The tide of commerce had slackened abroad as well as at home and the surplus of deep-water tonnage was world-wide.
In earlier generations afloat, the American spirit had displayed amazing recuperative powers.The havoc of the Revolution had been unable to check it, and its vigor and aggressive enterprise had never been more notable than after the blows dealt by the Embargo, the French Spoliations, and the War of 1812.The conditions of trade and the temper of the people were now so changed that this mighty industry, aforetime so robust and resilient, was unable to recover from such shocks as the panic of 1857 and the Civil War.Yet it had previously survived and triumphed over calamities far more severe.The destruction wrought by Confederate cruisers was trifling compared with the work of the British and French privateers when the nation was very small and weak.
The American spirit had ceased to concern itself with the sea as the vital and dominant element.The footsteps of the young men no longer turned toward the wharf and the waterside and the tiers of tall ships outward bound.They were aspiring to conquer an inland empire of prairie and mountain and desert, impelled by the same pioneering and adventurous ardor which had burned in their seafaring sires.Steam had vanquished sail--an epochal event in a thousand years of maritime history--but the nation did not care enough to accept this situation as a new challenge or to continue the ancient struggle for supremacy upon the sea.England did care, because it was life or death to the little, sea-girt island, but as soon as the United States ceased to be a strip of Atlantic seaboard and the panorama, of a continent was unrolled to settlement, it was foreordained that the maritime habit of thought and action should lose its virility in America.All great seafaring races, English, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Dutch, have taken to salt water because there was lack of space, food, or work ashore, and their strong young men craved opportunities.
Like the Pilgrim Fathers and their fishing shallops they had nowhere else to go.
When the Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind--taut, serene, immaculate--were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight of a huge carcass alongside.With a poor opinion of the seamanship of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among their favorite chanteys:
Oh, poor Reuben Ranzo, Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo, Oh, Ranzo was no sailor, So they shipped him aboard a whaler, Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo.
This was crass, intolerant prejudice.The whaling ship was careless of appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars, and trimming the yards to a hair.On a voyage of two or three years, moreover, there was always plenty of time tomorrow.Brave and resourceful seamen were these New England adventurers and deep-sea hunters who made nautical history after their own fashion.They flourished coeval with the merchant marine in its prime, and they passed from the sea at about the same time and for similar reasons.Modernity dispensed with their services, and young men found elsewhere more profitable and easier employment.
