New England, with its many rivers and indented coastline, until recent years, has been a breeding place for sailors and a location for shipbuilding. During the first century following the settlement, the larger part of the population lived near the coast, and as roads between towns were poor, it naturally followed that craft of small tonnage were constantly employed for transport on the ocean and the navigable rivers, and as no extent of rich soil was found awaiting cultivation, many settlers, of necessity, turned to fishing and to trade. A ship carpenter was brought over to Plymouth, in 1624, who "quickly builte them 2 very good and strong shalops ... and a great and strong lighter, and had ... timber for 2 catches" framed when he fell sick of a fever and soon died.[44] These shallops were used in opening a fur trade among the Indians on the Kennebec River that eventually discharged the indebtedness of the Pilgrims to the London adventurers.
Six shipwrights were sent over by the Company of the Massachusetts Bay, in the spring of 1629, together with a considerable stock of ship stores, such as pitch, tar, cordage and sail cloth.[45] Doubtless these men were employed at the outset in housing the settlers and in building small fishing boats, as the first vessel of any size in the Bay, of which there is record, is Governor Winthrop's trading bark, The Blessing of the Bay, of thirty tons, built mainly of locust, which went to sea, August 31, 1631, on a voyage to the eastward and afterwards traded with the Dutch at New Amsterdam.[46]
In January, 1633, Emanuel Downing wrote to the Council for New England that he had made enquiries of Mr. Winthrop respecting the ship carpenters employed in New England and found that the plantation was able to build ships of any burden. Their most competent shipwright was William Stephens, who had built in England, the Royal Merchant, a ship of six hundred tons.
The General Court, in 1639, exempted ship carpenters and fishermen (during the fishing season) from compulsory military training.[47] Two years later the Court was informed that some shipwrights were scanting their work and an order was adopted providing for a survey of all ship construction as was usual in England at that time.[48]
The coasting trade led to the building of small shallops and sloops and the need for firewood in Boston and Charlestown brought about the building of sloops, broad of beam, intended especially for that trade. Fishing craft and wood sloops were soon being built all along the coast. As early as 1634, one merchant in Marblehead owned eight fishing craft, and Portsmouth, N. H., had six great shallops, five fishing boats, with sails and anchors, and thirteen skiffs, in the trade as early as 1635. Richard Hollingsworth, in 1637, had a shipyard at Salem Neck and in 1641, built "a prodigious ship of 300 Tons."
The number of New England vessels used in foreign trading during the seventeenth century was considerable and the mainstay of the trade was the fishing business. Off-shore fishing in the early days was carried on in shallops—capacious, open boats carrying several pairs of oars and also fitted with masts and sails. They were sometimes decked over, in whole or in part, and usually carried one mast with a lug sail. Many of these small craft were built in the winter time by the fishermen and their sons, as a fisherman is always more or less of a boatbuilder by virtue of his calling. The lumber for the boat would be cut in the common woods and got out, a little at a time, and the boat when built would actually cost its owner little more than the outlay for certain necessary fittings. These boats might be framed-in anywhere—on the beach in front of the fisherman's cottage; in his dooryard or in the woods, some distance from the shore, to which the hull would be dragged by oxen, on sledges of timber. The first vessels sent to "the banks," from Massachusetts, for deep-water fishing, were "a ship and other vessels," rig unknown.[49] That was in 1645.
By 1665 there were three hundred New England vessels trading with Barbadoes, Virginia, Madeira, Acadia, etc., and 1,300 smaller craft were fishing at Cape Sable. Cod and mackerel were caught and salted. The best fish were sent to Malaga and the Canaries, the second sort to the Portugal Islands, and the worst to the Barbadoes there to be used in the diet of the negro slaves. At that time, the principal commodities produced in the Massachusetts Bay were fish and pipe-staves, masts, fir-boards, pitch, tar, pork, beef, and horses and corn which were sent to Virginia, Barbadoes, &c. Tobacco and sugar were taken in payment and shipped to England. Excellent masts were shipped from the Piscataqua River, and many pipe-staves. There were more than twenty sawmills located on that river and "much good timber was spoilt," reported an agent of Lord Arlington, the Secretary of State.[50] New England masts, 33 to 35 inches in diameter, at that time cost the Navy Commissioners from £95 to £115 per mast. The agent also reported that Boston, the chief town, was "built on a peninsula in the bottom of a bay, which is a good harbour and full of fish. The houses are generally wooden, the streets crooked, and neither days, months, seasons, churches, nor inns are known by their English names."
During the middle years of the seventeenth century the waters of the West Indies were covered with privateers commissioned to prey upon Spanish commerce. Not only did the home government issue these commissions but every Colonial governor as well, and not infrequently it was difficult to separate privateering from piracy. John Quelch, who was hanged in Boston for piracy, in 1704, preyed upon Portuguese commerce as he supposed in safety and not until he returned to Marblehead did he learn of the treaty of peace that made him a pirate. In 1653, Thomas Harding captured a rich prize sailing from Barbadoes and in consequence was tried in Boston for piracy, but saved his neck when he was able to prove that the vessel was Dutch and not Spanish.
The town of Newport, R. I., frequently profited from the visits of known pirates, as in 1688, when Peterson, in a "barkalonga" of ten guns and seventy men, refitted at Newport and no bill could be obtained against him from the grand jury, as they were neighbors and friends of many of the men on board. Two Salem ketches also traded with him and a master of one brought into "Martin's Vineyard," a prize that Peterson, "the pirate, had taken in the West Indies."[51] Andrew Belcher, a well-known Boston merchant, and master of the ship Swan, paid Peterson £57, in money and provisions, for hides and elephants' teeth, taken from his plunder.
The ill-defined connection between privateering and piracy was fully recognized in those days and characterized publicly by the clergy. In 1704 when Rev. Cotton Mather preached his "Brief Discourse occasioned by a Tragical Spectacle in a Number of Miserables under Sentence of Death for Piracy," he remarked that "the Privateering Stroke so easily degenerates into the Piratical; and the Privateering Trade is usually carried on with an Unchristian Temper, and proves an Inlet unto so much Debauchery and Iniquity."