The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

This unique feat in the history of privateering actions was largely due to Captain Haraden’s seamanship in that he was able so to handle the Pickering that he fought three successive single ship actions instead of permitting the enemy to concentrate or combine their attack.

Somewhat similar to these tactics was the manner in which he took two privateer sloops while he was cruising off Bermuda. They were uncommonly fast and agile vessels and they annoyed the Yankee skipper by retaking several of his prizes before he could send them free of this molestation. The sloops had no mind to risk an action with Haraden whose vessel they had recognized. So after nightfall he sent down his fore topgallant yard and mast, otherwise disguised the Pickering, and vanished from that part of the seas. A day later he put about and jogged back after the two privateers, putting out drags astern to check his speed. The Pickering appeared to be a plodding merchantman lumbering along a West India course.

Derby Wharf, Salem, Mass., as it appears to-day. Here the East India ships once lay three deep, and these decaying warehouses were filled with the riches of the most remote lands a century ago

As soon as he was sighted by his pestiferous and deluded foes, they set out in chase of him as easy booty. Letting the first sloop come within easy range, Jonathan Haraden stripped the Pickering of the painted canvas screens that had covered her gun ports, let go a murderous broadside and captured the sloop almost as soon as it takes to tell it. Then showing English colors above the Stars and Stripes aboard the Pickering, as if she had been captured, he went after the consort and took her as neatly as he had gathered the other.

Captain Haraden knew how to play the gentleman in this bloody game of war on the ocean. An attractive light is thrown upon his character by an incident which happened during a cruise in the Pickering. He fell in with a humble Yankee trading schooner which had been to the West Indies with lumber and was jogging home with the beggarly proceeds of the voyage. Her skipper signaled Captain Haraden, put out a boat and went aboard the privateer to tell a tale of woe. A little while before he had been overhauled by a British letter of marque schooner which had robbed him of his quadrant, compass and provisions, stripped his craft of much of her riggings, and with a curse and a kick from her captain, left him to drift and starve.

Captain Haraden was very indignant at such wanton and impolite conduct and at once sent his men aboard the schooner to re-rig her, provisioned her cabin and forecastle, loaned the skipper instruments with which to work his passage home and sent him on his way rejoicing. Then having inquired the course of the plundering letter of marque when last seen, he made sail to look for her. He was lucky enough to fall in and capture the offender next day. Captain Haraden dressed himself in his best and, to add dignity to the occasion, summoned the erring British skipper to his cabin and there roundly rebuked and denounced him for his piratical conduct toward a worthless little lumber schooner. He gave his own crew permission to make reprisals, which probably means that they helped themselves to whatever pleased their fancy and kicked and cuffed the offending seamen the length of their deck. Captain Haraden then allowed the letter of marque to resume her voyage. “He would not, even under these circumstances, sink or destroy a ship worthless as a prize and thus ruin a brother sailor.”

Off the Capes of the Delaware, Captain Haraden once captured an English brig of war, although the odds were against him, by “the mere terror of his name.” He afterward told friends ashore how this extraordinary affair occurred. There was a boy on the Pickering, one of the captain’s most ardent adorers, a young hero worshiper, who believed the Pickering capable of taking anything short of a line-of-battle ship. He had been put aboard a prize off the Capes, which prize had been captured, while making port, by the British brig-of-war. The lad was transferred to the brig with his comrades of the prize crew, and was delighted a little later to see the Pickering standing toward them. Being asked why he sang and danced with joy, the boy explained with the most implicit assurance:

“That is my master in that ship, and I shall soon be with him.”

“Your master,” cried the British bos’n, “and who in the devil is he?”