will
be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like
those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports
mysterious and unknown.

The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so
much to clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a
fishing settlement. Like the other Englishmen who long before
1620 had steered across to harvest the cod on the Grand Bank,
they expected to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water. The
convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was that it offered a
good harbor for boats and was "a place of profitable fishing."
Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the wilderness
and the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where they were
soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the
Kennebec colony.

Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the
Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing
carpenters and shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak so
close at hand into keelsons, frames, and planking. Two years
later, Governor John Winthrop launched his thirty-ton sloop
Blessing of the Bay, and sent her to open "friendly commercial
relations" with the Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the traffic
was in furs and wampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem were
not content to voyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled,
adventurous seamen of them, and what they caught with hook and
line, when dried and salted, was readily exchanged for other
merchandise in Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe.

A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives
in the ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden
schooners are fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker,
took their pay in shares. They became part owners, as did
likewise the merchant who supplied stores and material; and when
the ship was afloat, the master, the mates, and even the seamen,
were allowed cargo space for commodities which they might buy and
sell to their own advantage. Thus early they learned to trade as
shrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage directly concerned a
whole neighborhood.

This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more
interested in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the
Great Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on
the Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trails
to the country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginia
had discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slave
labor to toil for them, and they were not compelled to turn to
the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander,
hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow
sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, was
between the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the
latter. Elsewhere in the colonies the forest was an enemy to be
destroyed with infinite pains. The New England pioneer regarded
it with favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and
step the straight masts in them.

And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its
course before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic
trade route, causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and
economist, to lament in 1668 that in his opinion nothing was
"more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother
kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies,
plantations, or provinces."

This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered
in almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova
Scotia to Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island
Sound. It was not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with
crews of trained artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log
houses was the row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter
weather too rough for fishing, when the little farms lay idle,
this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shape
the timbers, and it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, a
ketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth to
London, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them not much
larger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at a
liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the
ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign
merchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer
lines and less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormy
coast and channels beset with shoals and ledges. The square-rig
did well enough for deepwater voyages, but it was an awkward,
lubberly contrivance for working along shore, and the colonial
Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat fore-and-aft
sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which required
fewer men in the handling.

Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude
beginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which
should one day comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the
wind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then
these early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carrying
smaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to a
closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in order
to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.

By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand
vessels were registered as built in the New England colonies, and
Salem already displayed the peculiar talent for maritime
adventure which was to make her the most illustrious port of the
New World. The first of her line of shipping merchants was Philip
English, who was sailing his own ketch Speedwell in 1676 and so
rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years he was the
richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which traded
coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St.
Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading,
flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by
the Grace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower . . . .
and by God's Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland."

No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to
cross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be
sold in the West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses
to Boston or Rhode Island. The slave-trade flourished from the
very birth of commerce in Puritan New England and its golden
gains and exotic voyages allured high-hearted lads from farm and
counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built at Marblehead, returned
from the West Indies and "brought some cotton and tobacco and
negroes, etc. from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch of
Manhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that the
Incorporated West India Company should "allot to each Patroon
twelve black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroes
should be found."

It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most
needed and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas
became the most lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a
roaring traffic in "rum and niggers," with a hundred sail to be
found in the infamous Middle Passage. The master of one of these
Rhode Island slavers, writing home from Guinea in 1736, portrayed
the congestion of the trade in this wise: "For never was there so
much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not ye like of ye
French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is full of
them. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, for
I purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is
very scarce. We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye
Road, so that ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is now
forced to take any that comes. Here is seven sail of us Rum men
that are ready to devour one another, for our case is desprit."

Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture
beyond all computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned
by governments, at length rending the nation asunder in civil war
and bequeathing a problem still unsolved--all this followed in
the wake of those first voyages in search of labor which could

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