USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume III > Part 35
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The great desideratum in a townsite, then, was safety from the Indians and wild animals, and a harbor where ships could enter easily and ride at anchor with safety. The Shawmut peninsula fitted these requirements per- fectly. There were no visions of a large city troubling the Puritans, nor did they try to peer beyond the day when they must wait four to six months for a vessel to make a round trip from the port. They were thinking of them- selves, and not of a time when Boston would be the center of a spider- web of railroads, when room must be found on the knob of land for hun- dreds of thousands, when myriads of automobiles would scurry over hun- dreds of acres which were then under the waters of the Bay, when a Lindbergh should fly past Boston and reach Old England in a day. Our forefathers were seeking safety and a port when they founded Boston- and they got it. That they bequeathed a whole series of problems to future generations is quite another story.
Solving the First Transportation Problems-The Puritan founders of Boston soon discovered that they had transportation troubles on their hands. As a young Englishman who came to the settlement in 1630 remarked, "It being a Necke and bare of wood, they were not troubled
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with three great annoyances of Woolves, Rattlesnakes and Musketoes, but their greatest wants be Wood and Medow ground which were never in that place; being constrayned to fetch their building timber and fire- wood from the Ilands in Boates, and their Hay in Loyters." Wrote Winthrop, in a letter to his son in 1637, "We in Boston were almost ready to brake up for want of wood." There was plenty of this material in the neighborhood of the "Necke" but the means of getting it over to the near-island had to be provided and landing places made for the Boates and "Loyters." Probably what was "Town Cove" was the seat of the first huts because it was the chief landing place of the settle- ment. The need of boats to bring lumber and provisions to Boston, and the desire to keep in touch with the other settlements around the Bay led to the establishment of the ship-building industry. The later need of vessels to carry the productions of the colony, of which the chief were fish and furs, brought about a rapid expansion of this industry until it was second only to the fisheries. The Puritans, like their New Eng- land descendants, had the happy faculty of not only solving their own problems but of turning the solutions into sources of wealth.
When it came to the building of houses on the peninsula, as has been indicated, the structures were placed close to the best boat landing on the easterly side. Blackstone, with no worry bothering him as to how he was to land wood and supplies, had chosen the western slope of Bea- con Hill for his cabin. The newcomers built homes at various places on the peninsula, since there had to be room for gardens and pastures for the community which was essentially agricultural. The tendency was, however, to cluster together along the water-front, a group of cabins here and another there, gradually spreading from "Town Cove north and south." The hills were left for some years before being used for building sites; early views of the town for half a century show the houses crowded along the shore, while Beacon Hill rose bare and blank to form a background. Beacon Hill was used for the purpose which gave it a name; Copp's Hill had a windmill placed upon it; Fort Hill, long since dumped into the very coves which harbored the craft of the Puritans, was utilized to protect the colony from the sea enemies. Paths and eventually, roads had to be established to get to these places ; to Fort Hill to construct and maintain its military works; to Copp's so that the grist might be ground ; to Beacon that a watch might be kept and the wood of the beacon replenished. Meanwhile the cows wandered everywhere, making their paths hither and yon: Probably the bull which Blackstone rode had already made many a track that was used by both man and beast by the later settlers. A church was built, and the way to it had to be kept open by its congregation. And one must not forget the springs
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to which the women came to draw water and gossip. The only sem- blance of a lengthy, reasonably straight road was the trail which led out and across the neck which joined the peninsula to the mainland.
Boston's Narrow Streets-These paths, made without plan, are the basis of the streets of Boston, and the source of its traffic problems. Our forefathers built close to the crooked paths ; present convenience was the directing force. Boston's narrow twisting streets, her crooked and often blind alleys, have resounded to the traffic of nearly three centuries. Only in the last quarter century have they been substantially changed. Year by year, structures with priceless associations are destroyed by the hand of progress ; streets endeared by their very narrow crookedness are made wide and straight for a generation in a hurry. Before we arrogate all wisdom and foresight to the city planners and street commissions of today, let us take note of an act passed by the overseers of 1635, which ordered, "That from this day there shall noe house at all be built in this towne neere unto any of the streets and laynes therein but with the advise and consent of the overseers of the towne's occasions for the avoyd- ing of disorderly building to the inconvenience of streets and laynes, and for the more comely and Commodius ordering of them, upon the forfeyture for every house built Contrarie to this order, of such sume as the overseers shall see fitting."
The history of transportation in Boston for two-thirds of its existence is a story of shipping rather than of railroads, of travel on the seas rather than on the land. Only by dint of careful preparation were Winthrop and his followers able to reach the new country, and for years the prob- lem was to find ways and means of keeping in contact with the mother country by means of vessels; ships to bring other folk and articles that were needed on this side of the ocean, and ships to convey such things as were produced in the new colony which could be sent back to pay for what had been sent. For that matter, it was the natural fitness of Boston Harbor to handle shipping that gave it the advantage over other places that not only led to its rapid growth, but gave it the supremacy among the towns of the New World, a supremacy it held for more than half of its history. It was, from the first and has always been, the entrepôt of New England. For the decade from 1630 to 1640, when the Puritan migration was at its height, there was a continual influx of migrants, cattle and supplies, and the majority of these entered by way of Boston. Winthrop wrote of 1638, "there came over this summer, twenty ships and at least three thousand persons," a very large traffic for one town in a colony whose total inhabitants only numbered under fifteen thousand. It is estimated that during the decade mentioned (1630-1640) there arrived in the colony-three-quarters of the arrivals being at Boston-298 ships with 21,200 passengers, besides a vast quantity of cattle and supplies.
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The First Boston Built Ship-The problem then, in the beginning, was how Boston could keep ahead in the matter of shipping, how it could provide and maintain a pathway across the sea so that men and com- merce might come and go. To assure unbroken connections with the old country, one of the requisites was vessels built and owned by the Colony. Perhaps the fact that the Puritans were not the best of farmers, or per- haps it might be more just to say, lacked a sufficient familiarity with soil conditions and products in the somewhat rugged country in which they had pitched their homes, stimulated ship building. Whatever the reason, Governor Winthrop built a sea-going vessel, the "Blessing of the Bay," and launched it, by a happy coincidence of dates, on a fourth of July, 1631. The craft, a bark of perhaps 60 tons, was used in the coastwise and West India trade. Coddington, Pynchon, Endicott and Sir Richard Saltonstall all became shipbuilders and traders. The first Boston ship was the "Trial," of about 200 tons, built in 1642 for Boston merchants. The Rev. Mr. Cotton delivered a sermon before her maiden trip, and she sailed proudly out of the harbor, the year of her launching, to Fayal. The next year the "Trial" went to Balboa, Spain, with fish, thence to Malaga, and then back to Boston, arriving March 23, 1644, "which was of great advantage to the country and gave encouragement to trade," according to Winthrop. This trip of the "Trial" may fairly be credited with starting Boston off on her career in foreign trade, and Boston, be it known, was the "birthplace of America's foreign trade."
Early Exports-The exports carried by the "Trial" indicate the importance fisheries had, and were to have, in the development of New England. Aside from furs and wood products, New England had little to export for many years. As the land became relatively well settled, the fur bearing animals retreated, and their pelts became fewer. Of timber, there was plenty. Lumber, masts and spars, naval stores and potash (made by the burning of trees cut down in clearing the land for agricul- ture) were in great demand abroad. Masts and spars were particularly sought, and agents of the Crown scoured the forests for the finest trees, which they marked with the "broad arrow," indicating they were the property of the government and therefore to be left untouched by the private individual. These tall straight trees supplied one of the pictur- esque exports of the time, but in amount did not bulk large in the exports carried on the high seas. Fish were the principal marketable products. In 1641, it is reported that 300,000 dried fish were shipped abroad. The Bay fisheries became the main enterprise of the colonists and others, first exploited by men of Dorchester in 1631. Captain John Smith had said that the fisheries of the region promised better than the "best mine the King of Spain hath." So well was this mine worked that during the
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Colonial and Provincial period, fish was one of the two most staple com- modities, and the fisheries were the most carefully protected and vigor- ously worked resources of New England. The British State Papers, 1664, to quote a foreign authority, made the statement "that Boston, with 14,300 souls (probably Massachusetts was meant) had a great trade with Barbadoes in fish and other provisions; three hundred vessels traded to the West Indies, Virginia, Madeira, etc., and 1,300 boats fished in the waters about Cape Sable, and there was a great mackerel fishery in Cape Cod Bay."
The "Sacred Cod"-Garner Poole, writing in the Boston Year Book of 1924, gave this quotable summary of the importance of fisheries in the his- tory of Boston : "Poised high aloft in the hall of the Massachusetts House of Representatives there has hung through immemorial years an ancient codfish quaintly wrought in wood but lifelike in appearance. The use of the codfish as a symbol of progress and the preëminence of Massachusetts is closely allied with the greatness of the State, and with its history, as it tells the story of the privations of the Pilgrims and Puritans whom many times it relieved in want and famine; and of commerce that was the source of our original wealth. The development and importance of the fisheries and the exchange of its products for molasses, spices, coffee, etc., resulted in the rapid growth of our merchant ships that reached their supremacy in the days of our clipper ships, a trade that made the Port of Boston famous, and to which can be traced the foundation of the wealth of many of our prominent families. While the commerce out of this port has declined in tonnage, and Boston has lost her place and supremacy in shipping, it has constantly gained in importance as a fishing port until it is now the largest collective unit of the industry in this country, and in the world, second only to Grimsby, England. From the standpoint of tonnage, it is a factor in the port activity not generally appreciated. Last year about 3,000 fishing vessels entered and cleared this port, landing in excess of 125,000,000 pounds of fish."
The early development of fisheries centered about Gloucester and Cape Cod, and was confined almost entirely to salt fish. The beginning of the fresh fish business in Boston goes back to only a century ago when a few boats operated off Nahant and sold their catch in Charles- town. This was a retail business, and shortly after Boston provided for this line of activity by opening twenty stalls in the Quincy market for the sale of fresh fish. Of the interesting history of the salt fish trade abroad, its changing fortunes, as war, or more particularly English laws, hampered or aided the industry, how the headquarters became re-located, robbing Boston of its supremacy as a salt fish center, is too long to be recounted here. Boston is still the largest fishing center in the United
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States. According to the last census, Massachusetts ranked first among the States as to the capital invested in fishing, the value of fishing ves- sels, and the value of fish products. As a fresh fish market, Boston still holds it place at the head, if oysters are not included.
As a fresh fish port, Boston did not come to her own until well in the present century, despite the fact that the beginnings were made in 1826. At first, Long Wharf was the wholesale point. As the business grew in size it was moved to the Commercial Wharf where it stayed for nearly a half century. In 1884 larger quarters were taken on T Wharf. The need for increased facilities, both of reception and sanitary care, became pressing about 1909, and with the support of Governor Draper, and the assistance of the Chamber of Commerce, the Boston Fish Pier at South Boston was built in 1914. The fresh fish industry now centers on the new pier, the most modern and largest single fish plant in the world. The pier is one hundred and twenty feet long, three hundred feet in width, and in addition to the Administration Building and whole- sale stores, has ample facilities for housing the various industries inci- dent to the business, including a cold storage plant which operates the largest of the world's fish departments. "At present, Boston, compared to New England, distributes about one-third of the total catch, or 150,000,000 to 175,000,000 pounds annually. New England produces annually abount one-half billion pounds of fresh fish, which returns to the fishermen about $20,000,000. Over 30,000 persons and 1,000 vessels are directly engaged in the industry here, the total capital invested be- ing about $40,000,000."
Early Shipyards and Shipping -- The fisheries of Boston play but a small part in the transportation systems of Boston, however, and the paragraphs given to the industry have little bearing on the subject except as they illus- trate and explain the start of the shipping interests which were dominant in the first two centuries. Aside from the production of dried fish, the build- ing of vessels to carry this fish to other lands constituted the main indus- tries of the new colony. Shipyards sprang up in all parts of Massachusetts Bay, the shores of the Boston peninsula becoming one of the favored locali- ties. The "Trial" was succeeded by many craft. So adept did the Yan- kees become in the construction of vessels, and so large were the sup- plies of materials entering into the making of a ship, that England began to fear, and attempted to restrain the ship-building industry, although this restraint was applied mainly by restricting the number of nations to which the colonists were allowed to export, and by limiting what colonial vessels might carry of articles not produced in the mother country. Much of the friction that led up to the Revolution grew out of these restrictive measures. How important ship-building became
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may be judged from the statement made in a petition of Boston citizens, 1746, which speaks of it as "the ancient and almost only manufacture the town of Boston ever had." An oak vessel could be built for $24.00 a ton, while on the continent, a ship of similar construction and mate- rial cost from $50.00 to $60.00 a ton. "It is estimated that at the out- break of the American Revolution, more than one-third of the British tonnage then afloat had been built in American ports, a very large pro- portion of it in New England."
The Revolution gave the first of several great setbacks to ship- building. The vast fleet of English war vessels blockaded American ports. They all but controlled the high seas, but that very control, or attempt to so do, led to the beginnings of Boston's trading with China and the East which later grew to large proportions and whose story contains most of the romance connected with the former shipping activities of the city. At the close of the war, Great Britain, clinging obstinately to her old commercial policy, refused to modify her Naviga- tion act, or to permit reciprocity in trade between her ports and those of the United States. The necessary seeking for new markets scattered the shipping of America all over the seven seas, and strengthened both the ship-building industry and shipping. Larger vessels were built, and in the construction of these, Boston took the lead. In 1788, an order was received in Boston for the making of the largest ship ever, until then, built in America. This was the "Massachusetts" of eight hundred and twenty tons and laid down in Quincy. In 1789, it sailed for Ba- tavia and Canton, in which latter port it was sold for $65,000.
Shipping in the Eighteenth Century-By the middle of the second century, after the settlement of Boston, the town was the center of pathways that led to the four quarters of the earth. The sea and the waterways leading into them were then the main highways, for rail- roads had still to be discovered, and there were few land roads of any length. Travel to and fro, even among the Colonies, was chiefly by water. Transportation was a thing of boats, the roads were the level- water areas, the motive power, the wind. Boston had direct connec- tions with most of the countries along the Atlantic in early years. In 1785 direct trade began with the East Indies, China and the northwest coast. In 1789, Boston sent forty-four vessels to these sections of the globe. The opening of trade with China was effected by a Salem ship, the "Grand Turk," in 1758; this was by way of Mauritius. Massachu- setts shared largely in the Russia trade as early as 1784. In 1803, of ninety American vessels arriving at St. Petersburg in the course of three months, fifty-four came from Massachusetts. The Russia trade was profitable as late as the Civil War. The China trade, as far as
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Boston was concerned, was about ended by the middle of the last cen- tury. This probably was brought about by ill-advised legislation, in 1824, when a one per cent tax was laid on auction sales of merchan- dise. Cargoes were sold by this method. Although the handicap was removed in 1852, it was too late to be of benefit, for meanwhile the China trade had been diverted to New York. The East Indian trade reached its height about 1856-59. Of one hundred and twenty-two ships loaded for the United States at Calcutta in 1857, with cargoes valued at $2,000,- 000, three-quarters were destined for Boston. In 1857 nearly a hun- dred ships, carrying East Indian goods, arrived in the Port of Bos- ton. As three quarters of the imports received from the East had to be re-shipped coastwise upon their arrival, Boston profited by this double freight. In 1805, Boston began the export of ice to Jamaica, a trade which gradually extended to Cuba, then to Rio Janeiro and even to Calcutta. This business held up rather well even as late as 1860.
Boston vessels performed many notable feats during the hey-day of the shipping supremacy of the town. It was Captain Gray, a Boston man in a Boston ship, the "Columbia", that was the first to circum- navigate the globe. And it was this same ship and master, who, in May, 1792, discovered a great river in Oregon, to which he gave the name of his beloved craft. The "Columbia" later went on to China by the Pacific route.
The most famous of American Naval frigates, the "Constitution", was built by Edmund Hart at his wharf in Boston. She was of 1,567 tons, and carried fifty-seven guns, and was launched October 21, 1797. The "Constitution's" sails were made in the Granary of Boston, the sail cloth having been woven in a factory at the corner of Tremont and Boyl- ston streets. "Old Ironsides," once "a navy in herself," is now (1929) being refitted to be kept as a memorial of the olden days.
The Clipper Ship and the Iron Steamship-The War of 1812, with the years of embargo preceding it, reduced the port prosperity of Boston sadly, but brought a revival of privateering. Once the war was over, shipping came again to its own, but with a demand for swifter vessels to engage in trade. Then came the clipper ship, "cod-headed and mack- erel-tailed", which made so many notable records in trans-ocean service. In 1821, one of these new style ships surprised the world by coming home from Calcutta in a little more than three months; she went out the next season in 89 days. The famous "Flying Cloud" had the reputa- tion of being the fastest sailing vessel that ever put out from port under the American flag. She was built at the shipyards of Donald McKay at East Boston. In the course of two years, Mckay built six clipper ships that were record-breakers. One of these the "James Blaine," in
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1854, made the run from Liverpool to Melbourne, Australia, in sixty- three days, and the return trip in sixty-nine, a record never equalled by any other sailing vessel. East Boston was the birthplace of very many of the clipper ships of that day, the largest as well as one of the latest being another Mckay ship, the "Great Republic," three hundred and twenty-five feet long and of 4,555 tons burden.
After 1856, ship-building began to wane as a Boston industry and never regained its former importance. Probably Boston Harbor never saw such lively days in its waters as it did during the clipper days, although there is now far more tonnage than ever moved into port at that time. There is still a great deal of coast-wise traffic going out of Boston by schooners and sailing vessels, but even this has been lessening for a number of years, and seems about to disappear. The cause of much of this change since the clipper days until now, was the invention of the metal steamship. From 1830 to 1840, continued experiments with steam- ships proved their feasibility. By 1840, iron vessels had been built that, not only in superior carrying power and durability, exceeded anything in wood, but proved fair to out-speed the clipper ship, and speed was a requisite of traffic then as it is now. England soon took and held the advantage in the construction of metal ships by reason of her well de- veloped iron industry, and the reluctance of the ship-builders of America to change. As far as Boston was concerned, her interest had become commercial and centered in manufacturing rather than ship- building. Lowell had become a great textile city, and with the intro- duction of steam as a motive power in all manner of mills, the capital of New England, and particularly of the Metropolis, was being invested in manufacturing. About this same period saw the opening of the rail- road (1835, financed largely by Boston merchants), so that transporta- tion by sea was superseded by a vision of transportation by land which quite overlooked the making of ships and the control of ocean traffic. Boston became a financial center, the counting house for the increasing railroads and for factories. The advent of the Civil War gave the coup- de-grace to ship building as a Boston industry. There have been revivals in nearby localities; the period of the World War is an example, but Boston no longer depends on that which she builds to take what she makes and carry it to the far quarters of the earth.
Boston Situated to be the Second Greatest Port-In 1824, the first regular steamship line was established from Boston to other American ports. In 1840, the Cunard Line chose the city as the terminus of the first steamship line connecting the United States with Great Britain. Boston had the opportunity to keep its eminence as the second great port in America. But in its reaching out for other advantages, it lost its
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place as a shipping center. By 1915 Boston ranked fourth in respect to tonnage entering, eighth in tonnage cleared, and sixth in total tonnage which amounted to only 4.41 per cent. of the tonnage of the United States. As regards the volume of its trans-Atlantic passenger business, Boston takes a higher place, but has even in this respect not held its own since the World War. Boston, more than any Atlantic Coast city of equal size, is naturally situated to become and remain the second greatest center of trans-Atlantic shipping. Since about 1910, her citizens have been awakening both to its loss of its inheritance backed by history, and the possibilities of its port. The World War, with its demands, taught it much. The efforts made in the last decade towards improve- ment have been many.
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