To save a vessel worth at most $5000 from confiscation, Homans murdered 600 negroes. The story is told in detail in the African Repository, Vol. XXIII, p. 371.
The profits in the trade are shown by the fact that slaves costing from $12 to $20 on the coast of Africa sold for $350, when delivered alive and able to walk, in Cuba. When smuggled into the United States, they sold all the way from $750 to $1000.
Old ships of known speed were in demand. Speed was necessary because the British government maintained cruisers on the coast that captured and confiscated vessels found with slaves actually on board. Our navy department sold the schooner Enterprise (the second of the name) to men in the slave-trade at a small fraction of her value. The swift privateers of the War of 1812 were also bought for the purpose. In later years it was the custom to build swift vessels especially for the trade. Baltimore and New York builders were patronized more than others, New York having the lead in later years. The builders always knew what trade the vessels were to enter, and charged accordingly. No builder ever lost standing in society because he turned out ships for this purpose. In fact, the slave-traders were well known, and they lived among the wealthiest society people of New York—at the Astor House, for instance, where they were in the habit of meeting to arrange the details of their voyages. Public documents show that the most respected merchants of the city were ready to go on the bonds of these slavers, when bonds were required. A New Bedford whale-ship owner who was convicted of fitting out one of his vessels for the trade was afterward elected mayor of his city. Even after the Civil War was begun, a United States district attorney—a man appointed by Lincoln—was seen dining at the leading New York restaurant with a slaver whom he should have been prosecuting at that moment; for while the two ate together, the slaver talked about a slave voyage that he intended to make.
Though American packets had for years controlled the trade between the United States and Europe, and the American clippers were making records that stirred the whole nautical world, the flag from those proud ships was used to cover the reeking slime in the slaver's hold, and it was the only flag that could protect the slaver from inspection on the African coast. These facts were well known, but they roused not a tremor of indignation among the American people, not one, save only in the breasts of a few "fanatics," and the arguments of the fanatics were answered by asking, "How would you like to have your sister marry a nigger?"
The story might well be forgotten—it would have been omitted here but for the fact that the humiliation of it may serve in righting wrongs as yet unheeded, or but partly heeded, which, if less brutal, are born of the same greed and the same disregard for human rights that made the slave-trade possible in the United States until after the middle of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XI
THE HARVEST OF THE SEA BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
IN the year 1772 the people of Marblehead, Massachusetts, boasted that "the number of polls was 1203," and that the vessels of all kinds owned in the port measured more than 12,000 tons. In 1780 the number of polls was 544, the tonnage but 1509. Within the borders of the town were 458 widows with 966 fatherless children.
Marblehead was a type of the New England fishing villages of the day. The nation had won freedom, but the fishing industry from which the American merchant marine had originated was ruined. Moreover, there was no immediate return of prosperity after peace was declared. The gross income of the New England cod-fishing vessels for the year 1787 averaged but $483 each; for 1788 it was $456 each, and for 1789 only $273. The average annual expense during this period was $416 each, and the vessels lost on the average $143 each during the year 1789. In that year the fleet measured 19,185 tons. In the next year the tonnage increased to 28,348, for the fishermen hoped for good times following the adoption of the Constitution, and in 1793, when the fleet received a national subsidy of $72,965.32, the tonnage reached 50,163. But in 1794, although the subsidy amounted to $93,768.91, the tonnage was only 28,671. In short, the statistics show that while the tonnage fluctuated from year to year, there was little prosperity for any of our fishermen in the period between the two wars for freedom.
A similar condition prevailed at Nantucket and other whaling ports. So discouraged were the Nantucket men that many of them migrated to England and France. For the British and French governments, to secure them, offered free transportation, free entry for ships and goods, and sums of money with which to begin life anew. Records show that no less than 149 Nantucket men commanded English whalers before the War of 1812.
The foreign aggressions of various kinds account for a large part of the depression of the fisheries during that unhappy period. The losses sustained by our freight carriers at that time were more than made up by the high freight rates received. But when the fish markets of the West Indies and of Europe were closed by adverse legislation, or by wars, there was no way to repair the loss except by national subsidies, and these, when granted, proved inadequate.