American Merchant Ships and Sailors

by Willis J. Abbot

The lives of the men who go down to the sea in ships are always full of romance, the literary value of which has been fully exploited by such writers of sea stories as Cooper and Clark Russell. But the romance of the typical sailor's life is that which grows out of a ceaseless struggle with the winds and waves, out of world-wide wanderings, and encounters with savages and pirates. It is the romance which makes up melodrama, rather than that of the normal life. The early New England fishermen, however, were something more than vagrants on the surface of the seas. In their lives were often combined the peaceful vocations of the farmer or woodsman, with the adventurous calling of the sailor. For months out of the year, the Maine fisherman would be working in the forests, felling great trees, guiding the tugging ox-teams to the frozen rivers, which with spring would float the timber down to tidewater. When winter's grip was loosened, he, like the sturdy logs his axe had shaped, would find his way to where the air was full of salt, and the owners of pinks and schooners were painting their craft, running over the rigging, and bargaining with the outfitters for stores for the spring cruise. From Massachusetts and Rhode Island farms men would flock to the little ports, leaving behind the wife and younger boys to take care of the homestead, until the husband and father returned from the banks in the fall, with his summer's earnings. His luck at fishing, her luck with corn and calves and pigs, determined the scale of the winter's living. Some of the fishermen were not only farmers, as well, but ship-builders and ship-owners, too. If the farm happened to front on some little cove, the frame of a schooner would be set up there on the beach, and all winter long the fisherman-farmer-builder would work away with adze and saw and hammer, putting together the stout hull that would defend him in time against the shock of the north-east sea. His own forest land supplied the oak trees, keelson, ribs, and stem. The neighboring sawmill shaped his planks. One lucky cruise as a hand on a fishing boat owned by a friend would earn him enough to pay for the paint and cordage. With Yankee ingenuity he shaped the iron work at his own forge—evading in its time the stupid British law that forbade the colonists to make nails or bolts. Two winters' labor would often give the thrifty builder a staunch boat of his own, to be christened the "Polly Ann," or the "Mary Jane"—more loyal to family ties than to poetic euphony were the Yankee fishermen—with which he would drive into the teeth of the north-east gale, breaking through the waves as calmly as in early spring at home he forced his plough through the stubble.

There was, too, in those early days of the fisheries, a certain patriarchal relation maintained between owner and crew that finds no parallel in modern times. The first step upward of the fisherman was to the quarter-deck. As captain, he had a larger responsibility, and received a somewhat larger share of the catch, than any of his crew. Then, if thrifty, or if possessed of a shipyard at home, such as I have described, he soon became an owner. In time, perhaps, he would add one or two schooners to his fleet, and then stay ashore as owner and outfitter, sending out his boats on shares. Fishermen who had attained to this dignity, built those fine, old, great houses, which we see on the water-front in some parts of New England—square, simple, shingled to the ground, a deck perched on the ridge-pole of the hipped roof, the frame built of oak shaped like a ship's timbers, with axe and adze. The lawns before the houses sloped down to the water where, in the days of the old prosperity, the owner's schooner might be seen, resting lightly at anchor, or tied up to one of the long, frail wharves, discharging cargo—wharves black and rotting now, and long unused to the sailor's cheery cry. There, too, would be the flakes for drying fish, the houses on the wharves for storing supplies, and the packed product, and the little store in which the outfitter kept the simple stock of necessaries from which all who shipped on his fleet were welcome to draw for themselves and their families, until their "ship came in." To such a fishing port would flock the men from farm and forest, as the season for mackerel drew nigh. The first order at the store would include a pair of buck (red leather) or rubber boots, ten or fifteen pounds of tobacco, clay pipe, sou'-westers, a jack-knife, and oil-clothes. If the sailor was single, the account would stop there, until his schooner came back to port. If he had a family, a long list of groceries, pork and beans, molasses, coffee, flour, and coarse cloth, would be bought on credit, for the folks at home. It came about naturally that these folks preferred to be near the store at which the family had credit, and so the sailors would, in time, buy little plots of land in the neighborhood, and build thereon their snug shingled cottages. So sprung up the fishing villages of New England.

The boys who grew up in these villages were able to swim as soon as they could walk; rowed and sailed boats before they could guide a plow; could give the location of every bank, the sort of fish that frequented it, and the season for taking them. They could name every rope and clew, every brace and stay on a pink or Chebacco boat before they reached words of two syllables in Webster's blue-backed spelling-book; the mysteries of trawls and handlines, of baits and hooks were unraveled to them while still in the nursery, and the songs that lulled them to sleep were often doleful ditties of castaways on George's Bank. Often they were shipped as early as their tenth year, going as a rule in schooners owned or commanded by relatives. It was no easy life that the youngster entered upon when first he attained the dignity of being a "cut-tail," but such as it was, it was the life he had looked forward to ever since he was old enough to consider the future. He lived in a little forecastle, heated by a stuffy stove, which it was his business to keep supplied with fuel. The bunks on either side held rough men, not over nice of language or of act, smoking and playing cards through most of their hours of leisure. From time immemorial it has been a maxim of the forecastle that the way to educate a boy is to "harden" him, and the hardening process has usually taken the form of persistent brutality of usage—the rope's end, the heavy hand, the hard-flung boot followed swift upon transgression of the laws or customs of ship or forecastle. The "cut-tail" was everybody's drudge, yet gloried in it, and a boy of Gloucester or Marblehead, who had lived his twelve years without at least one voyage to his credit, was in as sorry a state among his fellow urchins as a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" would be in the company of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

The intimacies of the village streets were continued on the ocean. Fish supplanted marbles as objects of prime importance in the urchin's mind. The smallest fishing village would have two or three boats out on the banks, and the larger town several hundred. Between the crews of these vessels existed always the keenest rivalry, which had abundant opportunity for its exhibition, since the conditions of the fishery were such that the schooners cruised for weeks, perhaps, in fleets of several hundred. Every maneuver was made under the eyes of the whole fleet, and each captain and sailor felt that among the critics were probably some of his near neighbors at home. Charles Nordhoff, who followed a youth spent at sea with a long life of honorable and brilliant activity in journalism, describes the watchfulness of the fleet as he had often seen it:

"The fleet is the aggregate of all the vessels engaged in the mackerel fishery. Experience has taught fishermen that the surest way to find mackerel is to cruise in one vast body, whose line of search will then extend over an area of many miles. When, as sometimes happens, a single vessel falls in with a large 'school,' the catch is, of course, much greater. But vessels cruising separately or in small squads are much less likely to fall in with fish than is the large fleet. 'The fleet' is therefore the aim of every mackerel fisherman. The best vessels generally maintain a position to the windward. Mackerel mostly work to windward slowly, and those vessels furthest to windward in the fleet are therefore most likely to fall in with fish first, while from their position they can quickly run down should mackerel be raised to leeward.

"Thus, in a collection of from six hundred to a thousand vessels, cruising in one vast body, and spreading over many miles of water, is kept up a constant, though silent and imperceptible communication, by means of incessant watching with good spy-glasses. This is so thorough that a vessel at one end of the fleet cannot have mackerel 'alongside,' technically speaking, five minutes, before every vessel in a circle, the diameter of which may be ten miles, will be aware of the fact, and every man of the ten thousand composing their crews will be engaged in spreading to the wind every available stitch of canvas to force each little bark as quickly as possible into close proximity to the coveted prize."

To come upon the mackerel fleet suddenly, perhaps with the lifting of the fog's gray curtain, or just as the faint dawn above the tossing horizon line to the east began to drive away the dark, was a sight to stir the blood of a lad born to the sea. Sometimes nearly a thousand vessels would be huddled together in a space hardly more than a mile square. At night, their red and green lights would swing rhythmically up and down as the little craft were tossed by the long rollers of old Atlantic, in whose black bosom the gay colors were reflected in subdued hues. From this floating city, with a population of perhaps ten thousand souls, no sound arises except the occasional roar of a breaking swell, the creaking of cordage, and the "chug-chug" of the vessel's bows as they drop into the trough of the sea. All sails are furled, the bare poles showing black against the starlit sky, and, with one man on watch on the deck, each drifts idly before the breeze. Below, in stuffy cabins and fetid forecastles, the men are sleeping the deep and dreamless sleep that hard work in the open air brings as one of its rewards. All is as quiet as though a mystic spell were laid on all the fleet. But when the sky to the eastward begins to turn gray, signs of life reappear. Here and there in the fleet a sail will be seen climbing jerkily to the masthead, and hoarse voices sound across the waters. It is only a minute or two after the first evidence of activity before the whole fleet is tensely active. Blocks and cordage are creaking, captains and mates shouting. Where there was a forest of bare poles are soon hundreds of jibs and mainsails, rosy in the first rays of the rising sun. The schooners that have been drifting idly, are, as by magic, under weigh, cutting across each other's bows, slipping out of menacing entanglements, avoiding collisions by a series of nautical miracles. From a thousand galleys rise a thousand slender wreaths of smoke, and the odors of coffee and of the bean dear to New England fishermen, mingle with the saline zephyrs of the sea. The fleet is awake.

They who have sailed with the fleet say that one of the marvels of the fisherman's mind is the unerring skill with which he will identify vessels in the distant fleet, To the landsman all are alike—a group of somewhat dingy schooners, not over trig, and apt to be in need of paint. But the trained fisherman, pursing his eyes against the sun's glitter on the waves, points them out one by one, with names, port-of-hail, name of captain, and bits of gossip about the craft. As the mountaineer identifies the most distant peak, or the plainsman picks his way by the trail indistinguishable to the untrained eye, so the fisherman, raised from boyhood among the vessels that make up the fleet, finds in each characteristics so striking, so individual, as to identify the vessel displaying them as far as a keen eye can reach.