Typical of the ships which won wealth and prestige for Joseph Peabody, was the redoubtable George which was the most successful vessel of her period. For twenty-two years she was in the East India trade, making twenty-one round voyages with such astonishing regularity as to challenge comparison with the schedules of the cargo tramps of to-day. She was only one hundred and ten feet in length, with a beam of twenty-seven feet, but during her staunch career the George paid into the United States Treasury as duties on her imports more than six hundred thousand dollars.
She was built in 1814 by a number of Salem ship carpenters who had been deprived of work by the stagnation of the War of 1812. They intended to launch her as a co-operative privateer, to earn her way by force of arms when peaceable merchantmen were driven from the high seas. But the war ended too soon to permit these enterprising shipwrights to seek British plunder and they sold the George to Joseph Peabody. She sailed for India in 1815, with hardly a man in her company, from quarterdeck to forecastle, more than twenty-one years of age. Every man aboard of her could read and write, and most of the seamen had studied navigation.
Not always did these enterprising and adventurous Salem lads return to their waiting mothers. In the log of the George for a voyage to Calcutta in 1824, the mate has drawn with pencil a tombstone and a weeping willow as a tribute to one Greenleaf Perley, a young seaman who died in that far-off port. The mate was a poet of sorts and beneath the headstone he wrote these lines:
“The youth ambitious sought a sickly clime,
His hopes of profit banished all his fears;
His was the generous wish of love divine,
To sooth a mother’s cares and dry her tears.”
Joseph Peabody began his sea life when a lad in his teens in the hardy school of the Revolutionary privateersmen. He made his first cruise in Elias Hasket Derby’s privateer, Bunker Hill, and his second in the Pilgrim owned by the Cabots of Beverly. A little later he became second officer of a letter of marque ship, the Ranger, owned by Boston and Salem shipping merchants. It was while aboard the Ranger that young Peabody won his title as a fighting seaman. Leaving Salem in the winter of 1781-82, the Ranger carried salt to Richmond, and loaded with flour at Alexandria for Havana. Part of this cargo of flour was from the plantation of George Washington, and the immortal story of the hatchet and the cherry tree must have been known in Cuba even then, for the Spanish merchants expressed a preference for this brand of flour and showed their confidence by receiving it at the marked weight without putting it on the scales.
The Ranger returned to Alexandria for another cargo of flour, and on July 5th, 1782, dropped down the Potomac, ready for sea. Head winds compelled her to anchor near the mouth of the river. At three o’clock of the following night, the seaman on watch ran aft, caught up a speaking trumpet, and shouted down to the sleeping officers in the cabin that two boats were making for the ship. Captain Simmons and Lieutenant Peabody rushed up the companionway, and as they reached the deck, received a volley of musketry from the darkness. Captain Simmons fell, badly wounded, and Peabody ran forward in his night clothes, calling to the crew to get their boarding pikes. He caught up a pike and with a brave and ready seaman named Kent, sprang to the bows and engaged in a hand to hand fight with the boarding party which was already pouring over the rail from the boat alongside.
The Ranger’s crew rallied and held the deck against this invasion until a second boat made fast in another quarter and swept the deck with musket fire. The first officer was in the magazine below, breaking out ammunition, the captain was wounded, and the command of this awkward situation fell upon Lieutenant, or Second Officer Peabody, who was a conspicuous mark in his white nightshirt. He ordered cold shot heaved into the boats to sink them if possible, and one of them was smashed and sunk in short order.