Many of the merchants had been sea-captains in their youth, and it was the captains who really made Salem famous. These men, from the training of the New England schoolroom and meeting-house, went out into the world and gathered there the fruits of centuries of civilization, which they brought home to soften the narrow self-righteousness of their fellow-citizens. In later years these captains carried missionaries to India, China, and Africa, unconscious that they were themselves the real missionaries, whose influence had wrought so desirable a change in New England thought and character. When Nathaniel Hawthorne served in the Custom House at Salem, the friends in whom he most delighted were sea-captains, for it was through their eyes that he looked out upon the great world, and gathered the knowledge of human nature that enabled him to portray in such grim reality the hidden springs of human thought and action. These captains were the sons of gentlemen, and were as a class the best educated men of their time in the United States, for they could do more important and difficult things, and do them well, than the men of any other profession. The old East India Museum at Salem is a monument to their taste and refinement. Nowhere else, perhaps, can be found another little museum as unique and beautiful, of treasures brought home one by one from distant lands and seas by the hands that gave them.
Boston, too, had her ships and seamen. From that port were sent out in 1788 the Columbia, a ship of two hundred and thirteen tons, and the sloop Washington, of ninety tons, commanded by Captains John Kendrick and Robert Gray, who took them round Cape Horn to the northwest coast of America, and then after trading for cargoes of furs, went across to China. The Columbia returned to Boston by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and was the first vessel to carry the United States ensign round the globe. Subsequently she discovered the majestic river that bears her name, and so won the great Northwest for the flag under which she sailed. The Massachusetts, of six hundred tons, the largest merchant vessel built in America up to her time, was launched at Quincy in 1789 and was owned in Boston. She sailed for Canton and was sold there to the Danish East India Company for $65,000.
Ezra Western was the most famous of the old time Boston ship-owners. He began business in 1764, and owned his own shipyard, sail-loft, and extensive rope-walk at Duxbury, Massachusetts, where his vessels were built and equipped. In 1798 his son Ezra became a partner, and this firm continued until the death of the father in 1822. The son Ezra then went on in his own name until 1842, when his sons Gersham, Alden, and Ezra, were taken into the firm, and they continued it until 1858, in all some ninety-three years, the last place of business being Nos. 37 and 38, Commercial Wharf. From the year 1800 to 1846 the Westerns owned twenty-one ships, ranging in tonnage from the Hope, of 880 tons, to the Minerva, of 250 tons; one barque, the Pallas, of 209 tons; thirty brigs, from the Two Friends, of 240 tons, to the Federal Eagle, of 120 tons; thirty-five schooners, from the St. Michael, of 132 tons, to the Star, of 20 tons; and ten sloops, from the Union, of 63 tons, to the Linnet, of 50 tons. The brig Smyrna, one of the Western fleet, built in 1825, of 160 tons, was the first American vessel to bear the flag of the United States into the Black Sea after it was opened to commerce. She arrived at Odessa July 17, 1830. The Westerns were easily the largest ship-owners of their time in the United States, and not only built but loaded their own vessels. Their house-flag was red, white, and blue horizontal stripes.
In the year 1791, Stephen Girard, who was born near Bordeaux in 1750 and had risen from cabin-boy to be captain of his own vessel, built four beautiful ships at Philadelphia for the China and India trade—the Helvetia, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. These vessels, long the pride of Philadelphia, greatly enriched their owner.
The sloop Enterprise, of eighty tons, built at Albany and commanded by Captain Stewart Dean, was sent from New York to China in 1785. This was the first vessel to make the direct voyage from the United States to Canton. She returned during the following year with her crew of seven men and two boys all in excellent condition. When she warped alongside the wharf at New York, Captain Dean and his crew were in full uniform, and the scene, which was witnessed by an admiring throng, was enlivened by “martial music and the boatswain’s whistle.�
Thomas Cheesman was one of the first ship-builders in New York, and he was succeeded in business, before the end of the eighteenth century, by his son Forman, born in 1763. The latter built the forty-four-gun frigate President, launched in the year 1800 at Corlear’s Hook—by far the largest vessel built in New York up to that time. Previous to this, however, he had built the Briganza and the Draper, each of three hundred tons, and the Ontario, of five hundred tons. Thomas Vail, William Vincent, and Samuel Ackley also built several vessels prior to the year 1800. The ships Eugene, Severn, Manhattan, Sampson, Echo, Hercules, Resource, York, and Oliver Ellsworth were launched from their yards. In 1804 the Oliver Ellsworth, built by Vail & Vincent and commanded by Captain Bennett, made the passage from New York to Liverpool in fourteen days, notwithstanding that she carried away her foretopmast, which was replaced at sea.
All of these shipyards were below Grand Street, on the East River. Samuel Ackley’s yard was at the foot of Pelham Street, and here the Manhattan, of six hundred tons, was built for the China and East India trade. She was regarded as a monster of the deep, and when she sailed upon her first voyage in 1796, it took nearly all the deep water seamen in the port to man her. Henry Eckford opened a shipyard at the foot of Clinton Street in 1802. From this yard he launched, in 1803, John Jacob Astor’s famous ship Beaver, of four hundred and twenty-seven tons. It was on board this ship that Captain Augustus De Peyster made his first voyage as a boy before the mast. Subsequently he commanded her, and upon retiring from the sea in 1845 he became the Governor of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor at Staten Island. The Beaver once made the homeward run from Canton to Bermuda in seventy-five days. Christian Bergh began ship-building in 1804 with the ship North America, of four hundred tons, built for the Atlantic trade, and the brig Gipsey, of three hundred tons, a very sharp vessel for those days. She was dismasted off the Cape of Good Hope upon her first voyage to Batavia, and afterwards foundered in a heavy squall, all hands being lost. The Trident, of three hundred and fifty tons, was built by Adam and Noah Brown in 1805, and the Triton, of three hundred and fifty tons, by Charles Brown during the same year, both for the China and India trade. John Floyd began ship-building in 1807, and launched the Carmelite, a ship of four hundred tons, during that year, but was soon appointed naval constructor at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Until 1794 ships had been built from skeleton models composed of pieces that showed the frames, keel, stem, and stern post, but were of little use in giving an accurate idea of the form of a vessel, while it required much time and labor to transfer the lines of the model to the mould loft. In this year, however, Orlando Merrill, a young ship-builder of Newburyport, at that time thirty-one years old, invented the water-line model, which was composed of lifts joined together, originally by dowels and later by screws. These could be taken apart and the sheer, body, and half-breadth plans easily transferred to paper, from which the working plans were laid down in the mould loft. This ingenious though simple invention, for which, by the way, Mr. Merrill never received any pecuniary reward, revolutionized the science of ship-building. The original model made by him in 1794 was presented to the New York Historical Society in 1853. Mr. Merrill died in 1855 at the age of ninety-two.
CHAPTER II
BRITISH SHIPPING AFTER 1815—THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
GREAT BRITAIN and the United States signed a treaty of peace and good-will at Ghent in 1814. During the following year the wars of England and France ended on the field of Waterloo. And so at last the battle flags were furled. The long-continued wars of England had, through neglect, reduced her merchant marine to a low standard of efficiency, and both men and ships were in a deplorable condition. There was no government supervision over British merchant shipping except taxation, the only check, and that but partially effective, being the Underwriters at Lloyd’s. Unscrupulous ship-owners might and often did send rotten, unseaworthy vessels to sea, poorly provisioned, short of gear and stores, with captains, mates, and crews picked up from low taverns along the docks. These vessels were fully covered by insurance at high rates of premium, with the hope, frequently realized, that they would never be heard from again.