USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 9
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Tradition, love of adventure, desire to see the world, and the social prestige of the shipmaster's calling were partly responsible for Yankee boys going to sea. Few could grow up in a seaport town and resist the lure. For boys in the inland towns, seafaring offered the only alternative to clodhopping, the sole means of foreign travel, and the best opportunity to gather wealth. The West was not yet a word to fire the imagi- nation. Hewing out a new farm in the Green Moun- tains or the Genesee Valley did not promise much variety from home life. One could fight Indians on the Northwest Coast - and play with the Kanaka girls between fights. Ordinary life, to be sure, was not so dismal in New England farming towns as the self- styled experts in Puritanism would have us think.
1 On the ship Restitution of Salem in 1804, out of nine seamen seven give their residence as Baltimore, although two were born in Salem, two in Germany, and one each in North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Phila- delphia. On the ship John of Salem, 250 tons, in 1804 nine seamen give their birthplace in Essex County, nine elsewhere in Massachusetts, three elsewhere in New England, two in New Jersey, one each in Maryland, "America," and Denmark.
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There was a succession of husking-bees and barn-rais- ings and rustic dances and sleighing parties, well lu- bricated with rum. But imagine the effect of a young man returning with tales of pirates and sea-fights and South Sea Islands, with 'cumshaws' of tea and silk and Chinese carving for his mother and sweetheart, and a bag of silver dollars to boot.
For one of the chief attractions of seafaring was the high wages that were not only earned, but actually paid, in the Federalist period. The Columbia, on her first voyage, paid ordinary seamen but $5, and able seamen $7.50 per month; but she sailed in a period of unemployment. Wages quickly rose with commercial expansion. By 1799, J. & T. Lamb were paying boys $8 to $10, ordinary seamen $14 to $17, able seamen $18, and petty officers up to $24 per month, in the Northwest fur trade. The crew of their snow Sea Otter was paid off with $500 to $600 each, after deducting $100 to $150 for articles furnished from the slop chest, on which (if the Lambs followed the practice of Bryant & Sturgis) the men were charged at least one hundred per cent profit. In addition they could make a couple of hundred dollars on a judicious investment at Can- ton, stuffed into their sea-chests.
Data on wages in other trade routes are scarce, but what we have indicate a rise to a similar high level. Israel Thorndike, of Beverly, was paying ordinary sea- men $4.50 and able seamen $7 per month in schooner voyages to the West Indies and Portugal in 1790. In 1794, the A.B.'s rate had risen to $10. On the U.S. frigate Essex, in 1799, boys and ordinary seamen got from $5 to $14, able seamen $17, besides prize money; at a time when an army private's pay was $3 per month. According to a French admiral in 1806, some seamen he impressed from an American brig were getting $17.
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In the Russian trade in 1811, William Gray is paying his ordinary seamen $16 and his A.B.'s $20 and $21. Senator Lloyd, of Massachusetts, stated early in 1812 that the average pay of American seamen was $22.50 per month.
Shore wages, in comparison, were low. Common labor received but eighty cents to a dollar a day in New England between 1800 and 1810, and out of this had to feed and house itself. There were few opportunities for wage-earning, outside farm labor. Consequently many young men went to sea merely to lay by a little money to get married on, or buy a farm. But many of them never returned from their dangerous calling. Yellow Jack contracted in a West-India port disposed of many a stout ploughboy. We hear of schooners limping home from the Spanish Main, sailed only by one sickly man and a boy. Out of 634 members of the Essex Lodge of Free Masons in Salem, 293 were mari- ners and 246 master mariners; of these 50 were lost at sea and 42 died in foreign ports. "By the arrival of Capt. Phillips from Calcutta in the ship Recovery," writes Dr. Bentley, "we learn of the death of Winthrop Gray, the last of a company of jolly fellows at Salem. We hear of the death of several of our promising young seamen." Within a few yards of each other in the old graveyard at Kingston, overlooking Plymouth Bay, may still be seen the following memorial stones:
Erected in memory of Capt. Joshua Delano who died in Havanna April 2, 1800 aged 31 years.
Erected in memory of Capt. William Delano, who died on his passage home from Batavia Octr. 21, 1797, aged 27 years.
In memory of Peleg Wadsworth, who was drowned February 24th 1795 in Lat. 39 N. Long. 70 W. aged 21 years 6 months and 5 days.
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In memory of Amasa Holmes, who died in his passage from Cronstadt to Boston Jan'y 30, 1834, in the 24th year of his age.
In memory of Simeon Washburn who was drowned July 6, 1805, aged 24 years.
The only approach to a privileged class in the Massa- chusetts fleet was the supercargoes. This position - the business agent of the owners on shipboard - was often reserved for Harvard graduates, merchants' sons, and other young men of good family who had neither the taste nor the ruggedness for the rough-and- tumble of forecastle life. His position was no sinecure. The relationship with the master, between whose functions and the supercargo's there was no sharp line, required diplomatic qualities. Responsibility for sell- ing and obtaining cargoes required self-reliance, and sound knowledge of world commerce and economics. John Bromfield, a supercargo with two generations of Boston merchants back of him, read Henry Cole- brooke's "Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal," William Marsden's "History of Sumatra," Colonel Symes's "Embassy to Ava," Stavorinus's "Voyage à Batavia," and Wilcocke's "History of Buenos Ayres," to qualify himself for his business. As supercargo un- der Captain Bill Sturgis in the Atahualpa, he informed the master of the pirate junks' approach off Macao - his brother had been killed by Malay pirates a few years before - and fought like a lion during the action. Joseph W. Cogswell, one of that group of New England intellectuals who attended Göttingen, first changed his sky if not his mind as supercargo on William Gray's brig Radius, in the most difficult days of neutral trade. Patrick T. Jackson, pioneer cotton manufacturer and founder of the city of Lowell, learned his first lessons from the world as clerk to his brother Captain Henry
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SHIPS AND SEAMEN
Jackson, on J. & T. H. Perkins's ship Thomas Russell, in the Mediterranean and East-India trade.
A supercargo was occasionally promoted to master mariner, as in the case of Dr. Bowditch; but there were few captains in the Massachusetts fleet who had not worked their way up from the forecastle. In spite of this democratic method of selection, New England shipmasters were distinguished for their gentlemanly qualities. The English merchant marine, in spite of privilege, was still officered by Captain Cuttles and Hatchways, of the type described by Smollett. If an English gentleman went to sea, he chose the navy. But in New England the social prestige of the merchant service remained as high as in colonial days. Gentle- men of family and education set the quarterdeck standards, to which homespun recruits conformed as best they could. Consequently we find American ship- masters received into the upper bourgeois society of the seaports where they traded; and not infrequently marrying Spanish or Italian girls of good family. Captain E. H. Derby, Jr., was entertained by Nelson aboard the Victory. The same wages and commissions were given generally as in the Canton trade,1 although naturally the latter was the most lucrative, and ob- tained the best men. Thus the officers became partners in every voyage. Not infrequently a shipmaster re- tired by the age of thirty with sufficient capital to start a mercantile business of his own. The master mariners whose names are in the records of the Boston Marine Society before 1812, were the merchant-shipowners of the next generation.
Hitherto, Yankee shipmasters had never been con- spicuous in navigation. In seamanship they were preëminent; in rigging, handling, and caring for their 1 Chapter VI.
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vessels - in getting the last ounce of speed and service out of them. Having no dockyards to depend on, they were used to turn engineer on occasion. Captain William Mugford received a gold medal from the American Philosophical Society, for the jury rudder he rigged on the ship Ulysses. They thought nothing of heaving down or careening a vessel on some lonely South-Sea beach, scrubbing her bottom, paying her seams, and making extensive repairs, while part of the crew stood guard against cannibals. When Captain Penn Townsend, by miscalculation, found his brig Eunice high and dry on St. Paul's Island (a favorite Salem resort in the Indian Ocean), his crew built a huge wooden cask around her hull, and rolled her off.
Dead reckoning, by compass, log, and dipsey lead, was the traditional New England method of finding one's position at sea.1 That was all very well for At- lantic and West-India voyages, but not for circum- navigating the globe. The stately ship Massachusetts, in 1790, in all her padded equipment, had no chro- nometer, and no officer who could find longitude by any other method. Consequently she missed Java Head, and lost several weeks' time. But a Salem boy was already planning a remedy.
Nathaniel Bowditch 2 was born at Salem in 1773, the son of Habakkuk Bowditch, a shipmaster who had seen better days. His formal schooling was slight. The dawn of Salem's maritime expansion found him ap- prentice to a local ship-chandler. He fed a precocious passion for mathematics in the Philosophical Library,
1 All the seaport towns had private schools of navigation in the sev- enteen-nineties. Even at as small a village as Wellfleet, "We have in the winter a number of private schools, by which means the greater part of the young men are taught the art of navigation," writes the Reverend Levi Whitman, of that place, in 1794.
2 First syllable rhymes with 'how.'
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NATHANIEL BOWDITCH
SHIPS AND SEAMEN
the nucleus of which was an Irish scientist's collection which a Beverly privateer had captured during the Revolution. In 1796, he went to sea as captain's clerk on the ship Henry, Salem to the Ile de France, and the following year sailed as supercargo in the Astrea, to Manila. On this voyage he not only spent every spare moment in making observations, but taught twelve members of the crew to take and work lunars, the only method of getting longitude without a chronometer, which no Salem vessel could afford. Working lunars is a tricky business, for any error in the observation brings a thirty-fold error in the result; and as young Bowditch found no less than eight thousand errors in the tables of the standard English book on navigation, he decided to get one out of his own. Two more voyages gave him the practice and the leisure for the immense amount of detailed calculations; and in 1801 appeared the first edition of Bowditch's "Practical Navigator," which has been translated into a dozen languages, passed through countless editions, and still remains the standard American treatise on navigation.
While the "Navigator" was making a market for itself, its author went to sea, as master of the ship Putnam, Beverly to the northwest coast of Sumatra. At the close of this successful pepper voyage, he proved his own theories by entering Salem Harbor on Christ- mas Eve, 1803, in a blinding northeast snowstorm, without having picked up a single landmark. For years to come, "I sailed with Captain Bowditch, Sir!" was a Salem man's password to an officer's berth.
Notwithstanding the work of Bowditch, it took a generation or more to wean most Massachusetts ship- masters from their dependence on dead reckoning, in which primitive method they were adepts. An inter- esting incident of neutral trading illustrates this. In
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1810, an American vessel was seized at Christiansand, and condemned by the admiralty courts of Denmark (then at war with England) on the ground that her lack of chart or sextant proved that her voyage commenced in the British Isles. The other American shipmasters in port then drew up a protest in which they assert, "we have frequently made voyages from America without the above articles, and we are fully persuaded that every seaman with common nautical knowledge can do the same."
Captain Jeremiah Mayo, of Brewster, about the year 1816, took the brig Sally of Boston, 264 tons, from Denmark through the English Channel to the Western Ocean in thick weather - without an observation or a sight of land. Bryant & Sturgis reprimand one of their East-India shipmasters, in 1823, for purchasing a chronometer for $250, and inform him he must pay for it himself. "Could we have anticipated that our injunctions respecting economy would have been so totally disregarded we would have sett fire to the Ship rather than have sent her to sea." Nathaniel Silsbee, in 1827, sailed to Rotterdam in a brig that had no chronometer, and whose officers knew nothing of lunar observations.
Still it was not Bowditch's fault if seamen did not use the means he offered; and an increasing proportion of them did. On his death, in 1838, the Boston Marine Society resolved, "As astronomer, a mathematician and navigator himself, a friend and benefactor has he been to the navigator and Seaman, and few can so justly appreciate the excellence and utility of his la- bours, as the members of this Society .... His intui- tive mind sought and amassed knowledge, to impart it to the world in more easy forms."
Boston, Salem, and Newburyport all had their
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SHIPS AND SEAMEN
marine societies, open to master mariners and some- times shipowners as well, before the Revolution. But at Salem in 1799 there was organized the East India Marine Society, with membership restricted to Salem shipmasters or supercargoes, "who shall have actually navigated the Seas near the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn." An exclusive club, perhaps; one whose certificate of membership equaled a patent of nobility in Essex County; but not a small or merely a social club. Fifty-seven members were admitted during the first two years. The Society furnished them with blank duplicate sea-journals to be filled out and deposited in the Marine Library at the close of each voyage. Therein were faithfully noted all observations of lati- tude, with the position of ports, reefs, and headlands, as "the means of procuring a valuable collection of useful information." Blank pages were assigned for "remarks on the commerce of the different places touched at in the voyage with the imports, exports and manner of transacting business." In this way the community gathered strength from the achievements of its members.
"Whatever is singular in the measures, customs, dress, ornaments, &c. of any people, is deserving of notice," continue the directions, which conclude with an injunction to note down "any remarkable books in use, among any of the eastern natives, with their sub- jects, dates and titles"; and to collect for the East India Marine Museum, articles of dress and ornament, idols and implements and all things vegetable, animal, and mineral. At their annual meetings the members, each bearing some Oriental trophy, passed in proces- sion through the streets, preceded by a man "in Chi- nese habits and mask," and a palanquin borne by Sa- lem negroes tricked out as natives of India, bearing a
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proud Salem youngster in the habiliments of a native prince. To the public spirit of her shipmasters, Salem owes the nucleus of her famous Ethnological Museum, and records of her early commerce unsurpassed by any American seaport.
CHAPTER IX MERCHANTS AND MANSIONS 1782-1812
DIVITIS India usque ad ultimum sinum (the spoil of Ind, to the uttermost gulf) was the appropriate motto on Salem's city seal. Wealth, her merchants certainly did acquire. Elias Hasket Derby, dying in 1799, be- queathed an estate of a million and a half dollars to his sons. Israel Thorndike, of Beverly, and Captain Simon Forrester, who came to Salem a poor Irish lad, each left about the same sum. 'Billy' Gray, when Jefferson's embargo caught him, was reputed to be worth three million dollars, and known to be the greatest individual shipowner in the United States. But more than this, the Salem merchants spent their money in a manner that enhanced the pleasant art of living, and permanently enriched the artistic content of America.
Puritanism, in its religious and social implications, stamped Federalist Salem. Puritanism is the reputed enemy of art and genial living. Yet the people of Massachusetts Bay, since their first struggle for exist- ence on the fringe of the continent, had built a succes- sion of goodly houses in oak and pine, and even brick, whose beauty improved as the sea yielded an increas- ing store. The spoil, accumulated through twenty years' voyaging to the uttermost limits of the Far East, produced at Salem the fairest flowers of Ameri- can domestic architecture.
The presiding genius of this Federal architecture (as it should be called, rather than the loose and ill-
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fitting 'Colonial' or 'Georgian') was Samuel Mc- Intire. Born at Salem in 1757, the son of a house- wright, McIntire had as hard and meager a boyhood as Bowditch. Of his young manhood we know little. Probably he worked as a woodcarver, and exercised his talents not only on houses, but on the figureheads, cabin mouldings, and quick-work of vessels. Suddenly in 1782, the year of peace, he blossoms forth as the architect of the Pierce-Nichols house; with its out- buildings one of the finest architectural groups ever executed in wood in the United States.
This house was built for Jerathmeel Pierce, a mer- chant who saved enough out of the Revolution to prove an early success in the East-India trade. It marks a new type, the square, three-storied, hip-roofed, de- tached dwelling, which stamps the Federalist period in New England. Captain Pierce, after a frugal fashion of that day, had only half the interior completed at once. The rest was fortunately postponed until McIntire had acquired a new manner; the refined and delicate style of interior decoration introduced in London by the brothers Adam. The east parlor was completed in 1801, just in time for the marriage of Sally Pierce to Captain George Nichols.
This twenty-three-year-old shipmaster had followed the sea since the age of sixteen, and had many ac- quaintances at London, St. Petersburg, Calcutta, and Batavia. He brought his bride from Bombay, for her wedding dress, the most beautiful piece of striped mus- lin ever seen in Salem. After four weeks' honeymoon he was off again to Sumatra. At the age of twenty- nine he retired from the sea, and lived long enough in the beautiful house that his father-in-law built, to vote twice for Abraham Lincoln.
For twenty years after the building of the Pierce-
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MERCHANTS AND MANSIONS
Nichols house, little notable construction was done in Salem. A few merchants, like E. H. Derby, employed the young architect to erect new and splendid dwellings, adorned by pilasters and surmounted by glazed cupolas whence approaching sail might be surveyed in comfort. But the greater number required a prudent accumula- tion, before deserting the ancestral gambrel. As they gathered wealth and the possibility of leisure, the mer- cantile families shrank from the raw east winds, and picturesque but embarrassing contacts of the water- front. About 1801, they began to desert Derby Street and its tributaries for Essex Street, Washington Square, and above all, Chestnut Street.
On this broad, elm-shaded avenue - to-day the finest street, architecturally, in New England - Mc- Intire and his nameless fellow-workers expended the endeavors of their fruitful years. The square, three- storied, hip-roofed house, constructed of warm red brick laid in flawless Flemish bond, prevailed. The front doors are framed in fanlight and sidelights, shaded by oblong or elliptical porches whose roofs are supported by attenuated columns, their capitals carved by the master himself. A Palladian window opens on a formal garden in the rear. The interiors are simply arranged, with four rooms to a floor, and decorated in a free and original adaptation of the Adam style. Stables, barns, and garden houses are designed with the same care as the mansion, that nothing might mar the general effect.
In his public buildings - the Court House, assem- bly halls, and South Meeting-House, McIntire was equally successful.
There was little in the architecture of these dwellings, save their uncompromisingly square mass, to suggest the character of their occupants. For very few of the
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shipmasters and merchants of Federalist Salem came of wealthy colonial families. They were a rugged race, with little of the polish that marked contemporary society in Boston or Philadelphia or Charleston. They were self-educated; for Salem then had miserable schools, and no boy destined for the sea went to Har- vard. They were not ashamed to work with their own hands in garden or outlying farm; and in a run of ill- luck, their wives or sisters could without loss of caste open a little shop in a front room - as Hepzibah in "The House of the Seven Gables." Their ways were at best bluff and simple; at worst, harsh and blustering. Too many carried the manners of the quarterdeck into their Adam parlors. One wonders where they acquired the taste to erect such dwellings, or, if the taste was wholly their architects' 1 to enrich them with the beautiful furniture, porcelain, and glass that are still the pride of Salem. Everything made in 1810 was not good; Chestnut Street mansions might as well have been stuffed with vulgarized empire as with chaste Chippendale.
Salem society, like that of all our seaport towns, was stratified. Of the life of her middle and lower classes we know little save their occasional delinquencies. Salem is said to have had a greater per capita wealth than any American town; but hard winters always crowded the almshouse and demanded much charity of the well-to-do. All classes were bound together by a common interest in maritime prosperity. In 1790, the two hundred and twenty-eight heads of families (includ- ing widows) in Dr. Bentley's East Church, included thirty-five mariners, fifty-eight master mariners, nine
1 For the sort of thing that the Salem architects avoided, see the engraving of "Mr. Dorsey's Gothic mansion" at Philadelphia, in Den- nie's Portfolio, V, 124 (1811).
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boat- or ship-builders, five rope- or sail-makers, and five fishermen. Even people whose principal occupa- tion was independent of commerce, generally owned a share in a ship, or made private adventures. Nathaniel Richardson, who owned the largest tannery in Essex County, also owned four vessels; and his son Nathaniel, who "hurried into bold adventures," died in Malaga at the age of eighteen.
Unquestioned social preëminence was enjoyed by the merchant-shipowners, who with few exceptions had commanded vessels on East-India voyages. Their social life was simple rather than brilliant. Formal dinners were infrequent, balls given only by subscrip- tion, at stated intervals, in Hamilton Hall or Washing- ton Hall, according as the company was Federalist or Republican. For the bitter politics of this period divided Salem society by a deep longitudinal chasm, across which the rival clans of Derby and Crownin- shield glared defiance. Driving or sleigh-riding, with Nahant or some good tavern for objective, was a com- mon diversion. But perhaps the favorite one for ship- masters' families was a fishing party in the bay, followed by landing on Baker's or Misery Island for a magnifi- cent chowder, cooked, as a chowder should be, in iron pot over driftwood fire by a Salem African. Several families maintained small pleasure-boats. The finest of them, George Crowninshield, Jr.'s, thirty-six-foot Jefferson, rigged like a Chebacco boat, once took Dr. Bentley from Salem to Beverly harbor in fifteen minutes and back in thirty-four. Wealth cost that generation too much effort to be frittered in riotous living or wasteful display. Those Salem families who acquired a fortune in the days when every day brought a ship, have with few exceptions retained their position to this day.
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Boston throughout the Federalist period was a commercial center of about three times the importance of Salem, whether one takes population, tonnage, or customs duties as the standard of comparison. The commercial activity of Boston Harbor was prodigious. "Upwards of seventy sail of vessels sailed from this port on Monday last, for various parts of the world," states the "Columbian Centinel " on Wednesday, Oc- tober 26, 1791. In 1793 there entered and cleared eleven vessels from England, one hundred and nine- teen from the West Indies, and one hundred and sixty- three from other foreign ports. "The harbour of Bos- ton is at this date [November, 1794] crowded with vessels," wrote Thomas Pemberton. "Eighty-four sail have been counted lying at two of the wharves only. It is reckoned that not less than four hundred and fifty sail of ships, brigs, schooners, sloops and small craft are now in this port." The population increased from 18,320 in 1790 to 33,787 in 1810.
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