The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The Panama Canal has strongly revived interest in the American merchant marine. A nation, long indifferent to the fact that it had lost its prestige on blue water, now discovers that after digging a ditch between two oceans at a cost of hundred of millions, there are almost no American ships to use it.

In other days, Yankee ships and sailors were able to win the commerce of the world against the competition of foreign flags because of native enterprise, brains, and seamanship. Nor is it impossible that such an era shall come again. It was not so much the lack of subsidies and the lower cost of foreign ships and crews that drove the American ensign from the high seas as the greater attraction which drew capital and energy to the tasks of building cities and railroads and opening to civilization the inland areas of the West.

If these records of maritime Salem hold any lessons for to-day, if they are worth while as something more than stirring tales of bygone generations, it is because those seafarers achieved success without counting the odds. They were enormously hampered by the policy of England which deliberately endeavored to crush Colonial shipping by means of numberless tonnage, customs, and neutrality regulations. It was a merciless jealousy that sought to confiscate every Yankee merchant vessel and ruin her owners.

There were the risks of the sea, of uncharted, unlighted coasts and reefs and islands, and a plague of ferocious pirates and lawless privateers who haunted the trade routes from the Spanish Main to Madagascar. The vessel lucky enough to escape all these perils might run afoul of another menace in the cruiser or customs officer of the King, and many an American merchantmen, hundreds of them, were seized in their own harbors and carried off before the eyes of their owners who could only stand by in speechless rage and sorrow at the loss of their labor and investment.

Notwithstanding all these grievous handicaps, American ships and sailors prospered and multiplied, nor did they stay at home and whine that they could not compete with the more favored merchant navies of England and the Continent. They took and held their commanding share of the world’s trade because they had to have it. They wanted it earnestly enough to go out and get it.

Whenever the United States shall really desire to regain her proud place among the maritime nations, the minds of her captains of industry will find a way to achieve it and her legislators will solve their share of the problem. And our people will cease paying over to English and German shipowners enough money in freight and passage bills every year to defray the cost of building a Panama Canal.

From log books, sea journals and other manuscripts hitherto unpublished (most of them written during the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812), are herein gathered such narratives as those of the first American voyages to Japan, India, the Philippines, Guam, the Cape of Good Hope, Sumatra, Arabia and the South Seas. These and other records, as written by the seamen who made Salem the most famous port of the New World a century ago, are much more than local annals. They comprise a unique and brilliant chapter of American history and they speak for themselves.

This era, vanished this closed chapter of American achievement which reached its zenith a full century ago, belongs not alone to Salem, but also to the nation. East and west, north and south, runs the love of the stars and stripes, and the desire to do honor to those who have helped win for this flag prestige and respect among other peoples in other climes. The seamen of this old port were traders, it is true, but they lent to commerce an epic quality, and because they steered so many brave ships to ports where no other American topsails had ever gleamed, they deserve to be remembered among those whose work left its imprint far beyond the limits of the town or coast they called home.