderness coast, trading for sea-otter skins, and averting hostile attacks by the ablest vigilance, diplomatic dealings, and a show of armed force when it became necessary.

His hold was nearly filled when his cutter went hard aground on a sunken ledge, and was tilted, nose under, at an angle of forty-five degrees. “This position, combined with a rank heel to starboard, made it impossible to stand on deck,” wrote her skipper. “We therefore put a number of muskets into the boat, and prepared to make such resistance in case of attack as could be made by fifteen men crowded into a sixteen-foot boat. Our situation was now one of the most painful anxiety, no less from the prospect of losing our vessel and the rich cargo we had collected with so much toil, than from the apprehension of being discovered in this defenceless state by any one of the hostile tribes by whom we were surrounded. A canoe of the largest class, with thirty warriors well-armed had left us but half an hour before we struck, and they were now prevented from seeing us only by having passed around a small island. Should the vessel bilge, there existed scarcely any other chance for the preservation of our lives than the precarious one of falling in with some ship before we were discovered by Indians....

“More than ten hours passed in this agonizing state of suspence, watching the horizon to discover if any savages were approaching; the heavens, if there were a cloud that might chance to ruffle the surface of the water; the vessel, whose occasional cracking seemed to warn us of destruction; and when the tide began to flow, impatiently observing its apparently sluggish advance, while I involuntarily consulted my watch, the hands of which seemed to have forgotten to move.”

The cutter was floated during the following night, conveyed to a beach and careened until her crew could repair her damaged copper and planking. Soon after this Captain Cleveland set sail for the return passage to China, via the Sandwich Islands, and “indeed the criminal who receives a pardon under the gallows could hardly feel a greater degree of exultation.” When he arrived at Canton, “several of the gentlemen who had predicted our destruction from attempting the voyage at the season we did, presumed, when they saw the cutter arrive, that we had failed, which indeed they had anticipated from the arrival in Canton several months before of the mutineers whom we had left on the coast of China, and the sad stories they told of hardship, danger and cruel usage.”

Captain Cleveland had secured his sea-otter skins at the rate of one flint-lock musket for eight prime pelts, and his cargo was worth sixty thousand dollars in the Canton market. For this return he had risked eleven thousand dollars, and his share of the profits amounted to two-thirds of the whole, or forty thousand dollars. He sold the cutter, and went to Calcutta in her as a passenger, with forty-six thousand dollars as his capital for another fling at fortune. He had been away from Salem a little more than two years, and at the age of twenty-five had wrested from the seas a competence sufficient to have comfortably supported him ashore. But he had no intention of forsaking the great game he was playing with such high-hearted assurance.

During the voyage from Canton to Calcutta while the cutter was off Malacca, “we saw a fleet of eleven Malay proas pass by to the eastward, from whose view we supposed ourselves to have been screened by the trees and bushes near which we were lying. On perceiving so great a number of large proas sailing together, we felt convinced they must be pirates, and immediately loaded our guns and prepared for defence; although conscious of the fact that the fearful odds between our crew of ten men and theirs, which probably exceeded a hundred for each vessel, left us scarce a ray of hope of successful resistance.

“We watched their progress therefore, with that intense interest which men may naturally be supposed to feel whose fortunes, liberty and lives were dependent on the mere chance of their passing by without seeing us. To our great joy they did so, and when the sails of the last of the fleet were no longer visible from our deck, and we realized the certainty of our escape, our feelings of relief were in proportion to the danger that had threatened us. On arriving at Malacca, the curiosity of the people was greatly excited to know how we had escaped the fleet of pirates which had been seen from the town.”

Arriving at Calcutta Captain Cleveland was disappointed in his expectations of sending home a cargo of goods upon terms which should swell his profits, so he began to plan a voyage in which the rewards might be in fairer proportion to the risks he was ready to undertake. The East India Company forbade communication between Bengal and the Isle of France, but Captain Cleveland foresaw an opportunity to pick up at a bargain the rich prizes and cargoes that French privateers were carrying into the latter port. Therefore, he bought a mite of a twenty-five ton pilot boat, had her sent to the Danish settlement of Serampore, put her under the Danish flag, and stole away into the Indian Ocean. For forty-five days he held on his course blistering under a tropic sun, and as he ingenuously explained to account for his foolhardiness: “Pleasing myself with the idea that all will turn out for the best, time passes as lightly with me as with most people, and I am persuaded that few people enjoy a greater share of happiness than myself, if you can conceive of there being any happiness in building airy castles and pursuing them nearly around the globe till they vanish, and then engaging in a fresh pursuit.”

The youthful merchant navigator fared safely in his cock-boat to the Isle of France and was again disappointed in his commercial air-castles. The privateers had sold their prizes and were winging it out to sea in search of more British plunder. For ten months he waited in the hope of a reopening of trade between America and the French colonies. At length he loaded seven thousand bags of coffee on board a Danish ship bound for Copenhagen, and sailed as a passenger. With him went Nathaniel Shaler of Connecticut, a sterling American merchant whom he had met in the Isle of France and who was a partner in this coffee adventure to Copenhagen.

They sold their cargo for a large profit, and then began to look about for a vessel suitable to undertake a voyage to the west coast of South America, a project which the twain had worked out during their companionship at sea. They found at Hamburg a fast and roomy Virginia-built brig, the Lelia Byrd, which they bought. Shaler was made captain by the toss of a coin, Captain Cleveland signing the ship’s papers as supercargo. While in Hamburg they had formed a warm friendship with a youthful Polish nobleman, Count de Rousillon, who had been an aide-de-camp to Kosciusko. His personality was most engaging, his love of adventure ardent, and his means slender, wherefore he embraced with enthusiasm the invitation to join the two young Americans in their voyage to South America. Alas, the glamor of such romance as was their fortune to enjoy has long since vanished from commerce, afloat and ashore. They were three seafaring “Musketeers” all under thirty years of age, setting forth to beard the viceroys of Spain.

Richard Cleveland had now been a cheerful exile from Salem for four years, following the star of his destiny in almost every ocean, escaping dangers uncounted with the skin of his teeth and by his sagacity, resolution and shrewdness finding himself richer for every audacious voyage. For two and a half years longer, he was to sail in the Lelia Byrd among the Spanish peoples of the South American coast before his wanderings should lead him home to Salem.

From Hamburg the brig went to Rio Janeiro where they were not allowed to trade, and thence doubled Cape Horn and reached Valparaiso in February in 1802. They were startled and alarmed to find four American vessels under detention by the Spanish government. After spirited correspondence with the Captain General at Santiago the Lelia Byrd was permitted to buy supplies sufficient for resuming her voyage and to sell so much of the cargo as would pay for the same. While at anchor in the bay, Captain Cleveland and his friends witnessed a tragedy which convinced them that the sooner they could get to sea the better. The American ship Hazard of Providence, Captain Rowan, which had touched for provisions, had on board several hundred muskets shipped in Holland and consigned to the Northwest Coast. The Governor ordered Captain Rowan to deliver up these arms as violating treaty stipulations. The American skipper saw no good reason why he should obey and refused to let a file of Spanish soldiers on board his ship.

The Governor flew into a violent passion, ordered every American merchant ashore to be locked up in the castle, and commanded an eighteen-gun Spanish merchant ship to bring her broadside to bear on the Hazard and demand Captain Rowan’s surrender under pain of being sunk at his moorings. The skipper replied that they might fire if they pleased, and nailed his stars and stripes to his masthead.

Shaler, Rousillon, and Cleveland, happening to be ashore, were swept up by the Governor’s drag-net order and sent to the castle as prisoners. Next day they were offered liberty without explanation, but the indignant trio from the Lelia Byrd refused to be set free until a proper apology had been made them. It was finally agreed that as Captain Shaler was nominal master of the brig, he should stay in prison while his comrades made matters hot for the offending Governor.

This official refused to let them send a messenger to the Captain General and asked why in the devil they did not put to sea, and be grateful that they had escaped the dungeons or worse. To which young Richard Cleveland made reply (which the gifted Count turned into fluent and fiery Spanish) that they wanted satisfaction for being locked up without cause, and that Captain Shaler proposed to languish behind the bars until he was informed why he had been put in. A day later, the situation remaining in status quo, the Governor sent for Cleveland, asked if he were not second in command and angrily ordered him to extract his recalcitrant skipper from jail and go to sea on the instant. The Yankee replied that the apology or explanation was still lacking, and that the Lelia Byrd was only waiting for her captain who was a prisoner in the castle.

Meanwhile a letter had arrived from the Captain General ordering Captain Rowan of the Hazard to deliver up the arms which comprised part of his cargo, and make a second declaration respecting their lading. The muskets were sent ashore, and the supercargo sent to the Governor with the customs certificate made out in Amsterdam. Captain Rowan did not understand that he was expected to make this report in person, but the Governor considered himself and his Spanish dignity again insulted by the failure of the captain to appear.

Early in the morning, two hours before Americans were permitted to land, and therefore before Captain Rowan could obey another summons, two hundred Spanish soldiers who were no better than brigands, boarded the Hazard and took her from an unarmed crew of twenty-three men who had no forewarning. In the words of Captain Cleveland:

“This was done by order of the Governor, who stood on shore opposite the vessel and was a witness to the horrid scene of assassination and rapine that followed. Captain Rowan’s life was saved by the humanity of the captain of a Spanish brig, who got into the cabin in advance of the rabble, as he had not time to save himself as the other officer had done, by retreating to the lazaretto. The plunder which ensued for the remainder of the day and the following night was such as to lighten the ship nearly a foot. Nor were the officers of rank backward in taking part in the pillage; and the custom house guards, far from preventing, were as eager as the rest in the work of robbery.”

Captain Cleveland rushed to the Governor’s palace and demanded with forceful Anglo Saxon threats, that he be allowed to send a statement overland to the Captain General, but he was told that if he did not want to share the fate of the Hazard, he had best put to sea. The persistence of this indomitable young Yankee at last wore down the Governor’s resistance, and the message was sent to Santiago by courier.

The answer was to the surprising effect that Captain Cleveland and his comrades should receive the most complete satisfaction for the injuries done them, at which Nathaniel Shaler, still cooling his heels in the castle, consented to emerge with his self-respect untarnished. After days and days of further complications due to red-tape and an invincible hostility toward all other than Spanish vessels trading in those waters, Captain Cleveland and his doughty shipmates were able to bid a glad farewell to the Governor of Valparaiso, His Illustrious Excellency, Don Antonio Francisco Garcia Carrasco.

“The notoriety they had attained by these protracted quarrels with an ignorant, conceited, and pusillanimous official, rendered it injudicious to attempt to enter any other port of Chili or Peru,” wherefore the Lelia Byrd was steered for the coast of Mexico, after gathering these proofs to convince far less astute shipmasters that the markets for American enterprise on the South American coast were not up to expectations. They made their first landing at San Blas, where the subordinate Spanish officials cordially received them. Rousillon went to the interior capital of Tipec to confer with the Governor, and alas, this peppery gentleman flew into a rage because his deputy at San Blas had dared to make a trading agreement with the Yankee brig without consulting him. Thus was brewed a tempest in a teapot, the upshot of which was that His Passionate Excellency at Tipec sent word that the Lelia Byrd must leave port or be attacked by a Spanish gunboat.

The diplomatic Rousillon thereupon undertook to go to the City of Mexico and solicit permission from the Viceroy to sell a part or the whole of the cargo. Captain Cleveland, finding the harbor of San Blas too hot to hold him, sailed for Three Marias Islands, sixty miles to the westward, there to wait until word was received from his emissary to the Viceroy. Three weary months passed in this empty fashion, at the end of which the two captains, Shaler and Cleveland, decided to risk a return to San Blas in the hope of finding some tidings of the mysteriously vanished Rousillon. They stole into the coast by night, and next day saw an Indian in a canoe who paddled out to them and delivered a letter from their absent comrade. He had succeeded in obtaining a concession to sell ten thousand dollars worth of goods at San Blas, and after two weeks of delay this part of the cargo was put ashore.

The sales dragged on with such interminable waste of time, however, that it was deemed best to leave Rousillon in Mexico to finish these transactions. He died before his mission was ended, and his friends and fellow seafarers mourned the loss of one who had become very dear to them and who had stood the test of their arduous life together.

The Lelia Byrd next proceeded to San Diego in search of sea-otter skins.[41] At this port they caught another Spanish Tartar in the person of the Commandant, Don Manuel Rodriguez, who boarded them with a file of dragoons, and left a guard on the ship, the sergeant of which volunteered the discouraging information that the Boston ship Alexander had left port a few days before, after being robbed by the Commandant of several hundred sea-otter skins which her captain had purchased ashore. With this warning Captain Cleveland kept an eye out for squalls. He was able to obtain several valuable lots of furs, and made ready to go to sea without more delay. One more consignment of skins was to be delivered and the night before sailing the first officer and two men were sent ashore for them. They did not return and daylight showed the boat hauled out on the beach and the men from the brig in the hands of a squad of soldiers.

Captain Cleveland manned a boat with his armed sailors, pulled for the beach and promptly took his men away from their captors. As soon as the crew was on board, the Commandant’s guard was unceremoniously disarmed, and with a fair wind the Lelia Byrd moved out to sea. “Before we got within gunshot of the fort,” wrote Captain Cleveland in his journal, “they fired a shot ahead of us. We had previously loaded all our guns, and brought them all on the starboard side. As the tide was running in strong, we were not abreast the fort—which we passed within musket shot—till half an hour after receiving the first shot, all of which time they were playing away upon us; but as soon as we were abreast the fort we opened upon them, and in ten minutes silenced their battery and drove everybody out of it. They fired only two guns after we began, and only six of their shot counted, one of which went through between wind and water; the others cut the rigging and sails. As soon as we were clear we landed the guard, who had been in great tribulation lest we should carry them off.”

Thirty years later Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, found the story of this exploit still current in San Diego and the neighboring ports and missions. Shortly after the transfer of California to the United States, Commodore Biddle referred to the “Battle of San Diego” as giving Captain Cleveland a fair claim to the governorship of the territory which claim he had won in the Lelia Byrd long before Fremont’s invasion.[42]

After some further adventures in search of trade along the Mexican coast the adventurers laid their course for the Sandwich Islands. They had purchased a horse on the coast and landed the beast on the island of Owyhee. There were only two European inhabitants on the Sandwich Islands at that time, John Young and Isaac Davis. Young came on board the brig and wanted to buy the mare as a present for King Tamaahmaah, but when his blasé Majesty saw the animal cantering up and down the beach he expressed little curiosity or interest, although this was the first animal larger than a pig ever seen by the natives of the Sandwich Islands. The king’s subjects were wildly excited, however, and when one of the sailors mounted the mare and tore up and down the beach, the spectators were much concerned for the rider’s safety, “and rent the air with shouts of admiration.”

From the Sandwich Islands the Lelia Byrd was carried to China, arriving off Canton on the 29th of August, 1803. Here the cargo of sea-otter skins was sold, and the two captains, Shaler and Cleveland, parted company for the time. Shaler loaded the brig for a return voyage to the California coast and Richard Cleveland took passage around the Cape of Good Hope, homeward for Boston.

At the age of thirty years this Salem mariner returned to his kinfolk and friends after an absence of seven and a half years at sea. He had left home a lad of twenty-three with two thousand dollars as his total capital. He had been twice around the world, had accomplished three most extraordinary voyages in tiny craft, from Europe to the Cape of Good Hope, from India to the Isle of France and from China to the Northwest coast of America. He had fought and beaten mutineers and Spanish gunners by force of arms, his invincible pluck and tenacity had won him victories over Governors and Viceroys from Africa to the Mexican coast, he had succeeded in a dozen hazardous undertakings where a hundred men had failed, and at thirty years of age he had lived a score of ordinary lives. He had increased his slender capital to seventy thousand dollars by the cleanest and most admirable exertions, and as fortunes were counted a hundred years ago, he was a rich man.

The achievements of modern so-called “Captains of Industry,” who amass millions in wresting, by methods of legalized piracy, the riches that other men have earned, raise a prodigious clamor of comment, admiring and otherwise. But, somehow, such an American as Richard Cleveland seems to be a far more worthy type for admiration, and his deeds loom in pleasing contrast with those of a railroad wrecker or stock juggler, even though a fortune of seventy thousand dollars is a bagatelle in the eyes of the twentieth century.

Captain Cleveland believed that his affairs were so prosperously shaped that he could retire from the sea. He built him a home in Lancaster, Mass., where with his wife and brother, his well-stored mind and simple tastes enjoyed the tranquil life of a New England village. But much of his fortune was afloat or invested in foreign shipping markets, and misfortune overtook his ventures one after the other. Three years after his homecoming he was obliged to go to sea again to win a new treasure in partnership with his old friend, Nathaniel Shaler. For almost fifteen years longer he voyaged from one quarter of the globe to the other, winning large profits only to risk them in more alluring undertakings, always turning a resolute and undaunted front to whatever odds overtook him. In his elder years, after a series of cruel maritime reverses, he wrote as a summary:

“On making an estimate of my losses for the twenty years between 1800 and 1820, I find their aggregate amount to exceed $200,000, though I never possessed at any one time a sum to exceed $80,000. Under such losses I have been supported by the consoling reflection that they had been exclusively my own, and that it is not in the power of any individual to say, with truth, that I have ever injured him to the amount of a dollar. With a small annual sum from the Neapolitan indemnity I have been able to support myself till this was on the point of ceasing by the cancelling of that debt, when I was so fortunate as to obtain an office in the Boston Custom House, the duties of which I hope to perform faithfully and in peace during the few remaining years or months or days which may be allotted to me on earth.”

From an obituary notice in the Boston Courier of December 8, 1860, this tribute to the memory of Richard Cleveland is quoted, because it was written by one who knew him:

“While in the planning of commercial enterprises he showed rare inventive qualities, and in the execution of them wonderful energy and perseverance, he was somewhat deficient in those humbler qualities which enable men to keep and manage what they have earned.... But this reverse of fortune served to bring out more and more the beauty of Captain Cleveland’s character, and to give him new claims to the affection and esteem of his friends. It was gently, patiently, heroically borne; never a word of complaint was heard from his lips, never a bitter arraignment of the ways of Providence, never an envious fling at the prosperity of others. And the wise, kind, cheerful old man was happy to the end.”

Thus lived and died an American sailor of the olden-time, a brave and knightly man of an heroic age in his country’s history.