Neither myself nor the chief mate of the ship for that voyage (Mr. Charles Derby) had attained the age of twenty-one years when we left home. I was not then twenty years of age, and it was remarked by the naval officer on taking the ship’s papers from the Custom House that it was the first instance in which papers had been issued from that office to a vessel bound to the East Indies, the captain and chief mate of which were both minors.”
This is what young Nathaniel Silsbee was able to record of the year 1792 when he took command of the new ship Benjamin, one hundred and sixty-one tons, laden with a costly cargo of merchandise and bound out from Salem for the Cape of Good Hope and India, “with such instructions as left the management of the voyage very much to my own discretion.” It was only four years earlier than this that the Salem ship Atlantic had flown the first American flag ever seen in the harbors of Bombay and Calcutta, and the route to those distant seas was still unfamiliar to these pioneers who swept round the Cape of Good Hope to explore new channels of trade on the other side of the world.
In these latter times a nineteen-year-old lad of good family is probably a college freshman without a shadow of responsibility, and whose only business care has to do with the allowance provided by a doting parent. He is a boy, and is ranked as such. When our forefathers were creating a merchant marine whose achievements form one of the finest pages of American history, seafaring lads were men at twenty, ruling their quarterdecks and taming the rude company of their forecastles by weight of their own merits in brains and pluck and resourcefulness.
Nathaniel Silsbee, a captain in the India trade at nineteen, was not a remarkably precocious mariner a century and more ago. He could say of his own family:
“Connected with the seafaring life of myself and my brothers, there were some circumstances which do not usually occur in one family. In the first place each of us commenced that occupation in the capacity of clerk, myself at the age of fourteen years; my brother William at about fifteen, and my brother Zachariah at about sixteen and a half years of age. Each and all of us obtained the command of vessels and the consignment of their cargoes before attaining the age of twenty years, viz., myself at the age of eighteen and a half, my brother William at nineteen and a half, and my brother Zachariah before he was twenty years old. Each and all of us left off going to sea before reaching the age of twenty-nine years, viz., myself at twenty-eight and a half; William at twenty-eight, and Zachariah at twenty-eight and a half years.”
In other words, these three brothers of Salem had made their fortunes before they were thirty years old and were ready to stay ashore as merchants and shipowners, backed by their own capital. A splendid veteran of their era, Robert Bennet Forbes of Boston pictured his very similar experience in this manner:
“At this time of my life (1834), at the age of thirty, I had become gray and imagined myself approaching old age. I had attained the summit of my ambition. I was what was then thought to be comfortably off in worldly goods; I had retired from the sea professionally and had become a merchant; I had contributed something toward the comfort of my mother; I had paid off large debts contracted in building my ship, and I began to think more of myself than I ever had done. Looking back to 1824 when I was content in the command of a little ship of 264 tons, on a salary of six hundred dollars per annum, I conceded that I had arrived at the acme of my hopes. I had been blessed with success far beyond my most ardent expectations.
“Beginning in 1817, with a capital consisting of a Testament, a ‘Bowditch,’ quadrant, chest of sea clothes and a mother’s blessing, I left the paternal mansion full of hope and good resolution, and the promise of support from my uncles. At the age of sixteen I filled a man’s place as third mate; at the age of twenty I was promoted to a command; at the age of twenty-six I commanded my own ship; at twenty-eight I abandoned the sea as a profession, and at thirty-six was at the head of the largest American house in China.”
Nathaniel Silsbee, therefore, was in tune with the time he lived in when at fourteen he embarked on his first voyage, from Salem to Baltimore as a captain’s clerk in a small schooner. His father had been an owner of several vessels in the West India trade, but losses at sea and other commercial misfortunes compelled him to take the boy from school and launch him in the business of seafaring. Three voyages in a coaster were followed by several months of idleness during which he “was uneasy and somewhat impatient” until a chance was offered to ship as supercargo of the brig Three Sisters bound on one of the first American voyages around the Cape of Good Hope in the winter of 1788. His wages for that voyage were five dollars a month, and all the property which his father could furnish as an “adventure” or private speculation, was six boxes of codfish worth eighteen dollars, “most of which perished on the outward passage.”
