The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Making his way on foot to the home of the consignee, he reported his arrival, explained the situation and wrote his employer that he had delivered his cargo safe, and that he would find his schooner half a mile in the woods anchored safely among the trees.

The marooned seaman had not to wait long for another berth. On the same day of his escape he saw a sloop beating out of the river and hailed her skipper. A foremast hand was wanted and Little shipped aboard for the West Indies. During the passage they were chased by an English frigate, and ran in under the guns of the Dutch fort at St. Eustatia. Cargo and vessel were sold, and Luther Little transferred himself to another sloop bound for Rhode Island.

“Arriving safe after a passage of eleven days,” he writes, “I took my pack and travelled to Little Compton where I had an uncle. Here I stayed one week, and then marched home on foot, the distance of seventy miles, without one cent in my pocket. I had been absent eleven months.”

A few months later Luther Little shipped on board a letter of marque brig bound to Cadiz. Off Cape Finnesterre a storm piled the vessel on the rocks where she went to pieces. Little was washed over the bows, but caught a trailing rope and hauled himself aboard with a broken leg. While he was in this plight the brig broke in two, and somehow, with the help of his fellow seamen, he was conveyed ashore to a Spanish coast fortification. Thence they were taken by boat to Bellisle. The infant Uncle Sam was not wholly neglectful of his subjects, even though he was in the death-grip of a Revolution, for to the inn at Bellisle there came “a coach with four white horses and Mr. John Baptiste, an officer in the employ of the United States government, to enquire if there were any from off that wreck who needed assistance and wished to go to the hospital.”

Luther Little lay in a hospital at Lisbon from autumn into spring where, he relates: “I was treated with great kindness and attention and although in my midnight dreams the spirits of a kind mother and beloved sisters would often hover around my pillow, still on waking, the thought that I had escaped an early death was ever present to the mind, and I felt that although far from home and friends, I had every reason to be thankful.”

The canny youngster had a shoe with a hollow heel, which hiding place he had prepared before leaving home, and in which he had tucked eight gold dollars with this sagacious reflection:

“Previous to this I had been left among strangers perfectly destitute without money either to assist myself, or to remunerate them for kindness received. I was now leaving home again, the future was covered with a veil which a wise Providence had never permitted human knowledge to rend. I knew not with what this voyage might be fraught—evil or good. I therefore resolved if possible to have something laid up as the old adage expresses, ‘for a wet day.’”

When Luther was discharged from the Spanish hospital eleven other luckless American seamen who had been cast on their beam ends were set adrift with him. The shoe with the hollow heel held the only cash in the party who undertook an overland journey of three hundred miles to the nearest seaport whence they might expect to find passage home. While spending the night at a port called St. Ubes there came ashore the captain and lieutenant of an English privateer. These were very courteous foemen, for the captain told how he had been made prisoner by a Yankee crew, carried into Salem, and treated so exceedingly well that he was very grateful. Thereupon he ordered his lieutenant to go off to the privateer and fetch a dozen of pickled neats’ tongues which he gave the stranded pilgrims to put in their packs. He also turned over to them a Portuguese pilot to escort them through the desolate and hostile country in which their journey lay. With the Portuguese, the neats’ tongues, and wine in leather bottles, paid for from the hollow heel, the American tars trudged along, sleeping on the ground and in shepherds’ sheds until they reached the boundary between Spain and Portugal.

“The Spanish and English were at war,” relates Luther Little, “and the stable in which we slept was surrounded by Spaniards who swore we were English and they would take us prisoners. In vain the landlord of the nearby tavern expostulated with them, saying we were Americans in distress traveling to Faro. They still persisted in forcing the door. The pilot told them that we were desperate men armed to the teeth and at length they disappeared.”

They were among a set of accomplished thieves, for next day they bought some mackerel and stowed it in their packs from which it was artfully stolen by the very lad who had sold it to them. The pilot cheered them with tales of highway robbery and murder as they fared on, indicating with eloquent gestures sundry stones which marked the burial places of slain travelers. They were once attacked by a gang of brigands who stole their mule and slender store of baggage, but the seamen rallied with such headlong energy that the robbers took to the bushes.