[49]. A striking example of this occurs in the narrative of the capture of the Kent, East Indiaman, in 1801, by a French privateer off the Sand Heads. A number of the passengers who were fighting on the quarter-deck and poop were killed by the hand grenades of the corsair. The Frenchmen boarded and a desperate fight ensued; but the enemy was greatly superior in number and arms. “A dreadful carnage followed, they showing no quarter to any one who came in their way, whether with or without arms; and such was their savage cruelty that they even stabbed some of the sick in bed.”
It is not pleasant, to be sure, to be delayed four and twenty hours by the stranding of a steamer of 5000 tons. But all the same, I think we have a good deal to be thankful for.
COSTLY SHIPWRECKS.
In 1808, a shrewd and evidently a “highly-calculating” Yankee took the trouble to express the loss suffered by the United States in consequence of the then embargo, in a form very nicely designed to go straight home to the businesses and bosoms of his compatriots. The sum amounted to forty-eight millions of dollars, which, said the ingenious arithmetician, at seventeen dollars to the pound weight, would weigh two millions eight hundred and twenty-three pounds avoirdupois; and it would require to carry it one thousand two hundred and sixty waggons, allowing each waggon to carry one ton; and the distance the waggons would occupy, allowing each waggon seventy-two feet, would be seventeen miles. Forty-eight millions of dollars, placed edge to edge in a straight line, would extend over a space of one thousand one hundred and thirty-four miles. “The above sum,” added the computator, “would be sufficient to furnish one hundred and twenty-one sail of the line, completely equipped for a twelve months’ cruise.” So much for the length, weight, and worth of an embargo in 1808.
Now, what sort of result, I wonder, would come of a calculation of the weight, and the length, and the waggon-filling capacity of all the money—in hard cash, in bars, and ingots—which will have been carried into and out of this kingdom by ships flying the mercantile ensign between January 1 and December 31 of this present year? I sometimes fancy that it needs a shipwreck and a great foundering of specie to make the “average” public realize the prodigious treasure which is at all hours of the day and night, year after year, and year after year growing vaster in bulk and in value, afloat under the colours flown by the ships of the British merchant service. Let any one, during any six consecutive days, take note of the published records of the bullion movements, and he would be astounded by the results. “The Bokhara has arrived at Plymouth, from China, with £42,450 in gold.” “The Khedive has taken £81,598 in specie for the East, and the Peshawur £65,600.” “The Pekin has brought £50,012 in specie.” “The Sutlej, £16,110 from Bombay.” “The Galicia, from Valparaiso, £80,000 in silver.” “The Iberia, from Australia, £58,000 in gold.” “The Elbe, from the River Plate, £93,379 in specie.” “The Kaisar-i-Hind, £46,000 in bar silver, and £15,000 in bar gold.” “The Eider, from New York, with £5920 in specie.” “The Trave, from New York, £7941.” “The Carthage, with 50,000 sovereigns from Melbourne.” “The Ruapehu, from Wellington (N.Z.), with £10,000.” And so on, and so on, day after day, month after month. Think of a year of figures to which the contribution of a single day may mean as much as half a million! But supplement this huge floating pile of gold and silver with the value of the cargoes, with the produce of the east and west and south, the tea, the silks, the cotton, the tobacco—the hundreds and thousands of packages for which the despairing cataloguist can find no better name than “sundries.” Where be the old galleons, the old plate-ships, the monstrous castellated egg-shells, with their millions of pieces of eight,[[50]] alongside the Aladdin-like metal holds, stored with the mintage of the four corners of the earth, which, in these days, the propeller is steadily threshing through the billows of all the world’s seas?
[50]. A strange use was made of this coin by Sir John Kempthorne. He was attacked by a large Spanish ship of war, and fought till all his ammunition was spent: “Then,” says Campbell in his “Lives,” “remembering that he had several large bags of pieces of eight on board, he thought they might better serve to annoy than enrich the enemy, and, therefore, ordered his men to load their guns with silver, which did such execution on the Spanish rigging, that, if his own ship had not been disabled by a lucky shot, he had in all probability got clear.”
Yet my veneration for the past would make me very earnestly distinguish. It is the number in our time that makes the wonder; the thought of several hundreds of great ocean steamers—English, French, Italian, Dutch—all afloat at once, heading along the thirty-two points, every one of them carrying a fortune, small or great—£10,000 or £100,000—in money, among the other commodities which form her freight; it is the fancy of this aggregate wealth as compared with the cargoes of the treasure ships of other times which gives to the sea-borne specie of this age its prodigious numerical significance. But, ship for ship, our grandsires beat us. You never hear in our time of a single steamer carrying the load of gold, silver, plate, and treasure that was heaped into the hold of the butter-box of the last and earlier centuries. Let me cite an instance or two.
On February 28, 1769, there arrived at Lisbon a ship-of-war, named the Mother of God, from Rio Janeiro, having made the voyage in one hundred and twenty days. She had on board nine millions of crusades in gold, two millions and a half of crusades in diamonds, and about a hundred thousand “crowns tournois” in piastres, making in the whole twenty-nine millions and fifty thousand livres tournois. So much for a single ship. In 1774 two Spanish ships from Vera Cruz and the Havannah arrived with twenty-two millions of crowns, exclusive of merchandize valued roundly at twenty-seven millions of crowns. Such examples could be multiplied. Of the cargo of an English Indiaman in 1771, one item alone—a diamond in the rough—was valued at £100,000, “coming to be manufactured here on account of one of the Asiatic Nabobs,” and on the private freight of this vessel I read that policies of insurance were opened at Lloyd’s Coffee House at a high premium, so costly were her contents and so doubtful her safe arrival.[[51]]
[51]. In estimating the expressed worth of the early cargoes the relative value of money must be borne in mind.