CHAPTER IV.—THE CAPTAINS
You would never think now that tall Indiamen were once built here in our town, but they were, and sailed hence round the world away, and we too boasted our wharves, with the once-familiar notice:
“All ships required to cock-a-bill their yards before lying at this dock.”
The last ship built in the town was the Valley Forge, launched about 1860; the last built at Bowman’s Point, two miles above, was the Two Brothers. The Valley Forge for ten whole years was never out of Eastern waters, plying between China and Sumatra, and the seaports of the Inland Sea.
Mr. Peter Simons, one of our early magnates, and “ship’s husband,” of many vessels (kind, merry, handsome Mr. Peter, he never was husband to anyone but his ships), took a treasure voyage to the Spanish Main once, and brought home a moderate sized treasure, some of the doubloons of which are preserved in his family to this day.
Ship-building was the chief industry of the place. There were four principal ship-yards. The skippers as well as the lumber came from close at hand. It seems a wonderful thing, in these stay-at-home times, that keen young lads from the farms could have been, at twenty-one, in command of full-rigged ships, fearlessly making their way, in prosperous trade, to places that might as well be in Mars, for all most of us know of them to-day: but Java and the Spice Islands, Shanghai, Tasmania, and the Moluccas were household words in those days, and you still hear a sentence now and then which shows the one-time familiarity of ways which have passed from our knowledge.
The portraits at the house of Captain George Annable, the last of our clipper-ship captains, were painted in Antwerp. So were those (very queer ones), at Captain Charles Aiken’s, and at Captain Andrews’. It appears now in talk with Captain Annable that of course they were painted at Antwerp, for that was where the American skippers as a rule wintered. Living there was better and cheaper for them and their families than at any other foreign port. It became the custom to winter at Antwerp, and there grew to be an American society there.
Captain Annable has crossed the Atlantic sixty-three times, sailing clipper mail-ships.