The Story of the American Merchant Marine

by John Randolph Spears

The adventure which led to the building of the Virginia grew out of that wonderful harvest of the sea, the cod fishery on the banks of Newfoundland. For more than a hundred years before she was built many fishermen of Europe had been sailing to the Banks in early spring and returning home each fall. Throughout the sixteenth century there were from 100 to 300 fishing vessels there every year, excepting only those years when wars raged the hardest. In 1577, for instance, as the records show, 350 vessels sailed for the Banks, gathered their harvest, went ashore in the bay where St. John, Newfoundland, now stands, cured the catch on flakes built on the beach, and then sailed for home well satisfied.

Though dimly seen now, those fishermen, as they flocked across the sea in the spring, form one of the most striking pictures in history. For no one had ever charted the western limits of that waste of waters. The Banks lay beyond a belt of the sea famous, or infamous, as the "roaring forties." And yet in ships so rude that the hulls were sometimes bound with hawsers to hold them together these men anchored where black fogs shut them in, where sleet-laden gales were a part of their common life, where bergs and fields of ice assaulted them, and where irresistible hurricanes from the unknown wilds beyond came to overwhelm them. To these real dangers they added others that, though born of the imagination, were still more terrifying. They saw evil spirits in the storm clouds, and demons came shrieking in the gales to carry their souls to eternal torment.

Even in pleasant weather life was hard. Masters ruled their crews by torture. To punish an obstinate sailor they wrapped a stout cord around his forehead and then set it taut until his eyes were popped from the sockets. The food brought from home spoiled. In the best vessels the crew slept in leaking, unwarmed forecastles, while in some of the vessels—those that were but partly decked over—they slept unsheltered. The brine of the sea covered them with sores called sea boils, and their hands dripped blood as they hauled in their cod lines.

Consider further that these fishermen came from four nations that were always at war with each other, either openly or in an underhanded way. And yet the English, the French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese anchored side by side on the Banks, built their flakes side by side on the Newfoundland beach, and when a ship opened her seams as she wallowed in the gale, the crews of the others within reach eagerly lowered their boats to rescue the drowning.

In courage, fortitude, sea skill, and resourcefulness those Banks fishermen had never been surpassed.

This is by no means to say that the fishermen never fought each other. Good fair fighting was a part of the comfort of life as they saw it. But the conditions that eliminated the weaklings naturally created in their minds a standard of justice under which all who survived could work.

Let it be noted now that with all their hardships they were not without compensating rewards. Good digestion waited on appetite. The life ashore while curing the catch—a life where venison and wild fowl replaced their salted meats, and the red people of the region came to visit them—was a time for jollification. But more important than all else they had leisure as well as hard work. For having a share in the catch instead of wages, they obtained enough money, on reaching home, to enable them to pass the winter beside the hearthstone, where they told tales of adventures that stirred the blood. So the love of the sea was cultivated and the race was perpetuated.

Into the midst of these fishermen, as they worked among their flakes upon the Newfoundland beach, came Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on August 5, 1583, who was the forerunner of the New England colonists. He told them he had come to take possession of the country and establish an English colony there. The fishermen saw that such a settlement would interfere with their business, but no resistance was made while he erected a monument and did such other things as the customs of the day required of those taking possession of a new land. One may fancy they saw in Sir Humphrey a man of their own sort. For he had crossed the sea in the ten-ton Squirrel, and although she was, as they said, "too small a bark to pass through the ocean sea at that season of the year," he sailed in her when bound for home; he would not ask his men to take a risk which he would not share. And when the storm that overwhelmed him came, he sat down at the stern of the little bark with a book in his hand, and shouted in a cheerful voice to the crew of the Hind, which was close alongside:—

"We are as near to heaven by sea as by land."

The sailors of Gilbert's expedition have been called "no better than pirates" (Bancroft), but at worst they were able to cherish the abiding faith of their master as expressed in those words. The seamen who sailed (1530) with William Hawkins in that "tall and goodlie ship of his own," the Paul, to the coasts of Africa and Brazil, and with Drake in the Pelican in that famous voyage around the world, and with Raleigh's expedition to the coast of North Carolina, were recruited from among these fishermen, to whom adventure was as the breath of life. And the men who did the actual work of building the Virginia were of the same class.