USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 2
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The ocean knows no favorites. Her bounty is re- served for those who have the wit to learn her secrets, the courage to bear her buffets, and the will to persist, through good fortune and ill, in her rugged service.
CHAPTER II THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 1602-1760
THE maritime history of Massachusetts, so far as white men are concerned, began when some Basque or Norman or "Portingale" unknown, blown off Grand Banks by an easterly gale, found shelter under the lee of Cape Cod or Cape Ann. Finding the Indians ready to truck, and the adjacent waters teeming with fish, he and his kind returned. By the time the Mayflower sailed, one could find men in any fishing port from Bristol to Bilbao who could tell the bearings of Cape Ann from Cape Cod, and compare the holding-ground in every harbor from Narragansett to Passamaquoddy. When the Pilgrims were casting about for a permanent settlement, the Mayflower's pilot recommended "a good harbor on the other headland of the bay, almost right over against Cape Cod ... in which he had been once." They would have fared better had they taken this seaman's advice.
Bartholomew Gosnold visited Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands in 1602, and named them. De Champlain, two years later, made a good harbor chart of Gloucester ("le Beau Port"), fought with natives at Nauset ("Mallebarre"), and looked în at the site of Boston; but New France he preferred to build along the mighty outlet of the Great Lakes. The Onrust sailed around Cape Cod to Nahant, and returned to Manhattan.
Captain John Smith, in 1614, was the first English- man to examine the Massachusetts coast, and to give
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THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
it that name. Erecting his fish-flakes (wooden frames for drying fish) on the Island of Monhegan, he sent one shipload to England, and another to Spain, where it fetched five Spanish dollars the quintal. The six months' voyage cleared fifteen hundred pounds. In the meantime he explored the coast, and told the world about it in his "Description of New England," a sane, conservative exposition of the natural advan- tages of Massachusetts. For his pioneer work, sound advice, and hearty support of the Pilgrim colony, John Smith should rightly be regarded as the founder of maritime Massachusetts. Yet in all our glut of tercentenaries, this honest, valiant captain has been forgotten. No monument or tablet commemorates his services in the region of his choice.
Stirred by Captain Smith's writings, and still more by his success, English fishermen began to crowd their Celtic rivals from New England waters. Now, Smith himself had urged his countrymen to save time and "overhead" by basing the fisheries in New England, and combining them with fur-trading and shipbuild- ing; rather than sending out fresh crews and equipment every summer. In 1623 the "Dorchester Adven- turers," a group of West-County capitalists, endeav- ored to put his suggestion into practice. A crew of men landed at the site of Stage Fort Park on Glouces- ter Harbor, built huts, flakes and a fishing stage, commenced tillage, and drew plans for a fishing- trading colony, with church, school, and shipyards. The immediate experiment failed (though not before a full fare had been sent to Spain); but the promoters were reorganized as the "Governor and Company of the Massachusetts-Bay," with a title to all land be- tween the Merrimac and the Charles, from sea to sea.
In the meantime, the Plymouth Colony had arrived.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
The Pilgrim fathers sailed with high hopes and a burning faith, but with few preparations and no clear idea of how to make a living on the Atlantic coast. Intending to "finde some place aboute Hudsons river for their habitation," the "deangerous shoulds and roring breakers" about Monomoy forced the Mayflower to "bear up againe for the Cape." Had the sands of Cape Cod afforded a sustenance, they might well have tarried at the site of Provincetown. But the cleared Indian cornfields across the bay, vacant through a providential pestilence, tempted them to the spot named Plymouth on Captain Smith's map.
Save for the overwhelming need of saving precious lives, this choice was unfortunate. Plymouth was deeply embayed, devoid of a dry landing place or anchorage for large vessels; and ill provided with back country. The Pilgrims learned the secrets of fur-trad- ing and fishing only after costly failures. They were mercilessly exploited by English financiers. For two generations they owned no great shipping. Reën- forced by the Puritan emigration of a later decade, they eventually spread out along Cape Cod, the South Shore, and Buzzard's Bay. Their faith and courage are beyond disparagement; but had Massachusetts been peopled alone by the Pilgrim seed, it would long have remained a mere slender line of cornfields, trucking posts, and fishing stations.
In 1630, ten years after its settlement, the Plymouth Colony contained but three hundred white people. At that time the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, founded only at the end of 1628, had over two thousand in- habitants. Within thirteen years the numbers had reached sixteen thousand, more than the rest of the English colonies combined; and the characteristic maritime activities of Massachusetts - fishing, ship-
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THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
ping, and West India trading - were already com- menced.
It was not the intention of the founders of Massa- chusetts-Bay to establish a predominantly maritime community. The first and foremost object of Winthrop and Dudley and Endecot and Saltonstall was to found a church and commonwealth in which Calvinist Pu- ritans might live and worship according to the Word of God, as they conceived it. They aimed to found a New England, purged of Old England's corruptions, but preserving all her goodly heritage. They intended the economic foundation of New England, as of Old England and Virginia, to be large landed estates, tilled by tenants and hired labor.
In this they failed. The New England town, based on freehold and free labor, sprang up instead of the Old English manor. And for only a decade was agriculture the mainstay of Massachusetts. The constant inflow of immigrants, requiring food and bringing goods, enabled the first comers to profit by corn-growing and cattle-raising. This could not con- tinue. "For the present, we make a shift to live," wrote a pessimistic pioneer in 1637; "but hereafter, when our numbers increase, and the fertility of the soil doth decrease, if God discover not means to enrich the land, what shall become of us I will not deter- mine."
God performed no miracle on the New England soil. He gave the sea. Stark necessity made seamen of would-be planters. The crisis came in 1641, when civil war in England cut short the flow of immigrants. "All foreign commodities grew scarce," wrote Gover- nor Winthrop, "and our own of no price. Corn would buy nothing; a cow which cost last year £20 might now be bought for 4 or £5 ... These straits set our people
II
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
on work to provide fish, clapboards, plank, etc., ... and to look out to the West Indies for a trade ... "
In these simple sentences, Winthrop explains how maritime Massachusetts came to be. The gravelly, boulder-strewn soil was back-breaking to clear, and afforded small increase to unscientific farmers. No staple of ready sale in England, like Virginia tobacco or Canadian beaver, could be produced or readily obtained. Forest, farms, and sea yielded lumber, beef, and fish. But England was supplied with these from the Baltic, and by her own farmers and fishermen. Un- less a new market be found for them, Massachusetts must stew in her own juice. It was found in the West Indies - tropical islands which applied slave labor to exotic staples like sugar-cane, but imported every ne- cessity of life. More and more they became dependent on New England for lumber, provisions, and dried fish. More and more the New England ships and mer- chants who brought these necessities, controlled the distribution of West-India products.
Massachusetts went to sea, then, not of choice, but of necessity. Yet the transition was easy and natural. "Farm us!" laughed the waters of the Bay in May- time, to a weary yeoman, victim of the ‘mocking spring's perpetual loss.' "Here thou may'st reap without sowing - yet not without God's blessing; 't was the Apostles' calling." And with sharp scorn spake the waters to an axeman, hewing a path from river landing to new allotment: "Hither thy road! And of the oak thou wastest, make means to ride it! Southward, dull clod, and barter the logs thou would'st spend to warm thy silly body, for chinking doubloons, as golden as the sunlight that bathes the Spanish main."
Materials and teachers for a maritime colony were
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THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
already at hand. The founders had been careful to secure artisans, and tools for all useful trades, that Massachusetts might not have the one-sided devel- opment of Virginia. Fishing had not ceased with the failure of the Gloucester experiment. Dorchester, the first community "that set upon the trade of fishing in the bay," was little more than a transference to New England soil of Dorset fishing interests. Scituate was settled by a similar company. The rocky peninsula of Marblehead, with its ample harbor, attracted fisher- folk from Cornwall and the Channel Islands, who cared neither for Lord Bishop nor Lord Brethren. Their descendants retained a distinct dialect, and a
jealous exclusiveness for over two centuries. Marble- head obeyed or not the laws of the Great and General Court, as suited her good pleasure; but as long as she 'made fish,' the Puritan magistrates did not interfere. Literally true was the Marblehead fisherman's reproof to an exhorting preacher: "Our ancestors came not here for religion. Their main end was to catch fish!"
Equally true was Marblehead's protest against an export tax in 1669. "Fish is the only great stapple which the Country produceth for forraine parts and is so benefitiall for making returns for what wee need." The firm-fleshed codfish of northern waters is unsur- passed for salting and drying. Colonial Massachusetts packed three grades. Dun fish, the best, was 'made' by alternately burying and drying the larger-sized cod until it mellowed sufficiently for the taste of Catho- lic Europe. Portugal and Spain, where Captain John Smith sold his first fare, Southern France and the 'Western' and 'Wine' Islands, were the markets for dun fish; and for barrel- and pipe-staves as well. In exchange, Cadiz salt; Madeira and Canary wine; Bilbao iron and pieces of eight; Malaga grapes and
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Valencia oranges were carried to English and colonial markets. When Charles II began tightening up colo- nial trade, Sir George Downing, of Harvard's first graduating class, saw to it that this Mediterranean traffic was allowed to continue. The middling grade , of dried codfish, easy to transport, to keep, and to prepare, was a favorite winter food of colonial farm- ers. The lowest-grade dried fish, together with pickled mackerel, bass, and alewives, was the principal me- dium in West-India trade. As John Smith predicted, "Nothing is here to be had which fishing doth hinder, but further us to obtain." Puritan Massachusetts de- rived her ideals from a sacred book; her wealth and power from the sacred cod.
Shipping was the other key industry of the colony. Fishing would have brought little wealth, had Massa- chusetts depended on outside interests for vessels - as she must to-day for freight-cars. Distribution, not production, brought the big returns in 1620 as in 1920. Massachusetts shipbuilding began with the launching in 1631 of Governor Winthrop's Blessing of the Bay, on the same Mystic River that later gave birth to the beautiful Medford-built East-Indiamen. By 1660 shipbuilding had become a leading industry in New- bury, Ipswich, Gloucester, Salem, and Boston. The great Puritan emigration brought many shipwrights and master builders, such as William Stephen, who "prepared to go to Spayne, but was persuaded to New England." A four-hundred-ton ship Seafort 1 was built
1 The method of computing tonnage in colonial times was probably the same that prevailed in the United States from the Revolution to 1865. Tonnage meant a vessel's capacity in tons of forty cubic feet each, estimated by the following formula (L = length on deck, B = greatest breadth, D = depth of hold):
(L-3/5 B) X B X D
95
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THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
at Boston in 1648, but wrecked on the Spanish coast, decoyed by false lights ashore.
Few Massachusetts-built vessels were so large as this; four hundred tons meant a great ship as late as 1815. The colonial fleet for the most part consisted of small single-decked sloops, the usual rig for coasters, and lateen-rigged ketches, the favorite rig for fisher- men, of twenty to thirty tons burthen, and thirty-five to fifty feet long.1 Good oak timber and pine spars were so plentiful that building large ships on order or specu- lation for the English market soon became a recognized industry. Rope-walks were established, hempen sail- cloth was made on hand looms, anchors and coarse iron- work were forged from bog ore, and wooden 'trunnels' (tree nails) were used for fastening planking to frame.
The English Navigation Act of 1651, restraining colonial commerce to English and colonial vessels, gave an increased impetus to New England ship- building; for the Dutch, with their base at New Am- sterdam, had been serious competitors. In another generation, vessels built and owned in New England were doing the bulk of the carrying trade from Chesa- peake Bay to England and southern Europe. "Many a fair ship had her framing and finishing here," wrote Edward Johnson about 1650, "besides lesser vessels, barques and ketches; many a Master, beside common Seamen, had their first learning in this Colony."
Half the breadth was generally used in lieu of depth after the War of 1812, and sometimes so used as early as 1789. William Stephen in 1661 contracted to build for Salem parties a two-decked ship, 91 X 23 × 9} at £3.5 per ton. Her tonnage would be 190. The Mayflower's was 180 (according to Bradford), but she was probably somewhat shorter and deeper.
1 See the model of the ketch Sparrow-Hawk, which brought forty passengers to Plymouth Colony in 1626, in the Peabody Museum, Salem; and her very ribs, preserved for two centuries in Cape Cod sand, now in the basement of Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
The shipmaster's calling has always been of high repute in Massachusetts. Only the clergy, the magis- tracy, and the shipowning merchants, most of whom were retired master mariners, enjoyed a higher social standing in colonial days. The ship Trial of two hun- dred tons, one of the first vessels built at Boston, was commanded by Mr. Thomas Coytmore, a gentleman of good estate, "a right godly man, and an expert seaman," says Governor Winthrop - who made his fourth matrimonial venture with Captain Coytmore's widow. The foremast hands were recruited in part from English seaports, but mostly from the adventure- loving youth of the colonies. When Captain John Turner came back from the West Indies in a fifteen- ton pinnace, with so many pieces of eight that the neighbors hissed "Piracy!"; when the Trial "by the help of a diving tub," recovered gold and silver from a sunken Spanish galleon; what ploughboy did not long for a sea-change from grubbing stumps and splitting staves? When gray November days succeeded the splendor of Indian summer, the clang of wild geese overhead summoned the spirit of youth to wealth and adventure
"Là-bas, où les Antilles bleues Se pâment sous l'ardeur de l'astre occidental."
A sea voyage, moreover, was an easy escape from the strict conventions and prying busybodies of New England towns. Not even Cotton Mather could ex- tend the long arm of Puritan elder into cabin and fore- castle. "It is a matter of saddest complaint that there should be no more Serious Piety in the Sea-faring Tribe," states his "Sailours Companion and Counsel- lor." "Old Ambrose called the Sea, The School of Vertue. It afflicts all the vertuous here, that the Mari-
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THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
ners of our Dayes do no more to make it so." His sub- sequent enumeration of seamen's vices suggests that the clipper-ship crews could have taught little to these sons of pious Puritan households. "No Sundays off soundings" doubtless held good in the seventeenth century as in the nineteenth.
Edward Randolph, an unfriendly but accurate Eng- lish observer, describes Massachusetts in 1676 as a thriving maritime colony. Thirty of her merchants have fortunes of ten to twenty thousand pounds. The colony feeds itself, and produces a surplus for export to Virginia and the West Indies, as well as "all things necessary for shipping and naval furniture." Four hundred and thirty vessels between thirty and two hundred and fifty tons burthen "are built in and belong to that jurisdiction." They traffic with the West Indies, and with most parts of Europe, carrying their own or other colonies' produce, distributing re- turn ladings throughout continental colonies and West Indies, "so that there is little left for the merchants residing in England to import into any of the planta- tions." They pay no attention to the English laws regulating trade. They have even sent ships to 'Scanderoon' (Alexandretta); to Guinea, the slave mart; and to Madagascar, the pirate rendezvous. Randolph's conclusion is significant. "It is the great care of the merchants to keep their ships in constant employ, which makes them trye all ports to force a trade, whereby they abound with all sorts of commodi- ties, and Boston may be esteemed the mart town of the West Indies."
Colonial Massachusetts, then, was a chain of pros- perous trading towns and fishing villages, separated from the wilderness by a belt of farming communities. The key industries were fishing and shipbuilding.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
The secret of maritime success was that persistent ·enterprise which led her merchant-shipowners to "trye all ports" and to risk all freights.
Even farming Massachusetts clung to coast-line or Connecticut River, a feeder of the Sound ports. Worcester County was a wilderness until 1730. For over a century after the Mayflower's voyage, few Massachusetts farms were more than thirty miles distant from tidewater, and all felt the ebb and flow of sea-borne commerce. "If the merchant trade be not kept on foot, they fear greatly their corne and cattel will lye in their hands," writes Edward Johnson. A Yankee farmer prospered only through foreign markets for his industrial by-products, such as bar- reled beef and pork, hewn lumber and staves; bowls, buckets, brooms, ox-bows, axe-helves, and the like, whittled out by firelight in long winter evenings. The influence of West-India trade and the fisheries pene- trated the remotest frontier settlements of New Eng- land.
The half-century of peace and virtual independence, which permitted this extraordinary development, was followed by forty years of war, Indian massacres, pestilence, witchcraft, and loss of liberty. In 1691 the Massachusetts-Bay Colony was combined with Ply- mouth, the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nan- tucket, and the provinces of Maine and Sagadahoc, under a royal charter as the "Province of Massa- chusetts-Bay." Imperial control was tightened, but not enough to prevent another outburst of prosperity after the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.
That date begins a general broadening-out in all
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THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
lines of marine activity. In codfishing it marks an era, both by the launching of the first schooner at Glouces- ter, and the British acquisition of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, with their convenient shores and teeming waters. Admission to the French West Indies in 1717 extended our fish market, and increased our impor- tations of molasses, until sixty-three Massachusetts distilleries were running full time. New England rum replaced beer and cider as the favorite American beverage, and supplanted French brandy as medium in the 'Guinea trade.' Slaving - popular tradition and Faneuil1 Hall to the contrary notwithstanding - never became a leading interest of Massachusetts; Boston and Salem as slaving ports were poor rivals to Newport. But most Boston merchants owned slaves as house servants, and bought and sold them like other merchandise.
Massachusetts also traded with the mainland of South America. At Surinam fish and lumber were ex- changed for the products of the Dutch East Indies; at Honduras logwood and mahogany were cut for the London market. New England provisions even found their way into Brazil by way of Madeira.
Shipbuilding increased so rapidly that in 1724 sev- eral master builders of London petitioned the Lords of Trade "not to encourage ship building in New England because workmen are drawn thither." Dux- bury shipbuilding began in 1719, when Thomas Prince built his first vessel of wild cherry wood; and the North River became a serious competitor to the Merrimac.
In 1713, the merchants of Boston proposed "the Erecting of a Light Hous and Lanthorn" at the
1 Properly pronounced "Funnel," and so spelled on Peter's tomb- stone. But the last generation of schoolma'ms has taught us to call it "Fan-you-well."
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
harbor entrance; and three years later Boston Light, the first lighthouse in the new world, was completed. "A great Gun to answer Ships in a Fog" was shortly added to its equipment. Marine insurance began at Boston a few years later. Offshore whaling was per- haps the most important development of the half- century before the Revolution. Cape Cod taught Nan- tucket how to harpoon whales, but Nantucket went her teacher one better when in 1715 Christopher Hussey fitted out a vessel to pursue sperm whales, and tow them ashore. A few years later, by erecting brick try-works on shipboard, the Nantucket whalers were able to extend their cruising radius to the coast of Brazil and the Arctic Ocean.
Massachusetts enjoyed peace for three-quarters of the period from 1713 to the Revolution. In war-time her fishing fleet was dismantled, but the fishermen found exciting employment on armed merchantmen bearing letters of marque and reprisal. A typical Massachusetts-built vessel of the larger class, subject of our unique pre-Revolutionary ship portrait, was the Bethel, owned by the Quincy family.1 Armed with fourteen guns and carrying thirty-eight men, she captured in 1748 by sheer Yankee bluff a Spanish treasure ship of twenty-four guns and one hundred and ten men, "worth the better part of an hundred thousand pounds sterling." So congenial, in fact, did our provincial seamen find privateering, that many could not bear to give it up when peace was concluded. In consequence, not a few were hanged in chains on Bird Island or Nix's Mate, whereby every passing sea- man might gain a moral lesson.
Boston increased .in population from about seven thousand in 1690 to about seventeen thousand in 1740.
1 The c in this name is pronounced like z.
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LETTER-OF-MARQUE SHIP BETHEL, OF BOSTON, 1748
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
It was the largest town in the English colonies until 1755, when passed by Philadelphia, and "the principal mart of trade in North America" for a much longer period. "Boston Pier or the Long Wharf," built in 1710, extended King (now State) Street some two thousand feet into deep water. Wealthy merchants came from overseas to share the results of Puritan thrift and energy. Thomas Amory, of London, after visiting Lisbon, Amsterdam, Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, found Boston their superior in com- mercial activity, and settled there in 1720. .
A fresh tide of immigration was beginning to flow into Massachusetts Bay, and a good part of it was non- English. The Yankee race, in fact, had never been all English. Were I asked to mention two Massachusetts families who generation after generation sent their sons to sea, I should name the Devereux and the Delano, both of French origin. In Mr. Whitmore's blue-book of Boston provincial society, about one- third of the families are of non-English origin; prin- cipally French and Scots, like the Faneuils and Bow- doins, Shaws and Cunninghams, but including Ger- mans like Caspar Crowninshield and Dutchmen like John Wendell. Irishmen like Patrick Tracy, of New- buryport, and Captain James Magee, of Boston, rose to eminence in maritime pursuits, and married into the old Puritan families. Thomas Bardin, a Welshman, founded the Hanover forge where North River vessels obtained their anchors and ironwork. Another Welsh- man taught Lynn to specialize in women's shoes, which before the Revolution became an important medium in the coasting trade.
Equally false are two contrasting notions: - the one that New England was of 'pure Anglo-Saxon stock' at the Revolution; the other that the Revo-
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