These ships took a large number of prizes, but Elias Hasket Derby gradually converted them from privateers to letters of marque, so that they could carry cargoes to distant ports and at the same time defend themselves against the largest class of British privateers. At the beginning of the war he owned seven sloops and schooners. When peace came he had four ships of from three hundred to three hundred and fifty tons, which were very imposing merchant vessels for that time.
It was with these ships, created by the needs of war, that the commerce of Salem began to reach out for ports on the other side of the world. They were the vanguard of the great fleet which through the two generations to follow were to carry the Stars and Stripes around the Seven Seas. Ready to man them was the bold company of privateersmen, schooled in a life of the most hazardous adventure, braced to face all risks in the peaceful war for trade where none of their countrymen had ever dared to seek trade before. While they had been dealing shrewd blows for their country’s cause in war, they had been also in preparation for the dawning age of Salem supremacy on the seas in the rivalries of commerce, pioneers in a brilliant and romantic era which was destined to win unique fame for their port.
CHAPTER VI
CAPTAIN LUTHER LITTLE’S OWN STORY
(1771-1799)
Captain Luther Little made no great figure in the history of his times, but he left in his own words the story of his life at sea which ancient manuscript contributes a full length portrait of the kind of men who lived in the coastwise towns of New England in the eighteenth century. He was not of Salem birth, but he commanded a letter of marque ship out of Salem during the Revolution, which makes it fitting that the manuscript of his narrative should have come into the hands of his grandson, Philip Little, of Salem. This old time seaman’s memoir, as he dictates it in his old age, reflects and makes alive again the day’s work of many a stout-hearted ship’s company of forgotten American heroes.
Born in Marshfield, Massachusetts, in 1756, Luther Little was a sturdy man grown at the beginning of the Revolution and had already spent five years at sea. At the age of fifteen he forsook his father’s farm and shipped on board a coasting sloop plying between Maine and the South Carolina ports. On one of these voyages he was taken ill with a fever and was left ashore in a settlement on the Pimlico River, North Carolina. The planter’s family who cared for the lad through his long and helpless illness were big-hearted and cheery folk, and his description of a “reaping bee,” as enjoyed a hundred and forty years ago, is quaintly diverting.
“When the evening amusements began our host performed on the violin and the young people commenced dancing. I was brought down stairs by one of the daughters and placed on a chair in one corner of the room to witness their sports. They got so merry in the dance that I was unheeded, and they whirled so hard against me as to knock me from my chair. One of the young women caught me in her arms, and carried me to the chamber and laid me on the mat. They held their frolic until midnight and eight or ten of the girls tarried till morning. My mat lay in one corner of the garret, and they were to occupy another on the opposite side. When they came upstairs they commenced performing a jumping match after making preparations for the same by taking off some of their clothes. They performed with much agility, when one of the stranger girls observing me in one corner of the garret exclaimed with much surprise: ‘Who is that?’ The answer was: ‘It’s only a young man belonging to the North that is here sick, and won’t live three days. Never mind him.’”
His sloop having returned, this sixteen-year-old sailor surprised his kind host by gaining sufficient strength to go on board and soon after set sail for Martinique in the West Indies. The Revolutionary Committee of North Carolina had ordered the captain to fetch back a supply of powder and shot. He took aboard this cargo after driving overboard and threatening to blow out the brains of an English lieutenant who had it in mind to make a prize of the sloop while she lay at Martinique.
It was out of the frying pan into the fire, for when the vessel reached the Carolina coast, “the news of our unexpected arrival had been noised abroad,” relates Luther Little, “and the King’s tender lay within a few miles of the bar in wait for us. Twelve pilot boats from Ocrakoke came off to us and informed us that the tender was coming out to take us. We loaded the pilot boats with powder, and the balls, which were in kegs, we hove overboard. By this time the tender made her appearance and ordered us all on board, made a prize of the sloop and ordered her for Norfolk where lay the English fleet. When our pilot and his crew went to take their boat I mingled with them and walked quietly on board without being observed, and set hard at rowing with one of the oars. The captain and the rest of the crew were made prisoners.”
The pilot boat landed young Little at Ocrakoke, where he found that the other pilots who had taken the powder ashore had stolen ten casks of it, scurvy patriots that they were. So the stout-hearted lad of sixteen borrowed an old musket and stood guard all night over the powder kegs. “The next morning,” he tells us, “the pilots finding they could plunder no more of the powder, agreed to carry it up the Pimlico River to the several County Committees for whom it was destined.” Luther Little went with them and saw to it that the powder reached its owners.
One Colonel Simpson offered him a small schooner laden with corn to be delivered down the Pongo River. She had a crew of slaves which the boy skipper loftily rejected and took his little schooner single-handed downstream, making port after a two days’ voyage. While at anchor there came a hurricane which had a most surprising effect on his fortunes. “I shut myself down in the cabin,” said he, “and in the course of the night found the vessel adrift. Not daring to go on deck I waited the result and soon felt the vessel strike. After thumping a while she keeled to one side and remained still. At daylight next morning I ventured on deck and found myself safe on terra firma, in the woods, one half mile from the water, the tide having left me safe among the trees.”