USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 36
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50
-
281
THE HARBOR AND SHIPPING
the outermost outwork of the harbor. Boston's approaches, broad, dcep, well lighted, are thoroughly modern.
The islands are the really characteristic part of the harbor. Sandy and sinooth, whale-backed and bare, with several cliff-slides where wind and tide have bitten at them, they miss their old covering of trees. It has often been suggested that they be reforested. Several have disappeared or are only just awash, such as Half Moon Island in Quincy bay and Nix's Matc, though that, no doubt, is because of the pirate's curse. No longer on holidays do parties sail down the harbor and picnic on them; instead they are made to serve all sorts of turns, mostly prosaic. There is a school on Thompson's Island, a prison on Deer, a quarantine station on Gallop's, a City Almshouse and Hospital on Long, and an incinerating plant on Spectacle, which is supposed to burn up old truck horses for their glue and which makes itself felt to leeward. Beside these there are some ten forts scattered about, some with high stone battlements and an Old World look, such as Fort Independence on Castle Island, others more modern. At present they are manned by skeleton crews.
South of the ship channels, behind the islands, lie the three great shallow bays of Dorchester, Quincy and Hingham, with their tributary rivers winding up to factories and salt marshes. There are important dredging works in the first two, especially the cutting of the twenty-four foot channel to the Fore River shipyards. In every case the Federal Government has kept the deeper part of thesc channels dredged, the state co-operating with local interests to carry shallower cuts farther inland.
From President Roads, where the coasting schooners lie at anchor waiting for a berth, to the docks and the Hill, runs a broad straight stream. It has been dredged steadily since 1867 and is now twelve hundred feet wide and thirty-five fcet deep, with an increase to forty fcet authorized. But it is filling, not dredging, that becomes conspicuous at the entrance of the inner harbor. To starboard, as we come in, are the Governor's Island flats running out from the back side of East Boston, which have been filled, in rather desultory fashion, since 1916. A large slip is to be left on the other side of the island. The Airport covers a great part of the completed filling and at some time perhaps will include the island itself. Aside from these, the whole space may eventually be covered with docks and factories, though that future seems a little distant now. A thirty-foot anchorage basin, begun in 1902, lies between flats and channel, usually crowded with shipping. To port, South Boston shows what can be done with Boston's future. Originally marsh, the developments there are, with the ship channel, the principal glories of the modern port. At the end of the point, the Castle Island flats were, unlike the others across the harbor, almost completely filled in 1919-20. Then comes the Army Base built by the Federal Government during the World War,-the largest overseas pier in the United States, with the largest dry dock in the Western Hemisphere beside it. Farther up are the Fish Pier and Commonwealth Pier No. 5, built by the Com- monwealth in 1914 as part of the program of the Directors of. the Port of Boston under the chairmanship of Hugh Bancroft. All of these for size and efficiency are unexcelled in the world, but pitting piers, however mighty, against a few cents in differentials is like relying on Goliath to beat David.
1
282
FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
Fort Point channel and its extension, the South bay, are picturesque vestiges of the Boston that once was a peninsula, but it is proposed to remove even them in the futile interest of automobile traffic. Here the lumber schooners wander through the drawbridges, their masts going by at the ends of the streets; here the sugar tramps dock, descendants of ancient carriers of molasses and rum.
The waterfront of Boston Proper is coeval with the China trade. Her blocks of warehouses of gray Quincy granite, her angular wharves, with the tide rising and falling on their green piles, might have been found on the Thames in Dickens' time. But T Wharf was deserted by the fishing fleet, except for the Italians, a few years ago and the others are almost all given up to insignificant coasters. The United Fruit steamers alone make a picaresque spot of red and white at the foot of State street. This decay is symbolic.
Charlestown is another story. Here, where the Tudor ice ships used to dock, are the Hoosac Docks of the Boston and Maine, built in the 80's to take care of the trade pouring through the new Hoosac Tunnel, and, on the other side of the Navy Yard, are the Mystic Docks of the same railroad. Up the Charles the Charles River Basin with its dam and lock, finished in 1908, seems hardly a part of the harbor, but schooners and barges penetrate the railroad bridges and the Viaduct to the Cambridgeport canals. And the vision of the red sweep of Beacon Hill with its houses and churches, standing out in clear easterly weather across the blue Basin, is one of the loveliest on any river or harbor in the world.
The Mystic today sweeps chemicals and fertilizer instead of rum and new ships down from Medford; Chelsea creek still has charm, however, with her Meridian street boneyard where the out-of-work coasting schooners wait and hope. Channels have been dredged in both streams, of thirty and twenty-five feet, respectively, with state and private interests as elsewhere carrying shallower cuts on from the second bridges. East Boston is the stamping ground, aside from ship-repair shops, of the Boston and Albany, just as Charlestown belongs to the Boston and Maine and South Boston to the New Haven. And railroads alone, these days, make a port important.
Yet Boston Harbor is not a catalogue of docks; it is a living thing. The old Hill presides over it, sometimes very fierce in a sharp winter northwester, with his golden helmet and his huge Custom House spear, the clouds driving over his crest like foam over a reef. The chop licks along the rusty wall-sides of anchored ships and the whole harbor is full of the bite and wet freshness of the first scent of salt water. Vessels swing in the stream and the ridiculous tugs and ferryboats scuttle back and forth, some of the latter with old fashioned walking beams sawing energetically up and down. On other days the cool of a summer southeaster just spots the tide with slow catspaws and a golden haze hangs over the islands. No one pays much attention to an oil tanker making port and less to a Bluenose coaster, overwhelmed with lumber, drifting up Broad Sound. Yet always beyond the haze lie Boston's horizons, three hundred years old, and sometimes the northwester clears the weather and drives our ships to sea.
Harbors, you see, are all very well, but they live, not by docks and channels, but by the ships in them. Boston as a ship-owning port and, I feel, as a self-
283
THE HARBOR AND SHIPPING
respecting port, decayed with the sailing ship and the last fifty years inelude the erisis of this decay. The Civil War was the beginning of the end. The "Ala- bama " and correspondingly high insurance rates account for only a small share of the blame; cotton mills and a correspondingly high tariff are the real offenders. The Civil War fixed the industrial system on the country and Boston shipping failed to eope with it; there was neither steel nor eoal in Massachusetts and even the wood was far more plentiful in Maine. Most of Boston's ships eame to be built "Down East." Boston had been too suecessful with the old teeh- nique; she lacked flexibility to change to the new. The masters of her ships still carried Cape Cod or North Shore names: Lothrop, Perkins, Hathaway, and so on, but the seamen were foreigners. The old "merchants" laeked the eapital for the new era of huge organization and a narrow margin of profits; they went out of business or became brokers and managing agents for the ships of other ports.
But the sailing ship died hard. For instance, on April 12, 1886, three steamers and forty-one sailing ships entered Boston, from foreign parts only. Twenty-two were from the Maritime Provinees, sixteen from Caribbean ports, and one each from England, Africa, South America and the East. The total tonnage of these vessels was, of course, much less than that handled by the harbor today, the color they lent, much more. It is the seattering arrivals from the long-haul trades that represent the real decay of Boston shipping. With Europe our commeree was largely carried by British and German steamers, with a few exceptions. Boston brigs and barkentines still brought occasional eargoes of salt from Trapani and other harbors in Sieily and Italy, and Italian barks continued to make passages up to the eve of the World War. With the Azores Islands a regular and very famous sailing packet serviee was maintained by the barks "Kennard" and "Sarah," owned by E. A. Adams of Boston. "Sarah's" last arrival here was on April 3, 1895.
The renowned Cape Horners usually loaded for California at New York and returned to Europe with grain, so that the tall full-rigged ships which represented Boston - "Northern Light," "Centennial," "Triumphant," "Sacramento, " "Saehem," "Antelope" and the rest - seldom saw their hailing port, though they made its six letters on their transoms well known in the Paeifie. They were owned in small fleets by the successors of the old one- man "merehant" firms - Edward Lawrence, Henry Hastings, George B. Lombard, Thayer and Lineon and others. William F. Weld and Company were the largest owners of sailing ships in the United States after the Civil War and were the best known of all Boston shipping companies. "Great Admiral," sold in 1897, was the last ship to fly their Black Horse house flag. Spars and lumber occasionally moved here from the West Coast, but the trade was not then as important as it is now, and Boston was never mueh touched by the legend of the "Yankee blood-boats":
"As soon as the hooker was over the bar, --- To me; way, hey, blow the man down - The mate knoeked me down with the end of a spar. --- Give us some time to blow the man down."
2S4
FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
The Eastern Trade - China, Philippines, Malaya, India and Australia - was, however, very close to Boston's heart. Except for the San Francisco run, the big full riggers were used nowhere else and many crossed the Pacific from California for a cargo home from the East. Here the New England industries were a real aid to Boston shipping, for they demanded a constant supply of hemp, jute and wool for coarse textiles. Refrigeration had by this time, though, pretty well killed ice as an export cargo and the export of the most amazing of all "Yankee notions" melted away. The Philippine Islands trade in jute, hemp and sugar was always the richest strand of Boston's eastern commerce. From Manila, Cebu and Iloilo her portly East Indiamen drifted home over the golden seas, arriving sometimes as often as once a week. Just on the turn of the century the trade died; the last American sailing ship from the Philippines was "John Currier" of Newburyport on July 25, 1899; the last from China made port the same year. Australia, notwithstanding Boston's rank as the world's greatest wool market, seldom sent her fleece here except through London. Charles Brewer and Company were one of the ablest Boston shipping houses. They were pioneers in the commerce of the Hawaiian Islands; the arrival of their "Manuel Llaguno" from Singapore in 1904 is the real end of Boston's sailing trade with the East; and they did not finally go out of business until the completion of the Panama Canal.
The African traffic was the most interesting of any carried on by Boston ships and has outlasted them all. It began with rum and slaves; it dealt in palm oil and hides in its quieter days and is not yet dead. Through two and a half centuries the methods have hardly changed; tiny schooners, brigs and barks have slipped into the green estuaries, over the bars of great rivers, gradually getting together a cargo, sometimes by rather primitive bartering. Adda, Axim, Accra, Konakri and Goree were favorite ports on the Guinea Coast, and from them the traders often came home by way of the Cape Verde Islands or the West Indies, as in middle passage days. The ninety-ton schooner, "M. E. Higgins," of New London was not too small for the business, and the schooners, "Orleans," "Harry Knowlton" and "D. A. Brayton," the barks, "Rebecca Goddard," "Jennie Cushman," "Fantee" and "Fury," were steady traders through the 80's. Sailing commerce with the East Coast was less long lasting but even more colorful. Zanzibar and the ports of Tamatave and Mojanga in Madagascar were the most popular. Here the bark "Glide" and the fast "Taria Topan" were the last survivors of that Salem specialty, the African trade, just as their larger contemporaries, the ships, "Sooloo," "Mindoro" and "Panay," were the last Salem East Indiamen. Both of them reached Aden in Arabia several times. Ropes, Emmerton and Company of Boston inanaged most of the East Coast ships. Their bark, "Joseph A. Ropes," home- ward bound from Madagascar, slid up on the Grampus Ledges off Cohasset in a northeaster, August 29, 1886. Her skipper allowed that generally he had been cheerful about life, but now at last was discouraged. Before the stranding he had beaten up to Boston Light three times only to be forced offshore again each time; furthermore, a whale had stove in his bow off the African Coast; and, last of all, his wife had died at sea and now was in the hold, pickled in a cask of rum. Happily "Joseph A. Ropes" got off, only to be lost six years
-
EM
ITALIAN FISHING FLEET AT T WHARF
286
FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
later on the coast of Madagascar. "Taria Topan" was sold in 1893 and went ashore on Horn Island off South America the next year. The Guinea ships, however, carried into the enlightened twentieth century a technique contem- poraneous with Captain Kidd.
The South American trade was more important than the African, though less distinguished. It went through several phases. The nitrate passage to Chile was never as vital to Boston sailing ships as it was to those of Liverpool or Nantes. The little full-rigger "Independence" and others of our ships went out several times to Pisagua or Valparaiso but lumber carrying to River Plate ports or to Rio Grande do Sul in Southern Brazil, with now and then a lading of hides home, took the time of a far larger Boston tonnage. Here the powerful firm of John S. Emery and Company almost monopolized the business, and their smart barkentines, "Rachel Emery," "John S. Emery" and so on, sailed regularly well into the new century. Later on, when the River Plate lumber trade from Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Coast ports became almost the last stand of the square-rigged ship, because the steam tramps could not afford to spend the long time necessary for unloading, the Emery firm and John G. Hall and Company managed a number of splendid British steel clippers in the traffic: "Brynhilda," "Timandra," "Pass of Balmaha," "Avon," "Snowden," "Rhine" and "Belmont." "Pass of Balmaha," besides breaking the record between Boston and the River Plate with a thirty-four day passage in 1908, was captured during the war and became Count Luckner's famous German raider, "Seeadler." "Belmont," owned by J. G. Hall and Company, was the last square-rigged vessel with "Boston " on her stern. The story of the barken- tine "Herbert Fuller" is, of course, the classic of the South American trade. She sailed from Boston for Rosario in the Argentine on July 8, 1896. On July 13 the first mate, Bram, slaughtered the captain, the captain's wife and the second mate with an axe while they slept - at least that is what the man at the wheel later swore he saw through the cabin skylight. Lester Monks, an invalid passenger, took charge. The rotting bodies were towed astern in a boat until the "Herbert Fuller" was taken into Halifax. Bram was found guilty, but was later pardoned, and appeared in Boston, not so long ago, as owner and master of a schooner out of Jacksonville. The "Herbert Fuller" was sunk by a submarine in the Mediterranean during the war.
The story moves from the aristocratic and unimportant to the plebeian and vital. The pomp of Africa and the East were Boston luxuries; the bulk of her foreign commerce has been carried on, since Governor Winthrop's day, with the West Indies. In the 80's hundreds of her brigs and schooners wan- dered over the length and breadth of the Caribbean, from Demerara down in Guiana to Progreso in Mexico. Salt from Grand Turk, logwood from Haiti, cocoa from Surinam, hemp from Mexico, and always sugar and molasses from Porto Rico and the islands, even when they no longer could be made into "Old Medford"- Boston was still a "mart town of the West Indies." Later, in the 90's, the banana steamers began to kill off the little sailers, but Boston led even in the work of destruction, and today the fruit and sugar ships still move toward New England across the trades, horse latitudes and westerlies.
-
287
THE HARBOR AND SHIPPING
But we haven't yet reached the foundation of Boston's sailing glory - the schooner. She was New England's one great maritime invention. She was designed for the coast,- for beats to windward off a lee shore, for reaching across the clear off-shore winter gales, for quick and easy handling in shifting weather and hard service,- and on the coast she reached her perfection. It was in 1882 that, forced by the tremendous growth of the coal trade from southern ports to New England factories, she began her most amazing expan- sion. In that year the first four-masted and five-masted schooners were launched, and the first five-master was "Governor Ames" of Boston. The theory that, if you kept on dividing the area of sails to be handled, you eould increase the size of schooners indefinitely and still sail them with a small crew, went on to its logical end. That was the 5,200-ton steel seven-master, "Thomas W. Lawson," designed by B. B. Crowninshield and built by the Fore River Shipyards at Quincy in 1902. She was the largest sailing ship ever built and yet, with properly placed donkey engines, required only sixteen men to handle her. The story goes, however, that it took half an hour to bring her about, and, badly ballasted, she turned turtle off Scilly, Friday, December 13, 1907. Still, it was not until the very end that the schooners became clumsy. They were used almost as much as the square-riggers in the African, South American and West Indian trade. "Governor Ames" rounded the Horn to California and the handsome "Haroldine" sailed to China. The coasting traffic reached its peak in 1905, a new wave of sailing shipping just as the square-riggers were passing. Thanks to the schooners, Boston was the largest coal port in the world for a few years before the World War. Even then, though, they were dying fast in competition with the more regular steam colliers. As the mate of the five-master "Nancy," stranded on Nantasket Beach a few years ago, remarked: "We may take four or we may take twenty days to make Boston from Norfolk. We can't compete with the steamers."
All Boston's overseas sailing trades were pretty well dead; the coasting schooners were dying ;- and then came the World War and the shipping boom to give the windjammers a last lease of glorious life. Schooners were rushed from Maine and even Massachusetts yards. There were suddenly arrivals under sail from India, Australia, East and South Africa, South America and the West Indies, and some of the coasting schooners dared the submarines to carry bulk cargoes to Europe. As late as 1920 the schooner "Herbert L. Rawding" arrived from Lisbon with salt after a forty-two day passage. The same year another Boston schooner, "Horace A. Stone," -- now a "show boat," of all things - came in from Buenos Aires. Most exciting of all the shipping stories of that year, though, was that of the last passage of Boston's last East Indiaman. The ship "Rhine" dropped anchor on the East Boston flats 298 days out from Calcutta with a jute cargo. She had been stripped of her running gear by a hurricane in the Indian Ocean and had been forced to put in at Durban and Bermuda in the course of her passage. The smart steel Clyde-built bark, "Belmont," owned by John G. Hall and Company, the last Boston square-rigger and her last representative in the River Plate lumber trade, left Battery Wharf in 1925 to become a barge. Africa only is left, for like a ghost from yesterday is the schooner, "Marion L. Conrad,"
288
FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
which sailed from Boston in 1929 on an old-fashioned trading voyage. Except for an ocasional American coaster, the lumber sehooners belonging to the Maritime Provinees of Canada, which erowded the harbor fifty years ago and still seem to have the vitality to survive, are the last vestiges of sail.
How is it possible to recapture the atmosphere of a time, which, though it is hardly more than a quarter of a century away, and there are inen alive who knew it well, is already as dead as Drake and the Armada and more forgot- ten? How is it possible to bring to life the brigs, barks and barkentines which earried Boston's eommeree, seldom of more than six hundred tons burden, with their soggy wooden hulls, their eoeky sheer, their white deckhouses, their preposterous kieked-up bowsprits and their top-gallant masts curved question- ingly forward by long tautenings of the stays? They were a little homely, almost eomieal, yet owned Massachusetts dignity as they took the swells. Then their skippers,- sometimes gloomy, sometimes aeid with Yankee humor, always with their own way of doing things. Think of spars over the tops of warehouses, of homeward-bounders diekering with tugboat skippers outside the Brewsters for a tow to the doeks, of vessels anchored in the swell off Minot's waiting for a breeze, of the songs at making sail when the wind eame fair and the bay was feather-white with an autumn northwester, of a hundred coasters and deepwatermen in sight at one time on a calm day in Vineyard Sound. Then across the seas and think of the bays and great surfs where Boston ships were known. The very names are suggestive: Sourabaya, Zanzibar, Goree, Rio Grande do Sul, Savannah-la-Mar But think also of northeast snowstorms in the bay or off Hatteras and think of the ships that put to sea and were "never heard from again."
As for shipbuilding, it was almost exactly fifty years ago that the last large wooden square-riggers were built at East Boston. The yards there could look back on a long and distinguished record, culminating in the career of Donald MeKay, but it steadily beeame cheaper, in a day of cheap ships, to set up the frames and planking of a new windjammer on the banks of a Maine river, nearer the pines. Shipbuilding at Medford ended before 1880. According to Basil Lubboek's "Down-Easters," the "Mary L. Cushing," built in 1883 at Newburyport, was the last full-rigged ship built in Massachusetts, and so far as I ean find out the bark "John D. Brewer" in 1882 was the last square- rigger of any size from a Boston ways. Smaller barkentines and schooners were eonstrueted in this state up to and during the World War, and, of course, new fishermen are still to be seen at the Essex yards. For yacht building, Lawley's at Neponset has always been supreme, though it was rivaled during the 80's and 90's by D. J. Lawlor at East Boston. MeKie's Yard at East Boston built the larger windjammers. The great glory of Boston shipbuilding today is the Fore River plant of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company at Quiney. It has launched such varying types as the schooner "Thomas W. Lawson," the Argentine battleship "Rivadavia" and the United States airplane carrier "Lexington," and at present it has, thanks to the Jones-White Shipping Aet, the contracts for a number of new freight and passenger ships.
In 1880 Boston owned two hundred and sixty square-rigged sea-going vessels, not ineluding sehooners, steamers and barges. In 1929, not counting
-
.
289
THE HARBOR AND SHIPPING
vessels of small tonnage, she owned one hundred and forty-one steamships and fifty-six sailing vessels, fishermen and coasters. The big four-masters of the Crowell and Thurlow fleet keep up Boston's pride of sail. The steamships, except for the tankers of the Beacon Oil Company and the collier fleet of the Mystic Steamship Company, are mostly tugs. Unless we count the new New England Transatlantic Line to London and Antwerp, whose ships fly the Nor- wegian flag, the American Republics Line to South America, which the firm of C. H. Sprague and Son of this city inanages for the United States Shipping Board, and vessels trading to Canada, Boston owns no ships in foreign trade. This is sufficient excuse if this account seems to pay too much attention to the end of the out-dated windjammers. We could then still hold up our heads in a shipping way.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.