The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

More than a century ago, therefore, these mariners of Salem began to write detailed journals of their voyages, to be deposited with this Society in order that their fellow shipmasters might glean from them such facts as might “tend to the improvement and security of navigation.” Few seas were charted, and Salem ships were venturing along unknown shores. The journal of one of these pioneer voyages was a valuable aid to the next shipmaster who went that way. These journals were often expanded from the ship’s logs, and written after the captains came home. The habit of carefully noting all incidents of trade, discovery, and dealings with primitive races taught these seamen to make their logs something more than routine accounts of wind and weather. Thus, year after year and generation after generation, there was accumulating a library of adventurous first-hand narrative, written in stout manuscript volumes.

It was discovered that a pen and ink drawing of the landfall of some almost unknown island would help the next captain passing that coast to identify its headlands. Therefore many of these quarterdeck chroniclers developed an astonishing aptitude for sketching coast line, mountains and bays. Some of them even made pictures in water color of the ships they saw or spoke, and their logs were illustrated descriptions of voyages to the South Seas or Mauritius or China. In this manner the tradition was cherished that a shipmaster of Salem owed it to his fellow mariners and townspeople to bring home not only all the knowledge he could gather but also every kind of curious trophy to add to the collections of the East India Marine Society. And as the commerce over seas began to diminish in the nineteenth century, this tradition laid fast hold upon many Salem men and women whose fathers had been shipmasters. They took pride in gathering together all the old log books they could find in cobwebby attics and battered seachests and in increasing this unique library of blue water.

Older than the East India Marine Society is the Salem Marine Society, which was founded in 1766 by eighteen shipmasters, and which still maintains its organization in its own building. Its Act of Incorporation, dated 1772, stated that “whereas a considerable number of persons who are or have been Masters of ships or other vessels, have for several years past associated themselves in the town of Salem; and the principal end of said Society being to improve the knowledge of this coast, by the several members, upon their arrival from sea communicating their observations, inwards and outwards, of the variation of the needle, soundings, courses and distances, and all other remarkable things about it, in writing, to be lodged with the Society, for the making of the navigation more safe; and also to relieve one another and their families in poverty or other adverse accidents of life, which they are more particularly liable to,” etc.

Most of these records, together with those belonging to the East India Marine Society and many others rescued from oblivion, have been assembled and given in care of the Essex Institute of Salem as the choicest treasure of its notable historical library. It has come to pass that a thousand of these logs and sea-journals are stored in one room of the Essex Institute, comprising many more than this number of voyages made between 1750 and 1890, a period of a century and a half, which included the most brilliant era of American sea life. Privateer, sealer, whaler, and merchantman, there they rest, row after row of canvas-covered books, filled with the day’s work of as fine a race of seamen as ever sailed; from the log of the tiny schooner Hopewell on a voyage to the West Indies amid perils of swarming pirates and privateers a generation before the Revolution, down to the log of the white-winged Mindoro of the Manila fleet which squared away her yards for the last time only fifteen years ago.

There is no other collection of Americana which can so vividly recall a vanished epoch and make it live again as these hundreds upon hundreds of ancient log books. They are complete, final, embracing as they do the rise, the high-tide and the ebb of the commerce of Salem, the whole story of those vikings of deep-water enterprise who dazzled the maritime world. These journals reflect in intimate and sharply focused detail that little world which Harriet Martineau discerned when she visited Salem seventy-five years ago and related:

“Salem, Mass., is a remarkable place. This ‘city of peace’ will be better known hereafter for its commerce than for it’s witch tragedy. It has a population of fourteen thousand and more wealth in proportion to its population than perhaps any town in the world. Its commerce is speculative but vast and successful. It is a frequent circumstance that a ship goes out without a cargo for a voyage around the world. In such a case the captain puts his elder children to school, takes his wife and younger children and starts for some semi-barbarous place where he procures some odd kind of cargo which he exchanges with advantage for another somewhere else; and so goes trafficking around the world, bringing home a freight of the highest value.

“These enterprising merchants of Salem are hoping to appropriate a large share of the whale fishery and their ships are penetrating the northern ice. They speak of Fayal and the Azores as if they were close at hand. The fruits of the Mediterranean are on every table. They have a large acquaintance at Cairo. They know Napoleon’s grave at St. Helena, and have wild tales to tell of Mozambique and Madagascar, and stores of ivory to show from there. They speak of the power of the king of Muscat, and are sensible of the riches of the southeast coast of Arabia. Anybody will give you anecdotes from Canton and descriptions of the Society and Sandwich Islands. They often slip up the western coast of their two continents, bringing furs from the back regions of their own wide land, glance up at the Andes on their return; double Cape Horn, touch at the ports of Brazil and Guiana, look about them in the West Indies, feeling almost at home there, and land some fair morning in Salem and walk home as if they had done nothing remarkable.”

Within sight of this Essex Institute is the imposing building of the Peabody Academy of Science and Marine Museum, already mentioned. Here the loyal sons of Salem, aided by the generous endowment of George Peabody, the banker and philanthropist, have created a notable memorial to the sea-born genius of the old town. One hall is filled with models and paintings of the stout ships which made Salem rich and famous. These models were built and rigged with the most painstaking accuracy of detail, most of them the work of mariners of the olden time, and many of them made on shipboard during long voyages. Scores of the paintings of ships were made when they were afloat, their cannon and checkered ports telling of the dangers which merchantmen dared in those times; their hulls and rigging wearing a quaint and archaic aspect.

Beneath them are displayed the tools of the seaman’s trade long ere steam made of him a paint-swabber and mechanic. Here are the ancient quadrants, “half-circles,” and hand log lines, timed with sandglasses, with which our forefathers found their way around the world. Beside them repose the “colt” and the “cat-o’-nine-tails” with which those tough tars were flogged by their skippers and mates. Cutlasses such as were wielded in sea fights with Spanish, French and English, boarding axes and naval tomahawks, are flanked by carved whales-teeth, whose intricate designs of ships, cupids and mermaids whiled away the dogwatches under the Southern Cross. Over yonder is a notched limb of a sea-washed tree on which a sailor tallied the days and weeks of five months’ solitary waiting on a desert island where he had been cast by shipwreck.