The War of 1812 was a sailors’ war, fought by the United States for “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.” Americans of this century cannot realize the bitterness of feeling against England which was at white heat in all the Atlantic seacoastwise towns during a period of forty years before the second war waged by the young republic against the mother country. To the men of New England, in the words of Josiah Quincy, the land was “only a shelter from the storm, a perch on which they build their eyrie and hide their mate and their young, while they skim the surface, or hunt in the deep.” In 1806 and 1807, according to the files of the State Department, six thousand American seamen were virtual captives in British war vessels. “The detection of an attempt to notify an American Consul of the presence of Americans on board an English ship was sure to be followed by a brutal flogging,” writes the historian McMaster.
President Jefferson shrank from war and sought a retaliatory compromise in the Embargo of 1808 which forbade the departure of an American merchant vessel for any foreign port. This measure which paralyzed American trade, was so fiercely opposed in New England that an insurrection was feared, and the ports were filled with dismantled ships, empty warehouses, deserted wharves and starving seamen. When war came, it was welcomed by forty thousand native American merchant seamen who, eager for revenge for the wrongs they had suffered, were ready to crowd the ships of the navy and overflow into the fleets of privateers that hurried from every deep-water port.
England’s high-handed claims to right of search and impressment and the continual menace from French and Spanish marauders had developed a much faster and more powerful class of merchant vessels than had been armed for service in the Revolution. During the war Salem placed in commission forty privateers of which more than half had been built in her own yards. Of these the most famous and successful was the ship America, whose audacious cruising ground was from the English Channel to the Canary Islands. The art of building fast and beautiful ships had been so far perfected a hundred years ago that Salem vessels were crossing the Atlantic in twelve and thirteen days for record passages, performances which were not surpassed by the famous clipper-packets of half a century later. The America, as shown in the interesting data collected by B. B. Crowninshield, although built in 1803, was faster with the wind on her quarter, than such crack racing machines as the Vigilant, Defender and Columbia. This noble privateer made a speed record of thirteen knots, with all her stores, guns, fittings, boats and bulwarks aboard, which is only one knot behind the record of the Defender, in short spurts, and when stripped in racing trim. The America frequently averaged better than ten knots for twelve hours on end, which matches the best day’s run of the Vigilant in her run to Scotland in the summer of 1894. This privateer, which carried a crew of one hundred and fifty men and twenty-two guns was no longer than a modern cup defender.
This splendid fabric of the seas was the fastest Yankee ship afloat during the War of 1812, and her speed and the admirable seamanship displayed by her commanders enabled her to cruise in the English Channel for weeks at a time, to run away from British frigates which chased her home and back again, and to destroy at least two million dollars worth of English shipping.
Michael Scott, in “Tom Cringle’s Log” described such a vessel as the America in the following passage dealing with the fate of a captured Yankee privateer at the hands of British masters:
“When I had last seen her she was the most beautiful little craft, both in hull and rigging, that ever delighted the eyes of a sailor; but the dock-yard riggers and carpenters had fairly bedeviled her—at least so far as appearances went. First they replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy, solid bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at least another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel, that formerly floated on the foam light as a sea gull, now looked like a clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long slender wands of masts, which used to swing about as if there were neither shrouds nor stays to support them, were now as taut and stiff as church steeples, with four heavy shrouds on a side, and stays, and backstays, and the devil knows what all.”
The America was built for the merchant service and her career before the war was not lacking in picturesque flavor. She was the pride of the great shipping family of Crowninshield, built by Retire Becket of Salem, under the eye of Captain George Crowninshield, Jr. With a crew of thirty-five men and ten guns she sailed on her first voyage, to the Dutch East Indies, in the summer of 1804, commanded by Captain Benjamin Crowninshield, Jr. Touching at the Isle of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, it was learned that a cargo of coffee might be obtained at Mocha in the Red Sea. The America shifted her course and proceeded to Mocha, where she dropped anchor only seven years after the Recovery had first shown the stars and stripes in that port. Having taken on coffee, goat skins, gum arabic, and sienna, the ship went to Aden carrying as a passenger Mr. Pringle, the English consul. A few days later Captain Crowninshield was informed that Mr. Pringle had taken passage for England from Aden in the ship Alert, which had been captured by Arabs, the captain and fifteen men murdered and the vessel carried off to India.
Meanwhile a rumor had reached Salem that the America, instead of obeying orders and going to Sumatra had veered away to Mocha after coffee. The owners had implicitly enjoined Captain Crowninshield after this imploring fashion:
“Now you’ve broken orders so often, see for once if you can’t mind them.”
When the ship was sighted off Salem harbor, the owners and some of their friends hastily put off in a small boat, wholly in the dark as to where their skipper had been and what he had fetched home, and not at all easy in their minds. If he had secured coffee, then they stood to win a small fortune, but if the cargo was pepper, which they had ordered him to get, well, the bottom had dropped out of the pepper market a short time before and the prospect was not so pleasing. It was a sea lottery of the kind that lent excitement to the return of most Salem ventures beyond the seas. As the owners neared the ship they began to sniff the wind. They thought they could smell coffee, but the old salt at the tiller suggested that the fragrant odor might be blown from a fresh pot of the beverage in the galley, and hopes fell below par. As soon as they were within fair hailing distance Captain Benjamin Crowninshield, one of the owners, shouted through a speaking trumpet, “What’s your cargo?”