USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Sketches about Salem people > Part 18
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
TRADE TO THE WEST INDIES
In the middle of the eighteenth century, trading with the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish islands of the West Indies was prohibited, but a little astute management could secure a registry to suit the occasion, and the colonial vessels became temporarily accredited to the nation they wished to trade with. As the French export duties were one per cent and the English four and a half, they naturally preferred the French.25
Derby's first voyage to the West Indies was in the winter of 1739, when he went as master of the schooner Ranger to St. Martin's in the French West Indies and sold his cargo for twenty-one hundred and seventy-eight pounds. His sailing orders clearly recognized that the voyage was likely to be an illegal one, for they clearly stated:
If you should go among the French, Endeavor to get sale at St. Martins but if you should fall as low as Statia [St. Eustatia] and any Frenchman should make you a good offer with good security or by making your vessel a Dutch bottom or any other means practi- cable in order to your getting among ye French among whom if you should ever arrive, be sure to give strict orders among your men not to sell the least trifle unto them on any terms least they should make your vessel liable to seizure - also secure a permit so as for you to trade there the next voyage which you may undoubtedly do by your Factor and a little greasing some others - also make a proper protest at any port you stop at.
This was duly signed by Benjamin Gerrish, Jr., the owner. This voyage was no doubt a success, for on July 5, 1742, Derby sailed for Barbados in the Volant, of which he was a part owner. This time the cargo was lumber, and no cod or mackerel were shipped. The main items were fifty-four thousand feet of boards, thirty-four thousand, five hundred shingles, thirty-five hundred staves, ten barrels of shad, six- teen horses, seventy-eight bags of corn, twenty bags of rye, and thirty-two empty water-casks. The captain was further directed to buy a negro boy seventeen years old for the owner.
During these years, Salem commerce was developing with many parts of the world. Between 1726 and 1743, there 25 Peabody, Merchant Venturers of Old Salem, 6.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
are entries at Salem from Cadiz, Oporto, Alicante, Malaga, Bilboa, Portugal, Fayal, Canary Islands, Leghorn, New- foundland, Canso, St. Martin's, Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, and Virginia. These were constant occurrences, as is testified by the fact that in 1739 there were twelve entries in one week from such ports, and eight or more were frequently entered in similar periods. The schooner Ranger, probably the same boat, but with Derby no longer as master, was cast away in Barnstable Bay on her way back from Holland in November, 1743.
THE FRENCH WAR - LOUISBURG
In 1739, the long period of peace came to an end. War broke out between England and Spain, and soon this conflict merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, which began in 1740. This brought France into line as one of England's enemies, and what affected France was bound to awaken animosity in America. This resulted in a rise in prices of all foodstuffs in Massachusetts. Beef, which was ninepence a pound in 1736, had risen to twenty pence in 1747, as the war dragged to its close. Wheat rose from twelve shillings a bag in 1738 to fifty shillings in 1748, and potatoes from eight shillings sixpence to twenty-five shillings. In 1748, common laborers were getting thirty shillings per day and wood cost four pounds a cord. Milk was eighteen pence a quart com- pared with sixpence at the beginning of the war. These prices were in the depreciated currency, but the change from year to year is not the equivalent of the depreciation and is only slightly due to it.26
Rates of insurance rose as the war advanced, especially after France came in. For instance, the rate to Antigua was eight per cent in 1743, but was double that in 1745; the Lon- don rate rose from seven to twenty-one per cent, and the Lis- bon rate from twelve to sixteen per cent. This insurance was written in Boston, as there was not as yet any insurance office in Salem.27
During these years around 1740, Salem was paying about one fortieth of the colony taxes and about one fifth of the
26 Felt, Annals of Salem, II, 200.
27 Ibid., II, 376.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
county tax, as well as spending about three or four hundred pounds herself. This made about eight hundred pounds in all, which was quite a burden on a town of five thousand persons.
The great event for New England in the war was the ex- pedition against Louisburg in 1745. Governor Shirley was urged by the merchants to take steps toward the reduction of this post, which seriously menaced the fisheries and the trade with the fishermen in Newfoundland.
The French had built up the fisheries with surprising rapidity since their last set-back in 1712, and by 1744 they had about five hundred and sixty ships at work which brought in 1,441,500 quintals, or over five times as much as the Mas- sachusetts fishermen at the same time. They now made a deliberate drive on the colonial fishermen.28 Envy changed rapidly to alarm all along the New England coast. The little port of Canso had just been captured and a fruitless attack made on Port Royal,29 showing that the Frenchmen intended to use Louisburg for a base for further encroachments. The expedition was a wild scheme. William Pepperell, a wealthy merchant of Kittery, who had been a militia colonel and was a man of energy, good sense, and tact, was selected to command the expedition, and Roger Wolcott, of Connecticut, was made second in command. Massachusetts provided, after con- siderable hesitation, about three thousand men, about one thousand of whom came from Maine, which supplied over one third of her fighting strength. New Hampshire and Con- necticut gave three hundred each and Rhode Island a sloop of war. George Whitfield's motto for one of the flags, "Nil desperandum Christo dux," "There is still room for hope when Christ is the leader," was not a very enthusiastic one, but it put the case pretty fairly well. A little naval force of one twenty-four-gun frigate, two twenty-gun ships, and ten small vessels, mostly eight to sixteen-gun sloops, was got to- gether to escort the expedition, which was loaded onto about ninety transports. Among the captains were Samuel Corwin, Samuel Grant, and Charles King, of Salem, the latter of whom had a company of fifty privates.30
28 Sabine, Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, 68-71. 20 Fiske, New France and New England, 250.
30 Felt, Annals of Salem, II, 511.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
Governor Shirley had sought aid from the British Navy, but Pepperell got off before any word was received, though, as a matter of fact, Commodore Warren, with a line-of-battle ship and two forty-four-gun frigates, had already been or- dered to Boston from Antigua in the Leeward Islands. He met a Boston ship on his way up, which advised him that Pepperell had already sailed, so he laid his course direct for Canso, and joined the expedition there, as Canso immediately surrendered on April 5. There they also received the reën- forcement of another British ship and three heavy frigates which came in by chance, but came immediately under the command of Warren,31 so they had naval force enough for almost any emergency. For three weeks they waited for the ice to break up, while Pepperell and his officers drilled the raw recruits and Parson Moody harangued them on Sunday, for the expedition had a bit the aspect of a religious crusade as well as a military one. On April 28, they reached Louisburg.
One of the understandings when they left actually was that they had not enough guns to capture the place, and that they must capture these weapons first, but they brought the necessary cannon balls to fit the French guns. This is prob- ably the only expedition which ever set off with such an idea, and the most surprising thing is that they did capture the guns.32 Fishing tackle was also carried so that the vessels could help out the food supply by fishing in their odd mo- ments, as feeding the expedition was quite a problem. There were about five hundred and sixty regular French troops in the fortress and perhaps fourteen hundred militia, but on the 16th of June, after various failures and rows, Pepperell's force actually captured the fortress and ran up the British flag.
The War of the Austrian Succession came to a final end, so far as France and England were concerned, in 1748, with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and, to the utter wrath of the New England colonists, Louisburg was restored to France. This peace was unpopular even in England, and one opponent of the Ministry remarked that, while the trained armies of Great Britain had been unable to accomplish anything on the
31 See Shirley to Pepperell, March 24, 1744-5, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, Series I, 12.
32 Parkman, A Half-Century of Conflict, II, 95.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
Continent, a band of untrained colonists had dealt France a fatal blow in America, and the Ministry had betrayed them by giving back Louisburg for a dishonorable peace in Europe. Even George II had declared Louisburg belonged, not to him, but to the people of Boston, and Dr. Smollett says, "The British Ministers gave up the important island of Cape Breton for a petty factory in the East Indies," meaning Madras.
Salem suffered a good deal during the war from privateers. In 1746, Captain Nathaniel Ingersoll was captured in his sloop Swallow bound for the West Indies, and a few months later, Captain Jonathan Webb in the sloop Lynn bound for Eustatia, both by French privateers. In 1748, Samuel Carle- ton was captured by a French frigate, and Captain Ingersoll, this time in the brig Union, by a Spanish privateer; but the records do not show that Derby was ever captured during these years of war.
DERBYS'S INCREASING ACTIVITIES
Timothy Orne, Jr., was one of the important Salem mer- chants in the middle of the eighteenth century and Derby's interests were allied to his. In September, 1743, Derby sailed away to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands, as master of a sloop that rejoiced in the nameof the Jolly Bacchus, with horses, hay, oats (presumably for the horses), dry fish and mackerel, empty hogsheads and shingles, returning the following March with cotton, rum, and molasses. Orne's part of the profit of this voyage was £380-5-9. In 1744, Derby was master of the schooner Dolphin, of which he and Orne each owned a third, and in 1745-6 he was master of the schooner Exeter, of which Orne owned a quarter, in all cases making similar ventures, going out chiefly with fish and returning largely with molasses. It is interesting to note how Derby kept acquiring interests in these ships, and from the above dates it is unlikely that he went on the Louisburg Expedition.33 No doubt he was coming and going between the West Indies and Salem with longer trips to Spain and Madeira; or even Lon-
" See " Vessels owned by T. Orne, Jr.," Essex Institute Historical Collec- tions, XXXVII, 77.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
don after the war ended in 1748, though probably not before on account of the risk of capture.
It was during this period, namely, from 1736 to 1747, that all of his children were born. Richard was the eldest, born in 1736; then Mary, who married Captain George Crownin- shield; then Elias Hasket; then John; then Martha, who married Dr. John Prince; and finally Sarah, born in 1747, who married Captain John Gardner.34 This was a nice family of three boys and three girls, and no doubt a great pleasure to their father as he came and went on his short voyages; but this family, with its upbringing, is positive evidence that his business prospered, as at the war prices it required money to feed and bring up a family even in those days.
There is an old leather-bound receipt book in the Essex Institute, which begins in June, 1746, and runs to August, 1758, in which everybody to whom Derby paid any money apparently had to sign a receipt, and as early as 1746 he was paying considerable sums of money. No doubt much of this was in the course of trade, but unfortunately the receipts usually read, simply, "payment in full of all money due me"; so it is more of an autograph album than a vital document. In 1749, he owed Thomas Barton eighteen pounds, thirteen shillings, and on November 16, 1750, he gave a note for twelve pounds, eleven shillings, at five per cent interest, pay- able on demand to Bowen and Freeman, dated at Halifax; but what he was doing there I do not know, probably as captain of a ship.
There was a good deal going on in these years in Salem, for in the year 1748, four ships, twelve snows, twenty-one brigs, sixty-three schooners, and thirty-one sloops from the Salem district cleared at the custom house and carried thirty-two thousand quintals of codfish to Europe and three thousand and seventy hogsheads to the West Indies.35 In 1749, Captain Derby headed a petition with a group of men who were to be excused from all town duties if they would buy a fire engine. They did buy it, and it was approved by the selectmen the next year. The owners left their shares by
34 Perley Derby, "Genealogy of the Derby Family," Essex Institute Histor- ical Collections, III, 162.
35 Felt, Annals of Salem, II, 258.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
will, or sold them if they wished, and the old engine was still doing business when Felt published the first volume of his Annals in 1845.36 This was apparently the first fire engine in Salem, so Derby was evidently the father of the Salem Fire Department as well as of the Salem East India Trade. The merchants seem to have suddenly realized the danger of fire, or else some enterprising salesman had descended on the vicinity, because Robert Hooper, Jr., the most important merchant of Marblehead, presented that town with an engine the same year. The engines were imported from London.
The time was approaching when the sturdy captain was going to lay aside the arduous duties of skipper and let other men do his sailing for him. In 1755, he was granted a part of Winter Island, which had previously been set aside by the town for the fishermen, to build a wharf and a warehouse. The price was a shilling a year for a thousand years, and about a hundred years later one of his descendants got a clear title for six hundred and forty-five dollars, but I should have thought the previous arrangement cheaper. I do not find that Derby used Winter Island much.
By 1757, he had already begun to relinquish his ships to his son Richard, Jr., who was then only twenty-one years old, but considered quite old enough to take a ship on a foreign voyage. On December 14, 1758, Richard wrote his father from Gibral- tar a letter about his adventures, which he sent home in the brigantine Lydia and Betsy, another of Derby's ships, com- manded by Captain Lambert. He had sold his white sugar at seventeen dollars and fifty cents per hundredweight and tar at eight dollars and fifty cents a barrel, but could not find a good purchaser for his fish, and was buying claret at ten dol- lars a cask, raisins, soap, and small handkerchiefs. He was trying to get five hundred dozen of these at four dollars a dozen.
There had been trouble evidently about a ship called the Sally, which seems to have been seized for some reason. He had got possession again, but decided to sell her, for if he loaded her for Eustatia "with no papers but a pass she would be seized by privateers before she got out of the roads." As a result of his trading he was remitting two hundred to two 36 Felt, Annals of Salem, I, 366.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
hundred and fifty pounds to Mr. Lane, of the firm of Lane and Booth, which long represented Mr. Derby in London.37
By this time the Seven Years' War had begun in Europe, and the privateers on both sides were on the watch, not only for enemy ships, among which they included those of enemy colonies, but also ships of their own colonies trading with the enemy. Between 1757 and 1764, Derby had the brig Nep- tune, the ship Antelope, the brigantine Lydia and Betsy, the brig Ranger, and the Mary and Sally trading to the Spanish pen- insula and Madeira. At Bilboa he was represented by Gar- doqui and Company. They often paid him with bills on London, which were good merchandise, as they sold at a premium on this side of the water. Or perhaps one of Derby's captains was short of money to buy the return cargo and so paid for it through the English agents, R. Anderson and Com- pany, of Gibraltar, with a bill on London.38
The insurance on the ships was effected frequently by the English agents, Lane and Booth,39 but a good deal was written in Salem, for in the list of policies underwritten by Timothy Orne, Jr., in 1758, are the brig Neptune, R. Derby, Jr., cap- tain, in January for Gibraltar, the schooner (not brig if there were two) Ranger for St. Eustatia in February, under George Crowninshield. In June, the brig Salisbury, of which Derby was half owner, went to Statia also, and in November the Mary and Sarah, evidently named for his daughters, sailed for Madeira and Gibraltar.40
The brig Neptune was a vessel of a hundred and fifty tons, carried a crew of twelve men, and mounted ten guns, prob- ably mostly swivels.41
TROUBLES WITH BRITISH PRIVATEERS
The trade to the West Indies was carried on in the smaller ships, which, loaded with fish, lumber, and grain and perhaps a deckload of horses and sheep, went peddling their goods from port to port among the islands. The larger ships went
37 Hunt, Lives of American Merchants, II, 21.
38 Peabody, Merchant Venturers of Old Salem, 10.
39 Hunt, Lives of American Merchants, II, 25.
40 Essex Institute Historical Collections, XXXI, 88.
" Felt, Annals of Salem, II, 259.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
anywhere that looked hopeful. Once the Antelope, having been to Cadiz, crossed to Tangier, loaded mules, took them to the West Indies, and returned to Salem with sugar and mo- lasses. This was a profitable trip; but with the outbreak of the war, this idea did not work so well. For instance, at Gi- braltar, Derby bought a French prize, a ship of three hundred tons, christened her the Ranger, and sent George Crownin- shield out to take command of her. He loaded her with wines and sailed for the West Indies, where he exchanged his cargo for sugar, probably at Martinique, and sailed for Leghorn. Just clear of the islands, she was seized, for trading between the French islands and America, by four British privateers and carried to New Providence in the Bahamas.
Mr. Derby was very angry. He sent a sloop at once to the Bahamas with his son John to protest. She was condemned by the Admiralty Judge Bradford, and it was approved by Governor Shirley, late of Massachusetts. With the help of able counsel, John Derby protested that you could not register a ship till you got her home, and that she was not trading from a French island to America, but to Leghorn, which was legal. She was nevertheless given up to her captors at a quarter of her value. Derby appealed and filed bonds to prosecute his appeal in England, but the case was pushed through under bonds of the captors, who were mostly bankrupt, and who at once left the island. Derby was furious, and pointed out to his counsel in London, as the case dragged on, that over two hundred vessels had been taken to the Bahamas and not one had escaped condemnation, and that the judge and governor, who arrived as poor men, had retired with thirty thousand pounds apiece. He got no redress, however, in Bahama or in England, but the son of Captain Crownin- shield collected this bill several times over with the privateer America some fifty years later. For the immediate present Derby had to be content with meager insurance, instead of a profit of seventy thousand dollars, which he claimed was his expectation. 42
In July, 1759, the fifty-six-ton schooner Three Brothers sailed for St. Martin's in the French West Indies. One day out of Salem, she was captured by a British privateer, which 42 Hunt, Lives of American Merchants, II, 26 and 27.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
immediately boarded her and removed all the specie, about eight hundred pieces of eight. A prize crew was put on board, and she was sailed down to Spanishtown, where most of the cargo was discharged, and then she was taken to Antigua and condemned. Captain Driver protested, but she had started to trade with the enemy, though the robbery and sale of her cargo before she was legally condemned was a piece of high- handed piracy.
The capturing and condemning of colonial vessels by Eng- lish privateers rankled in the colonial mind because the colo- nial vessels were seized by privateers in time of war for tech- nical breaches of laws that were never enforced in time of peace by the Royal Navy. Obvious injustice and unfairness, especially when it is impossible to do anything about it, have always rankled in the Anglo-Saxon mind, and right at this point in his career Richard Derby was being turned into a bitter enemy of England, who, though she did not realize it, was to pay for the injury in due time to the last dollar.
Three years later, Captain Driver was again captured, this time in the Sally, by a real enemy, the French privateer Le Tigre, but all she did was to hold the first mate as security for the ransom and let the Sally go. Derby, to make good the word of his captain, sent the schooner Mary as a cartel, a joint venture with two Newburyport merchants who also had a man held for ransom. They headed for Cape François in Hayti, and were grabbed by an English privateer, who re- moved the specie sent as the ransom, and sent the Mary into Nassau for heading for a French port. When the matter was explained, she was released and even the specie returned.43 She sailed on to Cape François, took over the hostages, and paid the ransoms. All now seemed bright, but, as she left the port, a French frigate again seized the hostages and obliged Captain Driver to sail the Mary over to Santiago de Cuba, where she was detained for three months and never reached Salem until six months after she had left in June, 1762.44
43 Peabody, Merchant Venturers of Old Salem, 15, 16.
" Ibid., 16.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR
The war was not without incident on land as well as at sea. It opened with Braddock's defeat at Fort DuQuesne, which was not an especially auspicious beginning. Nor was the loss of Fort William Henry, in August, 1757, and the massacre which followed it, in which Colonel Frye's Essex County regiment suffered severely and several men lost their lives. It had been hard to raise the men for this expedition, and Richard Derby's name appears with thirty-three others who subscribed to a fund to give the soldiers the ten pounds promised but never paid by the King. Moreover, Derby, Benjamin Pickman, and Benjamin Lynde Oliver were the three largest subscribers at thirty pounds apiece, and Derby was probably the moving spirit, for the account of receipts and disbursements is on the fly-leaf of his personal ledger.45
The fighting along Lake Champlain eventually leaned to- ward success for the British armies. General Abercrombie was again defeated near Ticonderoga in 1758, and Lord Howe was killed in an Indian ambush as he stood beside our own General Israel Putnam.46 But Louisburg was retaken by Lord Jeffrey Amherst and General Wolfe; and the next year Wolfe took Quebec, while Amherst retrieved the defeats on Champlain and captured Ticonderoga.47
The Peace of Paris was far more satisfactory than the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had been. France ceded to England Nova Scotia, Acadia, Cape Breton, and all other lands to the north, the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon alone excepted, and with them the right to fish, but only off shore. France also gave up all lands in Louisiana east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and Spain ceded Florida to England. This finally determined that all of North America east of the Mississippi was to be English and not French, and the century-long conflict was ended.
SALEM AFTER 1750
When peace came in 1763, Salem must have been a pleasant place to live in. Large and pleasant houses had taken the
45 Essex Institute Historical Collections, III, 83.
46 Fiske, New France and New England.
" See Roads, History and Traditions of Marblehead, 74.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
place of the earlier homes of fishermen and farmers and of the many-gabled but rather cramped houses of the more well-to- do citizens. Benjamin Pickman had recently built the house, already mentioned, which still stands just west of the East India Marine Hall, in which he glorified the codfish which had made his fortune by placing its image, carved in wood, on every step of his spacious stairway. John Cabot had built the house on Essex Street opposite the corner of Monroe Street, which is still one of the most beautiful in Salem. The fine old Hodges house, near the end of Crombie Street, which disap- peared behind the line of shops only a few years ago, was standing, and just one or two brick houses had appeared. Among these was the so-called Richard Derby house, built in 1761 on Derby Street below the custom house.48
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