ILLUSTRATIONS
| The Panay, one of the last of the Salem fleet bound out from Boston to Manila twenty-five years ago | [Frontispiece] |
| FACING | |
| PAGE | |
| Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne as surveyor | [6] |
| Page from the illustrated log of the Eolus | [6] |
| A corner in the Marine Room of the Peabody Museum | [14] |
| The Marine Room, Peabody Museum | [14] |
| Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society | [18] |
| Title page of the log of Capt Nathaniel Hawthorne | [18] |
| The Roger Williams house | [24] |
| The Philip English “Great House” | [30] |
| A bill of lading of the time of Philip English, dated 1716 | [36] |
| The log of a Salem whaler | [36] |
| A page from Falconer’s Marine Dictionary (18th Century) | [44] |
| Agreement by which a Revolutionary privateer seaman sold his share of the booty in advance of his cruise | [66] |
| Proclamation posted in Salem during the Revolution calling for volunteers aboard Paul Jones’ Ranger | [70] |
| Schooner Baltic | [76] |
| Derby Wharf, Salem, Mass., as it appears to-day | [86] |
| Captain Luther Little | [108] |
| The East India Marine Society’s hall, now the home of the Peabody Museum | [120] |
| Page from the records of the East India Marine Society | [120] |
| The Salem Custom House, built in 1818 | [140] |
| Richard Derby | [152] |
| “Leslie’s Retreat” | [158] |
| The Grand Turk, first American ship to pass the Cape of Good Hope | [176] |
| Nathaniel West | [180] |
| William Gray | [188] |
| Elias Hasket Derby | [188] |
| The Ship Mount Vernon | [192] |
| Elias Hasket Derby mansion (1790-1816) | [194] |
| Prince House. Home of Richard Derby. Built about 1750 | [194] |
| Joseph Peabody | [200] |
| Hon. Jacob Crowninshield | [204] |
| Benjamin Crowninshield | [208] |
| Ship Ulysses | [212] |
| Yacht Cleopatra’s Barge | [212] |
| Log of the good ship Rubicon | [214] |
| The frigate Essex | [230] |
| Broadside ballad published in Salem after the news was received of the loss of the Essex | [248] |
| Page from the log of the Margaret | [252] |
| The good ship Franklin | [252] |
| View of Nagasaki before Japan was opened to commerce | [260] |
| Salem Harbor as it is to-day | [274] |
| The old-time sailors used to have their vessels painted on pitchers and punch bowls | [284] |
| Title page from the journal of the Lydia | [284] |
| Nathaniel Bowditch, author of “The Practical Navigator” | [294] |
| Nathaniel Bowditch’s chart of Salem harbor | [304] |
| Captain Benjamin Carpenter of the Hercules, 1792 | [306] |
| From the log of the Hercules | [308] |
| Pages from the log of the ship Hercules, 1792 | [312] |
| Captain Nathaniel Silsbee | [318] |
| Captain Richard Cleveland | [334] |
| Captain James W. Chever | [358] |
| The privateer America under full sail | [358] |
| Captain Holten J. Breed | [370] |
| The privateer Grand Turk | [370] |
| An old broadside, relating the incidents of the battle of Qualah Battoo | [380] |
| The Glide | [390] |
| The Friendship | [390] |
| Captain Driver | [408] |
| Letter to Captain Driver from the “Bounty” Colonists | [408] |
| Captain Thomas Fuller | [432] |
| The brig Mexican attacked by pirates, 1832 | [432] |
| Frederick T. Ward | [454] |
| Captain John Bertram | [486] |
| Ship Sooloo | [494] |
THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF OLD SALEM
The Ships and Sailors of
Old Salem
CHAPTER I
A PORT OF VANISHED FLEETS
American ships and sailors have almost vanished from the seas that lie beyond their own coasts. The twentieth century has forgotten the era when Yankee topsails, like flying clouds, flecked every ocean, when tall spars forested every Atlantic port from Portland to Charleston, and when the American spirit of adventurous enterprise and rivalry was in its finest flower on the decks of our merchant squadrons. The last great chapter of the nation’s life on blue water was written in the days of the matchless clippers which swept round the Horn to San Francisco or fled homeward from the Orient in the van of the tea fleets.
The Cape Horn clipper was able to survive the coming of the Age of Steam a few years longer than the Atlantic packet ships, such as the Dreadnought, but her glory departed with the Civil War and thereafter the story of the American merchant marine is one of swift and sorrowful decay. The boys of the Atlantic coast, whose fathers had followed the sea in legions, turned inland to find their careers, and the sterling qualities which had been bred in the bone by generations of salty ancestry now helped to conquer the western wilderness.
It is all in the past, this noble and thrilling history of American achievement on the deep sea, and a country with thousands of miles of seacoast has turned its back toward the spray-swept scenes of its ancient greatness to seek the fulfillment of its destiny in peopling the prairie, reclaiming the desert and feeding its mills and factories with the resources of forest, mine and farm.
For more than two centuries, however, we Americans were a maritime race, in peace and war, and the most significant deeds and spectacular triumphs of our seafaring annals were wrought long before the era of the clipper ship. The fastest and most beautiful fabric ever driven by the winds, the sky-sail clipper was handled with a superb quality of seamanship which made the mariners of other nations doff their caps to the ruddy Yankee masters of the Sovereign of the Seas, the Flying Cloud, the Comet, the Westward Ho, or the Swordfish. Her routes were well traveled, however, and her voyages hardly more eventful than those of the liner of to-day. Islands were charted, headlands lighted, and the instruments and science of navigation so far perfected as to make ocean pathfinding no longer a matter of blind reckoning and guesswork. Pirates and privateers had ceased to harry the merchantmen and to make every voyage a hazard of life and death from the Bahama Banks to the South Seas.
Through the vista of fifty years the Yankee clipper has a glamour of singularly picturesque romance, but it is often forgotten that two hundred years of battling against desperate odds and seven generations of seafaring stock had been required to evolve her type and to breed the men who sailed her in the nineteenth century. It is to this much older race of American seamen and the stout ships they built and manned that we of to-day should be grateful for many of the finest pages in the history of our country’s progress. The most adventurous age of our merchant mariners had reached its climax at the time of the War of 1812, and its glory was waning almost a hundred years ago. For the most part its records are buried in sea-stained log books and in the annals and traditions of certain ancient New England coastwise towns,[1] of which Salem was the most illustrious.
This port of Salem is chiefly known beyond New England as the scene of a wicked witchcraft delusion which caused the death of a score of poor innocents in 1692, and in later days as the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is not so commonly known that this old town of Salem, nestled in a bight of the Massachusetts coast, was once the most important seat of maritime enterprise in the New World. Nor when its population of a century ago is taken into consideration can any foreign port surpass for adventure, romance and daring the history of Salem during the era of its astonishing activity. Even as recently as 1854, when the fleets of Salem were fast dwindling, the London Daily News, in a belated eulogy of our American ships and sailors, was moved to compare the spirit of this port with that of Venice and the old Hanse towns and to say: “We owe a cordial admiration of the spirit of American commerce in its adventurous aspects. To watch it is to witness some of the finest romance of our time.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem in 1848-49, after the prestige of the port had been well-nigh lost. He was descended from a race of Salem shipmasters and he saw daily in the streets of his native town the survivors of the generations of incomparable seamen who had first carried the American flag to Hindoostan, Java, Sumatra, and Japan, who were first to trade with the Fiji Islands and with Madagascar, who had led the way to the west coast of Africa and to St. Petersburg, who had been pioneers in opening the commerce of South America and China to Yankee ships. They had “sailed where no other ships dared to go, they had anchored where no one else dreamed of looking for trade.” They had fought pirates and the privateers of a dozen races around the world, stamping themselves as the Drakes and the Raleighs and Gilberts of American commercial daring.
In the Salem of his time, however, Hawthorne perceived little more than a melancholy process of decay, and a dusky background for romances of a century more remote. It would seem as if he found no compelling charm in the thickly clustered memories that linked the port with its former greatness on the sea. Some of the old shipmasters were in the Custom House service with him and he wrote of them as derelicts “who after being tost on every sea and standing sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast had finally drifted into this quiet nook where with little to disturb them except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of life.”
They were simple, brave, elemental men, hiding no tortuous problems of conscience, very easy to analyze and catalogue, and perhaps not apt, for this reason, to make a strong appeal to the genius of the author of “The Scarlet Letter.”
Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne as surveyor
Page from the illustrated log of the Eolus. Her captain drew such pictures as these of the ships he sighted at sea
“They spent a good deal of time asleep in their accustomed corners,” he also wrote of them, “with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories and mouldy jokes that had grown to be passwords and counter-signs among them.”
One of the sea journals or logs of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,[2] father of the author, possesses a literary interest in that its title page was lettered by the son when a lad of sixteen. With many an ornamental flourish the inscription runs:
Nathaniel Hathorne’s
Book—1820—Salem.
A Journal of a Passage from Bengall to America
In the Ship America of
Salem, 1798.
This is almost the only volume of salty flavored narrative to which Nathaniel Hawthorne may be said to have contributed, although he was moved to pay this tribute to his stout-hearted forebears:
“From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarterdeck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.”
Even to-day there survive old shipmasters and merchants of Salem who in their own boyhood heard from the lips of the actors their stories of shipwrecks on uncharted coasts; of captivity among the Algerians and in the prisons of France, England and Spain; of hairbreadth escapes from pirates on the Spanish Main and along Sumatran shores; of ship’s companies overwhelmed by South Sea cannibals when Salem barks were pioneers in the wake of Captain Cook; of deadly actions fought alongside British men-of-war and private armed ships, and of steering across far-distant seas when “India was a new region and only Salem knew the way thither.”
Such men as these were trained in a stern school to fight for their own. When the time came they were also ready to fight for their country. Salem sent to sea one hundred and fifty-eight privateers during the Revolution. They carried two thousand guns and were manned by more than six thousand men, a force equal in numbers to the population of the town. These vessels captured four hundred and forty-four prizes, or more than one-half the total number taken by all the Colonies during the war.
In the War of 1812 Salem manned and equipped forty privateers and her people paid for and built the frigate Essex which under the command of David Porter swept the Pacific clean of British commerce and met a glorious end in her battle with the Phoebe and Cherub off the harbor of Valparaiso. Nor among the sea fights of both wars are there to be found more thrilling ship actions than were fought by Salem privateersmen who were as ready to exchange broadsides or measure boarding pikes with a “king’s ship” as to snap up a tempting merchantman.
But even beyond these fighting merchant sailors lay a previous century of such stress and hazard in ocean traffic as this age cannot imagine. One generation after another of honest shipmasters had been the prey of a great company of lawless rovers under many flags or no flag at all. The distinction between privateers and pirates was not clearly drawn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the tiny American brigs and sloops which bravely fared to the West Indies and Europe were fair marks for the polyglot freebooters that laughed at England’s feeble protection of her colonial trade.
The story of the struggles and heroisms of the western pioneers has been told over and over again. Every American schoolboy is acquainted with the story of the beginnings of the New England Colonies and of their union. But the work of the seafaring breed of Americans has been somewhat suffered to remain in the background. Their astonishing adventures were all in the day’s work and were commonplace matters to their actors. The material for the plot of a modern novel of adventure may be found condensed into a three-line entry of many an ancient log-book.
High on the front of a massive stone building in Essex Street, Salem, is chiseled the inscription, “East India Marine Hall.” Beneath this are the obsolete legends, “Asiatic Bank,” and “Oriental Insurance Office.” Built by the East India Marine Society eighty-four years ago, this structure is now the home of the Peabody Museum and a storehouse for the unique collections which Salem seafarers brought home from strange lands when their ships traded in every ocean. The East India Marine Society still exists. The handful of surviving members meet now and then and spin yarns of the vanished days when they were masters of stately square-riggers in the deep-water trade. All of them are gray and some of them quite feeble and every little while another of this company slips his cable for the last long voyage.
The sight-seeing visitor in Salem is fascinated by its quaint and picturesque streets, recalling as they do no fewer than three centuries of American life, and by its noble mansions set beneath the elms in an atmosphere of immemorial traditions. But the visitor is not likely to seek the story of Salem as it is written in the records left by the men who made it great. For those heroic seafarers not only made history but they also wrote it while they lived it. The East India Marine Society was organized in 1799 “to assist the widows and children of deceased members; to collect such facts and observations as tended to the improvement and security of navigation, and to form a museum of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn.”[3]
The by-laws provided that “any person shall be eligible as a member of this society who shall have actually navigated the seas near the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, either as master or commander or as factor or supercargo in any vessel belonging to Salem.”
From its foundation until the time when the collections of the Society were given in charge of the Peabody Academy of Science in 1867, three hundred and fifty masters and supercargoes of Salem had qualified for membership as having sailed beyond Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope.
More than a century ago, therefore, these mariners of Salem began to write detailed journals of their voyages, to be deposited with this Society in order that their fellow shipmasters might glean from them such facts as might “tend to the improvement and security of navigation.” Few seas were charted, and Salem ships were venturing along unknown shores. The journal of one of these pioneer voyages was a valuable aid to the next shipmaster who went that way. These journals were often expanded from the ship’s logs, and written after the captains came home. The habit of carefully noting all incidents of trade, discovery, and dealings with primitive races taught these seamen to make their logs something more than routine accounts of wind and weather. Thus, year after year and generation after generation, there was accumulating a library of adventurous first-hand narrative, written in stout manuscript volumes.
It was discovered that a pen and ink drawing of the landfall of some almost unknown island would help the next captain passing that coast to identify its headlands. Therefore many of these quarterdeck chroniclers developed an astonishing aptitude for sketching coast line, mountains and bays. Some of them even made pictures in water color of the ships they saw or spoke, and their logs were illustrated descriptions of voyages to the South Seas or Mauritius or China. In this manner the tradition was cherished that a shipmaster of Salem owed it to his fellow mariners and townspeople to bring home not only all the knowledge he could gather but also every kind of curious trophy to add to the collections of the East India Marine Society. And as the commerce over seas began to diminish in the nineteenth century, this tradition laid fast hold upon many Salem men and women whose fathers had been shipmasters. They took pride in gathering together all the old log books they could find in cobwebby attics and battered seachests and in increasing this unique library of blue water.
Older than the East India Marine Society is the Salem Marine Society, which was founded in 1766 by eighteen shipmasters, and which still maintains its organization in its own building. Its Act of Incorporation, dated 1772, stated that “whereas a considerable number of persons who are or have been Masters of ships or other vessels, have for several years past associated themselves in the town of Salem; and the principal end of said Society being to improve the knowledge of this coast, by the several members, upon their arrival from sea communicating their observations, inwards and outwards, of the variation of the needle, soundings, courses and distances, and all other remarkable things about it, in writing, to be lodged with the Society, for the making of the navigation more safe; and also to relieve one another and their families in poverty or other adverse accidents of life, which they are more particularly liable to,” etc.
Most of these records, together with those belonging to the East India Marine Society and many others rescued from oblivion, have been assembled and given in care of the Essex Institute of Salem as the choicest treasure of its notable historical library. It has come to pass that a thousand of these logs and sea-journals are stored in one room of the Essex Institute, comprising many more than this number of voyages made between 1750 and 1890, a period of a century and a half, which included the most brilliant era of American sea life. Privateer, sealer, whaler, and merchantman, there they rest, row after row of canvas-covered books, filled with the day’s work of as fine a race of seamen as ever sailed; from the log of the tiny schooner Hopewell on a voyage to the West Indies amid perils of swarming pirates and privateers a generation before the Revolution, down to the log of the white-winged Mindoro of the Manila fleet which squared away her yards for the last time only fifteen years ago.
There is no other collection of Americana which can so vividly recall a vanished epoch and make it live again as these hundreds upon hundreds of ancient log books. They are complete, final, embracing as they do the rise, the high-tide and the ebb of the commerce of Salem, the whole story of those vikings of deep-water enterprise who dazzled the maritime world. These journals reflect in intimate and sharply focused detail that little world which Harriet Martineau discerned when she visited Salem seventy-five years ago and related:
“Salem, Mass., is a remarkable place. This ‘city of peace’ will be better known hereafter for its commerce than for it’s witch tragedy. It has a population of fourteen thousand and more wealth in proportion to its population than perhaps any town in the world. Its commerce is speculative but vast and successful. It is a frequent circumstance that a ship goes out without a cargo for a voyage around the world. In such a case the captain puts his elder children to school, takes his wife and younger children and starts for some semi-barbarous place where he procures some odd kind of cargo which he exchanges with advantage for another somewhere else; and so goes trafficking around the world, bringing home a freight of the highest value.
“These enterprising merchants of Salem are hoping to appropriate a large share of the whale fishery and their ships are penetrating the northern ice. They speak of Fayal and the Azores as if they were close at hand. The fruits of the Mediterranean are on every table. They have a large acquaintance at Cairo. They know Napoleon’s grave at St. Helena, and have wild tales to tell of Mozambique and Madagascar, and stores of ivory to show from there. They speak of the power of the king of Muscat, and are sensible of the riches of the southeast coast of Arabia. Anybody will give you anecdotes from Canton and descriptions of the Society and Sandwich Islands. They often slip up the western coast of their two continents, bringing furs from the back regions of their own wide land, glance up at the Andes on their return; double Cape Horn, touch at the ports of Brazil and Guiana, look about them in the West Indies, feeling almost at home there, and land some fair morning in Salem and walk home as if they had done nothing remarkable.”
Within sight of this Essex Institute is the imposing building of the Peabody Academy of Science and Marine Museum, already mentioned. Here the loyal sons of Salem, aided by the generous endowment of George Peabody, the banker and philanthropist, have created a notable memorial to the sea-born genius of the old town. One hall is filled with models and paintings of the stout ships which made Salem rich and famous. These models were built and rigged with the most painstaking accuracy of detail, most of them the work of mariners of the olden time, and many of them made on shipboard during long voyages. Scores of the paintings of ships were made when they were afloat, their cannon and checkered ports telling of the dangers which merchantmen dared in those times; their hulls and rigging wearing a quaint and archaic aspect.
Beneath them are displayed the tools of the seaman’s trade long ere steam made of him a paint-swabber and mechanic. Here are the ancient quadrants, “half-circles,” and hand log lines, timed with sandglasses, with which our forefathers found their way around the world. Beside them repose the “colt” and the “cat-o’-nine-tails” with which those tough tars were flogged by their skippers and mates. Cutlasses such as were wielded in sea fights with Spanish, French and English, boarding axes and naval tomahawks, are flanked by carved whales-teeth, whose intricate designs of ships, cupids and mermaids whiled away the dogwatches under the Southern Cross. Over yonder is a notched limb of a sea-washed tree on which a sailor tallied the days and weeks of five months’ solitary waiting on a desert island where he had been cast by shipwreck.
A corner in the Marine Room of the Peabody Museum, showing portraits of the shipmasters and merchants of Salem
The Marine Room, Peabody Museum, showing the ships of Salem during a period of one hundred and fifty years
Portraits of famous shipping merchants and masters gaze at portraits of Sultans of Zanzibar, Indian Rajahs and hong merchants of Canton whose names were household words in the Salem of long ago. In other spacious halls of this museum are unique displays of the tools, weapons, garments and adornments of primitive races, gathered generations before their countries and islands were ransacked by the tourist and the ethnologist. They portray the native arts and habits of life before they were corrupted by European influences. Some of the tribes which fashioned these things have become extinct, but their vanquished handiwork is preserved in these collections made with devoted loyalty by the old shipmasters who were proud of their home town and of their Marine Society. From the Fiji and Gilbert and Hawaiian Islands, from Samoa, Arabia, India, China, Africa and Japan, and every other foreign shore where ships could go, these trophies were brought home to lay the foundation of collections which to-day are visited by scientists from abroad in order to study many rare objects which can be no longer obtained.[4]
The catalogue of ports from which the deep-laden argosies rolled home to Salem is astonishing in its scope. From 1810 to 1830, for example, Salem ships flew the American flag in these ports:
Sumatra, Malaga, Naples, Liverpool, St. Domingo, Baracoa, Cadiz, Cayenne, Gothenburg, La Guayra, Havana, Canton, Smyrna, Matanzas, Valencia, Turk’s Island, Pernambuco, Rio Janeiro, Messina, St. Pierre’s, Point Petre, Cronstadt, Archangel, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Surinam, St. Petersburg, Calcutta, Porto Rico, Palermo, Algeciras, Constantinople, Cumana, Kiel, Angostura, Jacquemel, Gustavia, Malta, Exuma, Buenos Ayres, Christiana, Stralsund, Guadaloupe, Nevis, Riga, Madras, St. Vincent’s, Pillau, Amsterdam, Maranham, Para, Leghorn, Manila, Samarang, Java, Mocha, South Sea Islands, Africa, Padang, Cape de Verde, Zanzibar and Madagascar.
In these days of huge ships and cavernous holds in which freight is stowed to the amount of thousands of tons, we are apt to think that those early mariners carried on their commerce over seas in a small way. But the records of old Salem contain scores of entries for the early years of the last century in which the duties paid on cargoes of pepper, sugar, indigo, and other Oriental wares swelled the custom receipts from twenty-five thousand to sixty thousand dollars. In ten years, from 1800 to 1810, when the maritime prosperity of the port was at flood-tide, the foreign entries numbered more than one thousand and the total amount of duties more than seven million dollars. And from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the ships of Salem vanished from blue water, a period of seventy years, roughly speaking, more than twenty million dollars poured into the Custom House as duties on foreign cargoes.
Old men now living remember when the old warehouses along the wharves were full of “hemp from Luzon; pepper from Sumatra; coffee from Arabia; palm oil from the west coast of Africa; cotton from Bombay; duck and iron from the Baltic; tallow from Madagascar; salt from Cadiz; wine from Portugal and the Madeiras; figs, raisins and almonds from the Mediterranean; teas and silks from China; sugar, rum and molasses from the West Indies; ivory and gum-copal from Zanzibar; rubber, hides and wool from South America; whale oil from the Arctic and Antarctic, and sperm from the South Seas.”
In 1812 one hundred and twenty-six Salem ships were in the deep-water trade, and of these fifty-eight were East Indiamen. Twenty years later this noble fleet numbered one hundred and eleven. They had been pioneers in opening new routes of commerce, but the vessels of the larger ports were flocking in their wake. Boston, with the development of railway transportation, New York with the opening of the Erie Canal, Philadelphia and Baltimore with their more advantageous situations for building up a commerce with the great and growing hinterland of the young United States, were creating their ocean commerce at the expense of old Salem. Bigger ships were building and deeper harbors were needed and Salem shipowners dispatched their vessels from Boston instead of the home port. Then came the Age of Steam on the sea, and the era of the sailing vessel was foredoomed.
The Custom House which looks down at crumbling Derby Wharf where the stately East Indiamen once lay three deep, awakes from its drowsy idleness to record the entries of a few lumber-laden schooners from Nova Scotia. Built in 1819, when the tide of Salem commerce had already begun to ebb, its classic and pillared bulk recalls the comment of its famous officer, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “It was intended to accommodate an hoped for increase in the commercial prosperity of the place, hopes destined never to be realized, and was built a world too large for any necessary purpose.”
Yet in the records left by these vanished generations of seamen; in the aspect of the stately mansions built from the fortunes won by their ships; in the atmosphere of the old wharves and streets, there has been preserved, as if caught in amber, the finished story of one of the most romantic and high-hearted periods of American achievement.
Salem was a small city during her maritime career, numbering hardly more than ten thousand souls at a time when her trade had made her famous in every port of the world. Her achievements were the work of an exceedingly bold and vigorous population in whom the pioneering instinct was fostered and guided by a few merchants of rare sagacity, daring and imagination. It must not be forgotten that from the early part of the seventeenth century to the latter year of the eighteenth century when this seafaring genius reached its highest development, the men of Salem had been trained and bred to wrest a livelihood from salt water. During this period of one hundred and fifty years before the Revolution the sea was the highway of the Colonists whose settlements fringed the rugged coast line of New England. At their backs lay a hostile wilderness and a great part of the population toiled at fishing, trading and shipbuilding.
Roger Conant, who, in 1626, founded the settlement later called Salem, had left his fellow Pilgrims at Plymouth because he would not agree to “separate” from the Church of England. Pushing along the coast to Nantasket, where Captain Miles Standish had built an outpost, Roger Conant was asked by the Dorchester Company of England to take charge of a newly established fishing station on Cape Ann. This enterprise was unsuccessful and Conant aspired to better his fortunes by founding a colony or plantation on the shore of the sheltered harbor of the Naumkeag Peninsula. This was the beginning of the town of Salem, so named by the first governor, John Endicott, who ousted Roger Conant in 1629, when this property of the Dorchester Company passed by purchase into the hands of the New England Company.
Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society, used in 1790, showing wharves and harbor
Title page of the log of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne, father of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This lettering at the top of the page was done by the author when a boy
The first settlers who had fought famine, pestilence and red men were not consulted in the transaction but were transferred along with the land. They had established a refuge for those oppressed for conscience’s sake, and Roger Conant, brave, resolute and patient, had fought the good fight with them. But although they held meetings and protested against being treated as “slaves,” they could make no opposition to the iron-handed zealot and aristocrat, John Endicott, who came to rule over them. Eighty settlers perished of hunger and disease during Governor Endicott’s first winter among them, and when Winthrop, Saltonstall, Dudley and Johnson brought over a thousand people in seventeen ships in the year of 1629, they passed by afflicted Salem and made their settlements at Boston, Charlestown and Watertown.
“The homes, labors and successes of the first colonists of Salem would be unworthy of our attention were they associated with the lives of ordinary settlers in a new country. But small though the beginnings were these men were beginning to store up and to train the energy which was afterward to expand with tremendous force in the opening of the whole world to commerce and civilization, and in the establishment of the best things in American life.”[5] They were the picked men of England, yeomanry for the most part, seeking to better their condition, interested in the great problems of religion and government. Dwelling along the harbor front, or on the banks of small rivers near at hand, they at once busied themselves cutting down trees and hewing planks to fashion pinnaces and shallops for traversing these waterways. Fish was a staple diet and the chief commodity of trade, and often averted famine while the scanty crops were being wrested from the first clearings. Thus these early sixteenth century men of Salem were more at home upon the water than upon the less friendly land, and it was inevitable that they should build larger craft for coastwise voyaging as fast as other settlements sprang into being to the north and south of them.
No more than ten years after the arrival of John Endicott, shipbuilding was a thriving industry of Salem, and her seamen had begun to talk of sending their ventures as far away as the West Indies. In 1640 the West Indiaman Desire brought home cotton, tobacco and negroes from the Bahamas and salt from Tortugas. This ship Desire was a credit to her builders, for after opening the trade with the West Indies she made a passage to England in the amazingly brief time of twenty-three days, which would have been considered rapid sailing for a packet ship two hundred years later. In 1664 a local historian was able to record that “in this town are some very rich merchants.” These merchants, most of them shipmasters as well, were destined to build up for their seaport a peculiar fame by reason of their genius for discovering new markets for their trading ventures and staking their lives and fortunes on the chance of finding rich cargoes where no other American ships had dreamed of venturing.