USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 17
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That was the very year when President Polk ap- pointed Nathaniel Hawthorne surveyor of the port of Salem; in 1849 President Taylor removed him. In "The Scarlet Letter," which Hawthorne then wrote to replace official emoluments, he draws a true and en- during picture of Salem's gentle decay. The last en- tries from a dozen ports of world commerce had lately been recorded in the custom house, where Hawthorne dreamed away the idle days between the arrival of occasional hide ships, West Coast brigs, and Nova
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Scotia wood schooners. In 1848, with the establish- ment of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Mills, Salem en- tered the factory era; and a fluttering drone of spin- dles began to dominate the empty harbor and idle wharves.
CHAPTER XV THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE 1830-1845
BOSTON STATE-HOUSE is the hub of the solar system. You could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar. (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.)
WHILE foreign trade slipped away from the smaller seaports of Massachusetts, and riverside villages be- came manufacturing cities, Boston commerce in- creased to an extent undreamed of in Federalist days. Without annexing territory, Boston grew from forty- three thousand to sixty-one thousand souls between 1820 and 1830, passed the hundred-thousand mark about 1842, and increased over sixty per cent in the fifteen prosperous years that followed. In shipping and foreign commerce she managed to remain a good second to New York, despite the geographical ad- vantages of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans. Never before or since had Boston Harbor been so crowded, or the waterfront so congested with sailing vessels.1 In 1806, the banner year of neutral trade, one thousand and eighty-three sail entered Boston from foreign ports. In the eighteen-thirties the yearly aver-
1 Average annual arrivals from foreign ports at Boston, by decades:
1790-1800
1800-10 1810-20 1820-30
1830-35 1835-41
569
789
610
787
I199
1473
Annual arrivals of coasting vessels at Boston:
1830
1840
1844
1849
1851
2938
4406
5312
6199
6334
From Hazard's U.S. Register, VI, 32, and Boston Shipping List and Price Current, January 3, 1852.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
age almost attained fifteen hundred, and the average size of vessels was growing as well. Coastwise arrivals increased in the same proportion; and by 1844, when a new and even greater era began, fifteen vessels entered and left the harbor for every day in the year.
At the same time Boston had become the financial center for New England manufacturing, with a bank- ing system that withstood the panic of 1837; and itself a manufacturing city for Yankee notions, in both senses of the word. Next door to the Boston merchants lived the Boston reformers and poets. Not that they were any more welcome than before 1815; but some- how they appeared; and not infrequently in the midst of a shocked shipping family.
Old Boston was very young in 1840. "Here was the moving principle itself," wrote Emerson, "a living mind agitating the mass and always afflicting the con- servative class with some odious novelty or other." Here, in 1832, young Emerson himself challenged the past by resigning the pastorate of the Second Church. Within a quarter-mile of State Street was the obscure hole where 'the freedom of a race began,' when in 1831 young Garrison composed, set up, and printed the first number of "The Liberator." Wendell Phillips, off- spring of all that was worthy and respectable on Bea- con Hill, became Garrison's convert after seeing him mobbed by counting-room clerks. Under the very hub itself began a new chapter in education, when Hor- ace Mann, in 1837, became chairman of a new state board. The education of the blind had already begun through the concentrated brains, money, and benevo- lence of Samuel Gridley Howe and Thomas Handasyd Perkins. Longfellow, son of a member of the Hartford Convention, was domiciled under the Cambridge elms in 1836; and Prescott, whose father belonged to the
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THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE
same council of elders, produced his "Ferdinand and Isabella" the following year. In Faneuil Hall, in 1845, Charles Sumner flung down his challenge to milita- rism, which James Russell Lowell mercilessly satirized in the "Biglow Papers." Henry Thoreau, in the mean- time, had found a new way of life at Concord, and Brook Farm had flourished and collapsed.
There is little connection, to be sure, between the maritime history of Massachusetts and these high lights of reform, revolt, and letters. Commercial Bos- ton published their books, and financed such of their efforts as came under patchwork philanthropy; but for the most part ridiculed, condemned, or ignored. In all New England letters there is no genuine sea poetry; 1 nothing to equal the rollicking chanties that the com- mon seamen improvised. Yet maritime Massachu- setts became articulate in Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast" and Melville's "Moby Dick." What sea- faring people, in the nineteenth century, has left prose monuments to compare with these? Dana, too, must be counted among the New England reformers. Many well-meaning people endeavored to save Jack's soul, philanthropists provided him with a snug harbor for his old age; Dana endeavored to obtain him justice.
New York was the only successful rival to Boston among North American ports, if one takes shipping as well as commerce into consideration. Her exports steadily advanced, while those of Boston remained stationary; for Boston, as usual, lacked a good export medium.2 The imports of Boston increased, but New
1 Longfellow's"Building of the Ship" and Whittier's "Legends of New England" perhaps might be stretched into this class, and Holmes's prose passage on "Sea and Mountains" in The Autocrat, paper XI. In general, however, the New England poets' attitude toward the sea is that of a summer boarder who is afraid to get his feet wet.
2 New England manufactures were absorbed largely by the domestic
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
York's increased still more, and by 1845 the Empire State had a greater fleet than that of Massachusetts. To the extraordinary commercial growth of New York, the Bay State was a leading contributor. Many of the famous New York shipbuilders and merchants were Massachusetts men. "What aided in making great merchants in this city thirty years ago," wrote the author of "Old Merchants of New York City" in 1863, "was their having foreign or New England con- nections. Most of the shipping was owned in these eastern places, and consequently the merchant in New York who had the most extensive eastern connec- tions did the largest business." "It is well known," writes another Manhattan expert in 1844, "that one- third of the commerce of New York, from 1839 to 1842, was carried either upon Massachusetts' account, or in Massachusetts vessels." Eighty-three per cent of Boston's imports were on local account; i.e., pur- chased abroad by Boston firms. But only twenty- three per cent of New York's imports were owned by New-Yorkers. Manhattan's geographical position was such that all the world poured gold into her lap. Boston's growth resulted entirely from local enter- prise.
Shipping is the main explanation of Boston's suc- cessful rivalry with her other American competitors. A large proportion of the American merchant marine was still owned by Boston merchants, who preferred to handle the cargoes themselves rather than give Phila- delphia or Baltimore the profits of distribution. The ability of her merchant-shipowners to earn freights, to
market. The average yearly export of domestic cottons from Boston was only about $2,250,000 between 1848 and 1856, although Massachusetts and New Hampshire together produced cotton goods to the value of $28,500,000 in 1850.
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THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE
gather in cargoes from all parts of the world, and to find the right market, lay at the very root of Boston's success.
The old commercial spirit kept Boston abreast of modern improvements, provided harbor and railroad facilities, built larger and faster vessels, and estab- lished packet-lines. Boston's "principal advantage for the security of vessels," wrote a New-Yorker in 1844,1 "and it is one that distinguishes this port from other principal ports of our country," is her "numerous docks, which are constructed with solid strength, and run far up into the city. These are bordered by con- tinuous blocks of warehouses, either of brick or Quincy granite, which have an appearance of remarkable uni- formity, solidity, and permanence. By the arrange- ment of these docks the numerous vessels, whose trac- ery of spars and cordage line them on either side, may unship their cargoes at the very doors of the bordering warehouses, and receive in return their supplies for foreign ports with the utmost security and dispatch."
Central Wharf, built in 1819, with fifty-four brick stores running down its center for a quarter of a mile, was a fitting companion to India Wharf. In its upper stories were three great halls for auction sales, and in its octagonal cupola the headquarters of the "Sema- phore Telegraph Company," to which the approach of vessels was signaled from Telegraph Hill in Hull. 2 Below, as on India Wharf, were warehouses, whole- sale stores, and counting-rooms of leading mercantile firms. Here cargoes from all parts of the world were bought and sold and accounted for, without the aid of steam heat, clacking typewriter, and office system. An
1 James H. Lanman, in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, x (1844).
2 Central Wharf is shown on the left of Salmon's painting of the Wharves of Boston.
229
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
odor of tar and hemp, mingled with spicy suggestions from the merchandise stored above, pervaded every- thing. Respectable men clerks (female clerks, sir?'- would you have female sailors?) on high stools were constantly writing in the calf-bound letter-books, ledgers, and waste-books, or delving in the neat wooden chests that enclosed the records of each par- ticular vessel. Owners, some crabbed and crusty, others with the manners of a merchant prince, received you before blazing open fires of hickory or cannel coal, in rooms adorned with portraits and half-models of ves- sels. Through the small-paned windows one could see the firm's new ship being rigged under the owner's eye.
The invention and quick application of steam rail- roads was a great aid to the commerce of Boston. After playing with the idea of a Boston and Albany canal, Massachusetts wisely accepted the veto of her topogra- phy. In 1825 the Quincy Granite Railway, a short gravity tramway connecting granite quarries with tidewater, was financed by Thomas Handasyd Perkins. Further progress was delayed for several years, but by 1841 railroads spread fanwise from Boston to Salem and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Lowell and other manufacturing centers, to Providence and to Albany. Other local lines, like the Old Colony to Plymouth, soon followed. The Western Railroad, Boston's single connection with the West, was badly managed, and sent very little through freight to her wharves until after the Civil War, when the first grain elevator was erected on the harbor front. But the others, with water-front termini at Boston, and (in 1850) a belt- line connecting all with each other and the wharves, distributed incoming cargoes to inland points, and brought miscellaneous products of farm and forest, home workshop and factory, to Boston warehouses.
230
THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE
More important than the railroads as distributing agencies were the sailing packets. Every tidewater village between Eastport and Provincetown, and many beyond, had a packet-sloop plying to Boston. Even nearby Hanover found it cheaper to send packet-sloops down the tortuous course of the North River and around the Cohasset reefs to Boston, than to use the road. Plymouth, in 1830, had a population less than five thousand; but six sloops of sixty tons each were em- ployed as Boston packets, exchanging local products for raw materials used in the textile, iron, and cordage factories; two schooners of ninety tons plied around the Cape to Nantucket, New Bedford, and New York; and three other vessels brought lumber from Maine. A study of our coasting trade would reveal many quaint characters, and curious trade routes. Skipper Brightman, of Westport, for instance, collected fresh eggs from the surrounding country, and took them to Providence market in his sloop; he calculated that by 1840 he had transported at least three million and a half eggs. Hingham maintained rival Republican and Federalist lines of Boston packets; and so high ran political feeling that if a Federalist missed his boat he would spend the night on Long Wharf rather than take the Jacobin sloop. The Federalist Rapid, built in 18II, long outlasted her party, continuing in service until the Civil War.
Short local lines like these had existed since colonial days, and in the Federalist era there had been "con- stant traders," as they were advertised, which took freight to New York, Albany, Philadelphia, Alexan- dria, and Baltimore. Innovations of the era of peace were regular packet-lines1 to Southern ports and to
1 A packet-line, as the term was understood before the Civil War, meant two or more vessels whose owners advertised sailings to desig-
231
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Liverpool. By 1844 we find advertised in the Boston papers the " Regular " line, with four vessels running to Havana, and others to Alexandria and Washington, to Savannah, and every ten days to New Orleans ("The ship has fine 'tween decks for dry goods, shoes, &c."). Allen & Weltch are running packets to Norfolk, Mo- bile, and to New Orleans ("elegant and extensive accomodation, no ice or lime taken"). Nathaniel Winsor competes for the New Orleans, the Savannah, and the Mobile traffic; A. C. Lombard's line runs to Charleston, Benjamin Bruce's to Mobile, W. B. Ken- dall's to Savannah, and Reed's to Norfolk, City Point, and Richmond; Baltimore is served by the Manufac- turers', the Union, and the Despatch lines; four differ- ent lines run to Philadelphia, and at least five to New York.
Since colonial days there had been constant traders between Boston and Liverpool and London; but the famous Black Ball Line of New York, established in 1816, was the pioneer transatlantic packet-line under the American flag. The Boston & Liverpool Packet Company was founded in 1822, with four new ships named after jewels, one of which, the Boston-built Emerald 1 made an extraordinary passage from Liver- pool to Boston under Captain Philip Fox, of Cohasset. Leaving Liverpool on February 20, 1824, at 3 P.M., she stayed with an easterly gale all the way, and car- ried sail enough to keep her lee rail buried until 3 P.M. March 8, when she hove to for a pilot off Boston Light, just seventeen days out. Three hours later she anchored below Fort Independence. The owners
nated ports, on schedules as regular as wind and weather permitted; and which depended for their profit on freight and passengers furnished by the public, rather than goods shipped on their owners' account.
1 Length 110 feet, breadth 27 feet, tonnage 359.
232
BRIG MERCURY OF BOSTON ENTERING ELSINORE ROADS, 1825
PACKET SHIP EMERALD OF BOSTON
THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE
thought she had returned from some mishap on her outward passage, and would hardly believe Captain Fox until he handed them some Liverpool papers of the day he sailed.
Captain Fox was an early example of that breed of sea-captains called 'drivers,' for in 1819 he had made a similar passage only a few hours longer, in the Merri- mac-built ship Herald, 302 tons. Neither vessel ever showed much speed under other masters. To appreci- ate his achievement we must remember that the Emerald's record for a westward transatlantic passage was seldom, perhaps only once, surpassed by a sailing vessel, and then by a clipper ship five times her size.1
The Boston & Liverpool Packet Company failed very shortly, and was succeeded by a new line in 1827, for which several packet-ships of about 425 tons each were built to order at Medford and Boston. The ac- commodation plans of one of these, the Dover (121 feet long, built at Charlestown by John M. Robertson in 1828), show a forty-five foot main cabin with eleven staterooms about six feet square; a library, wine and spirit room, covered deck abaft the mainmast, for passengers' use and a "bathing room" (by the bucket method probably) on the port quarter. The charge for cabin passage was $140, including "mattresses, bedding, wines, and all other stores."
1 Captain Clark (Clipper Ship Era, 247) states that the record is fif- teen days Rock Light to Sandy Hook, made by the Andrew Jackson (1676 tons) in 1860. The famous Dreadnought's fastest westward passage was nineteen days. For a good example of the untrustworthiness of second-hand and subsequent statements of sailing ships' records, com- pare the yarns about the Emerald's passage in R. W. Emerson's Journals, III, 204 (told him in 1833 on shipboard); Nathaniel Spooner, Gleanings from the Records of the Boston Marine Society (1879), 98; H. A. Hill, Trade and Commerce of Boston (1894), 121, with Edmund P. Collier (who took the pains to examine contemporary and reliable sources), Cohasset's Deep-Sea Captains, 13.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Both packet-lines succumbed for the same cause: Boston's inability to furnish return cargoes. England, unlike the Baltic and Mediterranean, imported her East- and West-Indian goods in her own bottoms. No money could be made in the miscellaneous notions- sassafras, corn husks, cow horns, and rubber shoes - that Boston was shipping to Liverpool at this period. The packets were forced to Southern ports for an out- ward cargo of cotton; and this detour lost them their passenger business. Not until 1844, when the Train Line was founded, did Boston get a Liverpool sailing packet service of any vitality.
As early as 1825 the Boston merchants began to talk of a transatlantic steamship line. The matter had to wait until Samuel Cunard founded his North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, in 1839. Greatly to the delight of Bostonians, Mr. Cunard chose their city as his United States terminus. A wharf and docks at East Boston were leased to him rent free; and on June 2, 1840, the pioneer Cunarder Unicorn, 700 tons, entered the harbor. Boston had hardly recovered from the banquets given in her honor when the Bri- tannia steamed in, bearing Mr. Cunard himself; and a new set of festivities commenced. A fortnightly schedule of side-wheelers was soon established, greatly to the disgust of New York, which had only one trans- atlantic steam packet to Boston's four. In January, 1844, when Boston Harbor froze out to Fort Inde- pendence - an event that comes hardly once a genera- tion - the local merchants, to escape the jeers of New York, had a channel cut for the Britannia to get to sea.
The average length of the first thirty passages of Cunard liners to Boston, including the stop at Halifax, was one hour less than fifteen days. Within a decade, the time had been reduced by thirty hours. Rarely a
234
THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE
sailing packet would make better time than this on an eastward passage; but for westward passages the Emerald's record was never surpassed by a packet- ship, and seldom approached. The average was nearer forty days. A great Train packet-ship in the fifties once took fifty-six days to make Boston against west- erly gales, and a New York liner once required sixteen weeks. The sufferings of the Irish immigrants, who came to Boston in these and even less speedy and com- modious sailing vessels, were hardly inferior to those of the seventeenth-century Puritans who founded our first settlements.
The maritime enterprise of Massachusetts seemed to crumple up before the problem of steam navigation. On western waters the steamboat became an estab- lished institution before the Peace of Ghent; but Yan- kees, for a generation after, regarded a steamer trip as a reckless form of sport. They felt much safer under sail. The shipwrecks on a lee shore, broachings-to and "all hands lost," of which the interior read with horror, seemed light risks in comparison with bursting boilers, scalding steam, and "burning to the water's edge." Even within my recollection, old ladies would ask for a stateroom on the Bangor boat "as far as possible from the boiler."
Coastwise steam packet-lines were established very slowly. In 1817 a group of Salem men purchased in New York the steamboat Massachusetts, and attempted to establish a route between Salem and Boston. Al- though they advertised liberally in the newspapers, offering the public a trip around the bay at a dollar a head, no 'write-up' appeared, or passengers either. The Salem "Gazette" even described a "melancholy occurrence" on the Potomac, a steamboat accident with details "too shocking to relate," at a time when
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
the Massachusetts was trying to drum up trade. She was sold to the southward, and wrecked. A New Bedford-Nantucket service was attempted the next year in the Eagle, but withdrawn for want of patron- age. A tiny steam tug, the Merrimack, was placed on the Middlesex Canal in 1818, and several times at- tained Concord, New Hampshire; but proved a finan- cial failure.
Beyond a daily summer service to Nahant, which began in 1818, Boston had no steamboat facilities until 1824, when a Maine corporation established a line from Boston 'down East.' The Medford-built steam- boat Patent left Boston every Tuesday for Portland and Bath. There one could transfer to the steamboat Maine (a local product of two schooners' hulls, fas- tened catamaran fashion), for Boothbay, Owl's Head, Camden, Belfast, Sedgwick, Cranberry Isles, Lubec, and Eastport. The entire journey consumed five days, spending the nights in harbors along the coast. A di- rect line to the Penobscot was established in 1833, with the steamboat Bangor. Replaced by a larger boat in 1842, and sold to the Turkish government, this 160- foot sidewheeler cheerfully proceeded to Constanti- nople under her own steam, calling for coal at Nova Scotia, Fayal, Gibraltar, and Malta.
The remaining story of Massachusetts steam navi- gation before 1860 is one of costly failures in transat- lantic enterprises, ambitious projects that came to nothing, and a slow improvement in the down East, Nantucket and Long Island Sound service. Down to the Civil War steam played a very small part in the commerce of Massachusetts.
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THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE
Boston of 1830, already outgrown her original penin- sula, was unable to make land fast enough to prevent both commerce and population spilling over into near-by islands and necks. Charlestown was more populous in 1860 than the whole of Boston in 1800; and East Boston, which as Noddle's Island had just twenty-four inhabitants in 1825, passed the fifteen thousand mark within thirty years. East Boston owed its sudden rise to a shipbuilding industry, which in twenty years' time produced the finest sailing ships that the world had ever seen. Owing to lack of timber, which all New England shipyards had drawn from their immediate neighborhood and back-country, Bos- ton had declined as a shipbuilding center. In 1834 the pioneers of East Boston purchased land and erected a sawmill on Grand Island in Niagara River, transport- ing the timber to Boston by Erie Canal and Albany sailing packet. When Samuel Hall, of the old North River breed of master builders, established a yard at East Boston in 1837, the future of that place was assured.
No sooner had Boston acquired a municipal govern- ment than it resumed the process of pulling itself a few yards nearer the sea, by filling in the old Town Cove, whose creeks and docks ran up into the heart of the city. Josiah Quincy, the second mayor, turned out to be as far-sighted and enterprising in municipal affairs as he had been narrow-minded and reactionary in the affairs of the nation. His monument is Quincy Market and the surroundings; completed in 1827 at a cost of over a million dollars. Unlike modern municipal im- provements, Quincy Market not only paid for itself, but has returned a handsome income to the city. A stone's throw from the market was a new town wharf, where market boats could land their provisions. Com-
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
mercial Street was laid out to the northward along the heads of the wharves, filling up many a noisome dock on its way. To the southward, India and Broad Streets made the water-front until Atlantic Avenue cut off another bight of harbor in 1868.
Charles Bulfinch was employed in Washington from 1817 to 1830, and made few designs after his return. The mode of his successors in the public architecture of Boston, Isaiah Rogers, Ammi B. Young, and Alex- ander Parris, was the neo-classic, with heavy Doric pillars and pediment; their material, smooth Quincy granite, a stone without the mineral constituents to acquire an agreeable patina, but which takes on a cer- tain dingy impressiveness with age. Their masterpiece was the "new Custom House" constructed between 1837 and 1848 at the head of the tongue of water be- tween Central and Long Wharfs. Its classic pediment and monolithic granite pillars - each brought from Quincy by thirty-two yoke of oxen - now mask the foundations of the twentieth-century Custom House Tower.
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