The ships and sailors of old Salem: the record of a brilliant era of American achievement

Front matter

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The Pariay, one of tlie last of the Salem fleet bound out from Boston to jNIanila twentv-five vears ago

THE SHIPS AND SAILORS

Preface To The Second Edition

THE Panama Canal has strongly revived interest in the American merchant marine. A nation, long indifferent to the fact that it had lost its prestige on blue water, now discovers that after digging a ditch between two oceans at a cost of hundred of millions, there are almost no American ships to use it.

In other days, Yankee ships and sailors were able to win the commerce of the world against the competition of foreign flags because of native enterprise, brains, and seamanship. Nor is it impossible that such an era shall come again. It was not so much the lack of subsidies and the lower cost of foreign ships and crews that drove the American ensign from the high seas as the greater attraction which drew capital and energy to the tasks of building cities and railroads and opening to civilization the inland areas of the West.

If these records of maritime Salem hold any lessons for today, if they are worth while as something more than stirring tales of bygone generations, it is because those seafarers achieved success without counting the odds. They were enormously hampered by the policy of England which deliberately endeavored to crush Colonial shipping by means of numberless tonnage, customs, and neutrality regulations. It was a merciless jealousy that sought to confiscate every Yankee merchant vessel and ruin her owners.

There were the risks of the sea, of uncharted, unlighted coasts and reefs and islands, and a plague of ferocious pirates

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Preface

and lawless privateers who haunted the trade routes from the Spanish Main to Madagascar. The vessel lucky enough to escape all these perils might run afoul of another menace in the cruiser or customs officer of the King, and many and many an American merchantmen, hundreds of them, were seized in their own harbors and carried off before the eyes of their owners who could only stand by in speechless rage and sorrow at the loss of their labor and investment.

Notwithstanding all these grievous handicaps, American ships and sailors prospered and multiplied, nor did they stay at home and whine that they could not compete with the more favored merchant navies of England and the Continent. They took and held their commanding share of the world's trade because they had to have it. They wanted it earnestly enough to go out and get it.

Whenever the United States shall really desire to regain her proud place among the maritime nations, the minds of her captains of industry v/iil find a way to achieve it and her legislators will solve their share of the problem. And our people will cease paying over to English and German shipowners enough money in freight and passage bills every year to defray the cost of building a Panama Canal.

From log books, sea journals and other manuscripts hitherto unpublished (most of them written during the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812), are herein gathered such narratives as those of the first American voyages to Japan, India, the Philippines, Guam, the Cape of Good Hope, Sumatra, Arabia and the South Seas. These and other records, as written by the seamen who made Salem the most famous port of the New World a century ago, are much more than local annals. They comprise a unique and brilliant chapter of American history and they speak for themselves.

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Preface

This era, vanished this closed chapter of American achievement which reached its zenith a full century ago, belongs not alone to Salem, but also to the nation. East and west, north and south, runs the love of the stars and stripes, and the desire to do honor to those who have helped win for this flag prestige and respect among other peoples in other climes. The seamen of this old port were traders, it is true, but they lent to commerce an epic quality, and because they steered so many brave ships to ports where no other American topsails had ever gleamed, they deserve to be remembered among those whose work left its imprint far beyond the limits of the town or coast they called home.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Port of Vanished Fleets. ... 3 II Philip English and his Era. (1680-1750.) . 21

III Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates.

Chapter I

A MERICAN ships and sailors have almost vanished from /-\ the seas that lie beyond their own coasts. The twentieth century has forgotten the era w'hen Yankee topsails, like flying clouds, flecked every ocean, when tall spars forested every Atlantic port from Portland to Charleston, and when the American spirit of adventurous enterprise and rivalry was in its finest flower on the decks of our merchant squadrons. The last great chapter of the nation's life on blue water was written in the days of the matchless clippers which swept round the Horn to San Francisco or fled homeward from the Orient in the van of the tea fleets.

The Cape Horn clipper was able to survive the coming of the Age of Steam a few years longer than the Atlantic packet ships, such as the Dreadnought, but her glory departed with the Civil War and thereafter the story of the American merchant marine is one of swift and sorrowful decay. The boys of the Atlantic coast, whose fathers had followed the sea in legions, turned inland to find their careers, and the sterling qualities which had been bred in the bone by generations of salty ancestry now helped to conquer the western wilderness.

It is all in the past, this noble and thrilling history of American achievement on the deep sea, and a country with thousands of miles of seacoast has turned its back toward the sprayswept scenes of its ancient greatness to seek the fulfillment of its destiny in peopling the prairie, reclaiming the desert and feeding its mills and factories with the resources of forest, mine and farm.

For more than two centuries, however, we Americans were a maritime race, in peace and war, and the most significant deeds and spectacular triumphs of our seafaring annals were wrought long before the era of the clipper ship. The fastest and most beautiful fabric ever driven by the winds, the sky-sail clipper was handled with a superb quality of seamanship which made the mariners of other nations doff their caps to the ruddy Yankee masters of the Sovereign of the Seas, the Flying Cloud, the Comet, the Westward Ho, or the Sivordfish. Her routes were well traveled, however, and her voyages hardly more eventful than those of the liner of to-day. Islands were charted, headlands lighted, and the instruments and science of navigation so far perfected as to make ocean pathfinding no longer a matter of blind reckoning and guesswork. Pirates and privateers had ceased to harry the merchantmen and to make every voyage a hazard of life and death from the Bahama Banks to the South Seas.

Through the vista of fifty years the Yankee clipper has a glamour of singularly picturesque romance, but it is often forgotten that two hundred years of battling against desperate odds and seven generations of seafaring stock had been required to evolve her type and to breed the men who sailed her in the nineteenth century. It is to this much older race of American seamen and the stout ships they built and manned that we of to-day should be grateful for many of the finest pages in the history of our country's progress. The most adventurous age of our merchant mariners had reached its cHmax at the time of the War of 1812, and its glory was waning almost a hundred years ago. For the most part its records are buried in seastained log books and in the annals and traditions of certain ancient New England coastwise towns,* of which Salem was the most illustrious.

This port of Salem is chiefly known beyond New England as the scene of a wicked witchcraft delusion which caused the death of a score of poor innocents in 1692, and in later days as the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is not so commonly known that this old town of Salem, nestled in a bight of the Massachusetts coast, was once the most important seat of maritime enterprise in the New World. Nor when its population of a century ago is taken into consideration can any foreign port surpass for adventure, romance and daring the history of Salem during the era of its astonishing activity. Even as recently as 1854, when the fleets of Salem were fast dwindling, the London Daily News, in a belated eulogy of our American ships and sailors, was moved to compare the spirit of this port with that of Venice and the old Hanse towns and to say : " We owe a cordial admiration of the spirit of American commerce in its adventurous aspects. To watch it is to witness some of the finest romance of our time."

* In 1810 Newburyport merchants owned forty-one ships, forty-nine brijn;s and fifty scliooners, and was the seat of extensive commerce with the East Indies and other ports of the Orient. Twenty-one deep-water sailingships for foreign trade were built on the Merrimac River in that one year. The fame of Newburyport as a shipbuilding and shipowning port was carried far into the last century and culminated in the building of the Atlantic packet Dreadnought, the fastest and most celebrated sailing ship that ever flew the American flag. She made a passage from New York to Queenstown in nine days and thirteen hours in 1860. Her famous commander, the late Captain Samuel Samuels, wrote of the Dreadnought :

" She was never passed in anything over a four-knot breeze. She was what might be termed a semi-clipper and possessed the merit of being able to bear driving as long as her sails and spars would stand. By the sailors she was called the ' Wild Boat of the Atlantic, ' while others called her ' The Flying Dutchman. ' ' '

Nathaniel Hawthorne was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem in 1848-49, after the prestige of the port had been well-nigh lost. He was descended from a race of Salem shipmasters and he saw daily in the streets of his native town the survivors of the generations of incomparable seamen who had first carried the American flag to Hindoostan, Java, Sumatra, and Japan, who were first to trade with the Fiji Islands and with Madagascar, who had led the way to the west coast of Africa and to St. Petersburg, who had been pioneers in opening the commerce of South America and China to Yankee ships. They had "sailed where no other ships dared to go, they had anchored where no one else dreamed of looking for trade." They had fought pirates and the privateers of a dozen races around the world, stamping themselves as the Drakes and the Raleighs and Gilberts of American commercial daring.

In the Salem of his time, however, Hawthorne perceived little more than a melancholy process of decay, and a dusky background for romances of a century more remote. It would seem as if he found no compelling charm in the thickly clustered memories that linked the port with its former greatness on the sea. Some of the old shipmasters were in the Custom House service with him and he wrote of them as derelicts "who after being tost on every sea and standing sturdily against life's tempestuous blast had finally drifted into this quiet nook where with little to disturb them except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of life."

They were simple, brave, elemental men, hiding no tortuous problems of conscience, very easy to analyze and catalogue, and perhaps not apt, for this reason, to make a strong appeal to the genius of the author of "The Scarlet Letter."

" They spent a good deal of time asleep in their accustomed corners," he also wrote of them, "with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon

To the Imptclor* of ihe Port of S<UeDi

Custom House docuinc-nt with si^niature of Natliai.iol Hawthorne as surveyor

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Page from the ilhistrated loy „f the /vV».s-. Her captain drew such pictures as these of the shii)s he si<rhted at sea

A Port of Vafiished Fleets to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories and mouldy jokes that had grown to be passwords and counter-signs among them."

One of the sea journals or logs of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,* father of the author, possesses a literary interest in that its title page was lettered by the son when a lad of sixteen. With many an ornamental flourish the inscription runs:

Nathaniel Hathorne's

Book— 1820— Salem.

A Journal of a Passage from Bengali to America

In the Ship America of

This is almost the only volume of salty flavored narrative to which Nathaniel Hawthorne may be said to have contributed, although he was moved to pay this tribute to his stout-hearted forebears :

"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire."

Even to-day there survive old shipmasters and merchants of Salem who in their own boyhood heard from the lips of the actors their stories of shipwrecks on uncharted coasts; of captivity among the Algerians and in the prisons of France, Eng-

* Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author, chose to insert a "w" in the family name of Ilathorne borne by his father.

"The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who now adopted the fanciful spelling of his name after his personal whim, was man grown.' ' (Nathaniel Hawthorne, by George E. Woodberry, in American Men of Letters Series.)

land and Spain; of hairbreadth escapes from pirates on the Spanish Main and along Sumatran shores; of ship's companies overwhelmed by South Sea cannibals when Salem barks were pioneers in the wake of Captain Cook ; of deadly actions fought alongside British men-of-war and private armed ships, and of steering across far-distant seas when "India was a new region and only Salem knew the way thither."

Such men as these were trained in a stern school to fight for their own. When the time came they were also ready to fight for their country. Salem sent to sea one hundred and fifty-eight privateers during the Revolution. They carried two thousand guns and were manned by more than six thousand men, a force equal in numbers to the population of the town. These vessels captured four hundred and forty-four prizes, or more than one-half the total number taken by all the Colonies during the war.

In the War of 1812 Salem manned and equipped forty privateers and her people paid for and built the frigate Essex which under the command of David Porter swept the Pacific clean of British commerce and met a glorious end in her battle with the Phoebe and Cherub off the harbor of Valparaiso. Nor among the sea fights of both wars are there to be found more thrilling ship actions than were fought by Salem privateersmen who were as ready to exchange broadsides or measure boarding pikes with a "king's ship" as to snap up a tempting merchantman.

But even beyond these fighting merchant sailors lay a previous century of such stress and hazard in ocean traffic as this age cannot imagine. One generation after another of honest shipmasters had been the prey of a great company of lawless rovers under many flags or no flag at all. The distinction between privateers and pirates was not clearly drawn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the tiny American brigs and sloops which bravely fared to the West Indies and Europe were fair marks for the polyglot freebooters that laughed at England's feeble protection of her colonial trade.

The story of the struggles and heroisms of the western pioneers has been told over and over again. Every American schoolboy is acquainted with the story of the beginnings of the New England Colonies and of their union. But the work of the seafaring breed of Americans has been somewhat suffered to remain in the background. Their astonishing adventures were all in the day's work and were commonplace matters to their actors. The material for the plot of a modern novel of adventure may be found condensed into a three-line entry of many an ancient log-book.

High on the front of a massive stone building in Essex Street, Salem, is chiseled the inscription, "East India Marine Hall." Beneath this are the obsolete legends, "Asiatic Bank," and "Oriental Insurance Office." Built by the East India Marine Society eighty-four years ago, this structure is now the home of the Peabody Museum and a storehouse for the unique collections which Salem seafarers brought home from strange lands when their ships traded in every ocean. The East India Marine Society still exists. The handful of surviving members meet now and then and spin yarns of the vanished days when they were masters of stately square-riggers in the deep-water trade. All of them are gray and some of them quite feeble and every little while another of this company slips his cable for the last long voyage.

The sight-seeing visitor in Salem is fascinated by its quaint and picturesque streets, recalling as they do no fewer than three centuries of American life, and by its noble mansions set beneath the elms in an atmosphere of immemorial traditions. But the visitor is not likely to seek the story of Salem as it is written in the records left by the men who made it great. For those heroic seafarers not only made history but they also wrote it while they lived it. The East India Marine Society was organized in 1799 "to assist the widows and children of deceased members; to collect such facts and observations as tended to the improvement and security of navigation, and to form a museum of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn."*

The by-laws provided that " any person shall be eligible as a member of this society who shall have actually navigated the seas near the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, either as master or commander or as factor or supercargo in any vessel belonging to Salem."

From its foundation until the time when the collections of the Society were given in charge of the Peabody Academy of Science in 1867, three hundred and fifty masters and supercargoes of Salem had qualified for membership as having sailed beyond Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope.

More than a century ago, therefore, these mariners of Salem began to write detailed journals of their voyages, to be deposited with this Society in order that their fellow shipmasters might glean from them such facts as might " tend to the improvement and security of navigation." Few seas were charted, and Salem ships were venturing along unknown shores. The

* (1799) "Oct. 22. It is proposed by the new marine society, called the East India Marine Society, to make a cabinet. This society has been lately thought of. Captain Gibant first mentioned the plan to me this summer and desired me to give him some plan of articles or a sketch. The first friends of the institution met and chose a committee to compare and digest articles from the sketches given to them. Last week was informed that in the preceding week the members met and signed the articles chosen by the committee.

"Nov. 7. Captain Carnes has presented his curiosities to the new-formed East India Marine Society and they are providing a museum and cabinet. . . . Rooms were obtained for their meetings and a place for the deposit of books, charts, etc., and in July of the following year glass cases were provided to arrange therein the specimens that had been accumulated." (Diary of Rev. William Bentley.)

journal of one of these pioneer voyages was a valuable aid to the next shipmaster who went that way. These journals were often expanded from the ship's logs, and written after the captains came home. The habit of carefully noting all incidents of trade, discovery, and dealings with primitive races taught these seamen to make their logs something more than routine accounts of wind and weather. Thus, year after year and generation after generation, there was accumulating a library of adventurous first-hand narrative, written in stout manuscript volumes.

It was discovered that a pen and ink drawing of the landfall of some almost unknown island would help the next captain passing that coast to identify its headlands. Therefore many of these quarter-deck chroniclers developed an astonishing aptitude for sketching coast line, mountains and bays. Some of them even made pictures in water color of the ships they saw or spoke, and their logs were illustrated descriptions of voyages to the South Seas or Mauritius or China. In this manner the tradition was cherished that a shipmaster of Salem owed it to his fellow mariners and townspeople to bring home not only all the knowledge he could gather but also every kind of curious trophy to add to the collections of the East India Marine Society. And as the commerce over seas began to diminish in the nineteenth century, this tradition laid fast hold upon many Salem men and women whose fathers had been shipmasters. They took pride in gathering together all the old log books they could find in cobwebby attics and battered seachests and in increasing this unique library of blue water.

Older than the East India Marine Society is the Salem Marine Society, which was founded in 1766 by eighteen shipmasters, and which still maintains its organization in its own building. Its Act of Incorporation, dated 1772, stated that "whereas a considerable number of persons who are or have

The Shifs and Sailors of Old Salem

been Masters of ships or other vessels, have for several years past associated themselves in the town of Salem; and the principal end of said Society being to improve the knowledge of this coast, by the several members, upon their arrival from sea communicating their observations, inwards and outwards, of the variation of the needle, soundings, courses and distances, and all other remarkable things about it, in writing, to be lodged with the Society, for the making of the navigation more safe; and also to relieve one another and their families in poverty or other adverse accidents of life, which they are more particularly liable to," etc.

Most of these records, together with those belonging to the East India Marine Society and many others rescued from oblivion, have been assembled and given in care of the Essex Institute of Salem as the choicest treasure of its notable historical library. It has come to pass that a thousand of these logs and sea-journals are stored in one room of the Essex Institute, comprising many more than this number of voyages made between 1750 and 1890, a period of a century and a half, which included the most brilliant era of American sea life. Privateer, sealer, whaler, and merchantman, there they rest, row after row of canvas-covered books, filled with the day's work of as fine a race of seamen as ever sailed; from the log of the tiny schooner Hopewell on a voyage to the West Indies amid perils of swarming pirates and privateers a generation before the Revolution, down to the log of the white-winged Mindoro of the Manila fleet which squared away her yards for the last time only fifteen years ago.

There is no other collection of Americana which can so vividly recall a vanished epoch and make it live again as these hundreds upon hundreds of ancient log books. They are complete, final, embracing as they do the rise, the high-tide and the ebb of the commerce of Salem, the whole story of those vikings of deep-water enterprise who dazzled the maritime world. These journals reflect in intimate and sharply focused detail that little world which Harriet Martineau discerned when she visited Salem seventy-five years ago and related:

"Salem, Mass., is a remarkable place. This 'city of peace' will be better known hereafter for it's commerce than for it's witch tragedy. It has a population of fourteen thousand and more wealth in proportion to its population than perhaps any tow^n in the world. Its commerce is speculative but vast and successful. It is a frequent circumstance that a ship goes out without a cargo for a voyage around the world. In such a case the captain puts his elder children to school, takes his wife and younger children and starts for some semi-barbarous place where he procures some odd kind of cargo which he exchanges with advantage for another somewhere else; and so goes trafficking around the world, bringing home a freight of the highest value.

" These enterprising merchants of Salem are hoping to appropriate a large share of the whale fishery and their ships are penetrating the northern ice. They speak of Fayal and the Azores as if they were close at hand. The fruits of the Mediterranean are on every table. They have a large acquaintance at Cairo. They know Napoleon's grave at St. Helena, and have wild tales to tell of Mozambique and Madagascar, and stores of ivory to show from there. They speak of the power of the king of Muscat, and are sensible of the riches of the southeast coast of Arabia. Anybody will give you anecdotes from Canton and descriptions of the Society and Sandwich Islands. They often slip up the western coast of their two continents, bringing furs from the back regions of their own wide land, glance up at the Andes on their return; double Cape Horn, touch at the ports of Brazil and Guiana, look about them in the West Indies, feeling almost at home there, and land some fair morning in Salem and walk home as if they had done nothing remarkable."

Within sight of this Essex Institute is the imposing building of the Peabody Academy of Science and Marine Museum, already mentioned. Here the loyal sons of Salem, aided by the generous endowment of George Peabody, the banker and philanthropist, have created a notable memorial to the seaborn genius of the old town. One hall is filled with models and paintings of the stout ships which made Salem rich and famous. These models were built and rigged with the most painstaking accuracy of detail, most of them the work of mariners of the olden time, and many of them made on shipboard during long voyages. Scores of the paintings of ships were made when they were afloat, their cannon and checkered ports telling of the dangers which merchantmen dared in those times; their hulls and rigging wearing a quaint and archaic aspect.

Beneath them are displayed the tools of the seaman's trade long ere steam made of him a paint-swabber and mechanic. Here are the ancient quadrants, "half -circles," and hand log lines, timed with sandglasses, with which our forefathers found their way around the world. Beside them repose the " colt " and the "cat-o '-nine-tails" with which those tough tars were flogged by their skippers and mates. Cutlasses such as were wielded in sea fights with Spanish, French and English, boarding axes and naval tomahawks, are flanked by carved whalesteeth, whose intricate designs of ships, cupids and mermaids whiled away the dogwatches under the Southern Cross. Over yonder is a notched limb of a sea-washed tree on which a sailor tallied the days and weeks of five months' solitary waiting on a desert island where he had been cast by shipwreck.

Portraits of famous shipping merchants and masters gaze at portraits of Sultans of Zanzibar, Indian Rajahs and hong merchants of Canton whose names were household words in

A corner in the jNIarine Room of the Poaliody Muscnun. sliowing portraits cf the sliipmasters and merchants of Salem

The Marine Room, Peabody Museum, showing the ships of Salem during a period of one hundred and fifty years

A Port oj Vanished Fleets the Salem of long ago. In other spacious halls of this museum are unique displays of the tools, weapons, garments and adornments of primitive races, gathered generations before their countries and islands were ransacked by the tourist and the ethnologist. They portray the native arts and habits of life before they were corrupted by European influences. Some of the tribes which fashioned these things have become extinct, but their vanquished handiwork is preserved in these collections made with devoted loyalty by the old shipmasters who were proud of their home town and of their Marine Society. From the Fiji and Gilbert and Hawaiian Islands, from Samoa, Arabia, India, China, Africa and Japan, and every other foreign shore where ships could go, these trophies were brought home to lay the foundation of collections which to-day are visited by scientists from abroad in order to study many rare objects which can be no longer obtained.*

The catalogue of ports from which the deep-laden argosies rolled home to Salem is astonishing in its scope. From 1810 to 1830, for example, Salem ships flew the American flag in these ports:

* A costly new hall has been recently added to the Museum to contain the Japanese and Chinese collections. This building was the gift of Dr. Charles G. Weld of Boston. Its Japanese floor contains the most complete and valuable ethnological collections, portraying the life of the Japanese people of the feudal age, that exists to-day. Japanese scientists and students have visited Salem