The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Rudyard Kipling.

“We’re outward bound this very day,

Good-bye, fare you well,

Good-bye, fare you well.

We’re outward bound this very day,

Hurrah, my boys, we’re outward bound.”

(From a chantey sung while sheeting home topsails.)

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The Panama Canal has strongly revived interest in the American merchant marine. A nation, long indifferent to the fact that it had lost its prestige on blue water, now discovers that after digging a ditch between two oceans at a cost of hundred of millions, there are almost no American ships to use it.

In other days, Yankee ships and sailors were able to win the commerce of the world against the competition of foreign flags because of native enterprise, brains, and seamanship. Nor is it impossible that such an era shall come again. It was not so much the lack of subsidies and the lower cost of foreign ships and crews that drove the American ensign from the high seas as the greater attraction which drew capital and energy to the tasks of building cities and railroads and opening to civilization the inland areas of the West.