THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF OLD SALEM

The Panay, one of the last of the Salem fleet bound out from Boston to Manila twenty-five years ago

THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF
OLD SALEM
THE RECORD OF A BRILLIANT ERA OF
AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT
BY
RALPH D. PAINE
Author of “The Greater America,”
“The Romance of an Old-Time Shipmaster,” etc.
NEW EDITION
ILLUSTRATED

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1912

Copyright, 1908, by
THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright, 1912, by
A. C. McCLURG & CO., CHICAGO

All Rights Reserved
The Lakeside Press
R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY
CHICAGO

“THE MERCHANTMEN”

“Beyond all outer charting

We sailed where none have sailed,

And saw the land-lights burning

On islands none have hailed;

Our hair stood up for wonder,

But when the night was done,

There danced the deep to windward

Blue-empty ’neath the sun.”

Rudyard Kipling.

“We’re outward bound this very day,

Good-bye, fare you well,

Good-bye, fare you well.

We’re outward bound this very day,

Hurrah, my boys, we’re outward bound.”

(From a chantey sung while sheeting home topsails.)

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The Panama Canal has strongly revived interest in the American merchant marine. A nation, long indifferent to the fact that it had lost its prestige on blue water, now discovers that after digging a ditch between two oceans at a cost of hundred of millions, there are almost no American ships to use it.

In other days, Yankee ships and sailors were able to win the commerce of the world against the competition of foreign flags because of native enterprise, brains, and seamanship. Nor is it impossible that such an era shall come again. It was not so much the lack of subsidies and the lower cost of foreign ships and crews that drove the American ensign from the high seas as the greater attraction which drew capital and energy to the tasks of building cities and railroads and opening to civilization the inland areas of the West.

If these records of maritime Salem hold any lessons for to-day, if they are worth while as something more than stirring tales of bygone generations, it is because those seafarers achieved success without counting the odds. They were enormously hampered by the policy of England which deliberately endeavored to crush Colonial shipping by means of numberless tonnage, customs, and neutrality regulations. It was a merciless jealousy that sought to confiscate every Yankee merchant vessel and ruin her owners.

There were the risks of the sea, of uncharted, unlighted coasts and reefs and islands, and a plague of ferocious pirates and lawless privateers who haunted the trade routes from the Spanish Main to Madagascar. The vessel lucky enough to escape all these perils might run afoul of another menace in the cruiser or customs officer of the King, and many an American merchantmen, hundreds of them, were seized in their own harbors and carried off before the eyes of their owners who could only stand by in speechless rage and sorrow at the loss of their labor and investment.

Notwithstanding all these grievous handicaps, American ships and sailors prospered and multiplied, nor did they stay at home and whine that they could not compete with the more favored merchant navies of England and the Continent. They took and held their commanding share of the world’s trade because they had to have it. They wanted it earnestly enough to go out and get it.

Whenever the United States shall really desire to regain her proud place among the maritime nations, the minds of her captains of industry will find a way to achieve it and her legislators will solve their share of the problem. And our people will cease paying over to English and German shipowners enough money in freight and passage bills every year to defray the cost of building a Panama Canal.

From log books, sea journals and other manuscripts hitherto unpublished (most of them written during the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812), are herein gathered such narratives as those of the first American voyages to Japan, India, the Philippines, Guam, the Cape of Good Hope, Sumatra, Arabia and the South Seas. These and other records, as written by the seamen who made Salem the most famous port of the New World a century ago, are much more than local annals. They comprise a unique and brilliant chapter of American history and they speak for themselves.

This era, vanished this closed chapter of American achievement which reached its zenith a full century ago, belongs not alone to Salem, but also to the nation. East and west, north and south, runs the love of the stars and stripes, and the desire to do honor to those who have helped win for this flag prestige and respect among other peoples in other climes. The seamen of this old port were traders, it is true, but they lent to commerce an epic quality, and because they steered so many brave ships to ports where no other American topsails had ever gleamed, they deserve to be remembered among those whose work left its imprint far beyond the limits of the town or coast they called home.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SHIPS AND SAILORS
OF OLD SALEM

The Ships and Sailors of
Old Salem

CHAPTER I
A PORT OF VANISHED FLEETS

American ships and sailors have almost vanished from the seas that lie beyond their own coasts. The twentieth century has forgotten the era when Yankee topsails, like flying clouds, flecked every ocean, when tall spars forested every Atlantic port from Portland to Charleston, and when the American spirit of adventurous enterprise and rivalry was in its finest flower on the decks of our merchant squadrons. The last great chapter of the nation’s life on blue water was written in the days of the matchless clippers which swept round the Horn to San Francisco or fled homeward from the Orient in the van of the tea fleets.

The Cape Horn clipper was able to survive the coming of the Age of Steam a few years longer than the Atlantic packet ships, such as the Dreadnought, but her glory departed with the Civil War and thereafter the story of the American merchant marine is one of swift and sorrowful decay. The boys of the Atlantic coast, whose fathers had followed the sea in legions, turned inland to find their careers, and the sterling qualities which had been bred in the bone by generations of salty ancestry now helped to conquer the western wilderness.

It is all in the past, this noble and thrilling history of American achievement on the deep sea, and a country with thousands of miles of seacoast has turned its back toward the spray-swept scenes of its ancient greatness to seek the fulfillment of its destiny in peopling the prairie, reclaiming the desert and feeding its mills and factories with the resources of forest, mine and farm.

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. Her routes were well traveled, however, and her voyages hardly more eventful than those of the liner of to-day. Islands were charted, headlands lighted, and the instruments and science of navigation so far perfected as to make ocean pathfinding no longer a matter of blind reckoning and guesswork. Pirates and privateers had ceased to harry the merchantmen and to make every voyage a hazard of life and death from the Bahama Banks to the South Seas.

Through the vista of fifty years the Yankee clipper has a glamour of singularly picturesque romance, but it is often forgotten that two hundred years of battling against desperate odds and seven generations of seafaring stock had been required to evolve her type and to breed the men who sailed her in the nineteenth century. It is to this much older race of American seamen and the stout ships they built and manned that we of to-day should be grateful for many of the finest pages in the history of our country’s progress. The most adventurous age of our merchant mariners had reached its climax at the time of the War of 1812, and its glory was waning almost a hundred years ago. For the most part its records are buried in sea-stained log books and in the annals and traditions of certain ancient New England coastwise towns,[1] of which Salem was the most illustrious.

This port of Salem is chiefly known beyond New England as the scene of a wicked witchcraft delusion which caused the death of a score of poor innocents in 1692, and in later days as the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is not so commonly known that this old town of Salem, nestled in a bight of the Massachusetts coast, was once the most important seat of maritime enterprise in the New World. Nor when its population of a century ago is taken into consideration can any foreign port surpass for adventure, romance and daring the history of Salem during the era of its astonishing activity. Even as recently as 1854, when the fleets of Salem were fast dwindling, the London Daily News, in a belated eulogy of our American ships and sailors, was moved to compare the spirit of this port with that of Venice and the old Hanse towns and to say: “We owe a cordial admiration of the spirit of American commerce in its adventurous aspects. To watch it is to witness some of the finest romance of our time.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem in 1848-49, after the prestige of the port had been well-nigh lost. He was descended from a race of Salem shipmasters and he saw daily in the streets of his native town the survivors of the generations of incomparable seamen who had first carried the American flag to Hindoostan, Java, Sumatra, and Japan, who were first to trade with the Fiji Islands and with Madagascar, who had led the way to the west coast of Africa and to St. Petersburg, who had been pioneers in opening the commerce of South America and China to Yankee ships. They had “sailed where no other ships dared to go, they had anchored where no one else dreamed of looking for trade.” They had fought pirates and the privateers of a dozen races around the world, stamping themselves as the Drakes and the Raleighs and Gilberts of American commercial daring.

In the Salem of his time, however, Hawthorne perceived little more than a melancholy process of decay, and a dusky background for romances of a century more remote. It would seem as if he found no compelling charm in the thickly clustered memories that linked the port with its former greatness on the sea. Some of the old shipmasters were in the Custom House service with him and he wrote of them as derelicts “who after being tost on every sea and standing sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast had finally drifted into this quiet nook where with little to disturb them except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of life.”

They were simple, brave, elemental men, hiding no tortuous problems of conscience, very easy to analyze and catalogue, and perhaps not apt, for this reason, to make a strong appeal to the genius of the author of “The Scarlet Letter.”

Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne as surveyor

Page from the illustrated log of the Eolus. Her captain drew such pictures as these of the ships he sighted at sea

“They spent a good deal of time asleep in their accustomed corners,” he also wrote of them, “with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories and mouldy jokes that had grown to be passwords and counter-signs among them.”

One of the sea journals or logs of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,[2] father of the author, possesses a literary interest in that its title page was lettered by the son when a lad of sixteen. With many an ornamental flourish the inscription runs:

Nathaniel Hathorne’s
Book—1820—Salem.
A Journal of a Passage from Bengall to America
In the Ship America of
Salem, 1798.

This is almost the only volume of salty flavored narrative to which Nathaniel Hawthorne may be said to have contributed, although he was moved to pay this tribute to his stout-hearted forebears:

“From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarterdeck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.”

Even to-day there survive old shipmasters and merchants of Salem who in their own boyhood heard from the lips of the actors their stories of shipwrecks on uncharted coasts; of captivity among the Algerians and in the prisons of France, England and Spain; of hairbreadth escapes from pirates on the Spanish Main and along Sumatran shores; of ship’s companies overwhelmed by South Sea cannibals when Salem barks were pioneers in the wake of Captain Cook; of deadly actions fought alongside British men-of-war and private armed ships, and of steering across far-distant seas when “India was a new region and only Salem knew the way thither.”

Such men as these were trained in a stern school to fight for their own. When the time came they were also ready to fight for their country. Salem sent to sea one hundred and fifty-eight privateers during the Revolution. They carried two thousand guns and were manned by more than six thousand men, a force equal in numbers to the population of the town. These vessels captured four hundred and forty-four prizes, or more than one-half the total number taken by all the Colonies during the war.

In the War of 1812 Salem manned and equipped forty privateers and her people paid for and built the frigate Essex which under the command of David Porter swept the Pacific clean of British commerce and met a glorious end in her battle with the Phoebe and Cherub off the harbor of Valparaiso. Nor among the sea fights of both wars are there to be found more thrilling ship actions than were fought by Salem privateersmen who were as ready to exchange broadsides or measure boarding pikes with a “king’s ship” as to snap up a tempting merchantman.

But even beyond these fighting merchant sailors lay a previous century of such stress and hazard in ocean traffic as this age cannot imagine. One generation after another of honest shipmasters had been the prey of a great company of lawless rovers under many flags or no flag at all. The distinction between privateers and pirates was not clearly drawn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the tiny American brigs and sloops which bravely fared to the West Indies and Europe were fair marks for the polyglot freebooters that laughed at England’s feeble protection of her colonial trade.

The story of the struggles and heroisms of the western pioneers has been told over and over again. Every American schoolboy is acquainted with the story of the beginnings of the New England Colonies and of their union. But the work of the seafaring breed of Americans has been somewhat suffered to remain in the background. Their astonishing adventures were all in the day’s work and were commonplace matters to their actors. The material for the plot of a modern novel of adventure may be found condensed into a three-line entry of many an ancient log-book.

High on the front of a massive stone building in Essex Street, Salem, is chiseled the inscription, “East India Marine Hall.” Beneath this are the obsolete legends, “Asiatic Bank,” and “Oriental Insurance Office.” Built by the East India Marine Society eighty-four years ago, this structure is now the home of the Peabody Museum and a storehouse for the unique collections which Salem seafarers brought home from strange lands when their ships traded in every ocean. The East India Marine Society still exists. The handful of surviving members meet now and then and spin yarns of the vanished days when they were masters of stately square-riggers in the deep-water trade. All of them are gray and some of them quite feeble and every little while another of this company slips his cable for the last long voyage.

The sight-seeing visitor in Salem is fascinated by its quaint and picturesque streets, recalling as they do no fewer than three centuries of American life, and by its noble mansions set beneath the elms in an atmosphere of immemorial traditions. But the visitor is not likely to seek the story of Salem as it is written in the records left by the men who made it great. For those heroic seafarers not only made history but they also wrote it while they lived it. The East India Marine Society was organized in 1799 “to assist the widows and children of deceased members; to collect such facts and observations as tended to the improvement and security of navigation, and to form a museum of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn.”[3]

The by-laws provided that “any person shall be eligible as a member of this society who shall have actually navigated the seas near the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, either as master or commander or as factor or supercargo in any vessel belonging to Salem.”

From its foundation until the time when the collections of the Society were given in charge of the Peabody Academy of Science in 1867, three hundred and fifty masters and supercargoes of Salem had qualified for membership as having sailed beyond Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope.

More than a century ago, therefore, these mariners of Salem began to write detailed journals of their voyages, to be deposited with this Society in order that their fellow shipmasters might glean from them such facts as might “tend to the improvement and security of navigation.” Few seas were charted, and Salem ships were venturing along unknown shores. The journal of one of these pioneer voyages was a valuable aid to the next shipmaster who went that way. These journals were often expanded from the ship’s logs, and written after the captains came home. The habit of carefully noting all incidents of trade, discovery, and dealings with primitive races taught these seamen to make their logs something more than routine accounts of wind and weather. Thus, year after year and generation after generation, there was accumulating a library of adventurous first-hand narrative, written in stout manuscript volumes.

It was discovered that a pen and ink drawing of the landfall of some almost unknown island would help the next captain passing that coast to identify its headlands. Therefore many of these quarterdeck chroniclers developed an astonishing aptitude for sketching coast line, mountains and bays. Some of them even made pictures in water color of the ships they saw or spoke, and their logs were illustrated descriptions of voyages to the South Seas or Mauritius or China. In this manner the tradition was cherished that a shipmaster of Salem owed it to his fellow mariners and townspeople to bring home not only all the knowledge he could gather but also every kind of curious trophy to add to the collections of the East India Marine Society. And as the commerce over seas began to diminish in the nineteenth century, this tradition laid fast hold upon many Salem men and women whose fathers had been shipmasters. They took pride in gathering together all the old log books they could find in cobwebby attics and battered seachests and in increasing this unique library of blue water.

Older than the East India Marine Society is the Salem Marine Society, which was founded in 1766 by eighteen shipmasters, and which still maintains its organization in its own building. Its Act of Incorporation, dated 1772, stated that “whereas a considerable number of persons who are or have been Masters of ships or other vessels, have for several years past associated themselves in the town of Salem; and the principal end of said Society being to improve the knowledge of this coast, by the several members, upon their arrival from sea communicating their observations, inwards and outwards, of the variation of the needle, soundings, courses and distances, and all other remarkable things about it, in writing, to be lodged with the Society, for the making of the navigation more safe; and also to relieve one another and their families in poverty or other adverse accidents of life, which they are more particularly liable to,” etc.

Most of these records, together with those belonging to the East India Marine Society and many others rescued from oblivion, have been assembled and given in care of the Essex Institute of Salem as the choicest treasure of its notable historical library. It has come to pass that a thousand of these logs and sea-journals are stored in one room of the Essex Institute, comprising many more than this number of voyages made between 1750 and 1890, a period of a century and a half, which included the most brilliant era of American sea life. 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.

There is no other collection of Americana which can so vividly recall a vanished epoch and make it live again as these hundreds upon hundreds of ancient log books. They are complete, final, embracing as they do the rise, the high-tide and the ebb of the commerce of Salem, the whole story of those vikings of deep-water enterprise who dazzled the maritime world. These journals reflect in intimate and sharply focused detail that little world which Harriet Martineau discerned when she visited Salem seventy-five years ago and related:

“Salem, Mass., is a remarkable place. This ‘city of peace’ will be better known hereafter for its commerce than for it’s witch tragedy. It has a population of fourteen thousand and more wealth in proportion to its population than perhaps any town in the world. Its commerce is speculative but vast and successful. It is a frequent circumstance that a ship goes out without a cargo for a voyage around the world. In such a case the captain puts his elder children to school, takes his wife and younger children and starts for some semi-barbarous place where he procures some odd kind of cargo which he exchanges with advantage for another somewhere else; and so goes trafficking around the world, bringing home a freight of the highest value.

“These enterprising merchants of Salem are hoping to appropriate a large share of the whale fishery and their ships are penetrating the northern ice. They speak of Fayal and the Azores as if they were close at hand. The fruits of the Mediterranean are on every table. They have a large acquaintance at Cairo. They know Napoleon’s grave at St. Helena, and have wild tales to tell of Mozambique and Madagascar, and stores of ivory to show from there. They speak of the power of the king of Muscat, and are sensible of the riches of the southeast coast of Arabia. Anybody will give you anecdotes from Canton and descriptions of the Society and Sandwich Islands. They often slip up the western coast of their two continents, bringing furs from the back regions of their own wide land, glance up at the Andes on their return; double Cape Horn, touch at the ports of Brazil and Guiana, look about them in the West Indies, feeling almost at home there, and land some fair morning in Salem and walk home as if they had done nothing remarkable.”

Within sight of this Essex Institute is the imposing building of the Peabody Academy of Science and Marine Museum, already mentioned. Here the loyal sons of Salem, aided by the generous endowment of George Peabody, the banker and philanthropist, have created a notable memorial to the sea-born genius of the old town. One hall is filled with models and paintings of the stout ships which made Salem rich and famous. These models were built and rigged with the most painstaking accuracy of detail, most of them the work of mariners of the olden time, and many of them made on shipboard during long voyages. Scores of the paintings of ships were made when they were afloat, their cannon and checkered ports telling of the dangers which merchantmen dared in those times; their hulls and rigging wearing a quaint and archaic aspect.

Beneath them are displayed the tools of the seaman’s trade long ere steam made of him a paint-swabber and mechanic. Here are the ancient quadrants, “half-circles,” and hand log lines, timed with sandglasses, with which our forefathers found their way around the world. Beside them repose the “colt” and the “cat-o’-nine-tails” with which those tough tars were flogged by their skippers and mates. Cutlasses such as were wielded in sea fights with Spanish, French and English, boarding axes and naval tomahawks, are flanked by carved whales-teeth, whose intricate designs of ships, cupids and mermaids whiled away the dogwatches under the Southern Cross. Over yonder is a notched limb of a sea-washed tree on which a sailor tallied the days and weeks of five months’ solitary waiting on a desert island where he had been cast by shipwreck.

A corner in the Marine Room of the Peabody Museum, showing portraits of the shipmasters and merchants of Salem

The Marine Room, Peabody Museum, showing the ships of Salem during a period of one hundred and fifty years

Portraits of famous shipping merchants and masters gaze at portraits of Sultans of Zanzibar, Indian Rajahs and hong merchants of Canton whose names were household words in the Salem of long ago. In other spacious halls of this museum are unique displays of the tools, weapons, garments and adornments of primitive races, gathered generations before their countries and islands were ransacked by the tourist and the ethnologist. They portray the native arts and habits of life before they were corrupted by European influences. Some of the tribes which fashioned these things have become extinct, but their vanquished handiwork is preserved in these collections made with devoted loyalty by the old shipmasters who were proud of their home town and of their Marine Society. From the Fiji and Gilbert and Hawaiian Islands, from Samoa, Arabia, India, China, Africa and Japan, and every other foreign shore where ships could go, these trophies were brought home to lay the foundation of collections which to-day are visited by scientists from abroad in order to study many rare objects which can be no longer obtained.[4]

The catalogue of ports from which the deep-laden argosies rolled home to Salem is astonishing in its scope. From 1810 to 1830, for example, Salem ships flew the American flag in these ports:

Sumatra, Malaga, Naples, Liverpool, St. Domingo, Baracoa, Cadiz, Cayenne, Gothenburg, La Guayra, Havana, Canton, Smyrna, Matanzas, Valencia, Turk’s Island, Pernambuco, Rio Janeiro, Messina, St. Pierre’s, Point Petre, Cronstadt, Archangel, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Surinam, St. Petersburg, Calcutta, Porto Rico, Palermo, Algeciras, Constantinople, Cumana, Kiel, Angostura, Jacquemel, Gustavia, Malta, Exuma, Buenos Ayres, Christiana, Stralsund, Guadaloupe, Nevis, Riga, Madras, St. Vincent’s, Pillau, Amsterdam, Maranham, Para, Leghorn, Manila, Samarang, Java, Mocha, South Sea Islands, Africa, Padang, Cape de Verde, Zanzibar and Madagascar.

In these days of huge ships and cavernous holds in which freight is stowed to the amount of thousands of tons, we are apt to think that those early mariners carried on their commerce over seas in a small way. But the records of old Salem contain scores of entries for the early years of the last century in which the duties paid on cargoes of pepper, sugar, indigo, and other Oriental wares swelled the custom receipts from twenty-five thousand to sixty thousand dollars. In ten years, from 1800 to 1810, when the maritime prosperity of the port was at flood-tide, the foreign entries numbered more than one thousand and the total amount of duties more than seven million dollars. And from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the ships of Salem vanished from blue water, a period of seventy years, roughly speaking, more than twenty million dollars poured into the Custom House as duties on foreign cargoes.

Old men now living remember when the old warehouses along the wharves were full of “hemp from Luzon; pepper from Sumatra; coffee from Arabia; palm oil from the west coast of Africa; cotton from Bombay; duck and iron from the Baltic; tallow from Madagascar; salt from Cadiz; wine from Portugal and the Madeiras; figs, raisins and almonds from the Mediterranean; teas and silks from China; sugar, rum and molasses from the West Indies; ivory and gum-copal from Zanzibar; rubber, hides and wool from South America; whale oil from the Arctic and Antarctic, and sperm from the South Seas.”

In 1812 one hundred and twenty-six Salem ships were in the deep-water trade, and of these fifty-eight were East Indiamen. Twenty years later this noble fleet numbered one hundred and eleven. They had been pioneers in opening new routes of commerce, but the vessels of the larger ports were flocking in their wake. Boston, with the development of railway transportation, New York with the opening of the Erie Canal, Philadelphia and Baltimore with their more advantageous situations for building up a commerce with the great and growing hinterland of the young United States, were creating their ocean commerce at the expense of old Salem. Bigger ships were building and deeper harbors were needed and Salem shipowners dispatched their vessels from Boston instead of the home port. Then came the Age of Steam on the sea, and the era of the sailing vessel was foredoomed.

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.”

Yet in the records left by these vanished generations of seamen; in the aspect of the stately mansions built from the fortunes won by their ships; in the atmosphere of the old wharves and streets, there has been preserved, as if caught in amber, the finished story of one of the most romantic and high-hearted periods of American achievement.

Salem was a small city during her maritime career, numbering hardly more than ten thousand souls at a time when her trade had made her famous in every port of the world. Her achievements were the work of an exceedingly bold and vigorous population in whom the pioneering instinct was fostered and guided by a few merchants of rare sagacity, daring and imagination. It must not be forgotten that from the early part of the seventeenth century to the latter year of the eighteenth century when this seafaring genius reached its highest development, the men of Salem had been trained and bred to wrest a livelihood from salt water. During this period of one hundred and fifty years before the Revolution the sea was the highway of the Colonists whose settlements fringed the rugged coast line of New England. At their backs lay a hostile wilderness and a great part of the population toiled at fishing, trading and shipbuilding.

Roger Conant, who, in 1626, founded the settlement later called Salem, had left his fellow Pilgrims at Plymouth because he would not agree to “separate” from the Church of England. Pushing along the coast to Nantasket, where Captain Miles Standish had built an outpost, Roger Conant was asked by the Dorchester Company of England to take charge of a newly established fishing station on Cape Ann. This enterprise was unsuccessful and Conant aspired to better his fortunes by founding a colony or plantation on the shore of the sheltered harbor of the Naumkeag Peninsula. This was the beginning of the town of Salem, so named by the first governor, John Endicott, who ousted Roger Conant in 1629, when this property of the Dorchester Company passed by purchase into the hands of the New England Company.

Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society, used in 1790, showing wharves and harbor

Title page of the log of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne, father of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This lettering at the top of the page was done by the author when a boy

The first settlers who had fought famine, pestilence and red men were not consulted in the transaction but were transferred along with the land. They had established a refuge for those oppressed for conscience’s sake, and Roger Conant, brave, resolute and patient, had fought the good fight with them. But although they held meetings and protested against being treated as “slaves,” they could make no opposition to the iron-handed zealot and aristocrat, John Endicott, who came to rule over them. Eighty settlers perished of hunger and disease during Governor Endicott’s first winter among them, and when Winthrop, Saltonstall, Dudley and Johnson brought over a thousand people in seventeen ships in the year of 1629, they passed by afflicted Salem and made their settlements at Boston, Charlestown and Watertown.

“The homes, labors and successes of the first colonists of Salem would be unworthy of our attention were they associated with the lives of ordinary settlers in a new country. But small though the beginnings were these men were beginning to store up and to train the energy which was afterward to expand with tremendous force in the opening of the whole world to commerce and civilization, and in the establishment of the best things in American life.”[5] They were the picked men of England, yeomanry for the most part, seeking to better their condition, interested in the great problems of religion and government. Dwelling along the harbor front, or on the banks of small rivers near at hand, they at once busied themselves cutting down trees and hewing planks to fashion pinnaces and shallops for traversing these waterways. Fish was a staple diet and the chief commodity of trade, and often averted famine while the scanty crops were being wrested from the first clearings. Thus these early sixteenth century men of Salem were more at home upon the water than upon the less friendly land, and it was inevitable that they should build larger craft for coastwise voyaging as fast as other settlements sprang into being to the north and south of them.

No more than ten years after the arrival of John Endicott, shipbuilding was a thriving industry of Salem, and her seamen had begun to talk of sending their ventures as far away as the West Indies. In 1640 the West Indiaman Desire brought home cotton, tobacco and negroes from the Bahamas and salt from Tortugas. This ship Desire was a credit to her builders, for after opening the trade with the West Indies she made a passage to England in the amazingly brief time of twenty-three days, which would have been considered rapid sailing for a packet ship two hundred years later. In 1664 a local historian was able to record that “in this town are some very rich merchants.” These merchants, most of them shipmasters as well, were destined to build up for their seaport a peculiar fame by reason of their genius for discovering new markets for their trading ventures and staking their lives and fortunes on the chance of finding rich cargoes where no other American ships had dreamed of venturing.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In 1810 Newburyport merchants owned forty-one ships, forty-nine brigs and fifty schooners, and was the seat of extensive commerce with the East Indies and other ports of the Orient. Twenty-one deep-water sailing ships for foreign trade were built on the Merrimac River in that one year. The fame of Newburyport as a shipbuilding and shipowning port was carried far into the last century and culminated in the building of the Atlantic packet Dreadnought, the fastest and most celebrated sailing ship that ever flew the American flag. She made a passage from New York to Queenstown in nine days and thirteen hours in 1860. Her famous commander, the late Captain Samuel Samuels, wrote of the Dreadnought:

“She was never passed in anything over a four-knot breeze. She was what might be termed a semi-clipper and possessed the merit of being able to bear driving as long as her sails and spars would stand. By the sailors she was called the ‘Wild Boat of the Atlantic,’ while others called her ‘The Flying Dutchman.’”

[2] Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author, chose to insert a “w” in the family name of Hathorne borne by his father.

“The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who now adopted the fanciful spelling of his name after his personal whim, was man grown.” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, by George E. Woodberry, in American Men of Letters Series.)

[3] (1799) “Oct. 22. It is proposed by the new marine society, called the East India Marine Society, to make a cabinet. This society has been lately thought of. Captain Gibant first mentioned the plan to me this summer and desired me to give him some plan of articles or a sketch. The first friends of the institution met and chose a committee to compare and digest articles from the sketches given to them. Last week was informed that in the preceding week the members met and signed the articles chosen by the committee.

“Nov. 7. Captain Carnes has presented his curiosities to the new-formed East India Marine Society and they are providing a museum and cabinet.... Rooms were obtained for their meetings and a place for the deposit of books, charts, etc., and in July of the following year glass cases were provided to arrange therein the specimens that had been accumulated.” (Diary of Rev. William Bentley.)

[4] A costly new hall has been recently added to the Museum to contain the Japanese and Chinese collections. This building was the gift of Dr. Charles G. Weld of Boston. Its Japanese floor contains the most complete and valuable ethnological collections, portraying the life of the Japanese people of the feudal age, that exists to-day. Japanese scientists and students have visited Salem in order to examine many objects of this unique collection which are no longer to be found in their own country. Professor Edward S. Morse, director of the Museum, and curator of the Japanese pottery section of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, has sifted and arranged these collections with singular patience, expert knowledge, and brilliantly successful results. The South Sea collections are also unequaled in many important particulars, especially in the field of weapons and ornaments from the Fiji and Marquesas Islands.

[5] History of Essex County.

CHAPTER II
PHILIP ENGLISH AND HIS ERA
(1680-1750)

In the decade from 1685 to 1695 the infant commerce of Salem was fighting for its life. This period was called “the dark time when ye merchants looked for ye vessells with fear and trembling.” Besides the common dangers of the sea, they had to contend with savage Indians who attacked the fishing fleet, with the heavy restrictions imposed by the Royal Acts of Trade, with the witchcraft delusion which turned every man’s hand against his neighbor, and with French privateers which so ravaged the ventures of the Salem traders to the West Indies that the shipping annals of the time are thickly strewn with such incidents as these:

(1690)—“The ketch Fellowship, Captain Robert Glanville, via the Vineyard for Berwick on the Tweed, was taken by two French privateers and carried to Dunkirk.”

(1695)—“The ship Essex of Salem, Captain John Beal, from Bilboa in Spain, had a battle at sea and loses John Samson, boatswain. This man and Thomas Roads, the gunner, had previously contracted that whoever of the two survived the other he should have all the property of the deceased.”

Soon after this the tables were turned by the Salem Packet which captured a French ship off the Banks of Newfoundland. In the same year the ketch Exchange, Captain Thomas Marston, was taken by a French ship off Block Island. She was ransomed for two hundred and fifty pounds and brought into Salem. “The son of the owner was carried to Placentia as a hostage for the payment of the ransom.”

The ancient records of the First Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of July 25, 1677:

“The Lord having given a Comission to the Indians to take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men (though divers of them cleared themselves and came home) it struck a great consternation into all the people here. The Pastor moved on the Lord’s Day, and the whole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day following as a fast day; which was accordingly done and the work carried on by the Pastor, Mr. Hale, Mr. Chevers, and Mr. Gerrish, the higher ministers helping in prayer. The Lord was pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast day which was looked on as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there had been 19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also, a ketch with 40 men sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches. The Lord give them Good Success.”

In those very early and troublous times the Barbary pirates or Corsairs had begun to vex the New England skippers who boldly crossed the Atlantic in vessels that were much smaller than a modern canal boat or brick barge. These “Sallee rovers” hovered from the Mediterranean to the chops of the English Channel. Many a luckless seaman of Salem was held prisoner in the cities of Algiers while his friends at home endeavored to gather funds for his ransom. It was stated in 1661 that “for a long time previous the commerce of Massachusetts was much annoyed by Barbary Corsairs and that many of its seamen were held in bondage. One Captain Cakebread or Breadcake had two guns to cruise in search of Turkish pirates.” In 1700 Benjamin Alford of Boston and William Bowditch of Salem related that “their friend Robert Carver of the latter port was taken nine years before, a captive into Sally; that contributions had been made for his redemption; that the money was in the hands of a person here; that if they had the disposal of it, they could release Carver.”

The end of the seventeenth century found the wilderness settlement of Salem rapidly expanding into a seaport whose commercial interests were faring to distant oceans. 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.

The sailmaker, the rigger, the ship chandler, and the shipwright had begun to populate the harbor front, and among them swarmed the rough and headlong seamen from Heaven knew where, who shocked the godly Puritans of the older régime. Jack ashore was a bull in a china shop then as now, and history has recorded the lamentable but deserved fate of “one Henry Bull and companions in a vessel in our harbor who derided the Church of Christ and were afterward cast away among savage Indians by whom they were slain.”

Now there came into prominence the first of a long line of illustrious shipping merchants of Salem, Philip English, who makes a commanding figure in the seafaring history of his time. A native of the Isle of Jersey, he came to Salem before 1670. He made voyages in his own vessels, commanded the ketch[6] Speedwell in 1676, and ten years later had so swiftly advanced his fortunes that he built him a mansion house on Essex Street, a solid, square-sided structure with many projecting porches and with upper stories overhanging the street. It stood for a hundred and fifty years, long known as “English’s Great House,” and linked the nineteenth century with the very early chapters of American history. In 1692, Philip English was perhaps the richest man of the New England Colonies, owning twenty-one vessels which traded with Bilboa, Barbados, St. Christopher’s, the Isle of Jersey and the ports of France. He owned a wharf and warehouses, and fourteen buildings in the town.

One of his bills of lading, dated 1707, shows the pious imprint of his generation and the kind of commerce in which he was engaged. It reads in part:

“Shipped by the Grace of God, in good order and well conditioned, by Sam’ll Browne, Phillip English, Capt. Wm. Bowditch, Wm. Pickering, and Sam’ll Wakefield, in and upon the Good sloop called the Mayflower whereof is master under God for this present voyage Jno. Swasey, and now riding at anchor in the harbor of Salem, and by God’s Grace bound for Virginia or Merriland. To say, twenty hogshats of Salt.... In witness whereof the Master or Purser of the said Sloop has affirmed to Two Bills of Lading ... and so God send the Good Sloop to her desired port in Safety. Amen.”

Another merchant of Philip English’s time wrote in 1700 of the foreign commerce of Salem:

“Dry Merchantable codfish for the Markets of Spain and Portugal and the Straits. Refuse fish, lumber, horses and provisions for the West Indies. Returns made directly hence to England are sugar, molasses, cotton, wool and logwood for which we depend on the West Indies. Our own produce, a considerable quantity of whale and fish oil, whalebone, furs, deer, elk and bear skins are annually sent to England. We have much Shipping here and freights are low.”

The Roger Williams house, built before 1635. Tradition asserts that preliminary examinations of those accused of witchcraft in 1692 were held here.

(This photograph was made before a drug store was built in front of the house, and shows an old “town pump”)

To Virginia the clumsy, little sloops and ketches of Philip English carried “Molasses, Rum, Salt, Cider, Mackerel, Wooden Bowls, Platters, Pails, Kegs, Muscavado Sugar, and Codfish and brought back to Salem Wheat, Pork, Tobacco, Furs, Hides, old Pewter, Old Iron, Brass, Copper, Indian Corn and English Goods.” The craft which crossed the Atlantic and made the West Indies in safety to pile up wealth for Philip English were no larger than those sloops and schooners which ply up and down the Hudson River to-day. Their masters made their way without sextant or “Practical Navigator,” and as an old writer has described in a somewhat exaggerated vein:

“Their skippers kept their reckoning with chalk on a shingle, which they stowed away in the binnacle; and by way of observation they held up a hand to the sun. When they got him over four fingers they knew they were straight for Hole-in-the-Wall; three fingers gave them their course to the Double-headed Shop Key and two carried them down to Barbados.”

The witchcraft frenzy invaded even the stately home of Philip English, the greatest shipowner of early Salem. His wife, a proud and aristocratic lady, was “cried against,” examined and committed to prison in Salem. It is said that she was considered haughty and overbearing in her manner toward the poor, and that her husband’s staunch adherence to the Church of England had something to do with her plight. At any rate, Mary English was arrested in her bedchamber and refused to rise, wherefore “guards were placed around the house and in the morning she attended the devotions of her family, kissed her children with great composure, proposed her plan for their education, took leave of them and then told the officer she was ready to die.” Alas, poor woman, she had reason to be “persuaded that accusation was equal to condemnation.” She lay in prison six weeks where “her firmness was memorable. But being visited by a fond husband, her husband was also accused and confined in prison.” The intercession of friends and the plea that the prison was overcrowded caused their removal to Arnold’s jail in Boston until the time of trial. It brings to mind certain episodes of the French Reign of Terror to learn that they were taken to Boston on the same day with Giles Corey, George Jacobs, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, and Bridget Bishop, all of whom perished except Philip and Mary English. Both would have been executed had they not escaped death by flight from the Boston jail and seeking refuge in New York.

In his diary, under date of May 21, 1793, Rev. William Bentley, of Salem, pastor of the East Church from 1783 to 1819, wrote of the witchcraft persecution of this notable shipping merchant and his wife:

“May 21st, 1793. Substance of Madam Susannah Harthorne’s account of her grandfather English, etc. Mr. English was a Jerseyman, came young to America and lived with Mr. W. Hollingsworth, whose only child he married. He owned above twenty sail of vessels. His wife had the best education of her times. Wrote with great ease, and has left a specimen of her needlework in her infancy or youth. She had already owned her Covenant and was baptised with her children and now intended to be received at the Communion on the next Lord’s Day. On Saturday night she was cried out upon. The Officers, High Sheriff, and Deputy with attendants came at eleven at night. When the servant came up Mr. English imagined it was upon business, not having had the least notice of the suspicions respecting his wife. They were to bed together in the western chamber of their new house raised in 1690, and had a large family of servants.

“The Officers came in soon after the servant who so alarmed Mr. English that with difficulty he found his cloathes which he could not put on without help. The Officers came into the chamber, following the servant, and opening the curtains read the Mittimus. She was then ordered to rise but absolutely refused. Her husband continued walking the chamber all night, but the Officers contented themselves with a guard upon the House till morning. In the morning they required of her to rise, but she refused to rise before her usual hour. After breakfast with her husband and children, and seeing all the servants, of whom there were twenty in the House, she concluded to go with the officers and she was conducted to the Cat and Wheel, a public house east of the present Centre Meeting House on the opposite side of the way. Six weeks she was confined in the front chamber, in which she received the visits of her husband three times a day and as the floor was single she kept a journal of the examinations held below which she constantly sent to Boston.

“After six weeks her husband was accused, and their friends obtained that they should be sent on to Boston till their Trial should come on. In Arnold’s custody they had bail and liberty of the town, only lodging in the Gaol. The Rev. Moody and Williard of Boston visited them and invited them to the public worship on the day before they were to return to Salem for Trial. Their text was that they that are persecuted in one city, let them flee to another. After Meeting the Ministers visited them at the Gaol, and asked them whether they took notice of the discourse, and told them their danger and urged them to escape since so many had suffered. Mr. English replied, ‘God will not permit them to touch me.’ Mrs. English said: ‘Do you not think the sufferers innocent?’ He (Moody) said ‘Yes.’ She then added, ‘Why may we not suffer also?’ The Ministers then told him if he would not carry his wife away they would.

“The gentlemen of the town took care to provide at midnight a conveyance, encouraged by the Governor, Gaoler, etc., and Mr. and Mrs. English with their eldest child and daughter, were conveyed away, and the Governor gave letters to Governor Fletcher of New York who came out and received them, accompanied by twenty private gentlemen, and carried them to his house.

“They remained twelve months in the city. While there they heard of the wants of the poor in Salem and sent a vessel of corn for their relief, a bushel for each child. Great advantages were proposed to detain them at New York, but the attachment of the wife to Salem was not lost by all her sufferings, and she urged a return. They were received with joy upon their return and the Town had a thanksgiving on the occasion. Noyes, the prosecutor, dined with him on that day in his own house.”

That a man of such solid station should have so narrowly escaped death in the witchcraft fury indicates that no class was spared. While his sturdy seamen were fiddling and drinking in the taverns of the Salem waterfront, or making sail to the roaring chorus of old-time chanties, their employer, a prince of commerce for his time, was dreading a miserable death for himself and that high-spirited dame, his wife, on Gallows Hill, at the hands of the stern-faced young sheriff of Salem.

Philip English returned to Salem after the frenzy had passed and rounded out a shipping career of fifty years, living until 1736. His instructions to one of his captains may help to picture the American commerce of two centuries ago. In 1722 he wrote to “Mr. John Tauzel”:

“Sir, you being appointed Master of my sloop Sarah, now Riding in ye Harbor of Salem, and Ready to Saile, my Order is to you that you take ye first opportunity of wind and Weather to Saile and make ye best of yr. way for Barbadoes or Leew’d Island, and there Enter and Clear yr vessel and Deliver yr Cargo according to Orders and Bill of Lading and Make Saile of my twelve Hogsh’d of fish to my best advantage, and make Returne in yr Vessel or any other for Salem in such Goods as you shall see best, and if you see Cause to take a freight to any port or hire her I lieve it with your Best Conduct, Managem’t or Care for my best advantage. So please God to give you a prosperous voyage, I remain yr Friend and Owner.

“Philip English.”

England had become already jealous of the flourishing maritime commerce of the Colonies and was devising one restrictive Act of Parliament after another to hamper what was viewed as a dangerous rivalry. In 1668, Sir Joshua Child, once chairman of the East India Company, delivered himself of this choleric and short-sighted opinion:

“Of all the American plantations His Majesty has none so apt for the building of ships as New England, nor none comparably so qualified for the breeding of seamen, not only by reason of the natural industry of the people, but principally by reason of their cod and mackerel fisheries, and in my opinion there is nothing more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations or provinces.”

This selfish view-point sought not only to prevent American shipowners from conducting a direct trade with Europe but tried also to cripple the prosperous commerce between the Colonies and the West Indies. The narrow-minded politicians who sacrificed both the Colonies and the Mother country could not kill American shipping even by the most ingenious restrictive acts, and the hardy merchants of New England violated or evaded these unjust edicts after the manner indicated in the following letter of instructions given to Captain Richard Derby of Salem, for a voyage to the West Indies as master and part owner of the schooner Volante in 1741:

“If you should go among the French endeavour to get salt at St. Martins, but if you should fall so low as Statia, and any Frenchman should make you a good Offer with good security, or by making your Vessel a Dutch bottom, or by any other means practicable in order to your getting among ye Frenchmen, embrace it. Among whom if you should ever arrive, be sure to give strict orders amongst your men not to sell the least trifle unto them on any terms, lest they should make your Vessel liable to a seizure. Also secure a permit so as for you to trade there next voyage, which you may undoubtedly do through your factor or by a little greasing some others. Also make a proper Protest at any port you stop at.”

This means that if needs be, Captain Derby is to procure a Dutch registry and make the Volante a Dutch vessel for the time being, and thus not subject to the British Navigation Acts. It was easy to buy such registries for temporary use and to masquerade under English, French, Spanish or Dutch colors, if a “little greasing” was applied to the customs officers in the West Indies.

On the margin of Captain Derby’s sailing orders is scrawled the following memorandum:

“Capt. Derby: If you trade at Barbadoes buy me a negroe boy about siventeen years old, which if you do, advise Mr. Clarke of yt so he may not send one.

(Signed)

Benj. Gerrish, Jr.”

By permission of the Essex Institute

The Philip English “Great House,” built in 1685 and torn down in 1833. The home of the first great shipping merchant of the colonies

Such voyages as these were risky ventures for the eighteenth century insurance companies, whose courage is to be admired for daring to underwrite these vessels at all. For a voyage of the Lydia from Salem to Madeira in 1761, the premium rate was 11 per cent., and in the following year 14 per cent. was demanded for a voyage to Jamaica. The Three Sisters, bound to Santo Domingo, was compelled to pay 23 per cent. premium, and 14 per cent. for the return voyage. The lowest rate recorded for this era was 8 per cent. on the schooner Friendship of Salem to Quebec in 1760. For a Madeira voyage from Salem to-day the insurance rate would be 1¾ per cent. as compared with 11 per cent. then; to Jamaica 1½ per cent. instead of 14 per cent. in the days when the underwriters had to risk confiscation, violation of the British Navigation Acts, and capture by privateers, or pirates, in addition to the usual dangers of the deep.

Among the biographical sketches in the records of the Salem Marine Society is that of Captain Michael Driver. It is a concise yet crowded narrative and may serve to show why insurance rates were high. “In the year 1759, he commanded the schooner Three Brothers, bound to the West Indies,” runs the account. “He was taken by a privateer under English colors, called the King of Russia, commanded by Captain James Inclicto, of nine guns, and sent into Antigua. Her cargo was value at £550. Finding no redress he came home. He sailed again in the schooner Betsey for Guadaloupe; while on his passage was taken by a French frigate and sent into above port. He ransomed the vessel for four thousand livres and left three hostages and sailed for home November, 1761, and took command of schooner Mary, under a flag of truce, to go and pay the ransom and bring home the hostages.

“He was again captured, contrary to the laws of nations, by the English privateer Revenge, James McDonald, master, sent to New Providence, Bahama. He made protest before the authorities and was set at liberty with vessel and cargo. He pursued his voyage to Cape Francois, redeemed the hostages, and Sept. 6, 1762, was ready to return, but Monsieur Blanch, commanding a French frigate, seized the vessel, took out hostages and crew and put them on board the frigate bound to St. Jago, Cuba. He was detained till December, and vessel returned. Worn out and foodless he was obliged to go to Jamaica for repairs. On his arrival home his case was represented to the Colonial Government and transmitted to Governor Shirley at New Providence, but no redress was made.”

Many of these small vessels with crews of four to six men were lost by shipwreck and now and then one can read between the lines of some scanty chronicle of disaster astonishing romances of maritime suffering and adventure. For example in 1677, “a vessel arrived at Salem which took Captain Ephriam How of New Haven, the survivor of his crew, from a desolate island where eight months he suffered exceedingly from cold and hunger.”

In the seventeenth century Cape Cod was as remote as and even more inaccessible than Europe. A bark of thirty tons burden, Anthony Dike master, was wrecked near the end of the Cape and three of the crew were frozen to death. The two survivors “got some fire and lived there by such food as they had saved for seven weeks until an Indian found them. Dike was of the number who perished.”

Robinson Crusoe could have mastered difficulties no more courageously than the seamen of the ketch Providence, wrecked on a voyage to the West Indies. “Six of her crew were drowned, but the Master, mate and a sailor, who was badly wounded, reached an island half a mile off where they found another of the company. They remained there eight days, living on salt fish and cakes made from a barrel of flour washed ashore. They found a piece of touch wood after four days which the mate had in his chest and a piece of flint with which, having a small knife they struck a fire. They framed a boat with a tarred mainsail and some hoops and then fastened pieces of board to them. With a boat so constructed they sailed ten leagues to Anquila and St. Martins where they were kindly received.”

There was also Captain Jones of the brig Adventure which foundered at sea while coming home from Trinidad. All hands were lost except the skipper, who got astride a wooden or “Quaker” gun which had broken adrift from the harmless battery with which he had hoped to intimidate pirates. “He fought off the sharks with his feet” and clung to his buoyant ordnance until he was picked up and carried into Havana.

In 1759 young Samuel Gardner of Salem, just graduated from Harvard College, made a voyage to Gibraltar with Captain Richard Derby. The lad’s diary[7] contains some interesting references to the warlike hazards of a routine trading voyage, besides revealing, in an attractive way, the ingenuous nature of this nineteen-year-old youngster of the eighteenth century. His daily entries read in part:

1759. Oct. 19—Sailed from Salem. Very sick.

20—I prodigious sick, no comfort at all.

21—I remain very sick, the first Sabbath I have spent from Church this long time. Little Sleep this Night.

24—A little better contented, but a Sailor’s life is a poor life.

31—Fair pleasant weather, if it was always so, a sea life would be tolerable.

... Nov. 11—This makes the fourth Sunday I have been out. Read Dr. Beveridge’s “Serious Thoughts.”

12—Saw a sail standing to S.W. I am quartered at the aftermost gun and its opposite with Captain Clifford. We fired a shot at her and she hoisted Dutch colors.

13—I have entertained myself with a Romance, viz., “The History of the Parish Girl.”

14—Quite pleasant. Here we may behold the Works of God in the Mighty Deep. Happy he who beholds aright.

15—Between 2 and 3 this morning we saw two sail which chased us, the ship fired 3 shots at us which we returned. They came up with us by reason of a breeze which she took before we did. She proved to be the ship Cornwall from Bristol.

21—Bishop Beveridge employed my time.

23—We now begin to approach to land. May we have a good sight of it. At eight o’clock two Teriffa (Barbary) boats came out after us, they fired at us which we returned as merrily. They were glad to get away as well as they could. We stood after one, but it is almost impossible to come up with the piratical dogs.

28—Gibraltar—Went on shore. Saw the soldiers in the Garrison exercise. They had a cruel fellow for an officer for he whipt them barbarously.... After dinner we went out and saw the poor soldiers lickt again.

... Dec. 10—Benj. Moses, a Jew, was on board. I had some discourse with him about his religion.... Poor creature, he errs greatly. I endeavored to set him right, but he said for a conclusion that his Father and Grandfather were Jews and if they were gone to Hell he would go there, too, by choice, which I exposed as a great piece of Folly and Stupidity. In the morning we heard a firing and looked out in the Gut and there was a snow attacked by 3 of the piratical Teriffa boats. Two cutters in the Government service soon got under sail, 3 men-of-war that lay in the Roads manned their barges and sent them out as did a Privateer. We could now perceive her (the snow) to have struck, but they soon retook her. She had only four swivels and 6 or 8 men.... They got some prisoners (of the pirates) but how many I cannot learn, which it is to be hoped will meet with their just reward which I think would be nothing short of hanging.... Just at dusk came on board of us two Gentlemen, one of which is an Officer on board a man-of-war, the other belongs to the Granada in the King’s Service. The former (our people say) was in the skirmish in some of the barges. He could have given us a relation of it, but we, not knowing of it, prevented what would have been very agreeable to me.... It is now between 9 and 10 o’clock at night which is the latest I have set up since I left Salem.”

This Samuel Gardner was a typical Salem boy of his time, well brought up, sent to college, and eager to go to sea and experience adventures such as his elders had described. Of a kindred spirit in the very human quality of the documents he left for us was Francis Boardman, a seaman, who rose to a considerable position as a Salem merchant. His ancient log books contain between their battered and discolored canvas covers the records of his voyages between 1767 and 1774. Among the earliest are the logs of the ship Vaughan in which Francis Boardman sailed as mate. He kept the log and having a bent for scribbling on whatever blank paper his quill could find, he filled the fly-leaves of these sea journals with more interesting material than the routine entries of wind, weather and ship’s daily business. Scrawled on one ragged leaf in what appears to be the preliminary draft of a letter:

“Dear Polly—thes lines comes with My Love to you. Hoping thes will find you in as good Health as they Leave me at this Time, Blessed be God for so Great a Massey (mercy).”

Young Francis Boardman was equipped with epistolary ammunition for all weathers and conditions, it would seem, for in another log of a hundred and fifty years ago, he carefully wrote on a leaf opposite his personal expense account:

“Madam:

“Your Late Behavour towards me, you are sensible cannot have escaped my Ear. I must own you was once the person of whom I could Not have formed such an Opinion. For my part, at present I freely forgive you and only blame myself for putting so much confidence in a person so undeserving. I have now conquered my pashun so much (though I must confess at first it was with great difficulty), that I never think of you, nor I believe never shall without despising the Name of a person who dared to use me in so ungrateful a manner. I shall now conclude myself, though badley used, not your Enemy.”

It may be fairly suspected that Francis Boardman owned a copy of some early “Complete Letter Writer,” for on another page he begins but does not finish. “A Letter from One Sister to Another to Enquire of Health.” Also he takes pains several times to draft these dutiful but far from newsy lines:

“Honored Father and Mother—Thes lines comes with my Deuty to you. Hoping They will find you in as good Health as they Leave me at this Time. Blessed be God for so Great a Massey—Honored Father and Mother.”

In a log labeled “From London Toward Cadiz, Spain, in the good ship Vaughan, Benj. Davis, Master, 1767,” Francis Boardman became mightily busy with his quill and the season being spring, he began to scrawl poetry between the leaves which were covered with such dry entries as “Modt. Gales and fair weather. Set the jibb. Bent topmast stay sail.” One of these pages of verse begins in this fashion:

“One Morning, one Morning in May,

The fields were adorning with Costlay Array.

I Chanced for To hear as I walked By a Grove

A Shepyard Laymenting for the Loss of his Love.”

But the most moving and ambitious relic of the poetic taste of this long vanished Yankee seaman is a ballad preserved in the same log of the Vaughan. Its spelling is as filled with fresh surprises as its sentiment is profoundly tragic. It runs as follows:

A bill of lading of the time of Philip English, dated 1716

The log of a Salem whaler, showing how he recorded the number of whales he took

In 1774 we find Francis Boardman as captain of the sloop Adventure, evidently making his first voyage as master. He was bound for the West Indies, and while off the port of St. Pierre in Martinique he penned these gloomy remarks in his log:

“This Morning I Drempt that 2 of my upper teeth and one Lower Dropt out and another Next the Lower one wore away as thin as a wafer and Sundry other fritful Dreams. What will be the Event of it I can’t tell.”

Other superstitions seem to have vexed his mind, for in the same log he wrote as follows:

“this Blot I found the 17th. I can’t tell but Something Very bad is going to Hapen to me this Voyage. I am afeard but God onley Noes What may hapen on board the Sloop Adventure—the first Voyage of being Master.”

Sailing “From Guardalopa Toward Boston,” Captain Francis Boardman made this final entry in his log:

“The End of this Voyage for wich I am Very thankfull on Acct. of a Grate Deal of Truble by a bad mate. His name is William Robson of Salem. He was Drunk most Part of the Voyage.”

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The ketch of the eighteenth century was two-masted with square sails on her foremast, and a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, which was shorter than the foremast. The schooner rig was not used until 1720 and is said to have been originated by Captain Andrew Robinson of Gloucester.

[7] Historical Collections of the Essex Institute.

[8] Gosport Navy Yard, England.

CHAPTER III
SOME EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PIRATES
(1670-1725)

The pirates of the Spanish Main and the southern coasts of this country have enjoyed almost a monopoly of popular interest in fact and fiction. As early as 1632, however, the New England coast was plagued by pirates and the doughty merchant seamen of Salem and other ports were sallying forth to fight them for a hundred years on end.

In 1670 the General Court published in Boston, “by beat of drum,” a proclamation against a ship at the Isle of Shoals suspected of being a pirate, and three years later another official broadside was hurled against “piracy and mutiny.” The report of an expedition sent out from Boston in 1689, in the sloop Mary, against notorious pirates named Thomas Hawkins and Thomas Pound, has all the dramatic elements and properties of a tale of pure adventure. It relates that “being off of Wood’s Hole, we were informed there was a Pirate at Tarpolin Cove, and soon after we espyed a Sloop on head of us which we supposed to be the Sloop wherein sd. Pound and his Company were. We made what Sayle we could and soon came near up with her, spread our King’s Jack and fired a shot athwart her forefoot, upon which a red fflag was put out on the head of the sd. Sloop’s mast. Our Capn. ordered another shot to be fired athwart her forefoot, but they not striking, we came up with them. Our Capn. commanded us to fire at them which we accordingly did and called to them to strike to the King of England.

“Pound, standing on the Quarter deck with his naked Sword flourishing in his hand, said; ‘Come on Board you Doggs, I will strike you presently,’ or words to that purpose, his men standing by him upon the deck with guns in their hands, and he taking up his Gun, they discharged a Volley at us and we at them again, and so continued firing one at the other for some space of time.

“In which engagement our Capn. Samuel Pease was wounded in the Arme, in the side and in the thigh; but at length bringing them under our power, wee made Sayle towards Roade Island and on Saturday the fifth of sd. October gut our wounded men on shore and procured Surgeons to dress them. Our said Captaine lost much blood by his wounds and was brought very low, but on friday after, being the eleventh day of the said October, being brought on board the vessell intending to come away to Boston, was taken with bleeding afresh, so that we were forced to carry him on Shore again to Road Island, and was followed with bleeding at his Wounds, and fell into fitts, but remained alive until Saturday morning the twelfth of Octbr. aforesaid when he departed this Life.”

This admirably brief narrative shows that Thomas Pounds, strutting his quarter deck under his red “fflagg” and flourishing his naked sword and crying “Come on, you doggs,” was a proper figure of a seventeenth century pirate, and that poor Captain Pease of the sloop Mary was a gallant seaman who won his victory after being wounded unto death. Pirates received short shift and this crew was probably hanged in Boston as were scores of their fellows in that era.

Puritan wives and sweethearts waited months and years for missing ships which never again dropped anchor in the landlocked harbor of Salem, and perhaps if any tidings ever came it was no more than this:

“May 21 (1697)—The ketch Margaret of Salem, Captain Peter Henderson was chased ashore near Funshal, Madeira, by pirates and lost. Of what became of the officers and crew the account says nothing.”

In July of 1703, the brigantine Charles, Capt. Daniel Plowman, was fitted out at Boston as a privateer to cruise against the French and Spanish with whom Great Britain was at war. When the vessel had been a few days at sea, Captain Plowman was taken very ill. Thereupon the crew locked him in the cabin and left him to die while they conspired to run off with the brigantine and turn pirates. The luckless master conveniently died, his body was tossed overboard and one John Quelch assumed the command. The crew seem to have agreed that he was the man for their purpose and they unanimously invited him to “sail on a private cruise to the coast of Brazil.” In those waters they plundered several Portuguese ships, and having collected sufficient booty or becoming homesick, they determined to seek their native land. With striking boldness Quelch navigated the brigantine back to Marblehead and primed his men with a story of the voyage which should cover up their career as pirates.

Suspicion was turned against them, however, the vessel was searched, and much plunder revealed. The pirates tried to escape along shore, but most of them, Quelch included, were captured at Gloucester, the Isle of Shoals, and Marblehead.

One of the old Salem records has preserved the following information concerning the fate of these rascals:

(1704)—“Major Stephen Sewall, Captain John Turner and 40 volunteers embark in a shallop and Fort Pinnace after Sun Set to go in Search of some Pirates who sailed from Gloucester in the morning. Major Sewall brought into Salem a Galley, Captain Thomas Lowrimore, on board of which he had captured some pirates and some of their Gold at the Isle of Shoals. Major Sewall carries the Pirates to Boston under a strong guard. Captain Quelch and five of his crew are hung. About 13 of the ship’s company remain under sentence of death and several more are cleared.”

Tradition records that a Salem poet of that time was moved to write of the foregoing episode:

“Ye pirates who against God’s laws did fight,

Have all been taken which is very right.

Some of them were old and others young

And on the flats of Boston they were hung.”

There is a vivacious and entertaining flavor in the following chronicle and comment:

“May 1, 1718, several of the ship Hopewell’s crew can testify that near Hispaniola they met with pirates who robbed and abused their crew and compelled their mate, James Logun of Charlestown to go with them, as they had no artist; having lost several of their company in an engagement. As to what sort of an artist these gentlemen rovers were deficient in, whether dancing, swimming or writing master, or a master of the mechanical arts, we have no authority for stating.”

The official account of the foregoing misfortune is to be found among the notarial records of Essex county and reads as follows:

“Depositions of Richard Manning, John Crowell, and Aaron Crowell, all of Salem, and belonging to the crew of Captain Thomas Ellis, commander of the ship Hopewell, bound from Island of Barbadoes to Saltatuda. Missing of that Island and falling to Leeward we shaped our course for some of the Bahama Islands in hopes to get salt there, but nigh ye Island of Hispaniola we unhappily met with a pirate, being a sloop of between thirty and forty men, one Capt. Charles, commander, his sirname we could not learn. They took us, boarded us and abused several of us shamefully, and took what small matters we had, even our very cloathes and particularly beat and abused our Mate, whose name was James Logun of Charlestown, and him they forcibly carried away with them and threatened his life if he would not go, which they were ye more in earnest for insomuch as they had no artist on board, as we understood, having a little before that time had an Engagem’t. with a ship of force which had killed several of them as we were Informed by some of them. Ye said James Logun was very unwilling to go with them and informed some of us that he knew not whether he had best to dye or go with them, these Deponents knowing of him to be an Ingenious sober man. To ye truth of all we have hereunto sett our hand having fresh Remembrance thereof, being but ye fifth day of March last past, when we were taken.

Salem, May 1, 1718.”

In the following year Captain John Shattuck entered his protest at Salem against capture by pirates. He sailed from Jamaica for New England and in sight of Long Island (West Indies) was captured by a “Pyrat” of 12 guns and 120 men, under the command of Captain Charles Vain, who took him to Crooked Island (Bahamas), plundered him of various articles, stripped the brig, abused some of his men and finally let him go. “Coming, however, on a winter coast, his vessel stripped of needed sails, he was blown off to the West Indies and did not arrive in Salem until the next spring.”

In 1724 two notorious sea rogues, Nutt and Phillip, were cruising off Cape Ann, their topsails in sight of Salem harbor mouth. They took a sloop commanded by one Andrew Harradine of Salem and thereby caught a Tartar. Harradine and his crew rose upon their captors, killed both Nutt and Phillip and their officers, put the pirate crew under hatches, and sailed the vessel to Boston where the pirates were turned over to the authorities to be fitted with hempen kerchiefs.

On the first of May, 1725, a Salem brigantine commanded by Captain Dove sailed into her home harbor having on board one Philip Ashton, a lad from Marblehead who had been given up as dead for almost three years. He had been captured by pirates, and after escaping from them lived alone for a year and more on a desert island off the coast of Honduras. Philip Ashton wrote a journal of his adventures which was first published many years ago. His story is perhaps the most entertaining narrative of eighteenth century piracy that has come down to present times. Little is known of the career of this lad of Marblehead before or after his adventures and misfortunes in the company of pirates. It is recorded that when he hurried to his home from the ship which had fetched him into Salem harbor there was great rejoicing. On the following Sunday Rev. John Barnard preached a sermon concerning the miraculous escape of Philip Ashton. His text was taken from the third chapter of Daniel, seventeenth verse: “If it be so our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thy hands, O King.”

It is also known that at about the same time that Philip Ashton was captured by pirates his cousin, Nicholas Merritt, met with a like misfortune at sea. He made his escape after several months of captivity and returned to his home a year later when there was another thanksgiving for a wanderer returned.

A page from Falconer’s Marine Dictionary (18th Century)

Figure 4: a snow, (5) a ketch, (6) a brig or brigantine, (7) a bilander, (8) a xebec, (9) a schooner, (10) a galliot, (11) a dogger, (12 and 13) two gallies, one under sail, the other rowing, (14) a sloop

What the early shipmasters of Salem and nearby ports had to fear in the eighteenth century may be more clearly comprehended if a part of the journal of Philip Ashton is presented as he is said to have written it upon his return home. It begins as follows:

“On Friday, the 15th of June, 1722, after being out some time in a schooner with four men and a boy, off Cape Sable, I stood in for Port Rossaway, designing to lie there all Sunday. Having arrived about four in the afternoon, we saw, among other vessels which had reached the port before us, a brigantine supposed to be inward bound from the West Indies. After remaining three or four hours at anchor, a boat from the brigantine came alongside, with four hands, who leapt on deck, and suddenly drawing out pistols, and brandishing cutlasses, demanded the surrender both of ourselves and our vessel. All remonstrance was vain; nor indeed, had we known who they were before boarding us could we have made any effectual resistance, being only five men and a boy, and were thus under the necessity of submitting at discretion. We were not single in misfortune, as thirteen or fourteen fishing vessels were in like manner surprised the same evening.

“When carried on board the brigantine, I found myself in the hands of Ned Low, an infamous pirate, whose vessel had two great guns, four swivels, and about forty-two men. I was strongly urged to sign the articles of agreement among the pirates and to join their number, which I steadily refused and suffered much bad usage in consequence. At length being conducted, along with five of the prisoners, to the quarterdeck, Low came up to us with pistols in his hand, and loudly demanded: ‘Are any of you married men?’

“This unexpected question, added to the sight of the pistols, struck us all speechless; we were alarmed lest there was some secret meaning in his words, and that he would proceed to extremities, therefore none could reply. In a violent passion he cocked a pistol, and clapping it to my head, cried out: ‘You dog, why don’t you answer?’ swearing vehemently at the same time that he would shoot me through the head. I was sufficiently terrified by his threats and fierceness, but rather than lose my life in so trifling a matter, I ventured to pronounce, as loud as I durst speak, that I was not married. Hereupon he seemed to be somewhat pacified, and turned away.

“It appeared that Low was resolved to take no married men whatever, which often seemed surprising to me until I had been a considerable time with him. But his own wife had died lately before he became a pirate; and he had a young child at Boston, for whom he entertained such tenderness, on every lucid interval from drinking and revelling, that on mentioning it, I have seen him sit down and weep plentifully. Thus I concluded that his reason for taking only single men, was probably that they might have no ties, such as wives and children, to divert them from his service, and render them desirous of returning home.

“The pirates finding force of no avail in compelling us to join them, began to use persuasion instead of it. They tried to flatter me into compliance, by setting before me the share I should have in their spoils, and the riches which I should become master of; and all the time eagerly importuned me to drink along with them. But I still continued to resist their proposals, whereupon Low, with equal fury as before, threatened to shoot me through the head, and though I earnestly entreated my release, he and his people wrote my name, and that of my companions, in their books.

“On the 19th of June, the pirates changed the privateer, as they called their vessel, and went into a new schooner belonging to Marblehead, which they had captured. They then put all the prisoners whom they designed sending home on board of the brigantine, and sent her to Boston, which induced me to make another unsuccessful attempt for liberty; but though I fell on my knees to Low, he refused to let me go; thus I saw the brigantine depart, with the whole captives, excepting myself and seven more.

“A very short time before she departed, I had nearly effected my escape; for a dog belonging to Low being accidentally left on shore, he ordered some hands into a boat to bring it off. Thereupon two young men, captives, both belonging to Marblehead, readily leapt into the boat, and I considering that if I could once get on shore, means might be found of effecting my escape, endeavored to go along with them. But the quartermaster, called Russell, catching hold of my shoulder, drew me back. As the young men did not return he thought I was privy to their plot, and, with the most outrageous oaths, snapped his pistol, on my denying all knowledge of it. The pistol missing fire, however, only served to enrage him the more; he snapped it three times again, and as often it missed fire; on which he held it overboard, and then it went off. Russell on this drew his cutlass, and was about to attack me in the utmost fury, when I leapt down into the hold and saved myself.

“Off St. Michael’s the pirates took a large Portuguese pink, laden with wheat, coming out of the road; and being a good sailor, and carrying fourteen guns, transferred their company into her. It afterwards became necessary to careen her, whence they made three islands called Triangles lying about forty leagues to the eastward of Surinam.

“In heaving down the pink, Low had ordered so many men to the shrouds and yards that the ports, by her heeling, got under water, and the sea rushing in, she overset; he and the doctor were then in the cabin, and as soon as he observed the water gushing in, he leaped out of the stern port while the doctor attempted to follow him. But the violence of the sea repulsed the latter, and he was forced back into the cabin. Low, however, contrived to thrust his arm into the port, and dragging him out, saved his life. Meanwhile, the vessel completely overset. Her keel turned out of the water; but as the hull filled she sunk in the depth of about six fathoms.

“The yardarms striking the ground, forced the masts somewhat above the water; as the ship overset, the people, got from the shrouds and yards, upon the hull, and as the hull went down, they again resorted to the rigging, rising a little out of the sea.

“Being an indifferent swimmer, I was reduced to great extremity; for along with other light lads, I had been sent up to the main-topgallant yard; and the people of a boat who were now occupied in preserving the men refusing to take me in, I was compelled to attempt reaching the buoy. This I luckily accomplished, and as it was large secured myself there until the boat approached. I once more requested the people to take me in, but they still refused, as the boat was full. I was uncertain whether they designed leaving me to perish in this situation; however, the boat being deeply laden made way very slowly, and one of my comrades, captured at the same time with myself, calling to me to forsake the buoy and swim toward her, I assented, and reaching the boat, he drew me on board. Two men, John Bell, and Zana Gourdon, were lost in the pink.

“Though the schooner in company was very near at hand, her people were employed mending their sails under an awning and knew nothing of the accident until the boat full of men got alongside.

“The pirates having thus lost their principal vessel, and the greatest part of their provisions and water, were reduced to great extremities for want of the latter. They were unable to get a supply at the Triangles, nor on account of calms and currents, could they make the island of Tobago. Thus they were forced to stand for Grenada, which they reached after being on short allowance for sixteen days together.

“Grenada was a French settlement, and Low, on arriving, after having sent all his men below, except a sufficient number to maneuver the vessel, said he was from Barbadoes; that he had lost the water on board, and was obliged to put in here for a supply.

“The people entertained no suspicion of his being a pirate, but afterward supposing him a smuggler, thought it a good opportunity to make a prize of his vessel. Next day, therefore, they equipped a large sloop of seventy tons and four guns with about thirty hands, as sufficient for the capture, and came alongside while Low was quite unsuspicious of their design. But this being evidently betrayed by their number and actions, he quickly called ninety men on deck, and, having eight guns mounted, the French sloop became an easy prey.

“Provided with these two vessels, the pirates cruised about in the West Indies, taking seven or eight prizes, and at length arrived at the island of Santa Cruz, where they captured two more. While lying there Low thought he stood in need of a medicine chest, and, in order to procure one sent four Frenchmen in a vessel he had taken to St. Thomas’s, about twelve leagues distant, with money to purchase it; promising them liberty, and the return of all their vessels for the service. But he declared at the same time if it proved otherwise, he would kill the rest of the men, and burn the vessels. In little more than twenty-four hours, the Frenchmen returned with the object of their mission, and Low punctually performed his promise by restoring the vessels.

“Having sailed for the Spanish-American settlements, the pirates descried two large ships about half way between Carthagena and Portobello, which proved to be the Mermaid, an English man-of-war, and a Guineaman. They approached in chase until discovering the man-of-war’s great range of teeth, when they immediately put about and made the best of their way off. The man-of-war then commenced the pursuit and gained upon them apace, and I confess that my terrors were now equal to any that I had previously suffered; for I concluded that we should certainly be taken, and that I should not less be hanged for company’s sake; so true are the words of Solomon: ‘A companion of fools shall be destroyed.’ But the two pirate vessels finding themselves outsailed, separated, and Farrington Spriggs, who commanded the schooner in which I was stood in for the shore. The Mermaid observing the sloop with Low himself to be the larger of the two, crowded all sail, and continued gaining still more, indeed until her shot flew over; but one of the sloop’s crew showed Low a shoal, which he could pass, and in the pursuit the man-of-war grounded. Thus the pirates escaped hanging on this occasion.

“Spriggs and one of his chosen companions dreading the consequences of being captured and brought to justice, laid their pistols beside them in the interval, and pledging a mutual oath in a bumper of liquor, swore if they saw no possibility of escape, to set foot to foot and blow out each other’s brains. But standing toward the shore, they made Pickeroon Bay, and escaped the danger.

“Next we repaired to a small island called Utilla, about seven or eight leagues to leeward of the island of Roatan, in the Bay of Honduras, where the bottom of the schooner was cleaned. There were now twenty-two persons on board, and eight of us engaged in a plot to overpower our masters, and make our escape. Spriggs proposed sailing for New England, in quest of provisions and to increase his company; and we intended on approaching the coast, when the rest had indulged freely in liquor and fallen sound asleep, to secure them under the hatches, and then deliver ourselves up to government.

“Although our plot was carried on with all possible privacy, Spriggs had somehow or other got intelligence of it; and having fallen in with Low on the voyage, went on board his ship to make a furious declaration against us. But Low made little account of his information, otherwise it might have been fatal to most of our number. Spriggs, however, returned raging to the schooner, exclaiming that four of us should go forward to be shot, and to me in particular he said: ‘You dog Ashton, you deserve to be hanged up at the yardarm for designing to cut us off.’ I replied that I had no intention of injuring any man on board; but I should be glad if they would allow me to go away quietly. At length this flame was quenched, and, through the goodness of God, I escaped destruction.

“Roatan harbor, as all about the Bay of Honduras, is full of small islands, which pass under the general name of Keys; and having got in here, Low, with some of his chief men, landed on a small island, which they called Port Royal Key. There they erected huts, and continued carousing, drinking, and firing, while the different vessels, of which they now had possession, were repairing.

“On Saturday, the 9th of March, 1723, the cooper, with six hands, in the long-boat, was going ashore for water; and coming alongside of the schooner, I requested to be of the party. Seeing him hesitate, I urged that I had never hitherto been ashore, and thought it hard to be so closely confined when every one besides had the liberty of landing as there was occasion. Low had before told me, on requesting to be sent away in some of the captured vessels which he dismissed that I should go home when he did, and swore that I should never previously set my foot on land. But now I considered if I could possibly once get on terra firma, though in ever such bad circumstances, I should account it a happy deliverance and resolved never to embark again.

“The cooper at length took me into the long-boat, while Low and his chief people were on a different island from Roatan, where the watering place lay; my only clothing was an Osnaburgh frock and trowsers, a milled cap, but neither shirt, shoes, stockings, nor anything else.

“When we first landed I was very active in assisting to get the casks out of the boat, and in rolling them to the watering place. Then taking a hearty draught of water I strolled along the beach, picking up stones and shells; but on reaching the distance of a musket-shot from the party I began to withdraw toward the skirts of the woods. In answer to a question by the cooper of whither I was going I replied, ‘for cocoanuts,’ as some cocoa trees were just before me; and as soon as I was out of sight of my companions I took to my heels, running as fast as the thickness of the bushes and my naked feet would admit. Notwithstanding I had got a considerable way into the woods, I was still so near as to hear the voices of the party if they spoke loud, and I lay close in a thicket where I knew they could not find me.

“After my comrades had filled their casks and were about to depart, the cooper called on me to accompany them; however, I lay snug in the thicket, and gave him no answer, though his words were plain enough. At length, after hallooing loudly, I could hear them say to one another: ‘The dog is lost in the woods, and cannot find the way out again’; then they hallooed once more, and cried ‘He has run away and won’t come to us’; and the cooper observed that had he known my intention he would not have brought me ashore. Satisfied of their inability to find me among the trees and bushes, the cooper at last, to show his kindness, exclaimed: ‘If you do not come away presently, I shall go off and leave you alone.’ Nothing, however, could induce me to discover myself; and my comrades seeing it vain to wait any longer, put off without me.

“Thus I was left on a desolate island, destitute of all help, and remote from the track of navigators; but compared with the state and society I had quitted, I considered the wilderness hospitable, and the solitude interesting.

“When I thought the whole was gone, I emerged from my thicket, and came down to a small run of water, about a mile from the place where our casks were filled, and there sat down to observe the proceedings of the pirates. To my great joy in five days their vessels sailed, and I saw the schooner part from them to shape a different course.

“I then began to reflect on myself and my present condition; I was on an island which I had no means of leaving; I knew of no human being within many miles; my clothing was scanty, and it was impossible to procure a supply. I was altogether destitute of provision, nor could tell how my life was to be supported. This melancholy prospect drew a copious flood of tears from my eyes; but as it had pleased God to grant my wishes in being liberated from those whose occupation was devising mischief against their neighbors, I resolved to account every hardship light. Yet Low would never suffer his men to work on the Sabbath, which was more devoted to play; and I have even seen some of them sit down to read in a good book.

“In order to ascertain how I was to live in time to come, I began to range over the island, which proved ten or eleven leagues long, and lay in about sixteen degrees north latitude. But I soon found that my only companions would be the beasts of the earth, and fowls of the air; for there were no indications of any habitations on the island, though every now and then I found some shreds of earthen ware scattered in a lime walk, said by some to be the remains of Indians formerly dwelling here.

“The island was well watered, full of high hills and deep valleys. Numerous fruit trees, such as figs, vines, and cocoanuts are found in the latter; and I found a kind larger than an orange, oval-shaped of a brownish color without, and red within. Though many of these had fallen under the trees, I could not venture to take them until I saw the wild hogs feeding with safety, and then I found them very delicious fruit.

“Stores of provisions abounded here, though I could avail myself of nothing but the fruit; for I had no knife or iron implement, either to cut up a tortoise on turning it, or weapons wherewith to kill animals; nor had I any means of making a fire to cook my capture, even if I were successful.

“To this place then was I confined during nine months, without seeing a human being. One day after another was lingered out, I know not how, void of occupation or amusement, except collecting food, rambling from hill to hill, and from island to island, and gazing on sky and water. Although my mind was occupied by many regrets, I had the reflection that I was lawfully employed when taken, so that I had no hand in bringing misery on myself; I was also comforted to think that I had the approbation and consent of my parents in going to sea, and trusted that it would please God, in his own time and manner, to provide for my return to my father’s house. Therefore, I resolved to submit patiently to my misfortune.

“Sometime in November, 1723, I descried a small canoe approaching with a single man; but the sight excited little emotion. I kept my seat on the beach, thinking I could not expect a friend, and knowing that I had no enemy to fear, nor was I capable of resisting one. As the man approached, he betrayed many signs of surprise; he called me to him, and I told him he might safely venture ashore, for I was alone, and almost expiring. Coming close up, he knew not what to make of me; my garb and countenance seemed so singular, that he looked wild with astonishment. He started back a little, and surveyed me more thoroughly; but, recovering himself again, came forward, and, taking me by the hand, expressed his satisfaction at seeing me.

“This stranger proved to be a native of North Britain; he was well advanced in years, of a grave and venerable aspect, and of a reserved temper. His name I never knew, he did not disclose it, and I had not inquired during the period of our acquaintance. But he informed me he had lived twenty-two years with the Spaniards who now threatened to burn him, though I know not for what crime; therefore he had fled hither as a sanctuary, bringing his dog, gun, and ammunition, as also a small quantity of pork, along with him. He designed spending the remainder of his days on the island, where he could support himself by hunting.

“I experienced much kindness from the stranger; he was always ready to perform any civil offices, and assist me in whatever he could, though he spoke little; and he gave me a share of his pork.

“On the third day after his arrival, he said he would make an excursion in his canoe among the neighboring islands, for the purpose of killing wild hogs and deer, and wished me to accompany him. Though my spirits were somewhat recruited by his society, the benefit of the fire, which I now enjoyed, and dressed provisions, my weakness and the soreness of my feet, precluded me; therefore he set out alone, saying he would return in a few hours. The sky was serene, and there was no prospect of any danger during a short excursion, seeing he had come nearly twelve leagues in safety in his canoe. But, when he had been absent about an hour, a violent gust of wind and rain arose, in which he probably perished, as I never heard of him more.

“Thus, after having the pleasure of a companion almost three days, I was as unexpectedly reduced to my former lonely state, as I had been relieved from it. Yet through the goodness of God, I was myself preserved from having been unable to accompany him; and I was left in better circumstances than those in which he had found me, for now I had about five pounds of pork, a knife, a bottle of gunpowder, tobacco, tongs and flint, by which means my life could be rendered more comfortable. I was enabled to have fire, extremely requisite at this time, being the rainy months of winter. I could cut up a tortoise, and have a delicate broiled meal. Thus, by the help of the fire, and dressed provisions, through the blessings of God, I began to receive strength, though the soreness of my feet remained. But I had, besides, the advantage of being able now and then to catch a dish of cray fish, which, when roasted, proved good eating. To accomplish this I made up a small bundle of old broken sticks, nearly resembling pitch-pine, or candle-wood, and having lighted one end, waded with it in my hand, up to the waist in water. The cray fish, attracted by the light, would crawl to my feet and lie directly under it, when, by means of a forked stick, I could toss them ashore.

“Between two and three months after the time of losing my companion, I found a small canoe, while ranging along the shore. The sight of it revived my regret for his loss, for I judged that it had been his canoe; and, from being washed up here, a certain proof of his having been lost in the tempest. But on examining it more closely, I satisfied myself that it was one which I had never seen before....”

Three months after he lost his companion Philip Ashton found a small canoe which had drifted on the island beach. In this fragile craft he made his way to another island where he found a company of buccaneers who chased him through the woods with a volley of musketry. Re-embarking in his canoe he headed for the western end of this island and later reached Roatan where he lived alone for seven months longer. Here he was discovered and hospitably cared for by a number of Englishmen who had fled from the Bay of Honduras in fear of an attack by Spaniards. These refugees had planted crop and were living in what seemed to Philip Ashton as rare comfort. “Yet after all,” he said of them, “they were bad society, and as to their common conversation there was but little difference between them and pirates.”

At length this colony of outlaws was attacked and disbanded by a ship’s company of pirates headed by Spriggs who had thrown off his allegiance to Low and set up in the business of piracy for himself with a ship of twenty-four guns and a sloop of twelve.

Ashton evaded their clutches and with one Symonds, who had also fled from the attack of Spriggs, made his way from one island to another until he was fortunate enough to find a fleet of English merchant vessels under convoy of the Diamond man-of-war bound for Jamaica. They touched at one of these islands near the Bay of Honduras to fill their water casks and it was there that Ashton found the Salem brigantine commanded by Captain Dove.

The journal says in conclusion: “Captain Dove not only treated me with great civility and engaged to give me a passage home but took me into pay, having lost a seaman whose place he wanted me to supply.

“We sailed along with the Diamond, which was bound for Jamaica, in the latter end of March, 1725, and kept company until the first of April. By the providence of Heaven we passed safely through the Gulf of Florida, and reached Salem Harbor on the first of May, two years, ten months and fifteen days after I was first taken by pirates; and two years, and two months, after making my escape from them on Roatan island. That same evening I went to my father’s house, where I was received as one risen from the dead.”

CHAPTER IV
THE PRIVATEERSMEN OF ’76

Privateering has ceased to be a factor in civilized warfare. The swift commerce destroyer as an arm of the naval service has taken the place of the private armed ship which roamed the seas for its own profit as well for its country’s cause. To-day the United States has a navy prepared both to defend its own merchant vessels, what few there are, and to menace the trade of a hostile nation on the high seas.

When the War of the Revolution began, however, Britannia ruled the seas, and the naval force of the Colonies was pitifully feeble. In 1776 there were only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes in commission and this list was steadily diminished by the ill-fortunes of war until in 1782 only seven ships flew the American flag, which had been all but swept from the ocean. During the war these ships captured one hundred and ninety-six of the enemy’s craft.

On the other hand, there were already one hundred and thirty-six privateers at sea by the end of the year 1776, and their number increased until in 1781 there were four hundred and forty-nine of these private commerce destroyers in commission. This force took no fewer than eight hundred British vessels and made prisoners of twelve thousand British seamen during the war. The privateersmen dealt British maritime prestige the deadliest blow in history. It had been an undreamt of danger that the American Colonies should humble that flag which “had waved over every sea and triumphed over every rival,” until even the English and Irish Channels were not safe for British ships to traverse. The preface of the Sailor’s Vade-Mecum, edition of 1744, contained the following lofty doctrine which all good Englishmen believed, and which was destined to be shattered by a contemptible handful of seafaring rebels:

“That the Monarchs of Great Britain have a peculiar and Sovereign Authority upon the Ocean, is a Right so Ancient and Undeniable that it never was publicly disputed, but by Hugo Grotius in his Mare Liberum, published in the Year 1636, in Favour of the Dutch Fishery upon our Coasts; which Book was fully Controverted by Mr. Selden’s Mare Clausum, wherein he proves this Sovereignty from the Laws of God and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages past as that its Beginning cannot be traced out.”

When the War of 1812 was threatening, The London Statesman paid this unwilling tribute to the prowess of these Yankee privateersmen of the Revolution:

“Every one must recollect what they did in the latter part of the American War. The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of assurances at that time will clearly prove what their diminutive strength was able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred pennants were flying on their coast. Were we able to prevent their going in and out, or stop them from taking our trade and our store-ships, even in size of our own garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and Irish Channels picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their prizes into French and Spanish ports to the great terror and annoyance of our merchants and shipowners?

“These are facts which can be traced to a period when America was in her infancy, without ships, without money, and at a time when our navy was not much less in strength than at present.”

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. It was a matter of months only before they had made a jest of the boastful lines which had long adorned the columns of the Naval Chronicle of London:

“The sea and waves are Britain’s broad domain

And not a sail but by permission spreads.”

This race of seafarers had been drilled to handle cannon and muskets. Every merchantman that sailed for Europe or the West Indies carried her battery of six pounders, and hundreds of Salem men and boys could tell you stories of running fights and escapes from French and Spanish freebooters and swarming pirates. Commerce on the high seas was not a peaceful pursuit. The merchantman was equipped to become a privateer by shipping a few more guns and signing on a stronger company. The conditions of the times which had made these seamen able to fight as shrewdly as they traded may be perceived from the following extracts from the “Seaman’s Vade-Mecum,” as they appear in the rare editions published both in 1744 and 1780: “Shewing how to prepare a Merchant Ship for a close fight by disposing their Bulk-heads, Leaves, Coamings, Look-holes, etc.”

“If the Bulkhead of the Great Cabbin be well fortified it may be of singular Use; for though the Enemy may force the Steerage, yet when they unexpectedly meet with another Barricade and from thence a warm Reception by the Small-Arms, they will be thrown into great Confusion, and a Cannon ready loaded with Case-shot will do great Execution; but if this should not altogether answer the Purpose, it will oblige the Enemy to pay the dearer for their Conquest. For the Steerage may hold out the longer, and the Men will be the bolder in defending it, knowing that they have a place to retire into, and when there they may Capitulate for Good Quarter at the last Extremity....”

“... It has been objected that Scuttles (especially that out of the Forecastle) are Encouragements for Cowardice; that having no such Convenience, the Men are more resolute, because they must fight, die or be taken. Now if they must fight or die, it is highly unreasonable and as cruel to have Men to be cut to Pieces when they are able to defend their Posts no longer, and in this Case the Fate of the Hero and the Coward is alike; and if it is to fight or be taken, the Gallant will hold out to the last while the Coward (if the danger runs high), surrenders as soon as Quarter is offered; and now if there be a Scuttle, the Menace of the Enemy will make the less Impression on their Minds, and they will stand out the longer, when they know they can retire from the Fury of the Enemy in case they force their Quarters. In short, it will be as great a blemish in the Commander’s Politics to leave Cowards without a Scuttle as it will be Ingratitude to have Gallant Men to be cut to Pieces.”

“How to Make a Sally

“Having (by a vigorous defence) repulsed the Enemy from your Bulk-heads, and cutting up your Deck, it may be necessary to make a Sally to compleat your Victory; but by the Way, the young Master must use great caution before he Sally out, lest he be drawn into some Strategem to his Ruin; therefore for a Ship of but few hands it is not a Mark of Cowardice to keep the Close-Quarters so long as the Enemy is on board; and if his Men retire out of your Ship, fire into him through your Look-holes and Ports till he calls for Quarter. And if it should ever come to that, you must proceed Warily (unless you out Number him in Men) and send but a few of your Hands into his Ship while the others are ready with all their Small-arms and Cannon charged; and if they submit patiently disarm and put them down below, where there is no Powder or Weapons; but plunder not, lest your men quarrel about Trifles or be too intent in searching for Money, and thereby give the Enemy an opportunity to destroy you; and if you take the Prize (when you come into an harbor) let everything be equally shared among the Men, the Master only reserving to himself the Affections of his Men by his Generosity which with the Honour of the Victory to a brave Mind is equivalent to all the rest....”

“It is presumed that the Sally will be most Advantageous if made out of the Round-house, because having cleared the Poop, you will have no Enemy at your back; wherefore let all but two or more, according to your Number, step up into the Round-house, bringing with them all or most of the Musquets and Pistols there, leaving only the Blunderbusses. Let all the Small-Arms in the Quarters be charged, and the Cannon that flank the Decks and out of the Bulk-heads, traversing those in the Round-house, pointing towards the mizzenmast to gaul the Enemy in case of a retreat. All things being thus prepared, let a Powder-chest be sprung upon the Poop, and four Hand Granadoes tost out of the Ports, filled with Flower and fuzees of a long duration, then let the Door be opened, and in the Confusion make your Sally at once, half advancing forward and the other facing about to clear the Poop; when this is done, let them have an eye to the Chains. At the Round-house Door let two men be left to stand by the Port-cullis, each having a brace of Pistols to secure a Retreat; let then those in the Forecastle never shoot right aft, after the Sally is made, unless parallel with the Main Deck. The rest must be left to Judgment.”

Try to imagine, if you please, advice of such tenor as this compiled for the use of the captains of the transatlantic liners or cargo “tramps” of to-day, and you will be able to comprehend in some slight measure how vast has been the change in the conditions of the business of the sea, and what hazards our American forefathers faced to win their bread on quarterdeck and in forecastle. Nor were such desperate engagements as are outlined in this ancient “Seaman’s Vade-Mecum” at all infrequent. “Round-houses” and “great cabbins” were defended with “musquets,” “javalins,” “Half-pikes” and cutlasses, and “hand-granadoes” in many a hand-to-hand conflict with sea raiders before the crew of the bluff-blowed, high-popped Yankee West Indiaman had to “beat off the boarders” or make a dashing “Sally” or “capitulate for Good Quarter at the last Extremity.”

Of such, then, were the privateersmen who flocked down the wharves and among the tavern “rendezvous” of Salem as soon as the owners of the waiting vessels had obtained their commissions from the Continental Congress, and issued the call for volunteers. Mingled with the hardy seamen who had learned their trade in Salem vessels were the sons of wealthy shipping merchants of the best blood of the town and county who embarked as “gentlemen volunteers,” eager for glory and plunder, and a chance to avenge the wrongs they and their kinfolk had suffered under British trade laws and at the hands of British press gangs.

The foregoing extracts from the “Seaman’s Vade-Mecum” show how singularly fixed the language of the sea has remained through the greater part of two centuries. With a few slight differences, the terms in use then are commonly employed to-day. It is therefore probable that if you could have been on old Derby Wharf in the year of 1776, the talk of the busy, sun-browned men and boys around you would have sounded by no means archaic. 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.

Shipmasters had no sooner signaled their homecoming with deep freights of logwood, molasses or sugar than they received orders to discharge with all speed and clear their decks for mounting batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred waiting privateersmen. The guns and men once aboard, the crews were drilling night and day while they waited the chance to slip to sea. Their armament included carronades, “Long Toms” and “long six” or “long nine” pounders, sufficient muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlasses, tomahawks, boarding pikes, hand grenades, round shot, grape, canister, and double-headed shot.

When larger vessels were not available tiny sloops with twenty or thirty men and boys mounted one or two old guns and put to sea to “capture a Britisher” and very likely be taken themselves by the first English ship of war that sighted them. The prize money was counted before it was caught, and seamen made a business of selling their shares in advance, preferring the bird in the bush, as shown by the following bill of sale:

“Beverly, ye 7th, 1776.

“Know all men by these presents, that I the subscriber, in consideration of the sum of sixteen dollars to me in hand paid by Mr. John Waters, in part for ½ share of all the Prizes that may be taken during the cruize of the Privateer Sloop called the Revenge, whereof Benjamin Dean is commissioned Commander, and for the further consideration of twenty-four dollars more to be paid at the end of the whole cruize of the said Sloop; and these certify that I the subscriber have sold, bargained and conveyed unto the said John Waters, or his order, the one half share of my whole share of all the prizes that may be taken during the whole cruize of said Sloop. Witness my hand,

“P. H. Brockhorn.”