The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

FOOTNOTES:

[47] This sketch of the life of Frederick Townsend Ward is taken for the most part, from the Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. XLIV, Jan. 1908, to which Hon. Robert S. Rantoul contributed a most complete and authoritative account of General Ward’s family history and achievements. Mr. Rantoul included also the Chinese decrees, and other documentary material which are made use of as Chapter XXX of this book, and the author desires to make clear his obligations, both to the researches and literary labor of Mr. Rantoul and to the Essex Institute for permission to make use of this material as properly belonging in a record of the deeds of the Salem men of seafaring stock and training.

[48] The Middle Kingdom, by S. Wells Williams.

CHAPTER XXIII
THE EBBING OF THE TIDE

When the Embargo of 1807 was proclaimed as a counter-blow to England’s “unofficial war on American commerce and her wholesale impressment of American seamen,” the house-flags of Salem merchants flew over one hundred and fifty-two vessels engaged in foreign trade. The Embargo fell with blighting effects upon this imposing fleet and the allied activities interwoven throughout the life and business of the town, and the square-riggers lay empty and idle at the wharves. In 1808 the foreign commerce of the United States decreased from $246,000,000 to $79,000,000, and a British visitor, writing of New York, described what might have been seen in Salem:

“The port indeed was full of ships, but they were dismantled and laid up; their decks were cleared, their hatches fastened down, and scarcely a sailor was to be found on board. Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package was to be seen upon the wharves. Many of the counting houses were shut up or advertised to be let, and the few solitary merchants, clerks and porters, and laborers that were to be seen, were walking about with their hands in their pockets. The coffee houses were almost empty; the streets near the waterside were almost deserted; the grass had begun to grow upon the wharves.”

The Embargo was removed in the spring of 1809 and Yankee ships hastened to spread their white wings on every sea. Salem merchants loaded their vessels with merchandise and dispatched them to skim the cream of the European market. It was out of the frying-pan into the fire, however, for Napoleon had set a wicked trap for these argosies and so ordered it that all American shipping found in the ports of France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Prussia and Norway was confiscated and plundered under flimsy pretext of violations of paper blockades, and what not, of which these unsuspecting American shipmasters were wholly unaware. Thiers states that Napoleon wrote to the Prussian Government:

“Let the American ships enter your ports. Seize them afterwards. You shall deliver the cargoes to me, and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt.”

John Quincy Adams declared that fifty American vessels were thus taken in Norway and Denmark. In 1809-10, fifty-one of our ships were seized in the ports of France, forty-four in the ports of Spain, twenty-eight in Naples, and eleven in Holland, with a total loss to helpless American owners of at least ten million dollars. Felt’s Annals of Salem states that “on the 19th of August (1809), the ship Francis, Capt. William Haskell, arrives. She was purchased of the Neapolitan government by our consul there, to bring home the crews of American vessels confiscated by their order. Two hundred and fourteen persons came in her, many of whom belonged to this town. Their treatment is said to have been very cruel. The amount of Salem vessels and their cargoes condemned at Naples was 783,000 dollars.”

The stout-hearted merchants of Salem rallied bravely and when the War of 1812 began, they owned one hundred and twenty-six ships, fifty-eight of them East Indiamen. The war played havoc with this fleet, notwithstanding the activity of Salem privateers, and in 1815, there were left only fifty-seven of these ships in foreign commerce, a loss of a hundred sail in seven years. The tide had begun to ebb, the golden age was waning, and yet in 1816 the Salem Custom House cleared forty-two square-riggers for the East Indies and other ports of the Orient. But the pioneering, pathfinding era was almost over, except for ventures to the South Seas, Madagascar, and some of the ports of Africa and South America. The trade with the Orient in which Salem ships had blazed the way was now shared with the ships of other American ports.

The richest decade in this picturesque and adventurous traffic with the coasts and islands of strange, far-distant climes had been from 1800 to 1810, during which the duties paid on foreign cargoes amounted to $7,272,633, and the entries numbered 1,758, or an average of almost three ships a day signalling their homecoming from beyond seas.

During the years from 1820 to 1840 Salem continued to hold fast to her foreign trade, although overshadowed by Boston, and the old warehouses on the wharves were filled with the products of Zanzibar, Sumatra, Calcutta, Manila, Leghorn, the Rio Grande, Cayenne, Siam, Ceylon, and the Gold Coast. In 1850 the beginning of the end was in sight, and the “foreign entries” from Nova Scotia far outnumbered those from all the other ports in which the natives had once believed the map of America to consist chiefly of a vast commercial metropolis called Salem. The end of the history of the port, except for coastwise trade may be read in the Custom House records, as follows:

“In 1860 the foreign entries were: from Nova Scotia 215, Java 7, Africa 25, Cayenne 10, Montevideo 2, Zanzibar 4, Surinam 2, Rio Grande 2, Buenos Ayres 2, and one each from Mozambique, Shields, Sunderland, Port Praya, Newcastle and Trapani.

“In 1870 the foreign entries were: from the British provinces 117, Cayenne 3, Newcastle 2, and one each from Zanzibar, Rio Grande, Cape Verde Islands, and Sunderland.

“In 1878 the foreign entries were: from the British Provinces 53, and none from any other ports.”

Although in these latter days the romances of shipping had somewhat departed, yet now and then a Salem square-rigger brought home a tale to remind the old salts of the thrilling days of yore. There was the Sumatra, for example, Captain Peter Silver, which came from Batavia in 1842. While at sea she fell in with a bark which flew signals of distress yet appeared to be in good order below and aloft. There was no crew on deck, however, no living soul to be seen except a woman who implored help with frantic gestures. Running down close, Captain Silver made out the vessel to be the Kilmars of Glasgow, and he sent a boat aboard to pick off the lone woman. She proved to be a girl, only eighteen years old, wife of the master of the bark, almost out of her wits with hysteria and exhaustion. She said that the Kilmars had sailed from Batavia two months previously with a cargo of sugar for Europe. The crew, shipped in the Dutch East Indies, were a desperate and unruly lot of beachcombers, several of them released convicts.

A few days before the Sumatra came in sight, the captain of the Scotch bark had discovered that his crew was planning mutiny and were about to make their attack and gain possession of the vessel after ridding themselves of the officers. This captain was a man of the right mettle, for he promptly picked out the ringleader, charged him with the conspiracy, and after a brisk encounter shot him with a pistol, and removed him from the scene for the time. The mates were suspected of disaffection and the captain succeeded in locking them in the after cabin, after which he sailed into his crew, drove all hands below and fastened the hatches over them. The decks being cleared in this most gallant fashion, the captain, with the help of two boys undertook to navigate the bark back to Batavia.

This proved to be a bigger undertaking than he could handle, and while passing in sight of land, the captain decided to go ashore in a boat with the two boys and find help, the weather being calm and the mutineers securely bottled up below. He expected to be gone no more than a few hours, but the day passed, night came down, and his boat was missing. The young wife was alone, distraught and helpless, and she took her stand by the rail, determined to throw herself overboard if the mutineers should regain the deck. Next morning she sighted the Sumatra and was saved. But while the crew of the Sumatra was making sail to resume the voyage, no more than a few minutes after the boat had fetched the girl on board, the ruffians confined on the bark broke out from their prison, swarmed on deck, and took possession of their bark.

Captain Peter Silver of the Sumatra was not disposed to give them a battle, and they got the Kilmars under way and steered off on a course of their own. Upon reaching Batavia Captain Silver landed the young wife and gave her in charge of the Dutch officials who took care of her with sympathetic hospitality and sent her home to her kinfolk in Scotland. Sometime later the Kilmars entered the port of Angier where the mutineers were promptly captured and tried, and the bark was returned to her owners.

The captain of the Kilmars and the two boys were picked up adrift in the Straits of Sunda, and it was discovered that he had become insane from overwork and anxiety which explained why he had abandoned his wife and set off to find help on a strange coast. He was later restored to health and it is presumed that this plucky shipmaster, his girl wife and his bark were safely reunited after being parted from one another under these very extraordinary circumstances.

From the oil painting by Edgar Parker

Captain John Bertram

It is a coincidence worth noting that the first commanding figure in the maritime history of Salem, Philip English, was born in the Isle of Jersey, and that John Bertram, the last of the race of great shipping merchants of the port hailed from the same island. Two centuries intervened between their careers, John Bertram living until 1882, and witnessing the passing of the foreign commerce of Salem and the coming of the age of steam upon the high seas. As a young man he saw an average of a hundred square-rigged ships a year come home to Salem from the Orient, Africa, South America, Europe and the South Sea Islands. In his latter years he saw this noble commerce dwindle and American seamen vanish until in 1870 the bark Glide from Zanzibar recorded the last entry in the Salem Custom House of a vessel from beyond the Cape of Good Hope, and, in 1877, the Schooner Mattie F. crept in from South America as the last vessel to fetch home a cargo from anywhere overseas. The Manila trade had become a memory in 1858, the farewell voyage to Sumatra was made in 1860. Until the end of the century Salem shipowners were interested in the trade with the Philippines and other distant ports, but their vessels departed from and came back to Boston.[49] The Salem firm of Silsbee, Pickman and Allen built a fleet of fast and noble ships for the hemp trade, among them the Sooloo, Panay and Mindoro, but they never knew their own port, and in 1896 the last of this fleet, the Mindoro, was towed to Derby Wharf in Salem harbor to rot in idleness until she was cut down to a coal barge.

John Bertram deserved to be classed with the older generation of Elias Hasket Derby and Joseph Peabody, because he possessed the same high qualities of foresight, daring and sagacity, a type of the militant leader of commerce on the firing line of civilization. Like theirs, his was a splendid American spirit which created, builded, and won its rewards by virtue of native ability inspired and impelled by the genius of its time and place. He was in a privateer in the War of 1812, and lived to see his country’s flag almost vanish from blue water, its superb merchant marine dwindle to almost nothing, but while it was in its glory he played well his part in carrying the stars and stripes, over his own ships, wherever the mariners of other nations went to seek commerce. This John Bertram came to Salem in his boyhood and in 1813 was sailing out of Boston as a cabin boy in the schooner Monkey. A little later shipping out of Charleston in a privateer, he was taken prisoner and confined in British prison ships at Bermuda and Barbadoes. Having learned to speak French in his early years on the Isle of Jersey he persuaded his captors that he was a French subject and was released but was again captured and carried off to England while homeward bound to Salem. His was the usual story of lads with brains and ambition in that era, at first a sailor and shipmaster, then an owner of vessels and a merchant on shore.

John Bertram served a long apprenticeship before he forsook the quarterdeck. In 1824 he sailed for St. Helena in the chartered schooner General Brewer, and when a few days at sea overhauled the Salem brig Elizabeth, Captain Story, also headed for St. Helena. Commerce was a picturesque speculation then, and each of these skippers was eager to make port first with his cargo and snatch the market away from his rival.

The weather was calm, the wind was light, and Captain Bertram invited Captain Story to come on board and have a cup of tea, or something stronger. The skippers twain sat on deck and eyed each other while they yarned, each assuring the other that he was bound to Pernambuco. St. Helena? Nonsense! Captain Story was rowed back to his brig, the two vessels made sail and jogged on their course. When nightfall came, however, John Bertram threw his whole deck load of lumber overboard in order to lighten his schooner and put her in her best trim for sailing, cracked on all the canvas he could carry, and let her drive for St. Helena as if the devil were after him. He beat the Elizabeth to port so handsomely that his cargo had been sold at fancy prices and he was standing out of the harbor, homeward bound when the brig came creeping in with a very long-faced Captain Story striding her poop.

Soon after this Captain Bertram determined to go after a share of the South American trade, and after a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in the Velocity, he carried her to the Rio Grande and the Coast of Patagonia to trade in hides. He went ashore, leaving Captain W. B. Smith to pick up hides during short coastwise voyages, and finding the adventures prosperous, bought a Salem brig at Pernambuco and kept both vessels busy. For three years Captain Bertram lived on the coast of Patagonia directing the operations of his little fleet and taking this exile as a routine part of the education of an American shipping merchant.

After his return to Salem his activities were shifted to Zanzibar where the American flag was almost unknown. Madagascar had been opened to American trade in 1821 by the Salem brig Beulah on her way home from Mocha. Zanzibar was a small settlement with no foreign trade, gum-copal, the principal staple product, being carried to India in the Sultan’s vessels. In 1826 the Salem brig Ann called at Zanzibar and showed the natives the first American flag they had ever seen, but no attempt was made to establish commerce with the port until John Bertram set sail in the Black Warrior in 1830. He scented a pioneering voyage with gum-copal as the prize, an import in great demand by makers of varnish and up to that time imported by way of India at great cost. When the Black Warrior arrived at Zanzibar the Sultan was on the point of dispatching a vessel loaded with the coveted gum-copal to India, but this typical Salem navigator would not let such a chance slip through his fingers. He boarded the Sultan and made him an offer in shining silver dollars for the cargo, and the dazzled potentate set his slaves at work to transfer the cargo to the hold of the Black Warrior.

Thence John Bertram sailed home, and sold his gum-copal for a handsome profit. Other ships followed in his wake and for many years the Zanzibar trade in gum-copal was chiefly carried on in ships out of Salem which controlled the supply of this commodity as it had won and held the pepper trade with Sumatra and the coffee trade with Mocha during an earlier generation.

When the news of the California gold discoveries swept the East like wildfire in 1848, John Bertram was one of the first shipowners to grasp the possibilities of the trade around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Before the end of 1848 he had sent out a ship to carry the advance guards of the argonauts. This bark Eliza cleared from Derby Wharf in December with assorted cargo and passengers, and was cheered by an excited crowd which swarmed among the East India warehouses and listened to the departing gold-seekers sing in lusty chorus the “California Song” which later became the favorite ditty of many a ship’s company bound round the Horn. It ran to the tune of “Oh! Susannah” and carried such sentiments as these:

“I come from Salem City

With my wash-bowl on my knee;

I’m going to California

The gold dust for to see.

It rained all day the day I left,

The weather it was dry;

The sun so hot I froze to death,

Oh, brother, don’t you cry.

CHORUS

Oh, California;

That’s the land for me,

I’m going to California

With my wash-bowl on my knee.[50]

For this roaring California trade John Bertram and his partners built a famous American clipper, the John Bertram, of eleven hundred tons, at East Boston. The remarkable feature of this undertaking was that the ship was launched sixty days after the laying of her keel and ninety days from the time the workmen first laid tools to the timbers she was sailing out of Boston harbor with a full cargo, bound to San Francisco. The John Bertram was a staunch, able, and splendidly built ship, notwithstanding this feat of record-breaking construction. Thirty years after her maiden voyage she was still afloat in the deep-water trade, although under a foreign flag, a fine memorial of the skill and honesty of New England shipbuilders.

After winning a handsome fortune in his shipping enterprises John Bertram had foresight and wisdom to perceive that American ships in foreign trade were doomed to make a losing fight. Their day was past. He turned his energies into other and more profitable channels, and keeping pace with the march of the times, engaged in railroad development and manufacturing enterprises, a shipping merchant of the old school who adapted himself to new conditions with a large measure of success. Much of his fortune he gave to benefit his town of Salem in which his extensive philanthropies keep his memory green.

In 1869, Robert S. Rantoul of Salem, while writing of the town’s maritime history made this brave attempt to convince himself that her glory had not yet departed:

“While our packets ply to New York and our steam tug puffs and screams about the harbor; while marine railways are busy and shipyards launch bigger merchantmen than ever; while coal comes in upwards of four hundred colliers yearly, and our boarding officers report more than fifteen hundred arrivals,[51] while our fishing fleets go forth, and our whalers still cruise the waters of the Indian Ocean and the North Pacific, while we turn over $100,000 to $125,000 per year to the Federal Treasury from import duties and enter a large part of the dates, gum, spices, ivory, ebony and sheepskins brought into this country, it is no time yet to despair of this most ancient seaport of the United States of America.”

This was in a way, a swan-song for the death of Salem romance. The one steam tug which “screamed about the harbor,” was the forerunner of a host of her kind which should trouble the landlocked harbor that once swarmed with privateers and East Indiamen. The coal barge and the coasting schooner were henceforth to huddle in sight of crumbling Derby Wharf, and the fluttering drone of the spindles in the cotton mill to be heard along the waterfront where the decks of the stately square-riggers had echoed to the roaring chanties of “Whiskey Johnny,” “Blow the Man Down,” and “We’re Off for the Rio Grande.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an epitaph of Salem as a deep-water seaport, and thus it appeared to him, the greatest of its children, as he viewed it sixty years ago:

“In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf, but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown the not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a spacious edifice of brick....

“The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as well name at once as the Custom House of the port—has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and shipowners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have arrived at once—usually from Africa or South America—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel’s papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful or somber, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be turned into gold, or has buried him under a bulk of commodities such as nobody will care to rid him of....”

It is unmanly to mourn over old, dead days as better than the present times, to say that men were stronger, simpler, braver in the beginning of this Republic. Every age or generation, however, hammers out in the stress of its day’s work some refined metal of experience, some peculiarly significant heritage to help posterity in its struggle to perpetuate the things most worth while. It was not the rich freightage of silks, spices, ivory and tea which the ships of Salem fetched home, nor the fortunes which built the stately mansions of the elm-shaded streets, that made this race of seamen worthy of a page in the history of their country’s rise to greatness. They did their duty, daringly and cheerfully, in peace and in war. They let their deeds speak for them, and they bore themselves as “gentlemen unafraid,” in adversity and with manly modesty in prosperity. They believed in their country and they fought for her rights, without swashbuckling or empty words. They helped one another, and their community worked hand in hand with them, on honor, to insure the safety of their perilous ventures. The men who wove the duck, the sailmakers who fashioned it to bend to the yards, the blacksmith, the rigger, the carpenter, and the instrument-maker did honest work, all co-operating to build and fit the ship their neighbor was to command so that she might weather the hardest blow and do credit to those who made and sailed her.

Ship Sooloo, Capt. Charles H. Allen, Jr., bound for San Francisco, June 1, 1861

Every shipmaster had as good a chance as any other to win a fortune. Independence, self-reliance, initiative and ambition were fostered. It was clean-handed competition, aggressive, but with a fair chance for all. Whether it was the Atlantic daring to show American colors to the East India Company in Calcutta in 1788, or the Endeavor, with Captain David Elwell on her quarterdeck making the first passage of an American ship through the Straits of Magellan in 1824, or the Margaret at anchor in Nagasaki harbor half a century before another American vessel visited a port of Japan, these adventurers of commerce were red-blooded frontiersmen of blue water, as truly and thoroughly American in spirit and ambition as the strong men who pushed into the western wilderness to carve out new empire for their countrymen.

Judged by the standards of this age, these seamen had their faults. They saw no great wrong in taking cargoes of New England rum to poison the black tribes of Africa, and the schooner Sally and Polly of Salem was winging it to Senegal as early as 1789. Rum, gunpowder and tobacco outbound, hides, palm oil, gold dust and ivory homeward, were staples of a busy commerce until late into the last century. But the pioneering trade to the Orient, which was the glory of the port, was free from the stain of debasing the natives for gain.

Salem is proud of its past, but mightily interested in its present. Its population is four times as great as when it was the foremost foreign seaport of the United States and its activities have veered into manufacturing channels. But as has happened to many other New England cities of the purest American pedigree, a flood of immigration from Europe and Canada has swept into Salem to swarm in its mills and factories. Along the harbor front the fine old square mansions from which the lords of the shipping gazed down at their teeming wharves are tenanted by toilers of many alien nations. But the stately, pillared Custom House, alas, no more than a memorial of vanished greatness, stands at the head of Derby Wharf to remind the passer-by, not only of its immortal surveyor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also of an age of which the civic seal of Salem bears witness in its motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” (To the farthest port of the rich East.)