Meantime the boy, half dead with terror, had stowed himself away in a corner of the hold; nor was his terror lessened at the appearance of a pirate, cutlass in hand, slashing right and left in the darkness. He was about to cry for mercy when the man gave up his search; and an old sailor, who had been pals with the boy, now advised him to go boldly on deck as the pirates were sure to have him in the end, and in any case were likely to burn the brig. No sooner was he there than the pirates began a cruel game, making a circle about him, cutting at him with their swords, some crying to kill him, others to let him go, he was only a boy. They called for powder; he told them there was none. They called for fire; he told them he could get none. They threw a demijohn at him and told him to fetch them water. They knew well they had finished the rum. As the boy went below, he met his old sailor, who, offering to fetch the water, turned back, and was seen no more. The boy, reappearing, was ordered into the boat where the wounded mate, the passenger, and the sailors were already seated, the pirate muskets piled up astern, and a pirate standing there on guard. The mate, seeing his chance, heaved the pirate overboard, and pushed off. The pirates on deck pelted the boat with anything at hand, but the Yankees had all their firearms. And Crosby, seizing a musket, cried: “There, damn you, throw away!” The Yankees bent to their oars. “Are we all here?” cried Crosby to his men. But the old sailor who had gone to get the water was missing. They pulled up at a safe distance, hoping in vain that he might jump overboard, and then, when needs must, made for Matanzas, rowing along shore to provide for escape in case of pursuit, a distance they supposed of some thirty-five miles. A freshening breeze favored them, and by nightfall they made the harbor, rowing in with muffled oars as they wished to avoid Spanish vessels there and the fort. They were soon hailed by a friendly English voice, clambered aboard ship, the captain there got out his medicine chest and dressed their wounds, the sailors spread their mattresses on deck, and the refugees “lay down to such peace and rest,” said the cabin boy, “as you may well appreciate.” As for the ill-fated Alligator, having returned to Matanzas with her dead and wounded, she was ordered to Charlestown with the boats she had captured on her cruise, and the second night out grounding on a Florida reef, which has been named for her, was lost. The captain of the Iris, in the general settlement at the home port, bought for each of his crew, as a memento of their adventure, a pirate musket and a pirate sword.

Cape Cod sailors were in like degree, and with varying success, using their wits to elude pirates of the farther seas, swift Chinese lorchas, and low-hung craft in the Malay Straits. A Truro captain, commanding the Southern Cross, was shot by pirates in the China Sea in the presence of his wife. A Falmouth whaling captain, by his skill and coolness, saved his men from massacre by natives of the Marshall Islands. A Dennis captain, in 1820, had been murdered by pirates off Madeira. Another Dennis captain, of the barque Lubra, lost his life as late as 1865, when, one day out of Hong Kong, he was overhauled by so large a force of pirates that resistance was hopeless. Some of the crew took to the rigging, and two of them were shot there; others jumped overboard and were picked up by the pirates, who boarded the barque and proceeded to ransack her. The captain, whom they found in the cabin with his wife and child, they shot dead. Then, having stolen all valuables, destroyed the boats and nautical instruments, and set fire to the ship, they made off, leaving the crew to their fate. But with true Cape Cod pluck, the survivors of the tragedy managed to save the ship and somehow navigated her back to Hong Kong.

They were now sailing seas the world over, these Cape Cod men: farmers, fishermen, whalers as they had been, they were manning merchant ships that were carrying the American flag into every port. Yet from the first they had furnished some seamen for the traders: for as early as 1650, it is said, both at Saint Christopher’s and Barbadoes, “New England produce was in great demand”; and Gorhams and Dimmocks of Barnstable had acquired fortunes in the coasting and West Indies trade. An interesting little industry, in addition to fishing on the Banks, was carried on by a few boats that were fitted out to go to the Labrador coast to collect, on the rocky islands offshore, feathers and eider-down for the Cape Cod housewives. There, in the nesting-season, were held great battues, when the birds were killed wholesale with clubs or brooms made of spruce branches. Rich tells us that the sack that left home filled with straw returned filled with down for bed and pillows, “the latter called ‘pillow bears,’ and apostrophized by the old people as ‘pille’bers.’” Mountainous beds of feathers or down were then in order, and “boys used to joke about rigging a jury-mast and rattle down the shrouds to climb into bed.” Two Barnstable men, we know, coopers and farmers by trade, went on some of these “feather voyages,” which, however, were not long continued, as the merciless slaughter made the birds wary of their old haunts.

As early as 1717 hundreds of ships in the year were clearing from Boston and Salem for Newfoundland and “British plantations on the continent,” for “foreign plantations,” and the West Indies and the Bay of Campeachy, for European ports and Madeira and the Azores. And when all Europe was exhausted by the Napoleonic struggle, the United States, neutral and safe three thousand miles away, snapped up the carrying trade of the world; from fish cargoes for the hungry combatants the transition was easy to more varied commodities. Their own wars, French and English, had been good training schools for men of enterprise, and immediately the Cape Cod sailors were to prove their mettle in this new era of adventure. They bought shares in the ships they sailed, and profited, and bought more. Some of them, shrewd traders by instinct, gave up the sea for an office ashore, and as East India merchants laid the secure foundation of more than one snug urban fortune that survives to-day.

CHAPTER VIII
OLD SEA WAYS

I

Sixty years ago the thread snapped in that fine sea-piece of the American foreign trade, and now the calling and time of those deep-water sailors are dead as Nineveh. But Old Cape Cod was one with the illimitable seas and the spot most loved by men for whom the ocean was a workroom where fortunes might be made to spend at home. No picture of these men could be complete without the background of their life afloat. For five decades Yankee ships were weaving at the great loom of the Western Ocean to set the splendid colors of European adventure into new patterns of romance. Their tea-frigates raced around the “Cape” to the Far East; they took the short cut about Scotland to bargain with Kronstadt and Hamburg and Elsinore; barques and brigantines and full-riggers caught the “brave west winds” at the right slant and made record voyages past old Leeuwin, the Cape of Storms, standing out there to give them a last toss as they “ran down by” to Port Philip and “Melbun” and Sydney; clipper ships, the fastest under sail that have ever been known, winged their way around to “Frisco” in the great days of ’49. Cargoes sold there at a fabulous price, and then, short-handed, perhaps, because of desertion to the gold-fields, the great ships rushed by San Diego and Callao, rich ports enough for other times, and, storm or shine, swung ’round the Horn,

“... the fine keen bows of the stately clippers steering

Towards the lone northern star and the fair ports of home,”

to load again, and return by the path they had come.