USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 19
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"I repeat, and would dwell upon it (more as suggestion than mere fact) - among all the brilliant lights of bar or stage I have heard in my time ... I never had anything in the way of vocal utterance to shake me through and through, and become fix'd, with its accom- paniments, in my memory, like those prayers and sermons - like Father Taylor's personal electricity and the whole scene there - the prone ship in the gale, and dashing wave and foam for back-
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ground - in the little old sea-church in Boston, those summer Sun- days just before the secession war broke out."
The fame of Father Taylor was more widespread than that of any Massachusetts author or statesman, for it penetrated every part of the world visited by ships and sailors. When he died in 1871, "just as the tide turned, going out with the ebb as an old salt should," Father Taylor was mourned by thousands of humble folk who had never so much as heard of Emerson and Webster.
The coming of the Cunarders increased the morale of commercial Boston several hundred per cent. A New York paper admitted that Boston's trade with New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley equaled Man- hattan's. Boston is "gaining rapidly on her great rival, New York," crows Hayward's Gazeteer in 1846. "In arrivals from foreign ports, New York exceeded Boston in 1839, 606 vessels ... in 1844, only 34 ves- sels." So many of Boston's foreign entries were Nova Scotia schooners that the tonnage figures tell a differ- ent story; but her waterfront activity in the harbor, with close to three thousand foreign and six thousand coastwise entries a year, was prodigious. If Boston really expected to catch up with New York commerce, she was destined to disappointment; not even Yankee ingenuity could overcome the Hudson and the Erie. But in 1845 the most prosperous decade in the maritime history of Massachusetts was just beginning.
CHAPTER XVI SHIPS AND SEAMEN IN SOUTHERN SEAS 1820-1848
LITTLE change can be observed in the routes or the methods of Massachusetts commerce between 1815 and 1850. Maritime commerce is still a tale of the West Indies and South America, of Mediterranean and Baltic, of East Indies and China and South Seas, and of small coasters that assembled and distributed cargoes. Certain routes, like the New Orleans and the South American, rise greatly in importance; others, like the Northwest fur trade, decline; but no new ones were established, for the excellent reason that our pioneer shipmasters of the seventeen-nineties had traced every ocean-way that could be pursued with profit, until new folk-migrations made new markets in California, Australia, and South Africa.
In 1815 the old crew merely picked up the lines which war had loosed, and continued hauling to the old chanties. The bulk of our overseas trading was done by merchant-shipowners as before, men who owned fleets of vessels both large and small, traded with many countries on their own account, chartered their vessels or took freight for others when opportun- ity offered, distributed their cargoes by auction sales on the wharf or through their own wholesale stores in Boston. Commerce was still dominated by the men who had learned its secrets as captains and super- cargoes before the war.1
1 Of the twelve officers of the new Boston Chamber of Commerce founded in 1836, I recognize the names of all but three as prominent merchants and shipowners of the Federalist period.
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Besides the establishment of packet-lines, which we have already noted, one noteworthy change took place in maritime technique between 1815 and 1850 - an improvement in the design, rig, and handling of vessels. A shipmaster, retired since 1819, who took passage fifteen years later on a recent Boston-built ship, was astonished at her ability to carry sail, to beat to windward, and to "tack in a pint o' water." The Medford builders, in particular, had quietly evolved a new type of about 450 tons burthen which, handled by eighteen officers and men, would carry half as much freight as a British East-Indiaman of 1500 tons with a crew of 125, and sail half again as fast. Such a ship cost, in 1829, seventy dollars a ton to build or thirty dollars to charter for a China voyage; she could earn forty dollars a ton freight out and home and the in- surance rate was four per cent for the round passage, one per cent less than was charged Englishmen. More carrying capacity, and greater speed than older vessels of the same burthen, were obtained by greater length and depth in proportion to breadth, and a cleaner run. The bows are still bluff, but have sweeter water-lines than the older vessels. Longfellow has described the type in his "Building of the Ship":
Broad in the beam, but sloping aft With graceful curve and slow degrees, That she might be docile to the helm, And that the currents of parted seas, Closing behind, with mighty force, Might aid and not impede her course.
Iron was superseding rope for permanent lashings such as trusses, parrels, and the gammoning of bowsprits. Sails were now made of Lowell cotton duck, instead of Russia linen or baggy, porous hemp; and there were many more of them. Vessels of this period, in fact,
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carried a loftier rig in proportion to their length than the clipper ships. Skysails appear for the first time in our merchant fleet, and royal studdingsails - so small that the seamen called them the 'tub o'dusters.' Rus- sell Sturgis describes sailing from Manila to Gaspar Passage in 1844, with eleven sails set on the mainmast alone. Quarter-galleries, quick-work and gingerbread- work alike disappeared; leaving nothing of traditional adornment but a figure-head or billet-head, and a small scroll or shield on the transom. The clean, stripped, youthful-looking hulls, in marked contrast to the painted ladies of Federalist days, were clothed in dead black, relieved only by a bright waist, or white strip checquered by black ports.
In the shipbuilding boom that began about 1831, Maine overtook her parent Massachusetts. The great shipyards of the Sewalls and others on the Kennebec, St. George, and Penobscot rivers became serious com- petitors of the Mystic and Merrimac; and small coast- ing vessels were constructed all along the spruce- rimmed shore. Skeleton schooners and brigs crowded the shingle beaches at the head of rocky coves; then noisy with the cheerful clatter of shipbuilding, now si- lent from one year's end to another, save for scream of tern, and quork of blue heron.
Very different types of vessels were needed for dif- ferent routes. For the cotton-carrying trade the old- fashioned converging topsides were preferred, to in- crease stability with so light a cargo. But most ship- owners wanted vessels-of-all-work, as it were, which could be sent to any part of the world where chances were good and freights high. The finest type of the period was the Medford- or Merrimac-built East- Indiaman; seldom over five hundred tons burthen, and usually smaller; for the size of vessels was just begin-
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ning to increase. The Alert, which seemed so enormous to Dana after his California voyage in the brig Pilgrim, was but 113 feet long and 398 tons burthen. The Rajah, built by J. Stetson at Medford in 1836, 530 tons, 140 feet long, and 30 feet beam, is cited as "a fair specimen of our best freighting vessels." 1 They were not sharp ships, or clipper ships, or one-quarter the size of the most famous clippers; but they were the fastest and most economical ocean carriers of their generation. With their burly bows, lofty rig, flush decks, and bright waist or painted ports, these old Boston East-Indiamen have a certain charm that the clippers lack. Happy they, born in time to have seen such a ship rolling down from St. Helena, lee and weather studdingsails set alow and aloft, tanned and bearded sailors on her decks and Anjer monkeys chat- tering in her rigging, wafting an aroma of the Far East into the chilly waters of Massachusetts Bay.
From 1815 to 1840 Yankee seamen still existed. A strong minority, in some cases a majority, of foreign- ers, especially Johnny Bulls and Scandinavians, could be found in the forecastle of almost every Massachu- setts vessel. But the greater part of most crews were native Yankee. 'Crimping' had not yet become the usual method of shipping a crew. Wages were lower
1 In the Newburyport yards, the Volant of 457 tons, launched in 1810, held the record for size until 1836, when John Currier, Jr., built the Columbus, 594 tons, for the Black Ball Line. The next record-breakers in size were the Flavio, 698 (1839), St. George, 845 (1843), and Castillian, 1000 (1850). In the Medford yards, no vessel over 435 tons was built between 1810 and 1832. The first over 500 tons came in 1834, over 600 in 1837, over 800 in 1839, and the thousand-ton mark was touched in 1849. The yards of Bath, Maine, first passed the 500-ton mark in 1836. In 1841 the Sewalls built the Rappahannock, 1133 tons, for the cotton trade. She was too large to be profitable, and it is said that freight dropped a quarter of a cent a pound whenever she appeared at New Orleans. Not until 1852 did the Bath yards build another vessel above 1000 tons.
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THE MEDFORD-BUILT EAST-INDIAMAN COLUMBIANA, 1837
SHIP DROMO OFF MARSEILLES, 1836 DEEP-SEA TYPES OF THE THIRTIES
SHIPS AND SEAMEN IN SOUTHERN SEAS
than in Federalist days - eight dollars a month for boys, ten for ordinary and twelve for able seamen on long voyages - but good men were still attracted by the chance to rise, for vessels were small, and the pro- portion of officers to men about one to four or five. It was not uncommon for youngsters of the best families to ship before the mast, although these ship's cousins, as the regular seamen called them, generally bunked in steerage or 'tween-decks, and played the gentleman ashore. "Sailors are the best dressed of mankind," wrote Emerson in 37° 4' North, 36° II' West. They still wore a distinctive costume; shiny black tarpaulin hat, red-checked shirt, blue bell-mouthed dungaree trousers, navy-blue pea-jacket or watch-coat off the Horn; and for shore leave, a fathom of black ribbon for the hat, black silk kerchief in a neat sailor's knot around the neck, white ducks and black pumps.
The standard of seamanship was never higher. No man could be rated an able seaman until he became an expert in the beautiful splicing, seizing, parceling, graffing, pointing, worming, and serving which was included in the old-time art of rigging. Even an ordi- nary seaman was expected, "to hand, reef and steer, ... to be able to reeve all the studdingsail gear, and set a topgallant or royal studdingsail out of the top; to loose and furl a royal, and a small topgallant-sail or flying jib; and perhaps, also to send down or cross a royal yard." Constant, hard work was the rule. No 'sogering' was allowed on Yankee vessels, and the treatment of the men was sometimes unnecessarily harsh, as Dana relates. Medicine chests were carried, and many a stern master nursed a sick seaman back to health in the cabin. But how these deep-sea sailor- men must have laughed at the unconscious humor of Dr. Lowe's "Sailor's Guide to Health" which accom-
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panied the medicine chests! Among the rules in this omniscient manual were, "Use tobacco sparingly if at all"; "Eat freely of vegetables, especially on long voy- ages"; "Observe regular hours for sleep"; and "Select an anchorage to the windward of the land."
It was no laughing matter, however, for a sick sea- man who fell under the care of a captain's wife, so conscientious as Mrs. William Cleveland, of the Salem ship Zephyr. This good lady relates in her journal for 1829, how, "intending to be on the safe and cautious side," while in the fever-infested waters of Timor, she gave a chilly sailor "a powerful dose of Calomel and Jalap which was afterward followed by a dose of castor oil and numerous injections, blisters upon the calf of both legs after soaking them well in hot water, a blister on the breast, throat rubbed with Cinnamon, &c. He complained of no pain excepting the headache .. . soon after, delirium came on, which continued but a short time when he appeared to fall into a gentle quiet sleep ," - and passed away.
This voyage of the Zephyr is the earliest instance that has come to my notice of a Massachusetts ship- master taking his wife to sea. The practice never be- came general until after the Civil War, but on short voyages was not uncommon in the forties. Captain Caleb Sprague, of Barnstable, master of the ship North Bend, writes from Bordeaux in 1844, "There is 9 American Vessels here and 5 of the Capts. have their Wifes .... we have had more invitations to dine than we have wish'd as the dinners in this Country are very Lengthy say from 3 to 4 houres before you rise from the Table and than not dry for Wine etc." No wonder Mrs. Sprague acquired a nautical turn of speech, re- marking that an ill-fitting suit of clothes on her small boy "set like a shirt on a marlin-spike."
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As for eating and drinking, the age of rum was pass- ing, and the age of canned goods not arrived. Water, hard-tack, molasses, and 'salt horse' were the stand- bys. Colored sea-cooks compounded these maritime staples into the questionable amalgams which Rufus Choate described in one of his glowing periods as the "nutritious hash, succulent lob-scouse, and palatable dandy-funk." At Anjer, where hogs, chickens, and fresh vegetables were incredibly cheap, shipmasters laid in a store of them; but before long sarcastic grunts and crows informed the quarterdeck that Jack wanted his salt junk again. As one old shell-back asserted: "Yer may talk of yer flummadiddlers and fiddlepad- dles, but when it comes down to gen-u-ine grub, there ain't nothing like good old salt hoss that yer kin eat afore yer turns in and feel it all night a-laying in yer stummick and a-nourishin' of yer."
Seafaring, at best, was a rough, dangerous calling, and often rendered unbearable by the brutality of master or mate. The humanitarian movement of the eighteen-thirties made a few feeble attempts to pro- tect Jack from injustice and extortion. A federal statute of 1835 prescribed severe punishment for an officer who "from malice, hatred or revenge" shall "beat, wound or imprison" a member of his crew, or inflict "any cruel or unusual punishment." An act of 1840 gave a United States consul the power to dis- charge, with three months' advance pay, a seaman of whose cruel treatment he was convinced. It would seem, however, that those laws remained a dead letter, and that the shipmaster's despotism, benevolent or otherwise, remained unimpaired. Unscrupulous law- yers, inducing disgruntled seamen to bring action on flimsy grounds, so discredited the value of Jack's testi- mony that juries would seldom convict on it. And as
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United States consuls in those days received no sal- ary, but depended for their livelihood on commission business, they seldom had the courage to affront own- ers or officers.
Nevertheless, a foremast hand on a Yankee East- Indiaman was the best paid, best fed, and most com- petent sailor in the world, regarded by coasters, fisher- men, whalers, and man-o'-war's-men, as the top-dog of his profession. And the officers must no more be judged by the brutality of Captain Thompson than other professions by their black sheep. A Yankee ship- master, in 1840, was the world's standard in ability and in conduct. The Massachusetts merchant marine was commanded for the most part by men of high charac- ter and education; navigators who could work lunars as well as Bowditch himself, and who inherited all the practical seamanship of the old school; "merchant- captains" who owned part of their vessel, and had full responsibility in trading. Most of the famous clipper- ship commanders had their training during the thirties and forties, which we may fairly call the golden age of the American merchant marine.
The old Northwest fur trade was resumed in 1815 by several Boston firms which had long been engaged in it. Captain 'Bill' Sturgis, now head of Bryant & Stur- gis, and Josiah Marshall, a countryman from Billerica who had built up an importing business at Boston during the Federalist period, were now the most active Nor'westmen. The letters of these firms show little change in method, but a decline in profits. Competi- tors were many; the Hudson's Bay Company, the Northwest Fur Company, American fur-traders who
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operated from St. Louis, and the Russians, who threat- ened to monopolize all. In consequence, the sea-otter became too scarce and high to continue an important medium for China. Between 1821 and 1830 the vessels annually engaged in the Northwest fur trade declined from about thirteen to two. For some years longer William H. Bordman, Jr., and Perkins & Co. found it profitable to carry supplies to Sitka and the Hudson Bay posts. But by 1837 the old Northwest fur trade, Boston's high-school of commerce for forty years, was a thing of the past. 1
When the fur-traders departed, the settlers began to arrive. Hall J. Kelley, an energetic and erratic Bos- ton schoolmaster, founded in 1829 an Oregon Coloniza- tion Society, which was supported by Edward Everett and other prominent men. His plans for peopling the banks of the Columbia with picked New Englanders came to naught, but his activities turned the minds of restless Yankees to that region. One of his associates, a Cambridge ice-man named Nathaniel J. Wyeth, led overland in 1834 the first group of permanent settlers to the Oregon country.
In the meantime another outpost of Massachusetts had been founded, at Honolulu. In 1819 a band of Congregational missionaries and three native Hawai- ians, "formed into a Church of Christ" at Park Street, Boston, took passage around the Horn on the brig Thaddeus, to convert the heathen. On April 4, 1820, one hundred and sixty-three days out of Boston, this Hawaiian Mayflower anchored abreast the village of Kailua, where the king and queen, with hundreds 1
1 In 1831 Captain Dominis, of Josiah Marshall's brig Owhyhee, tried the experiment of bringing pickled Columbia River salmon to Boston. It sold for fourteen dollars a barrel, but the Treasury Department made Marshall pay duty on it, as if purchased outside the United States, and the venture was not repeated.
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of their subjects, were playing in the surf. Later in the day the royal family was entertained at dinner on the brig's quarterdeck. King Liholiho, dressed in a feather wreath, a string of beads, and a loincloth, was introduced to the missionaries' wives, while George Tamoree, a graceless native member of the party, fur- nished music for the meal on an orthodox bass viol.
The Boston missionaries arrived in the nick of time, partially to offset the demoralization introduced by Bos- ton traders and Nantucket whalers. The latter were just beginning to use the Islands as a base; the traders, as we have seen, had been coming for a generation past. It so happened that the panic of 1819, making it difficult to procure specie for China, coincided with a new reign in the Sandwich Islands, which took the lid off the sandalwood traffic. Kamehameha I had con- served this important natural resource, so much in demand at Canton. But Liholiho, a weak-minded and dissolute prince, cheerfully stripped his royal domain in order to gratify tastes which the Boston traders stimulated. They sold him on credit rum and brandy, gin and champagne, carriages and harnesses, clothes and furniture, boats and vessels; until he had tonnage and liquor enough for an old-time yacht club cruise.
In 1820 Josiah Marshall sent out from Boston two small brigs, which were exchanged for sandalwood at Honolulu. Bryant & Sturgis dispatched under the command of Captain John Suter, the veteran Nor'- westman, a veritable fleet consisting of the ships Tar- tar and Mentor, brigs Lascar, Becket, and Cleopatra's Barge. The latter was a famous vessel. Built at Salem in 1816 for George Crowninshield, Jr., a young gentleman of leisure, she had taken him on a trans- atlantic yachting cruise. Sold for a song after his death, she made a trading voyage to Brazil, and was
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1
!
1
BRIG CLEOPATRA'S BARGE, AS HAWAIIAN ROYAL YACHT
SHIPS AND SEAMEN IN SOUTHERN SEAS
then purchased by Bryant & Sturgis. The Hawaiian monarch gave in exchange for her an amount of sandal- wood worth fifty to ninety thousand dollars, and made her his royal yacht.1 Her outward cargo, typical of the trade, is listed on the annexed bill of health. Pos- sibly its rhythmic phrasing is accidental. But General Henry A. S. Dearborn, who as collector of the port of Boston signed this document, was something of a lit- térateur. Did the romantic name and history of the Cleopatra's Barge inspire him to premature effort in free verse?
The Barge was as long as the ship Columbia, but some of the schooners and brigs that our Pacific trad- ers sent around the Horn to Hawaii were even smaller than Captain Ingraham's brig Hope or John Boit's sloop Union. James Hunnewell, of Charlestown, who established a famous mercantile firm at Honolulu, brought out in 1826 a crank, leaky little schooner called the Missionary Packet, only fifty-four feet long, thirteen feet beam, six feet depth, and thirty-nine tons burthen. His passage of the Horn almost ended his career, and the single voyage took nine months. While resting at Honolulu after his hard experience, Hunnewell was pulled out of bed by a party of rollick- ing whalemen, and induced to treat the crowd from his cargo of rum. Disliking the quality of the liquor, they forced the owner to sample it himself before letting him go!
This genial traffic continued about ten years, when sandalwood became a drug in the Canton market, and all but extinct on the Islands. In the meantime New
1 The illustration, from a sketch made by Charles S. Stewart, one of the missionaries, in 1823, shows the Cleopatra's Barge under Hawaiian colors at Lahaina anchorage, island of Maui. Originally rigged as a brigantine or hermaphrodite brig, she was altered to a brig when she became a merchant vessel.
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Bedford and Nantucket whalers were flocking to Hawaii, to 'recruit,' as they called it, with fresh pro- visions and Kanakas. As many as sixty put in at Honolulu in 1822, and in 1844 the total arrivals of whaling craft surpassed four hundred. Their presence greatly increased the difficulties of the missionaries, but proved a godsend to the merchantmen whose holds they lined with oil and whalebone, obtained in Arctic and Japanese whaling grounds. At the same time the native demand for American manufactures was increasing. Hawaii by 1830 had become the com- mercial Gibraltar of the Pacific; the basis of a trade, by Massachusetts merchants there established, with California, Canton, Kamchatka, and the smaller South Sea islands. Honolulu, with whalemen and mer- chant sailors rolling through its streets, shops filled with Lowell shirtings, New England rum and Yankee notions, orthodox missionaries living in frame houses brought around the Horn, and a neo-classic meeting- house built out of coral blocks, was becoming as Yankee as New Bedford. "Could I have forgotten the circum- stances of my visit," wrote a visiting mariner in 1833, "I should have fancied myself in New England." 1 Even the first constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, issued by Kamehameha III under missionary influ- ence, had a flavor of the old Massachusetts theocracy: "No law shall be enacted which is at variance with the word of the Lord Jehovah."
The Boston firms interested in Hawaii extended their operations to other South Pacific islands, violat- ing the old demarcation line at the expense of Salem.
1 Francis Warriner, Cruise of the U.S. Frigate Potomac (1835), 224. Daniel Webster about 1840 tried a case at Barnstable, Cape Cod, that involved the nature of the entrance to the "harbor of Owhyhee." It was unnecessary to call in experts, as seven members of the jury were in- timately acquainted with said harbor.
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Josiah Marshall's brig Inore, Eliah Grimes master, even went to the Marquesas in search of edible birds' nests, but without success. A typical South Sea voyage was that of James Hunnewell's ship Tsar, Sam Ken- nedy master, a new vessel built for the Russian trade, and purchased from J. William Ropes for $28,000. Although of 470 tons burthen, the Tsar required no more men to handle her than a Nor'westman of one- quarter her size in the eighteenth century; for the South Sea was becoming safer than the Caribbean. Clearing from Boston in the spring of 1848, the Tsar stopped four days at Rio Janeiro, rounded the Horn, and let the trade-winds bring her to the enchanting island of Tahiti. For six weeks she rode at anchor in the landlocked harbor of Papeete (white crescent beach, border of palms, orange and banana trees, half concealing white cottages and thatched huts; back- drop of verdure-clad mountains, and slumbrous pour of surf on barrier reefs). Goods were sold to the amount of $23,712.20, including codfish, lumber, rice, Lowell and Amoskeag cottons, German glass, iron safes, needles and thread, drugs and gravestones. Some of the knobs dropped off the safes when swung out of the hold; one of the packages marked "Tartar Emetic" contained calomel; and one of the grave- stones, intended apparently for the Salem market, was already inscribed, "Sacred to the Memory of Maria Peabody." Otherwise everything was in good order.
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