USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 13
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
The affiliations of maritime Massachusetts with British capital were equally significant. In 1783 the merchants renewed their ties with London merchant- bankers, like the firm of Lane, Son & Fraser, with whom they had traded before the war. With other firms, like the Baring Brothers (both of whom married daughters of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant), their relations became very close. Hamilton's United States Bank, and the several state banks organized at this period, by no means sufficed to float commercial operations.1 It was from merchant-bankers of London
1 The insurance of the Massachusetts merchant marine at this period was underwritten locally, however. Between 1799 and 1805 there were incorporated at least three marine insurance companies in Boston (in addition to seven private insurance offices), three each in Salem and Newburyport, two in Nantucket, and one each in Beverly, Marblehead, Gloucester, and New Bedford. Peter C. Brooks, one of the wealthiest of Boston merchants, made most of his fortune in marine insurance. I add some of the rates occasionally quoted in the Boston Price-Current and Marine Intelligencer showing the difference made by the French spolia- tions.
From Boston to
Sept .- Dec. 1796
Feb. 6, 1797
Any European port, except the following
..
21@ 3
6 @ 7
Baltic and Mediterranean ports, warranted free from seizure.
3 @ 32
5
Cape of Good Hope, Ile de France, &c.
5@6
9 @10
Madeira, Canaries, C. Verde Is., &c.
2} @ 3
5
Persia, India, with liberty to trade at any ports or places.
5 @6
IO
China out and home.
10 @ 12
20
Jamaica.
22 @ 3
17
Other West-India Islands.
22 @ 3
9 @ 10
Nova Scotia and Newfoundland .
2 @ 23
5@6
Quebec.
32 @4
New Orleans.
.3}@4
10
St. Augustine and Bahamas
2
6
United States ports
I} @ 2
2} @ 3
1
168
FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
that the Boston shipowners obtained, on credit, their outward cargoes to the Northwest Coast. London, moreover, was the world's money-market. Exchange on Boston or New York was valueless outside the United States; but exchange on London was as good as gold throughout the western world. With proper banking connections in London, a Massachusetts ship- master could buy bills with his cargo in a foreign port where no profitable return lading was available, and remit to his London banker; or instead of having to sell his outward cargo before reloading, he could leave it with a commission merchant, obtain a new venture by drawing against his London account, and be off without loss of time. Such relations were particularly useful when unexpected repairs or losses had to be met. They were equivalent to a Brown-Shipley or Baring Brothers letter of credit to-day, or to a checking ac- count in making local purchases. Consequently her English connections were vital to maritime Massachu- setts, and peace with Britain seemed worth almost any price.
Had Europe remained tranquil, had the Dutch Re- public endured, and had French energy been guided into finance and industry, it is possible that Amster- dam or Paris would have replaced London as the finan- cial center for American commerce. Many Massachu- setts merchants deplored their too close dependence on English credit. The French Revolution served to draw the two countries together in trade as well as in thought, until its cataclysmic period began in 1792. From that time on the American trade with France and the French colonies became a colossal speculation, which appealed to the younger and more adventurous merchants, but appalled those who already had sound British connections. France, hemmed in by British
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
sea-power, threw open her colonial trade to neutrals. Famine, disorganization, and blockade raised the price of American provisions to unheard-of figures. Fortunes could be made in Paris by speculating in exchange, buying confiscated church or émigré estates, taking a share in French privateers, or bidding in their prizes. Such members of the younger generation as desired more refined adventure than the Northwest Coast af- forded, hastened to France. The blithe spirit of these youngsters is well illustrated by a letter of twenty-one- year-old Ralph Bennet Forbes, who founded a great mercantile family of Boston :
Boston I Nov. 1794.
.. . I was hurried away in June ten days after my arrival in France (almost malgré moi) in order to close in the West Indies to the sat- isfaction of the two respectable houses who were concerned (James & Thomas H. Perkins & Stephen Higginson, Esq.) of these people I enjoy the confidence and I believe the esteem, this I hope is not lessened by having made a great voyage - this by the way - le temps passe, il faut tenir parole.
I have now in contemplation a voyage to France ... my plan is rather speculative and I may extend my personal excursion as far as l'Isle de France, this will depend on l'état actuel de la guerre, which I think will soon be finished. C'est le moment, mon cher, pour les jeunes gens de mon caractère de faire des mouvements rapides, de ramener quelques capitaux pour leur établissement après la paix. C'est alors qu'il faut des Bases bien solides pour être respecté dans le Commerce. ... I find myself the loser by the Hispaniola Revolution of two hundred Joes (1600 Dollars); this affects me in beginning.
I must speak seriously of my intentions; after this voyage - it must be entirely between ourselves - I must be fixed in Boston for these reasons; my mother's property will constitute part of my capi- tal, she will give it to me on no other terms. I have here a great many rich friends who though they might not launch out, would readily put their marks on the back of a note for an occasion, this is a good introduction to the Bank, of course, a key to the False Capi- tal mode of Operation. I am determined to have a Southern Con- nection, on account of French business; they are not fond of cold
170
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FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
fingers. I am resolved never to connect myself, but with men stamped from infancy with Industry and determined like myself to devote every instant of time to business. My connections in Ja- maica are King's Contractors - they will commission whomever established at the southward, with the purchase of flour and bis- cuit for that Island; this is an object I am determined never to see the West Indies again.
Many were the gay adventures enjoyed by young shipmasters like John Bailey of Marblehead, whose fresh, confident features are preserved for us in minia- tures and portraits by French artists. One form of speculation was to purchase French prizes in American ports, and take them to Mauritius for sale. Such a one the captured English snow George, with a cargo of pro- visions invoiced at $25,000, was bid in at Boston in 1796 for $8000 by Crowell Hatch, one of the Colum- bia's owners, and placed under the command of his young kinsman John Boit, Jr., who had just returned from his remarkable voyage around the world. The George was foul, slow, and leaky. Near the Cape of Good Hope, Captain Boit got a spare topsail under her bows, which decreased the leak from 1500 to 400 strokes per hour; but as he neared Port Louis, Mau- ritius, the snow sailed more and more slowly, the leak gained, and the crew became weak from pumping. A signal of distress-the ensign in a wiff - brought out a naval detail from the French authorities, to relieve the men at the pumps, and saved her from foundering within sight of land. Captain Boit sold his cargo to the Government at a "ruinous advance," hove down his vessel, found the bottom worm-eaten and almost destitute of oakum, but cheerfully "painted the old Snow up as fine as a fiddle, & on the 20th of May del'd her up to Monsieur Hicks - a hard bar- gain on his side, I must confess !... God send I may
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
never sail in the like of her again!" He then laid out the proceeds in coffee and East-India goods, which he carried to Charleston, South Carolina, for another turnover, in a chartered ship.
It was easy enough to sell provisions in France at profiteer rates, but quite a different affair to collect payment. The adventures of Captain Elijah Cobb, of Brewster, illustrate the distinction. His brig Jane of Boston, on her way to Cadiz, was captured by a French frigate and sent into Brest, early in 1794. The prize court released her, and Cobb made a contract to sell his cargo of rice and flour for two hundred per cent profit, in bills of exchange on Hamburg. After waiting a month for the bills in vain, he sent the Jane home under the mate, and procuring a passport from Jean- bon St. André, went to Paris with an armed national courier, traveling day and night to escape brigands. At Paris the Terror was at its height. The authorities pretended never to have received the brig's papers, and deliberately mislaid the certified copies which the prudent master brought with him. There was nothing left but to interview Robespierre, who called him a sacré coquin, but gave the word that produced his papers and bills. Cobb left the capital just before the 9th Thermidor; but Joseph Russell, John Higginson, and Thomas H. Perkins, of Boston, witnessed the guillotining of Robespierre in the Place de la Con- corde.
The death of his benefactor so reduced the market value of Captain Cobb's bills, that he went himself to Hamburg to collect. The French agent there had be- gun to protest payment, but by a good bluff Cobb had his accepted, and remitted the funds to T. Dickerson & Sons, London. On his next voyage to Havre, with flour, the same performance had to be repeated. Two
I72
CAPT. JOHN BAILEY, OF MARBLEHEAD
CAPT. ELIJAH COBB, OF BREWSTER
1
FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
visits to Paris, and five months' dancing attendance at the ministry of finance, were required to obtain full payment. Captain Cobb exchanged the silver ingots with which his debt was discharged, for three thousand Spanish doubloons, which he managed to smuggle out of France on his person despite the chouans, and a strict search at the frontier.
American diplomatic history, in the period 1793- 1815, is closely interlocked with that of commerce and of all maritime pursuits. Broadly speaking, one may say that in 1793 maritime Massachusetts was making up her mind on the American policy toward the Euro- pean war. By 1795 she found her opinion to be flatly pro-British; in 1796 she imposed it on the rest of the state, and in 1797 on the rest of the nation.
British depredations on American commerce, in 1793-94, were irritating and costly. Other things be- ing equal, maritime Massachusetts, a lusty young rival to the mistress of the seas, would have helped revolu- tionary France break British sea-power. But other things were not equal. American democracy, that nine-lived feline which the merchants had petted in 1775 - and repeatedly drowned since - now re- turned with a new lover, the battle-scarred French tomcat Jacobinism; and their amorous yowlings made sleep impossible for decent merchants in Franklin Place. They were disgusted and alarmed by Genet's impudence, and his American partisans' lawlessness. The successive upheavals in France showed that no substitute could there be found for the London money market; and in 1795 France engulfed Holland. Fi- nally, the Reign of Terror and the politique de l'an III
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
seemed to confirm Burke's warning, that the French Revolution was an international menace. Embattled France became an object of horror and loathing, as now Soviet Russia. To seat Jacobinism on Neptune's throne, because of British enmity to American ship- ping, would merely destroy all property. "Civiliza- tion " was the issue.
So reasoned New England Federalism; an alliance of merchant-shipowner, country squire and Congre- gational clergy, that carried everything before it in Massachusetts. The first test came with Jay's treaty. This pact of November, 1794, averted a war with Eng- land, and secured compensation for the British spoli- ations; but renounced neutral rights and commercial equality, in terms so humiliating "that some of our respectable men have ... joined the Jacobins," wrote Cabot. Anti-British feeling flared to its highest point since the war. At a word from the French consul, a Boston mob sacked and burned to the water's edge a Bermudian privateer in the harbor. But the merchants soon saw the deeper issue of England, law, and order against France, Jacobinism, and terror. The eloquence of Harrison Gray Otis wooed the Boston democracy into agreement. Thereafter, Boston regularly deliv- ered a Federalist majority in state and national elec- tions. The clergy cowed their country congregations with tales of French atheism and atrocity. The treaty was ratified and carried into effect.1 John Adams was
1 "In consequence of the disposition shown in the House of Repre- sentatives of the Union not to grant the supplies for carrying the British treaty into effect, business has been very slack for these two weeks. All new appropriations are entirely suspended. The alarm is very general lest the dearest interests of our country - peace and national honor - should be sacrificed to party-spirit and Antifederal- ism." (J. & T. H. Perkins to one of their correspondents, April 30, 1796.) Although Jay's treaty, as ratified, did not permit American ves-
174
FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
elected President, and Timothy Pickering, of Salem, became Secretary of State.
French spoliations in 1797 and Talleyrand's treat- ment of the American mission discredited Jefferson, made the Federalists dangerously popular, and en- abled them in the name of patriotism to enforce con- formity by sedition trials, social pressure, and other means now sadly familiar. There would, in fact, have been a war with France in 1799, had not President Adams defied Hamilton and the Essex Junto by sud- denly adopting a pacific policy. Thereby began the feud between the Adams family and State Street.
Although war was not declared against France, a state of war existed on the sea, and was very popular in the Massachusetts seaports. By local initiative the sloop-of-war Merrimack and the frigate Essex were built at Newburyport and Salem. The frigate Consti- tution (Boston-built, but Philadelphia-designed) had been launched in view of an immense, enthusiastic crowd the previous year. A subscription loan of $136,- 500 from the Boston merchants floated the frigate Boston in 1799. Acts of Congress, now completely under the control of Hamilton and the Essex Junto, permitted American merchantmen to strike back at their French tormentors, and to make prize of any French armed vessel.
A typical cruise for a half-freighter, half-trader, was that of the letter-of-marque ship Mount Vernon of Salem, 355 tons, 20 guns and 50 men. She belonged to 'King' Derby, and was commanded by his son, E. H. Derby, Jr. Leaving Salem on July 14, 1799,
sels to trade with British colonies, the regular quotations of insurance rates to Jamaica, Bahamas, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, in Boston papers of 1796-97, proves that the trade was going on never- theless.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
with a complete outfit of light sails, including fore- and main-topgallant studdingsails, square spritsail on the jibboom, ringtail and steering-sail rigged below the spanker, she made Corvo in the remarkably short time of eight days, seven hours. After a running fight with a French frigate, a brush with a heavily armed lateener, and a regular battle with another off Alge- ciras, she made Gibraltar in seventeen days, twelve hours, from Salem. Her last assailant struck ensign and pennant. Captain Derby did not stop to take him, but put into Gibraltar with the satisfaction of having "flogged the vessel in full view of the English fleet."
At Gibraltar colonial produce such as sugar, with which the Mount Vernon was laden, was a drug in the market. Captain Derby therefore joined John Wil- liams, of Baltimore,1 in chartering and loading a brig; and on August 10 the two vessels left for the Levant. Touching at Palermo, but finding the market poor, they continued to Naples, where Captain Derby sold the Mount Vernon's cargo, valued at $43,275, for $120,000. "My sales have been handsome, though not so great as I could have wished," he wrote his father.
Exchange on London being disadvantageous, Cap- tain Derby made an investment of his gains, typical of this troubled period. Fifty thousand dollars were laid aside for wines and silks; but it was some time before they could be delivered. Yet even the hospitality of Nelson, and the smiles of Lady Hamilton, could not tempt Captain Derby to tarry in Naples. He pur- chased two new polacca-rigged ships for sixteen thou-
1 Probably of the Roxbury Williamses, who settled in Baltimore at this period. Amos Williams, of Baltimore, was part owner with the Peabodys of the schooner Equality of Salem ..
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FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
sand dollars, and convoyed them in the Mount Vernon up the Adriatic (beating off two Turkish pirates en route), to Manfredonia. There he loaded wheat, which was carried around Italy and sold at Leghorn. The profits on this venture paid for the two polaccas with thirty thousand dollars to boot, only two and a half months after their purchase. In less than eleven months' time Captain Derby had made a net profit of over a hundred thousand dollars on an investment of forty-three thousand.
The European war did not create, it merely ex- panded, this Massachusetts-Mediterranean traffic, which dates back to Captain John Smith. The reëx- port thither of Oriental goods began about 1790, when the glut of tea at Salem and Boston forced their mer- chants to seek new outlets. But this coasting trade of the Mount Vernon was new, and typical of war condi- tions. Schooners of seventy tons or under - like the Raven of Marblehead and the Lidia of Newburyport - crossed the Atlantic with a cargo of salt fish, sugar, and rum, bought goods cheap in one European port, sold them dear in another, and if they were so lucky as to avoid capture, cleared several times their cost in one voyage. Frequently they were sold abroad to avoid capture, and sometimes their officers and men stayed with them. The brig Salem of Boston, for instance, after a voyage to Amsterdam, Cadiz, and San Sebas- tian, was sold to French parties at Bordeaux. Captain Jeremiah Mayo, using her American papers, then took a cargo of claret to Morlaix, where it brought three or four times its cost in the Gironde.
Wheresoever in Europe a Massachusetts vessel was disposed of, it was easy for the officers and crew to pick up a passage home, as the following letter of a Beverly shipmaster relates:
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Li[s]bon. May ye 18, 1793
Kind & Loving Wife
I now take this operty. to inform you of my well fair & good state of health. Blessed be God for the same; hoping this will find you & fammele in as good health as it Leaves me at preasent; after I sold the schooner hope at Bilboa I wated for to get a passage to Amer- ica but cold not get a passage in a vessel that was coming Directly hoom; therefore I took passag with Capt. Joshua Orne to Lisbone and from thence I expected to go with him to Marblehead; but find- ing a snow near bound for Boston which wanted a mate and so I shipped with her, and shall sale tomorrow if nothing disapoints us, I have sent you By Cap. Joshua Orne: 7 dozn & 10 silk handchafs 2 Long Looking glasses a dozn of knives & forks one half of which is for your brother Beckford and a Little Gun and I Expect to send sum other things which I shall put on bord this Night and you Go for them or send sum boddey with an order. you may expect me in a few days after you receive this if nothing happens to us . . .
from your ever loving husband till Death
JONATHAN BASEY
During the first half of the Revolutionary-Na- poleonic wars, and until 1806, the yoke of Britain's sea-power was an easy one. No interference was made with broken voyages or with neutrals trading between the Baltic, the Hanse towns, and France. "I find several vessels have been advantageously em- ployed in plying between Hamburg, Rotterdam, and France, and that neutral vessels have been permitted a free trade even from England," writes James Per- kins to his brother at Bordeaux, in February, 1795. He is sending out the ship Betsy, with a cargo of rice, which is to serve as capital for continuing the carrying trade between northern and French ports. American entries at Hamburg increased from 35 in 1791 to 192 in 1799; and after Hamburg was closed to American shipping in 1804, vessels entered at Tönning in Schles- wig-Holstein, or at Lübeck. At Amsterdam there were 160 American entries in 1801.
178
-
Shower Lidia of Newbury Sort 9 Entering the Sort of Marseille_1. November
A TYPICAL NEUTRAL TRADER Schooner Lidia, of Newburyport, at Marseilles, 1807
FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
This North-European trade was not without its cul- tural contacts. "This day my box from Hamburg arrived with the proceeds of my Coffee," writes Dr. Bentley in his Salem diary for 1806. "The good Pro- fessor has furnished me with great economy with some of the best Books which his country has yielded." Thus German erudition entered New England. Dr. Bentley was one of the American correspondents of Professor Ebeling, of Hamburg, buying for his learned friend numerous imprints of the smaller New England presses, which have disappeared in the country of their production. The books and coffee which the good Doctor cast upon the waters were indeed found after many days, and by his alma mater; for Professor Ebeling's incomparable collection of Americana was purchased by Israel Thorndike, merchant of Beverly, and presented to the Harvard College Library.
If Massachusetts had the same share of the Ham- burg trade as of Baltic commerce, more than half the American entries were owned in her ports. For in 1802, out of eighty-one vessels that passed Elsinore dur- ing the open season, twenty-one belonged to Salem, fourteen to Boston, eight to Newburyport, eight to New York, seven to Providence, five to Marblehead, four to Gloucester, two to Charleston, and one each to Philadelphia, Norfolk, New Bedford, and Salisbury.1 Many arrived not from their home port, but from Lis- bon, Cadiz, the Western Islands, the West Indies, Amsterdam, and Bremen; bringing nankeens, pepper, sugar, fruit, coffee, tea, rum, wine, cotton, indigo, to- bacco, and mahogany to Copenhagen and St. Peters- burg. They cleared, laden with iron, hemp, flax, cord- age and sailcloth, for all parts of the world. Several were schooners and brigantines under eighty tons
1 From a "Sound list " brought home by one of the shipmasters.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
burthen. This type of commerce is generally called the neutral carrying trade; but it was more than a carrying trade as the term is now understood, for the vessels did not merely take freight at inflated figures; they bought and sold goods on their owners' account, and made immense sums, which no statistics record, by the repeated turnovers.
The European trade was also vitally interlocked with the East-India and China trade, that was so rap- idly expanding in the closing years of the eighteenth century. Unless an East-Indiaman made Madeira her first port of call, she generally acquired specie in Eu- rope, or a cargo suitable for Bengal, by selling the proceeds of a former voyage, together with West-India goods, salt provisions, fish, and Southern staples, at any northern or Mediterranean port. "The speedy conversion of your present lading into dollars must be a governing object in your operation," state the in- structions of J. & T. H. Perkins to one of their super- cargoes, outward-bound with East- and West-India goods to the Mediterranean and Calcutta.
Hardly a port of Europe there was, from Archangel to Trieste where the Yankee trader was not as familiar as the seasons; hardly an occasion where he was not present, with something to swap. As Nelson's fleet lay licking its wounds after Trafalgar, who should heave in sight but the ship Ann Alexander of New Bedford, Captain Loum Snow, with a cargo of lumber, flour, and apples - just what the fleet needed! Super- cargoes founded mercantile houses in foreign ports. Thomas Hickling, of Boston, settled in the Azores shortly after 1780. Preble & Co. (Ebenezer and Henry, brothers of the Commodore) were soliciting consignments at Dieppe, in 1804. George Loring, of Hingham, married a beautiful Spanish girl in the
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FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
seventeen-nineties; his sons formed the firm of Loring Brothers of Malaga, which fifty years later was oper- ating Massachusetts-built clipper ships under the Spanish flag.
The seamen of colonial and post-Revolutionary Massachusetts thought they knew the ropes of Euro- pean trade, but the war led their sons to new ports. Smyrna, the mart of Asia Minor, became the final residence of a loyalist member of the Perkins family, with whom J. & T. H. Perkins opened profitable rela- tions before the end of the eighteenth century, obtain- ing Turkish opium for Canton. A convincing contrast of Yankee enterprise with Eastern lethargy, is the trade followed by Ebenezer Parsons for several years; loading coffee at Mocha in the Red Sea, and circum- navigating Africa to sell it at Smyrna, for three and four hundred per cent profit.
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