This disparity of results was largely due to the greater number of English merchant vessels, but is also to be credited to the superior speed and handiness of the Yankee vessels, most of which were “Baltimore clippers,” topsail-rigged schooners with raking masts, that could outsail and out-manœuver anything afloat. “They usually carried from six to ten guns, with a single long one, which was called ‘Long Tom,’ mounted on a swivel in the center. They were usually manned with fifty persons besides officers, all armed with muskets, cutlasses, and boarding-pikes.”
An English writer, Mr. R. C. Leslie, is of the opinion that this type of vessel grew out of models in vogue in the West Indies, long before, for the small piratical craft that made those waters the terror of travelers.
DRAWN BY W. TABER.ENGRAVED BY HENRY WOLF.
UNITED STATES FRIGATE “CONSTELLATION” OVERHAULING THE SLAVER “CORA.”
These Baltimore clippers, too, enlarged and square-rigged, but still the fastest things on the western ocean, formed the craft with which the slave-trade was continued between Africa and America long after it had been condemned by the civilized world. For many years previous to the American Civil War, which put an end to the larger part of the traffic by destroying its market, England and the United States kept squadrons patrolling the African coast to arrest the slavers and free their “cargoes.”
What wild, wild tales of the sea do these reminiscences of piracy, privateering, and the slave-chase bring to mind—tales of horror, and yet full of such deeds of daring and romance and fierce delight as must stir the heart in spite of brain and conscience!
Pirates are things of the past—no more to be feared except in a small way in the Malayan and Chinese archipelagoes. The African slave-trade is extinct, so far as shipment across the ocean is concerned, save where, now and then, an Arab dhow steals with its black cargo along the East African foreland, or flits across the Gulf of Aden or the Red Sea. Privateering has been forbidden by international treaty among the larger European powers, which now recognize that trade goods, even of belligerents, must be held safe in the ships of neutrals (except articles declared contraband of war), because the business of the world cannot stop, or even be put in jeopardy, by a quarrel between two nations. Privateering, therefore, has been abandoned in Europe as a method of war since the treaty of Paris in 1856, though Prussia came pretty near it in 1870, by organizing what she called a volunteer fleet, and Spain reserves the privilege of commissioning privateers.
The United States, however, and some other countries whose policy or ability forbid them to have a large navy, would not enter into the European agreement above mentioned, mutually to abstain from privateering, on the plea that to do so would be to yield the most powerful weapon of a nation weak in naval armament and sea commerce, against any of many possible enemies whose large sea-borne commerce would expose it to the most serious wounds. In our Civil War the President issued no letters of marque, although authorized to do so. It was customary to speak of the Confederate cruisers Alabama, Shenandoah, Florida, etc., as privateers, or even pirates, and they actually played the part with a success woeful to us of the North, and to Great Britain, which had to pay for the damages caused by the Alabama; but, strictly speaking, they were neither, because commissioned by a temporary but regular government, whose flag might have been recognized if its arms had succeeded.
More lately (1898) the United States has announced it as its policy to refrain from privateering, though no formal signature has been given to any international agreement to that effect.