the
expedition.

In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richly
ladened galleon which was said to have been wrecked half a
century before off the coast of Hispaniola. Since his own funds
were not sufficient for this exploit, he betook himself to
England to enlist the aid of the Government. With bulldog
persistence he besieged the court of James II for a whole year,
this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster, until he was given a
royal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up more silver
from the sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other patrons
to outfit him with a small merchantman, the James and Mary, in
which he sailed for the coast of Hispaniola. This time he found
his galleon and thirty-two tons of silver. "Besides that
incredible treasure of plate, thus fetched up from seven or eight
fathoms under water, there were vast riches of Gold, and Pearls,
and Jewels . . . . All that a Spanish frigot was to be enriched
withal."

Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of
1687, with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as her
freightage of treasure. Captain Phips made honest division with
his backers and, because men of his integrity were not over
plentiful in England after the Restoration, King James knighted
him. He sailed home to Boston, "a man of strong and sturdy
frame," as Hawthorne fancied him, "whose face had been roughened
by northern tempests and blackened by the burning sun of the West
Indies . . . . He wears an immense periwig flowing down over his
shoulders . . . . His red, rough hands which have done many a
good day's work with the hammer and adze are half-covered by the
delicate lace rues at the wrist." But he carried with him the
manners of the forecastle, a man hasty and unlettered but
superbly brave and honest. Even after he had become Governor he
thrashed the captain of the Nonesuch frigate of the royal navy,
and used his fists on the Collector of the Port after cursing him
with tremendous gusto. Such behavior in a Governor was too
strenuous, and Sir William Phips was summoned to England, where
he died while waiting his restoration to office and royal favor.
Failing both, he dreamed of still another treasure voyage, "for
it was his purpose, upon his dismission from his Government once
more to have gone upon his old Fishing-Trade, upon a mighty shelf
of rock and banks of sand that lie where he had informed
himself."



CHAPTER II. THE PRIVATEERS OF '76

The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the
high seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century. Yet
with an immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers
increased their trade and multiplied their ships in the face of
every manner of adversity. The surprising fact is that most of
them were not driven ashore to earn their bread. What Daniel
Webster said of them at a later day was true from the beginning:
"It is not, sir, by protection and bounties, but by unwearied
exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly and resolute spirit
which relies on itself to protect itself. These causes alone
enable American ships still to keep the element and show the flag
of their country in distant seas."

What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent
eighteenth century may be inferred from the misfortunes of
Captain Michael Driver of Salem. In 1759 he was in command of the
schooner Three Brothers, bound to the West Indies on his lawful
business. Jogging along with a cargo of fish and lumber, he was
taken by a privateer under British colors and sent into Antigua
as a prize. Unable to regain either his schooner or his two
thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for home. Another
owner gave him employment and he set sail in the schooner Betsy
for Guadaloupe. During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and
carried into port by a French privateer. On the suggestion that
he might ransom his vessel on payment of four thousand livres, he
departed for Boston in hope of finding the money, leaving behind
three of his sailors as hostages.

Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael
Driver turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he
flew a flag of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing
to the ruffian who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He
violently seized the innocent Mary and sent her into New
Providence. Here Captain Driver made lawful protest before the
authorities, and was set at liberty with vessel and cargo--an act
of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court of the Bahamas.

Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois
and rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the
ransom money. As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French
frigate snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw
them ashore at Santiago, where for two months they existed as
ragged beachcombers until by some judicial twist the schooner was
returned to them. They worked her home and presented their long
list of grievances to the colonial Government of Massachusetts,
which duly forwarded them--and that was the end of it. Three
years had been spent in this catalogue of misadventures, and
Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless against
such intolerable aggression. They and their kind were a prey to
every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill
his own pockets.

Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these
undaunted Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on
blue water until shortly before the Revolution the New England
fleet alone numbered six hundred sail. Its captains felt at home
in Surinam and the Canaries. They trimmed their yards in the
reaches of the Mediterranean and the North Sea or bargained
thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of Nantucket, in their
apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant seas, and the
smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay,
Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's
familiar eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No
climate that is not a witness to their toils. Neither the
perseverance of Holland nor the activity of France, nor the
dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever carried this most
perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has
been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it
were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of
manhood."

In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of
which more than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there
were one hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which
took 14,331 barrels of oil valued at $358,200. In size these
vessels averaged no more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of
today, and yet they battered their way half around the watery
globe and comfortably supported six thousand people who dwelt on
a sandy island unfit for farming and having no other industries.
Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share of the catch
and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his own.

Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of
incomparable seamen destined to harry the commerce of England
under the new-born Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the
brink of actual war, Parliament flung a final provocation and
aroused the furious enmity of the fishermen who thronged the
Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to forbid the colonies to export
fish to those foreign markets in which every seacoast village was
vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving the fishing
fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob six
thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin
among the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from
which sailed hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This
measure became law notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one
peers of the realm who declared: "We dissent because the attempt
to coerce by famine the whole body of the inhabitants of great
and populous provinces is without example in the history of this,
or perhaps, of any civilized nation."

The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation
without representation but whetted their anger with grudges

<<Previous | Back to Page 1 | Next>>