The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

With my wash-bowl on my knee.[50]

For this roaring California trade John Bertram and his partners built a famous American clipper, the John Bertram, of eleven hundred tons, at East Boston. The remarkable feature of this undertaking was that the ship was launched sixty days after the laying of her keel and ninety days from the time the workmen first laid tools to the timbers she was sailing out of Boston harbor with a full cargo, bound to San Francisco. The John Bertram was a staunch, able, and splendidly built ship, notwithstanding this feat of record-breaking construction. Thirty years after her maiden voyage she was still afloat in the deep-water trade, although under a foreign flag, a fine memorial of the skill and honesty of New England shipbuilders.

After winning a handsome fortune in his shipping enterprises John Bertram had foresight and wisdom to perceive that American ships in foreign trade were doomed to make a losing fight. Their day was past. He turned his energies into other and more profitable channels, and keeping pace with the march of the times, engaged in railroad development and manufacturing enterprises, a shipping merchant of the old school who adapted himself to new conditions with a large measure of success. Much of his fortune he gave to benefit his town of Salem in which his extensive philanthropies keep his memory green.

In 1869, Robert S. Rantoul of Salem, while writing of the town’s maritime history made this brave attempt to convince himself that her glory had not yet departed:

“While our packets ply to New York and our steam tug puffs and screams about the harbor; while marine railways are busy and shipyards launch bigger merchantmen than ever; while coal comes in upwards of four hundred colliers yearly, and our boarding officers report more than fifteen hundred arrivals,[51] while our fishing fleets go forth, and our whalers still cruise the waters of the Indian Ocean and the North Pacific, while we turn over $100,000 to $125,000 per year to the Federal Treasury from import duties and enter a large part of the dates, gum, spices, ivory, ebony and sheepskins brought into this country, it is no time yet to despair of this most ancient seaport of the United States of America.”

This was in a way, a swan-song for the death of Salem romance. The one steam tug which “screamed about the harbor,” was the forerunner of a host of her kind which should trouble the landlocked harbor that once swarmed with privateers and East Indiamen. The coal barge and the coasting schooner were henceforth to huddle in sight of crumbling Derby Wharf, and the fluttering drone of the spindles in the cotton mill to be heard along the waterfront where the decks of the stately square-riggers had echoed to the roaring chanties of “Whiskey Johnny,” “Blow the Man Down,” and “We’re Off for the Rio Grande.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an epitaph of Salem as a deep-water seaport, and thus it appeared to him, the greatest of its children, as he viewed it sixty years ago:

“In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf, but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown the not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a spacious edifice of brick....

“The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as well name at once as the Custom House of the port—has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and shipowners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have arrived at once—usually from Africa or South America—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel’s papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful or somber, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be turned into gold, or has buried him under a bulk of commodities such as nobody will care to rid him of....”

It is unmanly to mourn over old, dead days as better than the present times, to say that men were stronger, simpler, braver in the beginning of this Republic. Every age or generation, however, hammers out in the stress of its day’s work some refined metal of experience, some peculiarly significant heritage to help posterity in its struggle to perpetuate the things most worth while. It was not the rich freightage of silks, spices, ivory and tea which the ships of Salem fetched home, nor the fortunes which built the stately mansions of the elm-shaded streets, that made this race of seamen worthy of a page in the history of their country’s rise to greatness. They did their duty, daringly and cheerfully, in peace and in war. They let their deeds speak for them, and they bore themselves as “gentlemen unafraid,” in adversity and with manly modesty in prosperity. They believed in their country and they fought for her rights, without swashbuckling or empty words. They helped one another, and their community worked hand in hand with them, on honor, to insure the safety of their perilous ventures. The men who wove the duck, the sailmakers who fashioned it to bend to the yards, the blacksmith, the rigger, the carpenter, and the instrument-maker did honest work, all co-operating to build and fit the ship their neighbor was to command so that she might weather the hardest blow and do credit to those who made and sailed her.