From the point of view, however, of influences on the development of ships these colonies, in themselves, had, with one exception, little effect. This one exception was the row of British colonies that lined the Atlantic Coast of North America from the Bay of Fundy to Florida. Here there began to grow up a people whose forebears had known the boisterous seas of northern Europe, and who were scattered along a narrow coastline where they found ready and at hand the best timber in the world from which to build ships. Furthermore, the fisheries of this coast were rich, and, too, traffic between these colonies soon sprang up and demanded ships to carry it, for roads were either bad or were non-existent and the great boulevard of the sea lay outside the entrances to the numerous fine harbours that indented the coast.
A BRITISH EAST INDIAMAN
These merchant ships, which sailed from England to the Far East, were almost as much like warships as they were like merchantmen. They were finely built, but they took their time on their voyages out and back.
At first, naturally enough, the ships that were built were small, but by the beginning of the 18th Century the business of building ships was an important one, particularly in New England. So important was it, and so well and so cheaply were ships built in this new part of the world, that Europeans found it to their interest to buy ships from the many yards that dotted this coast. This business continued to increase in the American colonies until, in 1769, according to Arthur H. Clark, in “The Clipper Ship Era,” 389 vessels, of which 113 were square-rigged, were built. All of these, it is true, were small, none of them being over 200 tons, but the business was flourishing and valuable experience that later proved of great importance was being secured.
During this same time “The United Company of Merchant Venturers of England Trading to the East Indies,” or, as it was later generally called, the East India Company, was gradually developing, for the long voyages from England to the East, those magnificent ships that now are universally referred to as East Indiamen.
So lucrative was the trade that these ships were engaged in, for it was a carefully controlled and legalized monopoly, that truly great amounts of money were made for the stockholders of the company and for the officers of the ships. And because the trade was exceptionally profitable these ships were wonderfully built and cost sums that, for those days, were huge. The ships, because they were navigating waters frequented by pirates and might be called upon to fight their way both out and back, were almost ships of war, and the discipline on board was more like the discipline of ships of the British Navy than like that of ordinary merchant ships. The crews were spick and span in neat uniforms. The men were drilled as carefully as man-of-war’s-men, and the crews were large, and consequently their work was not hard.
The ships themselves were built in the finest possible manner, and the cost of one 1,325-ton ship built for this service is said to have been more than a quarter of a million dollars—£53,000 to be exact—a sum truly huge for those days, and one not exactly to be sneezed at to-day.
This great company, with its monopoly that sometimes made it possible for a ship to earn 300 per cent. on her entire cost in a single round trip from England to India or China, was organized in 1600. The fact, however, that there was no competition for them to face resulted in a conservative outlook that made for slowness rather than for speed, and little actual advance in the science of design of either hulls or sails came as a result of the building of these costly and sturdy ships.
For two and a third centuries, however, this grand old company continued, and during that time many a fortune was built up for the investors, but finally the people of Britain rebelled at this monopoly, and Parliament, in 1832, withdrew the charter and threw open the trade to the East to other British lines.