Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude beginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which should one day comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the wind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck.Even then these early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carrying smaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to a closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in order to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.
By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels were registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem already displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was to make her the most illustrious port of the New World.The first of her line of shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own ketch Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which traded coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St.
Christopher's, and France.Very devout were his bills of lading, flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by the Grace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower....
and by God's Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland."No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to cross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in the West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or Rhode Island.The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of commerce in Puritan New England and its golden gains and exotic voyages allured high-hearted lads from farm and counter.In 1640 the ship Desire, built at Marblehead, returned from the West Indies and "brought some cotton and tobacco and negroes, etc.from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch of Manhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that the Incorporated West India Company should "allot to each Patroon twelve black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroes should be found."It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most needed and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the most lucrative markets.Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in "rum and niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle Passage.The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home from Guinea in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise: "For never was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before.Not ye like of ye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is full of them.For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, for I purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is very scarce.We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, so that ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is now forced to take any that comes.Here is seven sail of us Rum men that are ready to devour one another, for our case is desprit."Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture beyond all computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned by governments, at length rending the nation asunder in civil war and bequeathing a problem still unsolved--all this followed in the wake of those first voyages in search of labor which could be bought and sold as merchandise.It belonged to the dark ages with piracy and witchcraft, better forgotten than recalled, save for its potent influence in schooling brave seamen and building faster ships for peace and war.
These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers so manifold as to make their hardihood astounding.It was not merely a matter of small vessels with a few men and boys daring distant voyages and the mischances of foundering or stranding, but of facing an incessant plague of privateers, French and Spanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of freebooters under no flag at all.Coasts were unlighted, charts few and unreliable, and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the days of Columbus.Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking in ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the First Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of July 25, 1677: "The Lord having given a Commission to the Indians to take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men...it struck a great consternation into all the people here.The Pastor moved on the Lord's Day, and the whole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day following as a Fast Day, which was accordingly done....The Lord was pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which was looked on as a gracious smile of Providence.Also there had been 19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also a Ketch sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches.The Lord give them Good Success."To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and often more sordid than picturesque.Many of these sea rogues were thieves with small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter.They were of the sort that overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from Jamaica in 1718 when he reported his capture by one Captain Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns and 120 men who took him to Crooked Island, plundered him of various articles, stripped the brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go.In the same year the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they met with pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off their mate because they had no navigator.
