The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Peabody then mustered his crew against the boarding party from the other boat, and drove them overboard. After the Ranger’s decks had been cleared in fierce and bloody fashion and the fight was won, it was found that one of her crew was dead, three wounded, the captain badly hurt, and although Peabody had not known it in the heat of action, he had stopped two musket balls and bore the marks of a third. One of the very able seamen of the Ranger had seen a boarder about to fire point-blank at Peabody and with a sweep of his cutlass he cut off the hand that held the pistol. For this service Peabody made the seaman a life-long pensioner, showing that his heart was in the right place in more ways than one.

Joseph Peabody

The Ranger carried twenty men and seven guns at this time, and the enemy attempted to carry the ship with sixty men in two barges, their loss being more than forty in killed and wounded. They were later ascertained to be a band of Tories who had infested the bay of the mouth of the Potomac for some time, and had captured a brig of ten guns and thirty men a few days before this. The Ranger sailed up to Alexandria to refit and land her wounded, and the merchants of the town presented the ship with a silver mounted boarding-pike in token of their admiring gratitude for her stout defense. This trophy became the property of Joseph Peabody and was highly prized as an adornment of his Salem mansion in later years.

When the Ranger went to sea again, Thomas Perkins of Salem, her first officer, was given the command and Peabody sailed with him as chief mate. Thus began a friendship which later became a business partnership in which Perkins amassed a large fortune of his own. Peabody sailed as a shipmaster for a Salem firm for several years after peace came, and at length bought a schooner, the Three Friends, in which he traded to the West Indies and Europe. The story of his career thereafter was one of successful speculation in ships and cargoes and of a growing fleet of deep-water vessels until his death in 1844, a venerable man of large public spirit, and shining integrity, a pillar of his state and town, whose fortune had been won in the golden age of American enterprise in remote seas.

William Gray completed the triumvirate of Salem ship owners of surpassing sagacity and success, his name being rightfully linked with those of Elias Hasket Derby and Joseph Peabody. He served his apprenticeship in the counting room of Richard Derby and was one of the earliest American shipping merchants to seek the trade of Canton and the ports of the East Indies. In 1807 he owned fifteen ships, seven barks, thirteen brigs, and one schooner, or one-fourth of the tonnage of the port. He became the lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth and left a princely fortune as the product of his farsighted industry.

For the information of those unfamiliar with the records of that epoch on the seas, the rapidity with which these lords of maritime trade acquired their fleets and the capital needed to freight and man them, it may be worth while to give a concrete example of the profits to be won in those ventures of large risks and larger stakes. A letter written from the great shipping house of the Messrs. Perkins in Boston to their agents in Canton in 1814, goes to show that the operations of the captains of industry of the days of Derby and Gray and Peabody would have been respected by the capitalists of this twentieth century. Here is the kind of Arabian Night’s Entertainment in the way of dazzling rewards which these old-time merchants planned to reap:

“To Messers. Perkins and Co.

Canton, Jan. 1, 1814.

“You say a cargo laid at Canton would bring three for one in South America, and your copper would give two prices back. Thus, $30,000 laid out in China would give you $90,000 in South America, one half of which laid out in copper would give one hundred per cent, or $90,000, making $135,000 for $30,000.