Ralph Delahaye Paine

“ In the course of two or three days after the wreck of the Glide, the king permitted a part of the crew with several natives to go off to the ship to get the salt provisions and bread. Fifty or sixty savages were ransacking the wreck in every part, stripping the rigging from the spars, unhinging the cabin doors, hacking timber to extract nails and spikes, beating in barrels and hogsheads, dragging up our chests from the forecastle, jabbering all the while like monkeys yet working with the steady gravity of old caulkers. ”

“ When he had won his fight on the sea and came at last to live in comfort on shore, if he built himself a den in which to doze and smoke and read and chat, it was apt to be shaped like a ship’s cabin, to have a swinging light overhead, transoms for bunks, and spyglass, compass and barometer handy. The dust and cobwebs under the eaves of his attic concealed camphor and cedar trunks stuffed with camel’s hair shawls, pongee silks and seersucker suits. A log or two of sandalwood, brought home for dunnage, might sizzle on the andirons and fill his house with the spicy breath of Arabia. ”

“ Ready to man them was the bold company of privateersmen, schooled in a life of the most hazardous adventure, braced to face all risks in the peaceful war for trade where none of their countrymen had ever dared to seek trade before. While they had been dealing shrewd blows for their country’s cause in war, they had been also in preparation for the dawning age of Salem supremacy on the seas in the rivalries of commerce, pioneers in a brilliant and romantic era which was destined to win unique fame for their port. ”

“ Privateer, sealer, whaler, and merchantman, there they rest, row after row of canvas-covered books, filled with the day’s work of as fine a race of seamen as ever sailed; from the log of the tiny schooner Hopewell on a voyage to the West Indies amid perils of swarming pirates and privateers a generation before the Revolution, down to the log of the white-winged Mindoro of the Manila fleet which squared away her yards for the last time only fifteen years ago. ”

“ The Custom House which looks down at crumbling Derby Wharf where the stately East Indiamen once lay three deep, awakes from its drowsy idleness to record the entries of a few lumber-laden schooners from Nova Scotia. Built in 1819, when the tide of Salem commerce had already begun to ebb, its classic and pillared bulk recalls the comment of its famous officer, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “It was intended to accommodate an hoped for increase in the commercial prosperity of the place, hopes destined never to be realized, and was built a world too large for any necessary purpose.” ”

“ At the beginning of the Revolution, Salem was sending its boys to fill the forecastles of the vessels built in its own yards and commanded by its own shipmasters. Hard by were the towns of Beverly and Marblehead whose townsmen also won their hardy livelihood on the fishing banks and along distant and perilous trading routes. When British squadrons and cruisers began to drive them ashore to starve in idleness, these splendid seamen turned their vessels into privateers and rushed them to sea like flights of hawks. ”

“ Every age or generation, however, hammers out in the stress of its day’s work some refined metal of experience, some peculiarly significant heritage to help posterity in its struggle to perpetuate the things most worth while. It was not the rich freightage of silks, spices, ivory and tea which the ships of Salem fetched home, nor the fortunes which built the stately mansions of the elm-shaded streets, that made this race of seamen worthy of a page in the history of their country’s rise to greatness. ”

“ Captain David Porter had been overmatched, fighting his crippled ship against hopeless odds until his decks were such an appalling scene of slaughter as has been recorded of few naval actions in history. But the Salem-built frigate Essex had fulfilled her destiny in a manner to make her nation proud unto this day of the men who sailed and fought her in the harbor of Valparaiso, many thousand miles from the New England shipyard where a patriotic town of seafarers had united with one common purpose to serve their country as best they could. ”

“ There was a parley while Colonel Leslie argued that he was in lawful use of the King’s highway. The Salem rejoinder was to the effect that the road and the bridge were private property to be taken from them only by force and under martial law. At this juncture, when bloody collision seemed imminent, Captain Richard Derby took command of the situation, and roared across the stream, as if he were on his own quarterdeck:
“Find the cannon if you can. Take them if you can. They will never be surrendered.” ”

“ The mariners in Canton had told Captain Cleveland that he could never win his way clear of Formosa and into the Pacific during the winter or monsoon season, but the staunch cutter, after mutiny, stranding, and fighting her way inch by inch for thirty-one days steered out across the open ocean. On her northerly course the weather was so heavy that the seas washed over her day after day, and Captain Cleveland scarcely knew what it was to wear dry clothes, have a meal cooked in the wave-drenched galley, or snatch a whole night’s sleep. ”

“ One great German or English liner entering the port of New York registers a tonnage equaling that of the whole fleet of ships in the foreign trade of Salem in her golden age of adventurous discovery. Yet the liner has not an American among her crew of five hundred men, and not one dollar of American money is invested in her huge hull. She is a matter of the most complete indifference to the American people, who have ceased to care under what flags their commerce is borne over seas. ”

“ The wharf still stretches a long arm into the harbor and its tumbling warehouses, timbered with great hewn beams, were standing during the Revolution. Then they were filled with cannon, small arms, rigging and ships’ stores as fast as they could be hauled hither. Fancy needs only to picture this landlocked harbor alive with square-rigged vessels, tall sloops and topsail schooners, their sides checkered with gun-ports, to bring to life the Salem of the privateersman of one hundred and forty years ago. ”

“ The hostile ships had been sighted from Bilboa harbor where the Achilles was well known, and the word swiftly passed through the city that the bold American was holding pluckily to her landfall as if preparing for an attempt to recapture her prize. The wind had died during the late afternoon and by sunset thousands of Spaniards and seamen from the vessels in the harbor had swarmed to crowd the headlands and the water’s edge where they could see the towering Achilles and her smaller foe “like ships upon a painted ocean.” ”

“ The town had grown along the water’s edge beside which its merchants were beginning to build their spacious and gabled mansions. Their countinghouses overlooked the harbor, and their spyglasses were alert to sweep the distant sea line for the homecoming of their ventures to Virginia, the West Indies and Europe. Their vessels were forty and sixty tons burden, mere cockleshells for deep-water voyaging, but they risked storm and capture while they pushed farther and farther away from Salem as the prospect of profitable trade lured them on. ”

“ Captain William Orme, a Salem merchant, offered him the berth of lieutenant aboard the letter of marque brig Jupiter. She was a formidable vessel, carrying twenty guns and a hundred and fifty men. From Salem, that wasp’s nest of Revolutionary privateersmen, the Jupiter sailed for the West Indies. Captain Orme went in his ship, but while he was a successful shipping merchant, he was not quite a dashing enough comrade for so seasoned a sea-dog as this young Luther Little. To the windward of Turk’s Island they sighted a large schooner which showed no colors. ”

“ This measure which paralyzed American trade, was so fiercely opposed in New England that an insurrection was feared, and the ports were filled with dismantled ships, empty warehouses, deserted wharves and starving seamen. When war came, it was welcomed by forty thousand native American merchant seamen who, eager for revenge for the wrongs they had suffered, were ready to crowd the ships of the navy and overflow into the fleets of privateers that hurried from every deep-water port. ”

“ One hundred and ten years ago there was launched from a Salem shipyard a wooden sailing frigate called the Essex. She was the fastest and handsomest vessel of the United States navy and a dozen years after she first flew the flag of her country she won immortal renown under Captain David Porter. There is hardly a full-rigged sailing ship afloat to-day as small as the Essex, and in tonnage many modern three-masted coasting schooners can equal or surpass her. ”

“ THE EBBING OF THE TIDE When the Embargo of 1807 was proclaimed as a counter-blow to England’s “unofficial war on American commerce and her wholesale impressment of American seamen,” the house-flags of Salem merchants flew over one hundred and fifty-two vessels engaged in foreign trade. The Embargo fell with blighting effects upon this imposing fleet and the allied activities interwoven throughout the life and business of the town, and the square-riggers lay empty and idle at the wharves. ”

“ For more than two centuries, however, we Americans were a maritime race, in peace and war, and the most significant deeds and spectacular triumphs of our seafaring annals were wrought long before the era of the clipper ship. The fastest and most beautiful fabric ever driven by the winds, the sky-sail clipper was handled with a superb quality of seamanship which made the mariners of other nations doff their caps to the ruddy Yankee masters of the Sovereign of the Seas, the Flying Cloud, the Comet, the Westward Ho, or the Swordfish. ”

“ As they drew near the harbor, a sail was sighted making out from the land. All strange sails were under suspicion in that era of sea life, and Captain Haraden made ready to clear his ship for action even before the English captain, taken out of the prize, cheerfully carried him word that he knew the stranger to be the Achilles, a powerful and successful privateer hailing from London, carrying more than forty guns and at least a hundred and fifty men. ”

“ All appeared impressed with the irresistible power of a nation that could send such tremendous engines of war as the Potomac frigate upon their shores to avenge any wrongs committed upon its vessels, and that it would be better policy for them to attend to their pepper plantations and cultivate the arts of peace, than subject themselves to such severe retribution as had followed this act of piracy upon the Friendship. ”

“ Dying in 1850, Nathaniel Silsbee left bequeathed to his home town the memory of his own life as a tribute to the sterling worth and splendid Americanism of the old-time shipmasters of Salem. Trader and voyager to the Indies as a captain in his teens, retired with a fortune won from the sea before he was thirty, playing the man in many immensely trying and hazardous situations, this one-time Senator from Massachusetts was a product of the times he lived in. ”

“ It was the Amity, his own schooner which had been taken from him in the West Indies, from which he and his mate had been cast adrift by the piratical seamen. Captain Duncanson hurried into Mr. Derby’s private office as fast as his legs could carry him. By some incredible twist of fate the captors of the Amity had sailed her straight to her captain. ”

“ When our forefathers were creating a merchant marine whose achievements form one of the finest pages of American history, seafaring lads were men at twenty, ruling their quarterdecks and taming the rude company of their forecastles by weight of their own merits in brains and pluck and resourcefulness.
Nathaniel Silsbee, a captain in the India trade at nineteen, was not a remarkably precocious mariner a century and more ago. ”

“ They found at Hamburg a fast and roomy Virginia-built brig, the Lelia Byrd, which they bought. Shaler was made captain by the toss of a coin, Captain Cleveland signing the ship’s papers as supercargo. While in Hamburg they had formed a warm friendship with a youthful Polish nobleman, Count de Rousillon, who had been an aide-de-camp to Kosciusko. His personality was most engaging, his love of adventure ardent, and his means slender, wherefore he embraced with enthusiasm the invitation to join the two young Americans in their voyage to South America. ”

“ In some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and shipowners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston. ”