USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 11
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Marblehead stiffened her back, organized a lottery to relieve the poor, founded an academy in time to fit Joseph Story for college, acquired a bank and insur- ance company, and was rewarded with a partial return of prosperity. Her fishing schooners were the largest and best of the New England fleet. With the aid of small brigantines and topsail schooners like the Raven, their local catch was exported to France, Spain, and the West Indies, where high prices prevailed. "We got about one dollar for every fish we carried out" to Bilbao, one voyage, remembered an old fisherman.
When the Napoleonic wars raised freights to un- heard-of figures, the Marblehead schooners and brig- antines from seventy-five to one hundred and fifty tons burthen found it profitable to engage in the carrying trade. In 1792, Marblehead had only three entries from Europe; in 1805, the old impost book at the custom house records sixteen entries from Bilbao, one from Lisbon, four from Bordeaux, three from Nantes, one from La Rochelle, one from Alicante, two from Tönning (Holstein), one from St. Petersburg, and eight, with salt, from the Cape Verde Islands. In addition, there were the same year ten entries from Martinique, three from Havana, and one each from Guadeloupe and Dominica. In 1806, Marblehead had her first entry from the East Indies; the brigantine Orient (187 tons), Edmund Bray master, from Calcutta, with cottons,
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gunny bags, ginger, sugar, segars, bandannas, carpets, cords and blinds for Robert Hooper and several others. The customs duties annually collected at this little port rose from $22,300 in 1801 to $156,000 in 1807, when her fleet had a tonnage of 21,068; more than half that of Salem, but less than Newburyport or New Bedford.
Notwithstanding these impressive figures,1 Marble- head never recovered her provincial affluence. Her newly won wealth went mostly to swell Salem and Boston fortunes. Her fishermen, less thrifty than the Puritan stock of Beverly and Cape Cod, frolicked away every winter the remembrance of their summer toils, and kept in debt to the vessel owners. Her popu- lation increased only by 239 souls from 1790 to 1810, which means, in view of the notoriously large families of Marblehead fishermen, that considerable emigration took place.
Jefferson's embargo achieved the ruin of Marblehead as the first fishing port of New England; and the War of 1812 found her much as the Revolution had left her, poor but proud, sullen but excitable. Happy the visiting 'furriner' from Salem, Lynn, or Boston, who escaped a 'squaeling' from her 'ragged urchins!' 2 In 1808 occurred the regrettable incident of Skipper Benjamin (not Floyd) Ireson, for his crew's cowardice and lying (not for his hard heart), tarred and feathered and carried in a dory (not cart) by the fishermen (not
1 Due partly to Oriental imports in Boston vessels, consigned to Boston and other outside merchants. One such cargo, in the ship Liver- pool Packet, W. T. Magee master, from Canton, consigned to George W. Lyman and James Morgan, paid over $72,500 duties in 181I.
2 'Squaeling,' in Marblehead dialect, meant hurling a stone, or other hard object. "I don't remember any one being squaeled," said an old lady of Marblehead to a friend of mine not many years ago - "unless 't were a Lynn man!" she added, thoughtfully.
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the women) of Marblehead. Mr. Roads told the facts in his history, and Mr. Whittier acknowledged, "I have no doubt that thy version of Skipper Ireson's ride is the correct one."
T'other side Salem from Marblehead, not fifteen minutes' ride across Essex Bridge (completed in 1788 at the colossal cost of sixteen thousand dollars), was the ancient town of Beverly. Here were the stately homes of the Cabots, Lees, and Thorndikes, who, in combina- tion with the clever lawyers of Newburyport, the ora- tors of Boston, and the tea barons of Salem, controlled Massachusetts politics for the coming generation. History has not been kind to Beverly. After teaching Boston how to bake beans, the metropolis usurped the credit. After showing Salem how to fish and privateer, the larger port absorbed her neighbor in 1789 as a place of entry and registry. But the records of the state custom house, during the 'critical period,' throw light on her commercial economy. Apart from the operations of her distinguished triumvirate, Beverly was a fishing port, and the only fishing port which by 1790 had in- creased her catch and tonnage over pre-Revolutionary figures. In 1785, she was the proud possessor of thirty schooners and a sloop, from twenty to fifty tons bur- then, including two Pollys two Larks, three Betsys, three Swallows, a Two Friends, a Three Friends, a Three Brothers, an Industry, a Cicero, and a Hannah. Every summer they made from two to four fares of fish, and every winter traded with the South and the West Indies, and the Cape Verde Islands. Within ten years Beverly's tonnage had doubled. Dr. Dwight, of Yale, judged her fishermen "distinguished for good order, industry, sober manners, and sound morals." The records of the Beverly Farms Social Library, organized in 1806, bear him out; for we find that Skipper Charles
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Dodge took to sea with him Bishop Gardiner's 'Life,' Henry's 'Meditations,' and Baxter's 'Saints' Rest'; while Skipper Gamaliel Ober, for light summer read- ing on the Grand Banks, chose Jonathan Edwards on ' Religious Affections,' the third volume of Josephus, and Drelincourt on 'Death.'
Whilst Marblehead reverted from trading to fishing, and back again, Gloucester declined as a fishing port, but revived her foreign trade. In 1790, she already owned four ships, nine brigs, and twenty-three schoon- ers, beside fishing vessels. Gloucester's specialty was a commerce in fish and molasses with Surinam. Why Gloucester should have gotten a grip on this trade, which was common to all the fishing ports in colonial days, is a mystery; but certain it is that until well on in the nineteenth century, Gloucester vessels were better known in Dutch Guiana than those of any other North American port. The wealthier merchant families of Gloucester Harbor -Sargents and Parsons and Pearces - aspired to higher things. They formed an asso- ciation to carry on the East-India trade in the ship Winthrop and Mary, but the total loss of this vessel on her homeward passage from Sumatra in 1800 ended the experiment. Nevertheless, Gloucester was a thriv- ing and prosperous town in the Federalist period, boast- ing a bank with a vault carved out of solid rock, a schoolhouse with cupola, and a two-story "artillery house" or armory, with four field pieces and a bell pro- cured from Denmark. "They excell in their parties, their clubs, and also in their military parades," wrote Dr. Bentley, after being entertained by the Gloucester people in 1799.
Inability to man her Bankers, owing to the popular- ity of the Bay, Labrador, and offshore fisheries, was responsible for Gloucester's temporary decline as a
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fishing port. These minor fisheries were the specialty of Gallop's, Folly, Pigeon, Long, and Loblolly coves on Sandy Bay and the north side of Cape Ann.1 They were prosecuted not in Bankers of a size requiring capi- talist backing, but in smaller boats, which the fisher- men themselves could build and own on shares. The typical Cape Ann fishing vessel of the Federalist period was a Chebacco boat (ancestor of the Down East 'pinkies' of to-day) -so called from the Chebacco Parish of Ipswich where the type was invented and built. Double-ended, 'pink' (sharp) sterned, rigged with two pole masts, stepped well forward so that no headsail was needed, and not over thirty feet long, the Chebacco boats were easy to handle and rode the waves like a duck. They were seaworthy enough for a Labrador voyage, but for the most part sought cod, haddock, or pollock on the banks and submerged ledges along the Maine coast, or within a hundred miles of Eastern Point -Old Man's Pasture, Matinicus Sou' Sou' West, Spot o' Rocks, Saturday Night Ledge, Kettle Bottom, Cashe's Ledge, and the Fippennies. In 1792, Cape Ann owned one hundred and thirty- three Chebacco boats of eleven tons burthen on an average; and by 1804 the number had increased to two hundred and the tonnage doubled.
Yet the Cape Ann fishermen were as a class miser- ably poor, and generally in debt to some storekeeper at Gloucester Harbor. The picturesque coves where their tiny cottages clustered, afforded poor anchor- age and protection. At any sign of a northeast storm every Chebacco boat had to leave its tree-root moor-
! These villages were all in the township of Gloucester, until 1840, when some of them were set off as the town of Rockport. Gloucester village, now the city, was called "The Harbor," to distinguish it from other villages in the township.
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ing, and slip around Cape Ann, to the protection of Gloucester Harbor.
Chebacco (incorporated as a town of Essex in 1819) owned a fleet of about forty local boats. At Ipswich, up a narrow, winding river where nothing larger than a motor boat ventures nowadays, the Farleys, Tread- wells, Lakemans, and others owned a fleet of Bankers, Bay fishermen, and West-Indiamen. In ascending the river, they had to be warped around Nabby's Point by cables bent onto iron rings set in the rocks. Ipswich, in spite of her lace industry and fishing fleet, was somewhat of a decayed town during the Federalist period; an example of what Salem would have been without the East-India trade.
Reserving Newburyport for another chapter, let us coast by the fishing ports south of Boston. The South Shore was at a standstill during the Federalist period; but whatever life it had came from fishing. Cohasset with but 817 inhabitants in 1790, barely passed the thousand mark in 1820. Scituate increased by less than three hundred between 1776 and 1810. "The whole region," observed Dr. Dwight, "wears re- markably the appearance of stillness and retirement; and the inhabitants seem to be separated, in a great measure, from all active intercourse with their coun- try." But Dr. Dwight did not visit the active ship- yards on the upper North River. Plymouth Bay was slightly more progressive; but the combined popula- tion of Duxbury, Kingston, and Plymouth, including considerable farming country, hardly exceeded that of Marblehead or Gloucester in 1800, and "about half the inhabitants live by husbandry." Their fleet was almost annihilated by the Revolution. Before the war, these towns marketed their catch at the West Indies or through Boston, but about 1790 a Plymouth
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A View OF M. JOSHUA WINSOR'S House Ve
A WATERFRONT SCENE AT DUXBURY, ABOUT THE YEAR 1800
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merchant opened an export trade to the Mediterra- nean. Plymouth Bay then built up a considerable fleet - sixty-two schooners of thirty-eight to one hundred and thirty-six tons burthen by 1807. Two of them belonged to Joshua Winsor, of Duxbury, whose house, warehouse, wharf, and other possessions are shown in the attached illustration, the work of some itinerant painter. Fish-flakes of the ancient pattern - woven platforms of alder branches, on posts about thirty inches above the ground - lined the shores for two miles either side of Plymouth Rock. And as a neutral trading port, Plymouth Bay was not far behind Marblehead.1
Cape Cod, which had never permitted the war to shake its thrift and frugality, recovered a modest prosperity through a combination of fishing and salt- making. This latter industry began at Dennis early in the Revolution, when the British fleet cut off : our supply of salt - a necessity for curing fish, and preserving meat in pre-cold-storage days. After the war, it was necessary to cheapen the process in order to compete with imports. One Cape-Codder har- nessed the wind, to save pumping; and another har- nessed the sun, with an ingenious arrangement of wooden vats and sliding covers, to save fuel. By 1800 there were one hundred and thirty-six salt-works be- tween Sandwich and Provincetown, yielding twenty- five to thirty-three per cent profit from their sales of marine and Glauber salts, despite the heavy imports from Maia, Lisbon, and Turks Island. Dr. Dwight in his travels was impressed by the "tidy, comfortable appearance" of the Cape Cod cottages, and with the surprisingly fruitful yield of Cape Cod agriculture. Barnstable, for instance, exported about fifteen thou-
1 See below, chapter XII.
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sand bushels of flax annually. "But husbandry is pursued with little spirit," wrote the minister of Chatham; "the people in general passing the flower of their lives at sea, which they do not quit till they are fifty years of age, leaving at home none but the old men and small boys to cultivate the ground." In Wood's Hole, Barnstable, and other harbors vessels were fitted for combination fishing and whaling voyages, sailing to the Gulf of St. Lawrence prepared to catch anything from a herring to a Greenland whale. The population of Cape Cod increased from seventeen thousand in 1790 to twenty-two thousand in 1810; and the fishing fleet in proportion. But Provincetown, in 1810, still had less than one thousand inhabitants; and Cape civilization did not reach full bloom for another generation.
Going fishing or to sea was looked forward to by every Cape Cod boy. Elijah Cobb, later an eminent Brewster shipmaster, embarked at Namskaket on the packet-schooner Creture in 1783, to seek his fortune at Boston, paying his passage with two bushels of home- grown corn. He felt lucky to be shipped as cook and cabin boy for Surinam, at $3.50 per month; and brought his mother twenty silver dollars, more than she had seen since the death of her husband at sea, years be- fore. Osborne Howes, a prominent Boston merchant of Cape origin, describes the thrifty life in a North Dennis shipmaster's family, about 1812. Deborah, his mother, made all the clothing for herself and the five children. Cotton and wool were purchased in Boston, and made into yarn on the family spinning-wheel during the winter. When the days became longer, she and the older children spent an hour or more weaving every morning before feeding the stock or preparing breakfast; and in this way every child had a new
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woolen kersey suit, and two of striped or checked cotton cloth every year. Yet she was always bright and joyous, and received or gave visits three or four times a week. The Cape had to work hard for its daily bread, but what it got was good. The minister of Chatham gives us the typical menu of fishermen's families, toward the end of the eighteenth century. Breakfast: tea or coffee, brown bread (of home-grown 'rye and injun'), and salt or fresh fish. Dinner: one or more of the following dishes: roots and herbs, boiled salt meat, wild fowl in autumn, fresh fish, boiled or fried with pork, shellfish, boiled salt fish, indian pudding, pork and beans. Supper: the same as break- fast, plus cheese, cakes, gingerbread, and pie. "Some have pie for breakfast." Thank God for that!
"In the seaports of Massachusetts Bay, one-quarter of the people live on fresh fish," wrote Stephen Higgin- son in 1775. Every seaside village sheltered a number of boat fishermen, who supplied the population with fresh fish, especially in the winter season. Of this in- dustry no statistics and few records have been pre- served. Every locality had its favorite type of boat, the larger using the mainsail and foresail rig of the Chebacco boats (as shown in the picture of Mr. Joshua Winsor's house at Duxbury and the wood cut of Provincetown in 1839); the smaller hoisting a spritsail, as shown on the certificate of the Salem Marine Society. One also finds frequent mention of canoes,1 but whether these were dugouts, such as the
1 For instance, "Went adrift, a small canoe last week, supposed to have been taken up by some Vessel - a spritsail, driver and Gibb, two oars, &c on board." (Boston Independent Chronicle, July 2, 1798.) The birch-bark canoe was very little used in colonial Massachusetts, which lay south of the range of the canoe birch. The square-sterned skiffs carried at the taffrail on seagoing vessels, as shown in several of our il- lustrations, were called "Moses boats."
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colonists used, or whether the name had been trans- ferred to a small type of lapstreak boat, I have been unable to ascertain. On Cape Ann, when winter kept the Chebacco boats at home, the Sandy Bay boys put out in small flat-bottomed wherries, ancestors of the modern dory, and sold their catch to local storekeepers. Swampscott, a snug little village on the bight between Marblehead and Nahant, used a similar model to supply the shoemakers of Lynn. Cape Cod and Buz- zard's Bay used the lapstreak, round-bottomed whale- boat, and the Block Island or Vineyard sailboat, a fast, able flat-bottomed type with a Chebacco rig.
We must not forget the humble shellfish, whose praises were sung by William Wood in his "New England's Prospect":
The luscious Lobster, with the Crabfish raw, The Brinish Oister, Muscle, Periwigge,
And Tortoise sought for by the Indian Squaw, Which to the flats daunce many a winters Jigge, To dive for Cocles, and to digge for Clamms, Whereby her lazie husbands guts shee cramms.
Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, specialized in oysters. The enterprising people of this place, when some marine epidemic depleted their oyster-beds, procured fresh stock from Chesapeake Bay; and by 1800 some sixty thousand bivalves were annually transplanted in order to acquire the Wellfleet flavor. When properly fat- tened, they were transported by locally owned vessels to the markets of Boston, Salem, and Portland.
Swampscott claims the invention of the lobster trap in 1808, previous to which one could pick up enough lobsters at low tide to supply the Boston mar- ket. Orleans specialized in the humble industry of clam- digging, the product of which, shucked and salted and packed into barrels, provided bait for codfishing.
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Another Cape industry which profited by the shipping expansion of Federalist days was "moon-cursing," or plundering wrecks. Gossipy Dr. Bentley, apropos the snowstorm of 1802 in which several of his parishioners were lost on Peaked Hill Bar, recalled the story of the Reverend Mr. Lewis of Wellfleet. During his sermon one Sabbath, this sporting parson saw through the window a vessel going ashore. He stopped his ser- mon, descended the pulpit stairs, and with a shout of "Start fair!" led his congregation pell-mell out of the meeting-house door. A few years later, Dr. Bent- ley had to acknowledge his Cape Ann neighbors no greater respecters of flotsam than the men of Cape Cod. A richly laden East-Indiaman, running ashore on Thatcher's, was quickly relieved of her cargo. But note the inexorable workings of divine justice. The local market became so glutted with India cottons that the wreckers' wives could sell no product of their looms for almost a year!
Dark traditions have come down of the inhabitants of Cuttyhunk and Tarpaulin Cove, decoying vessels ashore by false lights, and murdering the crew. But the people of Cape Cod and Cape Ann always treated shipwrecked mariners with the utmost humanity. Zachary G. Lamson, in his autobiography, describes running ashore on the back side of Cape Cod, on the last night of the year 1801. The schooner drove over the shoals onto the beach, so that the crew was able to walk ashore over the bowsprit; but after wandering about in the small hours of a frigid morning, in vain search for shelter, two fell exhausted on the beach. The others crawled over the schooner's gunwale as she lay stranded by the tide, and turned in, with clothes frozen stiff. That afternoon some men of Orleans and Chatham, who had seen the vessel from the hills,
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pulled them out of bed, and dug their shipmates out of the snow. A tough breed, these Beverly seamen. Peter Woodbury and John Low, after lying twelve hours in the snow without boots or mittens, plus a six- mile boat journey, encrusted with ice like a tongue in aspic, were restored by kind Chatham women apply- ing hot blankets steadily for seven hours. A day or two later, they walked all the way home to Beverly; and Peter served as master's mate on the Constitution dur- ing the War of 1812.
Although the codfisheries no longer played a stellar rôle in the pageant of maritime Massachusetts, their lesser part was no less indispensable. Pacific and Baltic trade required other currency than fish; but much of that currency was obtained in the first instance from fish. The sacred cod still fed the West-India and Medi- terranean trades. He and his humbler cousins pro- vided the seaboard population with cheap food. Pur- suit of him employed thousands of people who must otherwise have emigrated; restored prosperity to the minor seaports, and preserved their pristine vigor.
CHAPTER XI NEWBURYPORT AND NANTUCKET 1790-1812
NEWBURYPORT was unique among Massachusetts sea- ports of Federalist days, in that she acquired consid- erable wealth without aid of Oriental trading. This compact little town, covering one square mile at the mouth of the Merrimac, recovered prosperity through a thrifty combination of shipbuilding, fishing, West- India and European trading, distilling, domestic manu- factures, and internal improvements. Her population doubled between 1776 and 1810, her fleet increased from 118 vessels of twelve thousand tons in 1790 to 176 vessels of thirty thousand tons in 1806. Duties collected on imports tripled in ten years.
Much human effort was required before Newbury- port could reap full advantage of her position at the mouth of the Merrimac. The entrance lay over a bar with only seven feet of water on it at low tide; a bar that broke in easterly gales. An intricate system of day and night signals, shown from the lighthouses on Plum Island, warned approaching sail when it was un- safe to enter. Newburyport opened inland communi- cation with Hampton by a canal through the salt marshes. Her capitalists organized, in 1792, the "Pro- prietors of the Locks and Canals on Merrimack River," who in four years' time completed a canal around the Pawtucket Falls between Chelmsford and Dracut.1
1 It was this corporation which, in the hands of Boston capitalists of Newburyport descent, became the corporate overlord of the manu- facturing city of Lowell.
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By this means, Newburyport became the emporium for lumber, firewood, and country produce of north- eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. At the same time the Chain Bridge, built three miles above the town, induced seagoing vessels to end their voyages at Newburyport instead of ascending higher.
It was this canal, tapping new sources for oak and pine, plus inherited aptitude, which enabled the lower Merrimac to hold its own in shipbuilding. There were two shipyards at Haverhill in 1800, others at Ames- bury, Salisbury, and Old Newbury, and at least six at Newburyport, owned by Jackmans, Curriers, and other ancestors of the clipper-ship builders. Twelve thousand tons of shipping were launched on the Merri- mac in 1810, and practically all their cordage, sails, blocks, ironwork, and fittings were made locally.
Newburyport specialized in the Labrador and Bay fisheries, in which sixty vessels were engaged in 1806. Her other hundred and sixteen vessels were employed in coasting, West-Indian, and European trade - of which more anon. Newburyport was also noted for rum and whiskey distilleries, for Laird's ale and porter, and for goldsmiths; Jacob Perkins having discovered a cheap method of making gold-plated beads, which were then in fashion. Even after the war-time de- pression there were ten jewelers' and watchmakers' shops at Newburyport. Here were printed and pub- lished the numerous editions of Bowditch's "Navi- gator," and Captain Furlong's "American Coast Pilot."
Newburyport boasted a society inferior to that of no other town on the continent. Most of the leading families were but one generation removed from the plough or the forecastle; but they had acquired wealth before the Revolution, and conducted social matters
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with the grace and dignity of an old régime. When Governor Gore, in 1809, made a state visit to New- buryport, where he had once studied law, he came in coach and four with outriders, uniformed aides, and a cavalry escort; and when the town fathers informed his ancient benefactress, Madam Atkins, that His Ex- cellency would honor her with a call, the spokesman delivered his message on his knees at the good lady's feet. We read of weekly balls and routs, of wedding coaches drawn by six white horses with liveried foot- men, in this town of less than eight thousand inhab- itants. When personal property was assessed, several Newburyport merchants reported from one thousand to twelve hundred gallons of wine in their cellars.
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