CHAPTER XXIII
THE EBBING OF THE TIDE
When the Embargo of 1807 was proclaimed as a counter-blow to England’s “unofficial war on American commerce and her wholesale impressment of American seamen,” the house-flags of Salem merchants flew over one hundred and fifty-two vessels engaged in foreign trade. The Embargo fell with blighting effects upon this imposing fleet and the allied activities interwoven throughout the life and business of the town, and the square-riggers lay empty and idle at the wharves. In 1808 the foreign commerce of the United States decreased from $246,000,000 to $79,000,000, and a British visitor, writing of New York, described what might have been seen in Salem:
“The port indeed was full of ships, but they were dismantled and laid up; their decks were cleared, their hatches fastened down, and scarcely a sailor was to be found on board. Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package was to be seen upon the wharves. Many of the counting houses were shut up or advertised to be let, and the few solitary merchants, clerks and porters, and laborers that were to be seen, were walking about with their hands in their pockets. The coffee houses were almost empty; the streets near the waterside were almost deserted; the grass had begun to grow upon the wharves.”
The Embargo was removed in the spring of 1809 and Yankee ships hastened to spread their white wings on every sea. Salem merchants loaded their vessels with merchandise and dispatched them to skim the cream of the European market. It was out of the frying-pan into the fire, however, for Napoleon had set a wicked trap for these argosies and so ordered it that all American shipping found in the ports of France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Prussia and Norway was confiscated and plundered under flimsy pretext of violations of paper blockades, and what not, of which these unsuspecting American shipmasters were wholly unaware. Thiers states that Napoleon wrote to the Prussian Government:
“Let the American ships enter your ports. Seize them afterwards. You shall deliver the cargoes to me, and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt.”
John Quincy Adams declared that fifty American vessels were thus taken in Norway and Denmark. In 1809-10, fifty-one of our ships were seized in the ports of France, forty-four in the ports of Spain, twenty-eight in Naples, and eleven in Holland, with a total loss to helpless American owners of at least ten million dollars. Felt’s Annals of Salem states that “on the 19th of August (1809), the ship Francis, Capt. William Haskell, arrives. She was purchased of the Neapolitan government by our consul there, to bring home the crews of American vessels confiscated by their order. Two hundred and fourteen persons came in her, many of whom belonged to this town. Their treatment is said to have been very cruel. The amount of Salem vessels and their cargoes condemned at Naples was 783,000 dollars.”
The stout-hearted merchants of Salem rallied bravely and when the War of 1812 began, they owned one hundred and twenty-six ships, fifty-eight of them East Indiamen. The war played havoc with this fleet, notwithstanding the activity of Salem privateers, and in 1815, there were left only fifty-seven of these ships in foreign commerce, a loss of a hundred sail in seven years. The tide had begun to ebb, the golden age was waning, and yet in 1816 the Salem Custom House cleared forty-two square-riggers for the East Indies and other ports of the Orient. But the pioneering, pathfinding era was almost over, except for ventures to the South Seas, Madagascar, and some of the ports of Africa and South America. The trade with the Orient in which Salem ships had blazed the way was now shared with the ships of other American ports.
The richest decade in this picturesque and adventurous traffic with the coasts and islands of strange, far-distant climes had been from 1800 to 1810, during which the duties paid on foreign cargoes amounted to $7,272,633, and the entries numbered 1,758, or an average of almost three ships a day signalling their homecoming from beyond seas.
During the years from 1820 to 1840 Salem continued to hold fast to her foreign trade, although overshadowed by Boston, and the old warehouses on the wharves were filled with the products of Zanzibar, Sumatra, Calcutta, Manila, Leghorn, the Rio Grande, Cayenne, Siam, Ceylon, and the Gold Coast. In 1850 the beginning of the end was in sight, and the “foreign entries” from Nova Scotia far outnumbered those from all the other ports in which the natives had once believed the map of America to consist chiefly of a vast commercial metropolis called Salem. The end of the history of the port, except for coastwise trade may be read in the Custom House records, as follows:
“In 1860 the foreign entries were: from Nova Scotia 215, Java 7, Africa 25, Cayenne 10, Montevideo 2, Zanzibar 4, Surinam 2, Rio Grande 2, Buenos Ayres 2, and one each from Mozambique, Shields, Sunderland, Port Praya, Newcastle and Trapani.