THE SHIPS AND SAILORS OF OLD SALEM "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 indiffer- ent 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 today, if they are worth while as something more than stir- ring tales of bygone generations, it is because those seafarers achieved success without counting the odds. They were enor- mously hampered by the policy of England which dehberately endeavored to crush Colonial shipping by means of number- less 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 vii Preface and lawless privateers who liaimted 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 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 ship- owners 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. viii Preface This era, vanished this closed chapter of American achieve- ment 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 com- merce 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. IX CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I A Port of Vanished Fleets. ... 3 II Philip English and his Era. (1680-1750.) . 21 III Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates. (1670-1725.) 39 IV The Privateersmen of '76 . . . . 58 V Jonathan Haraden, Privateersman. (1776- 1782.) 78 VI Captain Luther Little's Own Story. (1771- 1799.) 98 VII The Journal of William Russell. (1776- 1783.) 117 VIII The Journal of William Russell (concluded). (1779-1783.) 134 IX Richard Derby and his Son John. (1774- 1792.) 149 X Elias Hasket Derby and his Times. (1770- 1800.) 173 XI Pioneers in Distant Seas. (1775-1817.) . 197 XII The Building of the Essex. (1799.) . 228 XIII The First American Voyagers to Japan. (1799-1801.) 250 XIV The First Yankee Ship at Guam. (1801.) . 270 XV Nathaniel Bowditch and his "Practical Navigator." (1802.) 288 XVI The Voyages of Nathaniel Silsbee. (1792- 1800.) 310 xi Contents CHAPTER PAGE XVII The Voyages of Richard Cleveland. (1791- 1820.) . . . . . . . .329 XVIII The Privateers of 1812 . . . . 353 XIX The Tragedy of the Friendship. (1831.) . 378 XX Early South Sea Voyages. (1832.) . . 40G XXI The Last Pirates of the Spanish Main, (1832.) 431 XXII General Frederick Townsend Ward. (1859- 1862.) 451 XXIII The Ebbing of the Tide .... 482 Appendix ....... 499 Xll 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 Cheater America" 'The Romance of an OldrTime Shipmaster" etc NEW KDITIOM ILLUSTRATED CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1912 Fn Copyright, 1908, by ^ THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY Copyright, 1912, "by A. C. McCLURG & CO., CHICAGO AH Eights Reserved R. R. DONNELLHY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO tCI.A3it)9B4 ^,^ ILLUSTRATIONS The Panay, one of the last of the Salem fleet bound out from Boston to Manila twenty-five years ago Frontispiece FACING PAGE Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne as surveyor ..... 6 Page from the illustrated log of the Eolus ... 6 A corner in the Marine Room of the Peabody Museum . 14 The Marine Room, Peabody Museum .... 14 Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society . 18 Title page of the log of Capt. Nathaniel Hawthorne . 18 The Roger Williams house ...... 24 The Philip English "Great House" .... 30 A bill of lading of the time of Philip English, dated 1716 36 The log of a Salem whaler ...... 36 A page from Falconer's Marine Dictionary ( 1 8th Century) 44 Agreement by which a Revolutionary privateer seaman sold his share of the booty in advance of his cruise . 66 Proclamation posted in Salem during the Revolution call- ing for volunteers aboard Paul Jones' Ranger . . 70 Schooner Baltic ........ 76 Derby Wharf, Salem, Mass., as it appears to-day . . 86 Captain Luther Little ...... 108 The East India Marine Society's hall, now the home of the Peabody Museum . . . . . .120 Page from the records of the East India Marine Society 120 The Salem Custom House, built in 1818 . . . 140 xiii Illustrations PAGE Richard Derby ........ 152 "Leslie's Retreat" 158 The Grand Turh, first American ship to pass the Cape of Good Hope 176 Nathaniel West 180 William Gray 188 Elias Hasket Derby 188 The Ship Mount Vernon . . . . .192 Elias Hasket Derby mansion (1790-1816) . . .194 Prince House. Home of Richard Derby. Built about 1750 194 Joseph Peabody ....... 200 Hon. Jacob Crowninshield ...... 204 Benjamin Crowninshield ...... 208 Ship Ulysses ........ 212 Yacht Cleopatra^ s Barge . . . . . .212 Log of the good ship Rubicon ..... 214 The frigate Essex 230 Broadside ballad published in Salem after the news was received of the loss of the Essex .... 248 Page from the log of the Margaret . . . .252 The good ship FranJclin ...... 252 View of Nagasaki before Japan was opened to commerce . 260 Salem Harbor as it is to-day ..... 274 The old-time sailors used to have their vessels painted on pitchers and punch bowls ..... 284 Title page from the journal of the Lydia . . . 284 Nathaniel Bowditch, author of " The Practical Navigator " 294 Nathaniel Bowditch's chart of Salem harbor . . 304 Captain Benjamin Carpenter of the Hercules, 1792 . 306 From the log of the Hercules ..... 308 XIV Illustrations Pages from the log of the ship Hercules, 1792 Captain Nathaniel Silsbee . Captain Richard Cleveland Captain James W. Chever . The privateer America under full sail . Captain Holten J. Breed The privateer Grand Turk . An old broadside, relating the incidents of the battle of Qualah Battoo .... The Glide The Friendship ..... Captain Driver ..... Letter to Captain Driver from the "Bounty" Captain Thomas Fuller The brig Mexican attacked by pirates, 1832 Frederick T. Ward .... Captain John Bertram Ship Sooloo ..... FACING PAGE ; 312 . 318 . 334 . 358 . 358 370 370 the battle of . 380 . 390 . 390 . 408 " Colonists . 408 . 432 . 432 . 454 . . 486 • . . 494 XV THE SHIPS AND SAILORS OF OLD SALEM C^e ^Up^ anb bailors; of 0lti talent CHAPTER I A PORT OF VANISHED FLEETS A MERICAN ships and sailors have almost vanished from /-% the seas that lie beyond their own coasts. The twen- tieth century has forgotten the era when Yankee top- sails, 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 ances- try now helped to conquer the western wilderness. 3 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem It is all in the past, this noble and thrilling history of Amer- ican 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 for- gotten 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 4 A Port of Vanished Fleets of our merchant mariners had reached its cHmax 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,* 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 com- monly 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 popu- lation 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 Ameri- can commerce in its adventurous aspects. To watch it is to witness some of the finest romance of our time." * 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 saihngships 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 Dread- nought, 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. ' ' ' 5 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 ship- masters 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 Presi- dential 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." " 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 6 IDiatvitt of SaUm ^ a3c\)cvlv, To the Intpeclors of the Port of Saleaa ; __-^/ ^ Duii<.s oa ^Icafundizc ouuuiiif tiaic. «!i;^h iQcrchJii-f p\ #'' I'y^fr^ -M-y^c.^ ^r,,^^^ X- -' g^..- .^ ^ II 1^ ii\ ' 1 J .^ ,.,>d'./^.^ /^„. ^S"^ ^^^f/^ ^ <^,', ^, -L/!?, /->/ s^iC fj(fn-/'j Page from the illustrated loy of the i':o///.s\ Iler captain drew such pictures as these of the sliii>s he sisrhted at sea A Port of Vanished Fleets to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories and mouldy jokes that had grown to be pass- words and counter-signs among them." One of the sea journals or logs of Captain Nathaniel Ha- thorne,* 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 Bengali 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 fol- lowed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confront- ing 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 cap- tivity among the Algerians and in the prisons of France, Eng- * 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.) 7 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem land 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 priva- teers 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 merchant- man. But even beyond these fighting merchant sailors lay a pre- vious 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 8 A Port of Vanished Fleets 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 adven- ture 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 col- lections 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 9 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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, particu- larly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn."* 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 super- cargoes 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 * (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 Bast 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 pro- vided to arrange therein the specimens that had been accumulated. ' ' (Diary of Rev. William Bentley.) 10 A Port of Vanished Fleets 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 cap- tains 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 ac- counts of wind and weather. Thus, year after year and genera- tion 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 quarter-deck 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 nine- teenth 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 ship- masters, 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 11 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 particu- larly 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 his- torical library. It has come to pass that a thousand of these logs and sea-journals are stored in one room of the Essex Insti- tute, 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 hun- dreds upon hundreds of ancient log books. They are com- plete, final, embracing as they do the rise, the high-tide and the ebb of the commerce of Salem, the whole story of those 12 A Port of Vanished Fleets 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 it's 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 ex- changes 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 appro- priate 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 Medi- terranean 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, 13 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 mari- ners 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 wait- ing on a desert island where he had been cast by shipwreck. 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 14 A foriRT in tlie Marine Koom of the IVabody Museum, sli()\viii<,r |)(>rtralts cf the slii]) masters and inei-eliauts of Salem The :Marine Room, Peabody Museum. sliowiiiK the ships of Salem duriujr a period of one hundred and fifty years A Port of Vanished Fleets the Salem of long ago. In other spacious halls of this museum are unique displays of the tools, weapons, garments and adorn- ments of primitive races, gathered generations before their coun- tries and islands were ransacked by the tourist and the ethnolo- gist. 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 for- eign 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.* 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, Gottenburg, La Guayra, Havana, Canton, Smyrna, Matanzas, Valencia, Turk's Island, Pernambuco, Rio Janeiro, Messina, St. Pierre's, Point Petre, Cronstadt, Arch- angel, 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, * 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 nave visited Salem 15 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 com- merce 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 Zan- zibar; rubber, hides and wool from South America; whale oil from the Arctic and Antarctic, and sperm from the South Seas." 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 weajwns and ornaments from the Fiji and Marquesas Islands. 16 A Port of Vanished Fleets 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 trans- portation. New York with the opening of the Erie Canal, Philadelphia and Baltimore with their more advantageous sit- uations 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 accommo- date 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 sea- men; in the aspect of the stately mansions built from the for- tunes 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, number- ing hardly more than ten thousand souls at a time when her 17 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem trade had made her famous in every port of the world. Her achievements were the work of an exceedingly bold and vigor- ous 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 develop- ment, 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 ship- building. 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. 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. 18 ;^ 7(. >.M//,..JS,/.y./:... ;>^^/,..■,„ /, .. y /. '■■"■ TT- Certificate of Membership in the Salem Marine Society, used in 1790, showing wharves and harbor leeftRnnk- ^a(i-[s^mj^~^^Y \ P'^aF'gtt M//////y,/, -fz/z/^^fZ/^w/ . ^,v/,/z/// i MTJUCA 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 A Port of Vanished Fleets 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 vi^inter 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."* They were the picked men of England, yoemanry 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, * History of Essex County 19 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 mer- chants." 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. SO 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 hfe. 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 Mars- ton, was taken by a French ship off Block Island. She was ransomed for two hundred and fifty pounds and brought into 21 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 endeav- ored 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 22 Philip English and His Era 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 spy- glasses were alert to sweep the distant sea line for the home- coming of their ventures to Virginia, the West Indies and Europe Their vessels were forty and sixty tons burden, mere cockle- shells 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 ship- wright 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 regime. 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* *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. The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 con- ditioned, by Sam '11 Browne, Phillip English, Capt. Wm. Bow- ditch, Wm. Pickering, and Sam '11 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, 24 a-fl Philip English and His Era deer, elk and bear skins are annually sent to England. We have much Shipping here and freights are low." 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 Com 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 observa- tion they held up a hand to the sun. Wlien 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 con- sidered 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 "per- suaded that accusation was equal to condemnation." She lay 25 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 Har- thorne'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 OflScers, High Sheriff, and Deputy with attendants came at eleven at night. When the servant came up INIr. 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 S6 Philip English and His Era 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 serv^ants, of whom there were twenty in the House, she con- cluded 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 con- stantly 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 27 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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, accom- panied 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 com for their relief, a bushel for each child. Great advan- tages 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 drink- ing in the taverns of the Salem water-front, 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 him- self 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 pic- ture 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 Philip English and His Era 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 ray best advantage, and make Retume 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 re- strictive 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 com- parably 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 danger- ous 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 restric- tive 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 29 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 French- men, 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." 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 30 Philip English and His Era 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 re- corded 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 If per cent, as compared with 11 per cent, then; to Jamaica 1^ 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 insur- ance 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 com- mand 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 31 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 repre- sented to the Colonial Government and transmitted to Gov- ernor 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 ro- mances 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 taiTed mainsail and some hoops and then fastened pieces of board to them. With a boat so constructed they sailed ten 32 Philip English and His Era 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* 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. * Historical Collections of the Essex Institute. 33 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 — Gibralter — ^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 Tereffa 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 Philip English and His Era 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 con- siderable 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. Hop- ing 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 35 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 Board- man 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 sur- prises as its sentiment is profoundly tragic. It runs as follows : 1 "In Gosport* of Late there a Damsil Did Dwell, for Wit and for Beuty Did she maney Exsel. * Gosport Navy Yard, England. 36 :;1 by the Grac? of G Op in, gO0(] Ou' r a i ' . PLounJ for ^-9:;;%^ . - ~^£- \J~ -T- '" ^^'- irl he I, iri" rnitkcj anfi niimhrocl ,«in iheMa'ecnf,ancl arc tnhe i!.'i jjtirl !i ■ ^-..I Ofaer and wj!lO>d 'iLMjiJ^JUi'^^ aiorliU, Port nf J/r&^rf " *'%C— ( a^»g|«H«pa>«,ly cxc.^ c*| ufitr. •' ■>^ y ^ !li;y Diving Ff.:bht' f°'^|j^lp'| ■:^tIAvarageaccm>om-i1. Tnwi-ncrswfie'CnrihsV.IfernrP ft? ri li - i . (f^^"' A'livh' affirmtd 10 '/i^'' -' fill- of [ u'ljig, ill oi it ,c to (lam! voi ! ' And (?, f;,,,H.^nJ tlv gVH,J<^V>^ilifr- £ ||) »itr d«- f|fa;^oll ir>!afay, A r_ ' .'< /l ii" '^^A ' > ^ c // A bill of lading uf the time of Philip English, dated 1716 III .nliciK "^'if <>' • The log of a Salem whaler, showing how he recorded the number of whales he took Philip English and His Era 2 A Young man he Corted hir to be his Dear And By his Trade was a Ship Carpentir. 3 he ses "My Dear Molly if you will agrea And Will then Conscent for to Marey me 4 Your Love it will Eas me of Sorro and Care If you will But Marey a ship Carpentir." 5 With blushes mor Charming then Roses in June, She ans'red (") Sweet William for to Wed I am to young. 6 Young Men thay are fickle and so Very Vain, If a Maid she is Kind thay will quickly Disdane. 7 the Most Beutyfullyst Woman that ever was Born, When a man has insnared hir, hir Beuty he scorns. (") 8 (He) (") O, My Dear Molly, what Makes you Say so? Thi Beuty is the Haven to wich I will go. 9 If you Will consent for the Church for to Stear there I will Cast anchor and stay with my Dear. 10 I ne're Shall be Cloyedd with the Charms of thy Love, this Love is as True as the tru Turtle Dove. 11 All that I do Crave is to marey my Dear And arter we are maried no Dangers we will fear. (") 12 (She) "The Life of a Virgen, Sweet William, I Prize for marrying Brings Trouble and sorro Like-wise. (") 13 But all was in Vane tho His Sute she did Denie, yet he did Purswade hir for Love to Comeply. 14 And by his Cunneng hir Hart Did Betray and with Too lude Desire he led hir Astray. 15 This Past on a while and at Length you will hear, the King wanted Sailors and to Sea he must Stear. 16 This Greved the fare Damsil allmost to the Hart To think of Hir True Love so soon she must Part. 17 She ses (") my Dear Will as you go to sea Remember the Vows that you made unto me. (") 18 With the Kindest Expresens he to hir Did Say (") I will marey my Molly air I go away. 19 That means tomorrow to me you will Come. then we will be maried and our Love Carried on. (") 20 With the Kindest Embraces they Parted that Nite She went for to meet him next Morning by Lite. 21 he ses (" ) my Dear Charmer, you must go^ with me Before we are married a friend for to see. (") he Led hir thru Groves and Valleys so deep That this fare Damsii Began for to Weep. 22 The Ships and Sailors oj Old Salem 23 24 She ses (") My Dear William, you Lead me Astray on Purpos my innocent Life to be Bel ray. { ) rHe) r) Those are true Words and none can you save, { ) for all this hole Nite I have Been digging your grave. 25 A Spade Standing By and a Grave thare she See (She) (" ) O, Must this Grave Be a Bride Bed to Me? ( ) 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 m 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." , . • .u Other superstitions seem to have vexed his mmd, f or m 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 Adven- ture— 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 thankful! 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." 38 CHAPTER III SOME EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PIRATES (1670-1725) THE pirates of the Spanish Main and the southern coasts of this country have enjoyed ahnost 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 ofi&cial 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 sup- posed 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 fore- foot, 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. 39 The Ships aiid Sailors of Old Salem " 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 land- locked 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 40 Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates Peter Henderson was chased ashore near Funshal, Madeira, by pirates and lost. Of what became of the oflBcers and crew the account says nothing." In July of 1703, the brigantine Charles, Capt. Daniel Plow- man, 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 con- veniently 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 unan- imously 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 home- sick, 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 cap- tured some pirates and some of their Gold at the Isle of Shoals Major Sewall carries the Pirates to Boston under a strong 41 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 HopewelFs 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 mechan- ical 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 Hispan- iola we unhappily met with a pirate, being a sloop of between thirty and forty men, one Capt. Charles, commander, his sir- name we could not learn. They took us, boarded us and abused several of us shamefully, and took what small matters we had, 42 Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates even our very cloathes and particularly beat and abused our Mate, whose name was James Logun of Charlestowne, 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 Har- radine of Salem and thereby caught a Tartar. Harradine and his crew rose upon their captors, killed both Nutt and Phillip and their ofl[icers, 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. 43 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 pub- lished many years ago. His story is perhaps the most enter- taining 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 miracu- lous 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 Ash- ton 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. What the early shipmasters of Salem and nearby ports had to fear in the eighteenth century may be more clearly com- prehended 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 44 A page from Falconer's Marine Dictionary (18th Century) Figure 4: a snow, (5) a ketch, (6) a brig or lirigantine, '"i a hilander, (8) a xebec. (9l a schooner, (10) a galliot, (11) a dogger. il2 and 13) two gallies, one under sail, the other rowing, iH) a sloop Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates 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 de- manded: '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 suffi- ciently 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. 45 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem " 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 con- cluded 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. 46 Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates Thereupon two young men, captives, both belonging to Marble- head, 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 quarter- master, 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 miss- ing 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 com- pletely 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 some- what above the water; as the ship overset, the people, got from the shrouds and yards, upon the hull, and as the hull went 47 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem down, they again resorted to the rigging, rising a little out of the sea. " Being an indifferent swimmer, I was reduced to great ex- tremity; for along with other light lads, I had been sent up to the main-top-gallant 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 Gourd on, 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 suflficient 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. 48 Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates "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, there- fore, 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 French- men 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 bum 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 Cartha- gena 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 con- cluded that we should certainly be taken, and that I should not less be hanged for company's sake; so true are the words of 49 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 con- sequences 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 stand- ing 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 50 Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates 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 repHed 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 posses- sion, 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 occa- sion. 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 circum- stances, 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 Osna- burgh 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. 51 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem Then taking a hearty draught of water I strolled along the beach, picking up stones and shells; but on reaching the dis- tance 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, how- ever, 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 52 Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates 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 cocoa- nuts 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 53 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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, with- out seeing a human being. One day after another was lingered out, I know not how, void of occupation or amusement, except collecting food, rambUng 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 law- fully 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. There- fore, 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 ■Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates years with the Spaniards who now threatened to bum 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 accom- pany 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 55 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 com- fort. "Yet after all," he said of them, "they were bad society, and as to their common conversation there was but little differ- ence between them and pirates." 56 Some Early Eighteenth Century 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 com- manded 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." 57 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 com- mission. 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 58 The Privateersmen of '76 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. Sclden'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 States- man 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." 59 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 pur- suit. 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 Barri- cade and from thence a warm Reception by the Small Arms, they will be thrown into great Confusion, and a Cannon ready 60 The Privateersmen of '76 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, be- cause 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), sur- renders 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 Bulkheads, 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; there- fore 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 61 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 dis- arm 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 mizzen-mast 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-cuUis, 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 The Privateersmen of '76 parallel with the Main Deck. The rest must be left to Judg- ment." 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 compre- hend 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 de- fended with "musquets," "javahns," "Half-pikes" and cut- lasses, 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 com- missions 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 63 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem 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 land-locked 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 64 The Privateersmen of '70 by Mr. John Waters, in part for h share of all the Prizes that may be taken during the cruize of the Privateer Sloop called the Revenge, whereof Benjamin Dean is commissioned Com- mander, 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." An endorsement on the back of the document records that Mr. Waters received the sum of twenty pounds for "parte of the within agreement," which return reaped him a handsome profit on the speculation. Many similar agreements are pre- served to indicate that Salem merchants plunged heavily on the risks of privateering by buying seamens' shares for cash. The articles of agreement under which these Salem privateers of the Revolution made their warlike cruises belong with a vanished age of sea life. These documents were, in the main, similar to the following : "Articles of Agreement " Concluded at Salem this Seventh day of May, 1781, between the owners of the Privateer Ship Rover, commanded by James Barr, now fixing in this port for a cruise of four months against the Enemies of the United States of America, on the first part and the officers and seamen belonging to said Ship Rover on the other part as follows, viz.: "Article 1st. The owners agree to fix with all expedition said Ship for sea, and cause her to be mounted with Twenty Guns, four Pounders, with a sufiiciency of ammunition of all kinds and good provisions for one Hundred men for four months' cruise, also to procure an apparatus for amputating, 65 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem and such a Box of medicine as shall be thought necessary by the Surgeon. "Ai-ticle 2nd. The Officers and Seamen Shall be entitled to one half of all the prizes captured by Said Ship after the cost of condemning, etc., is deducted from the whole. " Article 3rd. The Officers and Seamen agree that they will to the utmost of their abilities discharge the duty of Officers and Seamen, according to their respective Stations on board Said Ship, her boats and Prizes, by her taken, and the Officers and Seamen further agree that if any Officer or Private shall in time of any engagement with any Vessell abandon his Post on board said Ship or any of her boats or Prizes by her taken, or disobey the commands of the Captain or any Superior Officer, that said Officer or Seaman, if adjudged guilty by three Officers, the Captain being one, shall forfeit all right to any Prize or Prizes by her taken. "Article 4th. The Officers and Seamen further agree that if any Officer shall in time of any engagement or at any other time behave unworthy of the Station that he holds on board said Ship, it shall be in the power of three officers, the captain being one, to displace said Officer, and appoint any one they may see fit in his place. That if any Officer belonging to said Ship shall behave in an unbecoming character of an officer and gentleman, he shall be dismissed and forfeit his share of the cruise. "Article 5th. The owners, officers and Seamen agree that if any one shall first discover a sail which shall prove to be a Prize, he shall be entitled to Five hundred Dollars. "Article 6th. Any one who shall first board any Vessell in time of an engagement, which shall prove a Prize, Shall be entitled to one thousand Dollars and the best firelock on board said Vessell, officers' prizes being excepted. "Article 7th. If any officer or Seaman shall at the time of 66 1« — it ./Cl^ .^aZ^^ ^,f^^ Cv./- ^^v. //>.» Agreement l)y which a Revolutionary j^rivateer seaman sold his share of the booty in advance of his cruise The Privateersmen of '76 an Engagement loose a leg or an arm he shall be entitled to Four Thousand Dollars ; if any officer or Seaman shall loose an Eye in time of an Engagement, he shall receive the Sum of Two thousand Dollars; if any officer shall loose a joint he shall be entitled to one thousand Dollars, the same to be paid from the whole amount of prizes taken by said Ship. "Article 8th. That no Prize master or man, that shall be put on board any Prize whatever and arrive at any port what- ever. Shall be entitled to his share or shares, except he remain to discharge the Prize, or he or they are discharged by the agent of said Ship, except the Privateer is arrived before the Prize. "Article 9th. That for the Preservation of Good order on board said Ship, no man to quit or go out of her, on board of any other Vessell without having obtained leave from the com- manding officer on board. "Article 10th. That if any person Shall count to his own use any part of the Prize or Prizes or be found pilfering any money or goods, and be convicted thereof, he shall forfeit his Share of Prize money to the Ship and Company. " That if any person shall be found a Ringleader of a meeting or cause any disturbance on board, refuse to obey the command of the Captain, or any officer or behave with Cowardice, or get drunk in time of action, he shall forfeit his or their Share of or Shares to the rest of the Ship's Company." So immensely popular was the privateering service among the men and youth of Salem and nearby ports that the naval vessels of the regular service were hard put to enlist their crews. When the fifes and drums sounded through the narrow streets with a strapping privateersman in the van as a recruiting officer, he had no trouble in collecting a crowd ready to listen to his persuasive arguments whose burden was prize money and glory. More than once a ship's company a hundred strong G7 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem was enrolled and ready to go on board by sunset of the day the call for volunteers was made. Trembling mothers and weeping wives could not hold back these sailors of theirs, and as for the sweethearts they could only sit at home and hope that Seth or Jack would come home a hero with his pockets lined with gold instead of finding his fate in a burial at sea, or behind the v/alls of a British prison. It was customary for the owners of the privateer to pay the cost of the "rendezvous," which assembling of the ship's com- pany before sailing was held in the "Blue Anchor," or some other sailors' tavern down by the busy harbor. That the "rendezvous" was not a scene of sadness and that the priva- teersmen were wont to put to sea with no dust in their throats may be gathered from the following tavern bill of 1781 : Dr. Captain George Williams, Agent Privateer Brig Sturdy Beggar to Jonathan Archer, Jr. To Rendezvous Bill as follows: 1781 Aug. 8-12 to 11 Bowls punch at 3-1 Bowl tod. at 1-3 1.14.3 14 to 8 bowls punch 1 bowl chery tod. at 1-9 1.5.9 20 to 6 bowls punch 8 Bowls Chery tod. 2 Grog 1.14.6 22 to 7 bowls punch 7 bowls Chery tod. 1.13.3 30 to 14 Bowls punch 8 bowls Chery tod. and 2^ Grog " 2.19.1 Sept. 4 to 7 Bowls punch 10 bowls chery 3 Grog 2.13.9 6 to 10 bowls punch 1 bowl chery tod. 2 grog 1.14.3 10 to 4| bowls punch 1 . 2.6 There were stout heads as well as stout hearts in New Eng- land during those gallant days and it is safe to say that the crew of the Sturdy Beggar was little the worse for wear after the farewell rounds of punch, grog and "chery tod." at the ren- dezvous ruled by mine host, Jonathan Archer. It was to be charged against privateering that it drew away from the naval service the best class of recruits. 68 The Privateersmen of '76 An eye witness, Ebenezer Fox of Roxbury, wrote this account of the putting an armed State ship into commission in 1780: " The coast was Hned with British cruisers which had almost annihilated our commerce. The State of Massachusetts judged it expedient to build a gun vessel, rated as a twenty-gun ship, named Protector,* commanded by Captain John Foster Williams, to be fitted as soon as possible and sent to sea. A rendezvous was established for recruits at the head of Hancock's Wharf (Boston) where the National flag, then bearing thirteen stars and stripes, was hoisted. "All means were resorted to which ingenuity could devise to induce men to enlist. A recruiting officer bearing a flag and attended by a band of martial music paraded the streets, to excite a thirst for glory and a spirit of military ambition. The recruiting officer possessed the qualifications requisite to make the service alluring, especially to the young. He was a jovial, good-natured fellow, of ready wit and much broad humor. Crowds followed in his wake, and he occasionally stopped at the corners to harangue the multitude in order to excite their patriotism. When he espied any large boys among the idle crowd crowded around him he would attract their attention by singing in a comical manner: "'All you tliat have bad Masters, And cannot get your due, Come, come, my brave boys And join our ship's crew.' "Shouting and huzzaing would follow and some join the ranks. My excitable feelings were aroused. I repaired to the rendezvous, signed the ship's papers, mounted a cockade and was, in my own estimation, already half a sailor. "The recruiting business went on slowly, however; but at * See Captain Luther Little's story of the Protector's fight with the Admiral Duff. Chapter VI, Page 109. The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem length upward of 300 men were carried, dragged and driven onboard; of all ages, kinds and descriptions; in all the various stages of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness; with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than described. Such a motley group has never been seen since Falstaff's ragged regiment paraded the streets of Coventry." When Captain John Paul Jones, however, was fitting out the Ranger in Portsmouth harbor in the spring of 1777, many a Salem lad forsook privateering to follow the fortunes of this dashing commander in the service of their country. On Salem tavern doors and in front of the town hall was posted the fol- lowing "broadside," adorned with a wood cut of a full-rigged fighting ship. It was a call that appealed to the spirit of the place, and it echoes with thrilling effect, even as one reads it a hundred and forty years after its proclamation : " Great Encouragement For Seamen "All Gentlemen Seamen and able-bodied Landsmen who have a Mind to distinguish themselves in the Glorious Cause of their Country and make their Fortunes, an opportunity now offers on board the Ship Ranger of Twenty Guns (for France) now laying in Portsmouth in the State of New Hamp- shire, Commanded by John Paul Jones, Esq. : let them repair to the Ship's Rendezvous in Portsmouth, or at the Sign of Commodore Manley in Salem, where they will be kindly entertained, and receive the greatest Encouragement. The Ship Ranger in the Opinion of every Person who has seen her is looked upon to be one of the best Cruizers in America. She will be always able to fight her Guns under a most excellent Cover; and no Vessel yet built was ever calculated for sailing faster. 70 GREAT ■■'■ E N C O U R A G E M E N-3P O R ^ SEAMEN. tL GEN .LtMEN SEAMEN' and sblc-bodied LANDS^lEAl— ; who h ..x a Minduj diAinguiOi thcmlelvcjjn iliu GLOkIoU^^- '" CAUJ^of their C8r' try, ^d"Si3cc~their Fortune*, »fi,Ob-'-'' . pwrtujicy now oftrs cm M^siiK i^ift K\ti,G^:^X;f^JfyK^^ JfoT F»/v;;;_nD\«,la)>i^ ir.Bj*s»Mou^, m the State of NEW-ilAj»i ttfJOH.N l-HUL JONti/'tlo^^e; them reparr ti5 the Ship's Keadcz^ •ouc in PcMiTJMou . H, or at the Sign of C.)rflaioit.- i he Ship Ra.sge», in the Opinion of every Perfon who h:.s feea her is looked upon Abe Q^- ot the bed Cruizers in Ami«ic».— She will be always able to PSght her Guns M:■.^zt ^ufcoft/ctceK^at Cover ; _and no Wfiel yet built wai eijer calculated tor iailing taftcr, aii.i^nwwng gfxyi Weather. Any GsNTir.iiEN Vold.vteesi who havf a ?^ind to : .ke an agreabit Vojage in this plca&nc Seafon of the Year, may, by entering oa bo.-;-i the alx>ye Ship R^nceh, meet with every Ci»ility they can pofflbly cxpeft, and for a tV::her Eticour-.gimcnt d^per.d on tiie tirft Op- portunity betn^ embraced to reward each one agre»b!c: to i;is Merit. and lb; Advance-Money be paitl oa ^^r. 'SllreafopaWe rraveiiing Expences will h^ iUowcd, ^^'thcir A; pcaru -ic; on Board. Q N p R E S S, AUach 29, 1777, THAP the M/>BiSB Co«i:iTTiL»t!*r,-''' I'ruclamatioii pusted in Salem during tlie Kevululiuu c-aliing lor vulunteers aboard Paul Jones' Ranger The Privateersmen of '76 "Any Gentlemen Volunteers who have a Mind to take an agreable Voyage in this pleasant Season of the Year may, by entering on board the above Ship Ranger meet with every CiviHty they can possibly expect, and for a further Encourage- ment depend on the first Opportunity being embraced to reward each one Agreable to his Merit. All reasonable Travelling Expences will be allowed, and the Advance Money be paid on their Appearance on Board. "In Congress, March 29, 1777. " Resolved, "That the Marine Committee be authorized to advance to every able Seaman that enters into the Continental Service, any Sum not exceeding Forty Dollars, and to every ordinary Seaman or Landsman any Sum not exceeding Twenty Dol- lars, to be deducted from their future Prize Money. "By Order of Congress, "John Hancock, President." It was of this cruise that Yankee seamen the world over were singing in later years the song of " Paul Jones and the Ranger," which describes her escape from a British battleship and four consorts : " 'Tis of the gallant Yankee ship That flew the Stripes and Stars, And the whistHng wind from the west nor west Blew through her pitch pine spars. With her starboard tacks aboard, my boys. She hung upon the gale. On an autumn night we raised the light On the old Head of Kinsale. 'Up spake our noble captain then. As a shot ahead of us past; * Haul snug your flowing courses. Lay your topsail to the mast.' 71 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem Those Englishmen gave three loud hurrahs From the deck of their covered ark, And we answered back by a solid broadside From the decks of our patriot bark. 'Out booms, out booms,' our skipper cried, 'Out booms and give her sheet,' And the swiftest keel that ever was launched Shot ahead of the British fleet. And amidst a thundering shower of shot, With stern sails hoisted away, Down the North Channel Paul Jones did steer Just at the break of day." The privateersmen were as ready to fight, if needs be, as were these seamen that chose to sail with Paul Jones in the Continental service. All British merchantmen carried guns and heavy crews to man them, and while many of them thought it wisdom to strike their colors to a heavily armed privateer without a show of resistance, the "packet ships" and Indiamen were capable of desperate actions. The American privateers ran the gauntlet also of the king's ships which swarmed in our waters, and they met and engaged both these and British priva- teers as formidable as themselves. The notable sea fights of this kind are sometimes best told in the words of the men who fought them. Captain David Ropes, of an old Salem seafaring family, was killed in a privateer action which was described in the following letter written by his lieutenant, later Captain William Gray. Their vessel was the private armed ship Jack of Salem, carrying twelve guns and sixty men. "Salem, June 12, 1782. "On the 28th of May, cruising near Halifax, saw a brig standing in for the land; at 7 P.M. discovered her to have a copper bottom, sixteen guns and full of men ; at half-past nine o'clock she came alongside when a close action commenced. 72 The Privateersmen of '76 "It was our misfortune to have our worthy i^H ^^H ^H Bp 4^ < ^ ^ N *«S ■>SbLt^ ^^^^^^^^^1 ^^^^^^1 ^^^^^' "•'. i/'« "^, t S ^ l9 ^^H ^H ri^ ■ "^ -^ ^ N 5 •? "■■^i < ^1 H P t^^ '■" ■5 ^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^1 ^* ^:" ^ "^ $ ^ ■ ^^H ^^1 ;J ^ ^! " N > ; ^^^ ^^1 ,•; ' "s iN -i '- 9 ^^^^^1 ^' • V V5. ? ?; SRS V- ^; "n ■^ ^^ ■ •- . .' -; ^ - ■ - - 2 t~ oj .a ' a; t^ '0 0) — cfi Journal of William Russell Prison, finding 1G8 Americans among whom was Captain Manley and some more of my acquaintances. Our diet is short, only I pound of beef, 1 lb. of bread, 1 qt. of beer per day per man." Much of this vivacious journal is occupied with the stories of attempted escapes from the prison. The punishment was severe, but nothing could daunt the high spirits of these Yankee seamen who were continually burrowing through the walls, gnawing their way to liberty like so many beavers, and now and then scoring a success. This appears to have been their chief diversion, a warfare of wits waged against their guards, with considerable good humor on both sides. Less than two weeks after his commitment William Russell records, January 1, 1780: "Made a breach in the wall of the Prison, with the design of escaping, but it was discovered by the Sentinel on the other side. The masons were sent to mend it but it being dinner time they left for dinner and two Sentinels were placed to prevent our escape. Eight of our men put on frocks and took mortar and daubed their clothing, going through the hole as workmen. One of them came back into the yard undis- covered, but the rest were taken or gave themselves up. "Jan. 7th. Began another hole at the south end of the prison. The dirt was put in our bread sacks which was the occasion of our being found out. The masons were sent for and the hole stopped again. Richard Goss, Jacob Vickary, Samuel Goss and John Stacey were put upon one half diet and confined to the Black Hole for forty days. Jason ship American Privateer, sailed out of Boston in North America, and commissioned by the North American Congress, which was taken by the Sur- prise, English Frigate; "That the said William Russell was taken at Sea in the High Treason Act committed on the High Seas, out of the Realm on the 29th day of September last, being then and there found in Arms le\^ing War, in Rebellion and aiding the King's Enemies, and was landed in Dartmouth in the County of Devon, and the said William Russell now brought before in the Parish of Stock Dem- ereali aforesaid, charged with and to be committed for the said offense to the Old Mill Prison in the Borough of Plymouth-" 121 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem " Jan. 28th. Began upon the same again and tho' the two Sentinels were kept with us all night, and two lamps burning, we went on with it with great success. The weather being very rainy and frost in the ground which thawed just as we were going through, the Sentinel marching on his post broke into the hole that ran across the road. Immediately the guard was alarmed and came into the prison, some with guns, some with cutlasses. However we got to our hammocks and laughed at them. One of the prisoners threw a bag of stones down stairs and liked to have killed a drummer. The hole was mended next day and all hopes of our escape is at an end. Very bad weather and very dark times." The attention of these energetic prisoners was diverted from more attempts to break through the walls by the tidings of the arrival of a cartel or vessel sent to take home exchanged Ameri- cans. The list of "Pardons," as the journal calls them, did not include Captain Manley and the men of the Jason, and on March 5th it is related : " One hundred embarked to-day in the cartel for France, we remained in good spirits. I wrote a petition to the Honourable Commissioners for taking care of Sick and Hurt Seamen at London, in Captain Manley's name, to obtain His Majesty's pardon for nineteen Americans that came after the 168 that were pardoned, that we might be ready to go in the next draft. The cartel sailed and we are awaiting her return with great expectation of being released from this disagreeable confine- ment." The story of their bitter disappointment is told in a letter written by William Russell to his wife in Boston at this time. This true-hearted patriot was much concerned about the for- tunes of his fighting countrjnmen, news of whom was filtering into Mill Prison in the form of belated and distorted rumors. He wrote: 122 Journal of William Russell "My dear: " I transmit these few lines to you with my best love, hoping by the blessing of God they will find you and my children, with our Mother, Brother and Sisters, and all relations in as good state of health as they leave me, but more composed in mind. I desire to bless Almighty God for the measure of health I have enjoyed since this year came in, as I have not had but one twenty-four hours' illness, tho' confined in this disagreeable prison, forgotten as it seems by my Countrymen. " My dear, in my last letter sent by Mr. Daniel Lane, I men- tioned my expectation of being at home this summer (but how soon are the hopes of vain man disappointed), and indeed everything promised fair for it till the return of the Cartel from France which was the 20th of last month. We expected then to be exchanged, but to our sorrow found that she brought no prisoners back. She lay some weeks in Stone Pool waiting for orders, till at last orders came from the Board at London that she was suspended until such time as they knew why the pris- oners were not sent. Then all hope of our being exchanged was and still is at an end, except kind Providence interposes. " It is very evident that the People here are in no wise blame- able, for they were ready and willing to exchange us, had there been anybody sent from France. We have been informed by one of our friends that saw a letter from Doctor Franklin which mentioned that the reason of our not being exchanged was owing to the neglect of Monsieur Le Sardine, Minister at France. If so I shall never love a Frenchman. However, God only knows! "I understand Mr. John Adams has superseded Doctor Franklin at France, to whom I am going to write if he can't get us exchanged this Fall. If he don't I think many in the yard will enter into the King's service. And I should myself, was it not that (by so doing) / must sell my Country, and that 123 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem which is much more dearer to me, yourself and my children, but I rely wholly on God, knowing He will deliver me in His own good time. " I am extremely sorry to hear that Charleston is taken. Had our people beat them there the War would have been over, for that was all their dependence. They would have readily granted us our Independence for they are sick of the War. It is not too late yet if the people in America would turn out in good spirit, as they might soon drive them off the Earth." The foregoing letter was written in April, 1780, and Charles- ton was not captured by General Clinton's army until May 12th. It was a false report, therefore, which brought grief to the heart of William Russell and his comrades, and must have been born of the fact that Clinton was preparing to make an overland march against Charleston from his base at Savannah. The history of two and a half years of the Revolution as it was conveyed to the Americans in Mill Prison in piecemeal and hearsay rumors was a singularly grotesque bundle of fiction and facts. No sooner was the hope of exchange shattered than the industrious Americans were again absorbed in the game of playing hide-and-seek with the prison guard. On April 11th, William Russell goes on to say in his matter-of-fact fashion: "This evening Captain Manley and six others got over the sink dill wall and went across the yard into the long prison sink and got over the wall, except Mr. Patten who seeing somebody in the garden he was to cross was afraid to go down the wall by the rope. He came back and burst into the prison by the window, frightening the Sentinel who was placed to prevent escapes. He in turn alarmed the guard, but by this time the rest had got into Plymouth, and being late at night they took shelter in Guildhall. The guard finding a rope over the wall knew that somebody had made their escape. They surrounded 124 Journal of William Russell Plymouth, made a search aud found Captain Manley, Mr. Drummond, Knight, Neagle and Pike, and put them into the Black Hole that night." A more cheering item of news found its way into the journal under date of June 27th: "Somerset Militia mounted guard. Have just heard from a friend that Captain Paul Jones had taken two Frigates, one Brig and a Cutter." There is something fine and inspiriting in the following paragraph which speaks for itself: " July 4, 1780. To-day being the Anniversary of American Independence, the American prisoners wore the thirteen Stars and Stripes drawn on pieces of paper on their hats with the motto, Independence, Liberty or Death. Just before one o'clock we drew up in line in the yard and gave Thirteen Cheers for the Thirteen United States of America and were answered by the French prisoners. The whole was conducted in a decent manner and the day spent in mirth." It is the more to be regretted that Mr. Patten and one John Adams should have chosen this day to turn traitor and enlist on board the British sixty-four gun ship Dunkirk " after abusing Captain Manley in a shameful manner." To atone for their desertion of their flag, however, there is the shining instance of one Pike as told on July 26th: " When we were turning in at sunset some high words arose between the soldiers and our people. An officer and two men came to the window and asked if we were English, and began to use uncivil language. Upon which Pike said he was an Englishman and was taken by the Americans in the first of the war, and would fight for them as long as they had a vessel afloat. They called him a rascal and threatened to put him in the Black Hole. We laughed at them and told them there were more rascals outside than in. They went out of the yard and 125 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem soon returned with six or seven more soldiers to put Pike into the Black Hole, but not knowing him they seized on several and let them go. They searched the prison, and we told them that if they confined one they should confine all. Whereupon they went out again and we clapped our hands at them and gave them three Cheers." Late in July the master, mate and crew of the American Letter of Marque Aurora were brought into the prison, increas- ing the number of American prisoners to an even hundred. That England was fighting the world at large during this period appears in the muster roll of Mill Prison which included also 287 French and 400 Spanish seamen. The capture of Henry Laurens, formerly President of the Congress of the United States and recently appointed Minister to Holland, was a matter of great interest to the Yankee seamen in Mill Prison, and the diarist has this to say about it in his journal for September, 1780: " 10th. A frigate arrived last Friday at Dartmouth from New Foundland and brought three Americans as prisoners. One was Henry Laurens, Esq., of South Carolina w^ho was taken in a tobacco-laden vessel which sailed with a fleet of twelve from Virginia. "Mr. Laurens, Esq., late President of the Congress of the United States but now Ambassador to Holland, and his clerk, were committed to the Tower after a spirited speech." "Sept. 30, 1780. To-day I am twelve Months a Prisoner and fourteen Months since I left Home." Thus ends the chronicle of the first year of William Russell's wearing exile in Old Mill Prison, the story of a brave and patient man who showed far more concern for the cause of his fellow patriots at home than for his own hapless plight and separation from his loved ones. Crew after crew of American privateering vessels had been brought into the prison, and 126 Journal of William Russell most of this unfortunate company seem to have been of a dauntless and cheerful temper. They had tried one hazard of escape after another, only to be flung into the " Black Hole " with the greatest regularity. And whereas in other British jails and in their prison ships there were scenes of barbarous oppression and suffering, these sea-dogs behind the gray walls at Plymouth appear to have been on terms of considerable friendliness with their guards, except for the frequent and painful excursions to the "Black Hole." The Americans, however, took their punishment as a necessary evil following on the heels of their audacious excursions over and through the prison walls. Christmastide of 1780 brought a large addition to the prison company, eighty-six Frenchmen from Quebec and nine Ameri- cans belonging to the privateerships Harlequin and Jack of Salem and the Terrible of Marblehead. All hands found cause for rejoicing that war was declared between Holland and Eng- land, and the journal makes mention on December 25th: " To-day being Christmas and the happy news of the Dutch War, I drew up the Americans in the yard at one o'clock to Huzza in the following manner: Three times for France; three times for Spain; and seven times for the seven states of Holland. The French in the other yard answered us and the whole was performed in a decent manner. "28th. Captain Samuel Gerrish made his escape over the wall into the French prison. He remained in the French prison all night and went off about eight o'clock this morning. We were informed that Captain Gerrish got the French barber to dress his hair this morning in the prison. A little while after, Mr. Cowdry with some French officers came into the yard, and when they retired Captain Gerrish placed himself among them, and went out bowing to the Agent who did not know him. He has not been heard of since. The Agent ordered all the 127 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem prisoners shut up at noon. After dinner we were all called over, but no Captain Gerrish. The Agent is pretty good-natured. Mr. Saurey brought us our money, and says he has enough for us all winter. "Dec. 31st. We have now 122 Dutch prisoners. The year closes at twelve o'clock midnight; and we still in prison. "1781. Jany. 1st. A Sentinel informed Captain Manley to-day that a Minister in Cornwall had been in a trance and when he came out said that England would be reduced and lose two Capital places or Cities, and that in the run of a year there would be Peace. "3d. To-day eighteen or twenty of the Americans innocu- lated themselves for the Small Pox. Mr. Saurey came to-day" and brought our money which is augmented to a Shilling a week and to be continued during our confinement. Such as are necessitated for clothes Captain Connyngham is to make a list of and Mr. Saurey* will send it to Mr. Diggsf at London in order to obtain them. "Feb. 4th (Sunday). This morning Captain Manley com- municated to me that he had received a great deal of abuse from Captain Daniel Brown and was determined to have satis- faction by giving him a challenge to fight a duel with pistols, * In his "History of Prisons," published in 1792, John Howard, the philan- thropist, mentions in an account of a visit to Forton Prison near Portsmouth durinfj the Revolution: "The American prisoners there had an allowance from the States paid by order of Dr. Franklin." The small payments of cash doled out to the American searnen in Mill Prison were entrusted to this Miles Saurey, of London, by Benjamin Franklin, at that time in France as INIinister. t Under date of " Passy, 25 June, 1782," Franklin wrote his friend Robert R. Livingston: "I have long suffered with these poor brave men who with so much public virtue have endured four or five years' hard imprisonment rather than serve against their country. I have done all I could toward making their situation more comfortable but their numbers were so great that I could do little for each, and that very great villain, Digges, defrauded them of between three and four hundred poun^ -t^TN^,/-^.^ ja-^«/ ^ y* ^ ..^ ^-^.2;^ j^/S^^/ Ot^^ yy^u^t^ X// -^a^^.-i^ fAyyi^]_ ,<^^*y/i JUtJ^ oj &7 '^ i/^->^' €> ^ /^ '^ ^ ' '^ '/^x:a^4 ^^^-^ -^^/^ c\ £ ^ ^^<^ ''^-^ "^^ -^-^^^ ^ ^'^^^ Log of the good ship fi./t/rori, showing the captain's cipher at the bottom of the page Pioneers in Distant Seas them in their normal order. The passage already quoted therefore translates itself as follows: " O, Dear Wife, what shall I write to fill this sheet. I will tell you that I look your letters over and over and wish me in your arms, but I wait in patience, thinking on a happy meeting. I am well." Other messages which this sailor wrote from his heart and confided to his cipher in the log of the Rubicon read in this wise : "My Heart within me (is) ashes. I want to see my loving Wife and press her to my bosom. But, O, my days are gone and past no more to return forever." "True, undivided and sincere love united with its own object is one of the most happy Passions that possesses the human heart." "Joanna, this day brings to my mind grateful reflections. " This is the day that numbers thirty years of my Dear's life. O, that I could lay in her arms to-night and recount the days that have passed away in youthful love and pleasure." " The seed is sown, it springs up and grows to maturity, then drops its seed and dies away, while the young shoot comes up and takes its place. And so it is with Man that is born to die." Now and then a sea tragedy is so related in these old log books that the heart is touched with a genuine sympathy for the victim, as if he were more than a name, as if he were a friend or a neighbor. It is almost certain that no one alive to-day has ever heard of Aaron Lufkin, able seaman, who sailed from Calcutta for the Cape of Good Hope in the year 1799. The ship's clerk, William Cleveland of Salem, who kept a journal of the voyage, wrote of this sailor in such a way that you will 215 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem be able to see him for what he was, and will perhaps wish no better epitaph for yourself : "Aaron Lufkin, one of the most active of our seamen held out till he was scarcely able to walk, but as this appeared to be fatigue, his case was not particularly observed by the Captain nor officers. When he first complained he said he had been unwell for some days but that there were so few on duty he would stand it out. Unfortunately his zeal for his duty cost him his life, for on the 17th of April he died after lingering in torment for several days. He was often out of his head and continually on the fly when no person was attending him, and constantly talking of his father, mother and sisters, which shewed how fond he was of them. Indeed his little purchases in Calcutta for his sisters were a sufficient proof. He was the only son of a respectable tradesman in the town of Freeport (Maine) and the brother of eight or nine sisters, all of which were younger than himself, though he was but twenty years old." The death of an able seaman, under such peaceful circum- stances as these, was a matter of no importance except to his kindred and his shipmates. It is significant of the spirit and singularly dramatic activity of those times that the loss of a whole ship's company might be given not so much space in the chronicles of the town as the foregoing tribute to poor Aaron Lufkin. Indeed " Felt's Annals of Salem " is fairly crowded with appalling tragedies, told in a few bald lines, of which the following are quoted as examples of condensed narration: "News is received here that Captain Joseph Orne in the ship Essex had arrived at Mocha, with $60,000 to purchase coft'ee, and that Mahomet Ikle, commander of an armed ship, persuaded him to trade at Hadidido, and to take on board 30 of his Arabs to help navigate her thither while his vessel kept her company; that on the approach of night, and at a concerted 216 Pioneers i7i Distarit Seas signal, the Arabs attacked the crew of the Essex, and Ikle laid his ship alongside, and that the result was the slaughter of Captain Orne, and all his men, except a Dutch boy named John Hermann Poll. The Essex was plundered and burnt. The headless corpse of Capt. Orne and the mutilated remains of a merchant floated on shore and were decently buried. It was soon after ascertained that the faithless Mahomet was a notorious pirate of that country. He kept the lad whose life he had spared, as a slave until 1812, when Death kindly freed him from his cruel bondage." On the 13th of November, 1807, "the ship Marquis de Somereulas* arrives hither from Cronstadt and Elsinore. She brings in eleven men, a woman called Joanna Evans, and her child, which were picked up Oct. 28th in a longboat. The rest being eight in number, were rescued at the same time on board a ship from Philadelphia. They had been in the boat six days, during which seven of their company died of starvation. The living, in order to sustain themselves, fed upon the dead. They were the remains of one hundred and ten souls on board an English transport which was waterlogged and then blew up * "A narrative dated Sept. 18, 1806, is published. It relates that the ship Marquis de Sumereulas, Captain William Story, on the coast of Sumatra, had a narrow escape from being surprised by some of the natives. Two proas came alongside with fourteen men who were allowed to come on board. Only five of the ship's company were left on deck. The mate and rest of the hands were stowing the cargo. The captain, being in the cabin, heard Mr. Bromfield, the clerk who was above, exclaim that he was cresed. The sailmaker ran to his rescue, but was dangerously wounded and jumped down the hatchway. All the hands below were ordered to gain the deck, though they had scarcely any arms. The captain, while endeavoring to ascend the companion way, was attacked with boarding pikes. His men attempted to get up but were repulsed with several of them wounded. They were rallied and another effort was about to be made. The injunction was given that if they did not succeed, and the Malays took possession of the ship, a match should be applied to the magazine to blow her up. In the meanwhile the natives had retreated, which was immediately discovered by the crew who got on deck with the expectation of a deadly contest. INIr. Bromfield was found dead. The carpenter and cook were missing, but these two had escaped in a boat and soon returned to unite with their comrades." (Felt's "Annals of Salem.") 217 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem and foundered. The captain and some of his men, being in a small boat, by some means or other separated from those in the long boat and were never afterwards heard of. After the sad story of these shipwrecked sufferers was generally known among our citizens, they experienced from them the most kindly sympathy and substantial aid to the amount of between two and three hundred dollars." A more cheerful story, and one which may be called an old- fashioned sea yarn, was told with much detail by a writer in the Salem Evening Journal in 1855, who had received it at first hand from a shipmate of the hero. In 1808, when England was nominally at peace with the United States, but molesting her commerce and impressing her seamen with the most perni- cious energy, the bark Active, of Salem, arrived at Martha's Vineyard and Captain Richardson reported that "while on his course for Europe he was captured by an English letter-of- marque, whose commander put seven men on board with Cap- tain Richardson and three of his crew, the rest of his men being taken from him and the bark ordered to Nevis. When near that port the Americans seized upon the arms of the English, confined them in irons, and put away for home where Captain Richardson afterwards arrived in safety." "A few years ago," narrates the loquacious contributor to the Salem Evening Journal of 1855, "the writer heard from one who was on board the barque Active on the above mentioned voyage a somewhat amusing account of one of the crew, who came down from New Hampshire, when she was about ready to sail, and not being able to find any work on shore, shipped with Capt. Richardson and went to sea. As a matter of course, our country friend, as far as regarded nautical phrases and the 'ropes' generally, was extremely verdant. To use his own words, he 'didn't really know t'other from which." Capt. Richardson knew all this beforehand, but he also knew that 218 Pioneers in Distant Seas our Yankee friend was a tall, stout, and very smart young man and so he did not hesitate at all about taking him on board his vessel. The chief mate, however, not being so well aware of Peleg's verdancy as the Captain, and observing that he stood with his hands in his pockets gazing curiously around the ship, whilst the rest of the crew were engaged in getting the anchor secured, addressed him thus: "'Who are you?' '"Peleg Sampson, from away up in Moultonboro, State of New Hampshire. I say, it's a dernation mighty curious place this, ain't it?' "Rather surprised at the familiar manner of our Yankee friend, the mate replied: " ' I guess you'll find it curious enough before the voyage is up. Lay forward there and help cat that anchor.' "Whilst the mate stepped on the forecastle for the purpose of superintending this necessary operation, Peleg began to search all around the deck with a minuteness that would have done honor to an experienced gold-hunter. After he had been for a few minutes thus engaged, he followed the mate to the forecastle deck and said : "'I say, mister, I cack'late there ain't any of them critters here.' "'What critters? You d — n land-lubber,' said the mate. "'Cats,' returned Peleg, with an innocent gravity of tone and manner, which made the sailors turn from their work and gaze, open-mouthed, upon their verdant shipmate. Who the said anything about cats?' asked the mate. ***Why you, you tarnal goslin,' returned Peleg somewhat tartly. * Didn't you tell me to help cat the anchor, and before I could do that ere, hadn't I got to find the animal to do it with, hey, what?' " On hearing this reply to the mate's question, the old salts 219 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem burst out in a loud, uproarious guffaw, in which the chief officer most heartily joined, as he had by this time become most fully aware that Peleg was nothing more nor less than a 'green hand.' " About a week afterwards, when the Active had got well out to sea, and Peleg had recovered from a severe fit of seasickness so as to be able to be about the decks, the mate, being in want of an article from aloft, said to Peleg: " ' Go up in the maintop there, and bring down a slush bucket that's made fast to the topmast rigging.' '"What, up these rope-ladders do you want me to go?' asked Peleg, with a scared look at the main-rigging. "'Yes,' returned the mate, 'and be spry about it, too.' "'Can't do any such business,' returned Peleg, in a very decided tone of voice. 'Why don't you tell me to run over- board. I should jest as soon think on't, really. Now I'm ready to pull and haul, or wrestle, back to back, Indian hug, or any way you like, fight the darnation Englishers till I'm knocked down, or do anything I km do, but as to going up them darna- tion littleish rope-ladders, I can't think of it nohow.' " Thinking it would be as well not to urge the matter farther at that time, the mate sent another hand for the slush bucket, and thus the affair ended. Afterwards, however, as we learned from the same authority, Peleg became one of the smartest sailors on board the vessel, and in the affair of retaking the ship from English, did most excellent and efficient service." In Felt's Annals of Salem, it is related under date of Feb- ruary 21, 1802, "the ships Ulysses, Caiptam James Cook; Brutus, Captain William Brown, owned by the Messrs. Crowninshield ; and the Valusia, Captain Samuel Cook, belonging to Israel Williams and others sailed for Europe (on the same day). Though when they departed the weather was remarkably pleasant for the season, in a few hours a snowstorm commenced. 220 Pioneers in Distant Seas After using every exertion to clear Cape Cod the tempest forced them the next day upon its perilous shore. The most sad of all in this threefold catastrophe was the loss of life in the Brutus. One hand was killed by the fore-yard prior to the ship striking; another was drowned while attempting to reach the shore, and the commander with six men perished with the cold after they had landed, while anxiously seeking some shelter for their wet, chilled, and exhausted bodies." "(1819) July 16. A few days since one of our sailors was exceedingly frightened by meeting in the street what he really believed to be the ghost of a shipmate. This person was Peter Jackson, whose worth as a cook was no less because he had a black skin. He had belonged to the brig Ceres. As she was coming down the river from Calcutta, she was thrown on her beam ends and Peter fell overboard. Among the things thrown to him was a sail-boom on which he was carried away from the vessel by the rapid current. Of course all on board concluded that he was downed or eaten by crocodiles, and so they reported when reaching home. Administration had been taken on his goods and chattels and he was dead in the eye of the law. But after floating twelve hours he was cast ashore and as soon as possible hastened homeward. Notwithstanding he had hard work to do away with the impression of his being dead, he succeeded and was allowed the rights and privileges of the living." While Newport and Bristol, of all the New England ports, did the most roaring trade in slaves and rum with the west coast of Africa, Salem appears to have had comparatively few dealings with this kind of commerce. Slavers were fitted out and owned in Salem, but they were an inconsiderable part of the shipping activity, and almost the only records left to portray this darker side of seafaring America in the olden times are fragmentary references such as those already quoted and 221 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem these which follow. There has been preserved a singularly pitiful letter from a Saleni boy to his mother at home. It reads : "Cayenne, April 23, 1789. "Honour'd Parent: " I take this Opportunity to write Unto you to let you know of a very bad accident that Happen'd on our late passage from Cape Mount, on the Coast of Africa, bound to Cayenne. We sailed from Cape Mount the 13th of March with 36 Slaves on bord. The 26th day of March the Slaves Rised upon us. At half-past seven, my Sire and Hands being foreward Except the Man at the helm, and myself, three of the Slaves took Possession of the Caben, and two upon the Quarter Deck. Them in the Caben took Possession of the fier Arms, and them on the quarter Deck with the Ax and Cutlash and Other Weapons. Them in the Caben handed up Pistels to them on the quarter Deck. "One of them fired and killed my Honoured Sire, and still we strove for to subdue them, and then we got on the Quarter Deck and killed two of them. One that was in the Caben was Comeing out at the Caben Windows in order to get on Deck, and we discovered him and Knock'd him overbord. Two being in the Caben we confined the Caben Doors so that they should not kill us. "Then three men went foreward and got the three that was down their and brought them aft. And their being a Doctor on board, a Passenger that could Speak the Tongue, he sent one of the boys down and Brought up some of the fier Arms and Powder. And then we cal'd them up and one came up, and he Cal'd the other and he Came up. We put them In Irons and Chained them and then the Doctor Dres'd the People's Wounds, they being Slightly Wounded. Then it was one o'clock. "They buried my Honoured Parent, he was buried as decent 222 Pioneers in Distant Seas as he could be at Sea, the 16th of this Month. I scalt myself with hot Chocolate but now I am abel to walk about again. So I remain in good Health and hope to find you the Same and all my Sisters and Brothers and all that Inquires after Me. We have sold part of the Slaves and I hope to be home soon. So I Remain your Most Dutiful Son, "Wm. Fairfield. "Addressed to Mrs. Rebecca Fairfield, "Salem, New England." Under date of May 29, 1789, Doctor Bentley wrote in his diary : "On Wednesday went to Boston and returned on Friday. News of the death of Captain William Fairfield who com- manded the Schooner which sailed in Captain Joseph White's employ in the African Slave Trade. He was killed by the Negroes on board." This following letter of instructions to one of the few Salem captains in the slave trade was written in 1785, under date of November 12th: "Our brig of which you have the command, being cleared at the ofiice, and being in every other respect complete for sea, our orders are that you embrace the first fair wind and make the best of your way to the Coast of Africa and there invest your cargo in slaves. As slaves, like other articles when brought to market, generally appear to the best advantage, therefore too critical an inspection cannot be paid to them before purchase; to see that no dangerous distemper is lurking about them, to attend particularly to their age, to their countenance, to the strength of their limbs, and as far as possible to the goodness or badness of their constitutions, etc., will be very considerable objects. "Male or female slaves, whether full grown, or not, we cannot 223 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem particularly instruct you about, and on this head shall only observe that prime male slaves generally sell best in any market. No people require more kind and tender treatment to exhilarate their spirits than the Africians, and while on the one hand you are attentive to this, remember that, on the other hand, too much circumspection cannot be observed by yourself and people to prevent their taking advantage of such treatment by insur- rection and so forth. When you consider that on the health of your slaves almost your whole voyage depends, you will particularly attend to smoking your vessel, washing her with vinegar, to the clarifying your water with lime or brimstone, and to cleanliness among your own people as well as among the slaves." These singularly humane instructions are more or less typical of the conduct of the slave trade from New England during the eighteenth century when pious owners expressed the hope that "under the blessing of God" they might obtain full caroges of negroes. The ships were roomy, comparatively comfortable quarters were provided, and every effort made to prevent losses by disease and shortage of water and provisions. It was not until the nations combined to drive the traffic from the high seas that slavers were built for speed, crammed to the hatches with tortured negroes and hard-driven for the West Indies and Liverpool and Charleston through the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage. Salem records are not proud of even the small share of the town in this kind of commerce, and most of the family papers which dealt with slave trading have been purposely destroyed. It is true also that public sentiment opposed the traffic at an earlier date than in such other New England ports as Bristol and Newport. Slaves captured in British privateers during the Revolution were not permitted to be sold as property, but were treated as prisoners of war. The refusal of Elias Hasket 224 Pioneers in Distant Seas Derby to let his ship Grand Turk take slaves aboard on her first voyage to the Gold Coast was an unusual proceeding for a shipping merchant of that time. Nor according to Doctor Bentley was the slave trade in the best repute among the people of the place. While Salem commerce was rising in a flood tide of enter- prising achievement in the conquest of remote and mysterious markets on the other side of the globe, and the wounds left by the Revolution were scarcely healed, her ships began to bring home new tales of outrage at the hands of British, French and Spanish privateers and men-of-war. There was peace only in name. In 1790, or only seven years after the end of the Revo- lution, seamen were bitterly complaining of seizures and im- pressments by English ships, and the war with France was clouding the American horizon. The Algerine pirates also had renewed their informal activities against American shipping, and the shipmasters of Salem found themselves between several kinds of devils and the deep sea wherever they laid their courses. The history of the sea holds few more extraordinary stories than that related of a Salem sailor and cherished in the maritime chronicles of the town. "On the 14th of August, 1785, a French vessel from Mar- tinique, bound to Bordeaux came up with the body of a man floating at some fifty rods distance. The captain ordered four men into the boat to pick it up. When brought on board, to the great surprise of the crew, the supposed dead body breathed. Half an hour afterwards the man opened his eyes and exclaimed : *0 God, where am I?' On taking off his clothes to put him to bed it was discovered that he had on a cork jacket and trousers. It was afterwards ascertained that he had sailed from Salem in a brig bound to Madrid. The brig was attacked by Sallee pirates and captured. This sailor, pretending to be 225 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem lame, was neglected by the Moors who had captured him. About 11 o'clock at night, having put on his cork apparatus, he let himself down from the forechains into the water unper- ceived. He swam about two days when he being quite ex- hausted, his senses left him, in which state he was discovered by the men from the Frigate. On his arrival at Bordeaux he was presented by the Chamber of Commerce with a purse of 300 crowns." On February 10th, 1795, the following appeal was posted in the streets of Salem: "For the purpose of taking into consideration the unhappy situation of the unfortunate prisoners at Algiers, and to de- vise some Method for carrying into efiFect a General Collection for their Relief on Thursday, the 19th day of the present Month! "The Meeting is called by the desire of the Reverend Clergy and other Respectable Citizens of this Town who wish to have some System formed that will meet the Acceptance of the Inhabitants previous to the Day of Contribution. "The truly deplorable fate of these miserable captives loudly calls for your Commiseration, and the Fervent Prayers they have addressed to you from their Gloomy Prisons ought to soften the most Adamantine Heart. They intreat you in the most Impassioned Language not to leave them to dispair, but as Prisoners of Hope, let those of them who still survive the Plague, Pestilence, and Famine, anticipate the day that shall relieve them from the Cruel scourge of an Infidel, and restore them to the Arms of their long-bereaved Friends and Country. " It is hoped that the Humane and Benevolent will attend that Charity may not be defeated of her intended Sacrifice in the auspicious Festival, when the New World shall all be assembled, and the United States shall offer her tribute of Praise and Thanksgiving at the Altars of God."* 226 Pioneers in Distant Seas An item of the date of February 16th, 1794, records that "information is received that Edward Harwood, mate, James Peas and Samuel Henry of Salem, lately returned from Algerine captivity were apportioned shares of a benefit previously taken for such sufferers at the Boston Theatre," * The 19th of February, 1795, was a day of National Thanksgiving ordered by proclamation of President Washington. 227 CHAPTER XII THE BUILDING OF THE ESSEX (1799) TWENTIETH century battleships are built at a cost of six or seven millions of dollars with the likelihood of becoming obsolete before they fire a gun in action. It is a task of years to construct one of these mighty fabrics, short-lived as they are in service, and crammed with intricate machinery whose efficiency under stress of war is largely experimental. One hundred and ten years ago there was launched from a Salem shipyard a wooden sailing frigate called the Essex. She was the fastest and handsomest vessel of the United States navy and a dozen years after she first flew the flag of her country she won immortal renown under Captain David Porter. There is hardly a full-rigged sailing ship afloat to-day as small as the Essex, and in tonnage many modern three-masted coasting schooners can equal or surpass her. Yet her name is one of the most illustrious in the list of a navy which bears also those of the Constitution, the Hartford, the Kearsarge and the Olympia. It was the maritime war with France at the end of the eigh- teenth century which caused the building of the Essex. When American commerce was being harried unto death by the frigates and privateersmen of "the Terrible Republic" as our sailors called France, our shadow of a navy was wholly helpless to resist, or to protect its nation's shipping. At length, in 1797, Congress authorized the construction of the three famous frigates. Constitution, Constellotion and United States, to fight 228 The Building of the Essex for American seamen's rights. The temper and conditions of that time were reflected in an address to Congress dehvered by President John Adams on November 23, 1797, in which he said: "The commerce of the United States is essential, if not to their existence, at least to their comfort, growth and prosperity. The genius, character and habits of our people are highly com- mercial. Their cities have been formed and exist upon com- merce; our agriculture, fisheries, arts and manufactures are connected with and dependent upon it. In short, commerce has made this country what it is, and it cannot be destroyed or neglected without involving the people in poverty or distress. Great numbers are directly and solely supported by navigation. The faith of society is pledged for the preservation of the rights of commercial and seafaring, no less than other citizens. Under this view of our affairs I should hold myself guilty of neglect of duty if I forebore to recommend that we should make every exertion to protect our commerce and to place our country in a suitable posture of defence as the only sure means of preserv- ing both." The material progress of this country has veered so far from seafaring activities that such doctrine as this sounds as archaic as a Puritan edict for bearing arms to church as a protection against hostile savages. One great German or English liner entering the port of New York registers a tonnage equaling that of the whole fleet of ships in the foreign trade of Salem in her golden age of adventurous discovery. Yet the liner has not an American among her crew of five hundred men, and not one dollar of American money is invested in her huge hull. She is a matter of the most complete indifference to the American people, who have ceased to care under what flags their com- merce is borne over seas. On the other hand, the shipping of Salem and other ports was The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem a factor vital to national welfare a century ago. But when John Adams preached the necessity of resorting to arms to protect it, the country was too poor to create a navy adequate for defense. Forthwith the merchants whose ships were being destroyed in squadrons by French piracy offered to contribute their private funds to build a jBeet of frigates that should rein- force the few naval vessels in commission or authorized. It was a rally for the common good, a patriotic movement in which the spirit of '76 flamed anew. The principles that moved the American people were voiced by James McHenry, Secretary of War in 1789, in a letter to the Chairman of the Committee of the House of Representatives for the Protection of Commerce: "France derives several important advantages from the sys- tem she is pursuing toward the United States. Besides the sweets of plunder obtained by her privateers she keeps in them a nursery of seamen to be drawn upon in conjunctures by the navy. She unfits by the same means the United States for energetic measures and thereby prepares us for the last degree of humiliation and subjection. " To forbear under such circumstances from taking naval and military measures to secure our trade, defend our territories in case of invasion, and to prevent or suppress domestic insurrec- tion, would be to offer up the United States a certain prey to France . . . and exhibit to the world a sad spectacle of national degradation and imbecility." In June of the following year. Congress passed an act "to accept not exceeding twelve vessels on the credit of the United States, and to cause evidences of debt to be given therefor, allowing an interest thereon not exceeding six per cent." It was in accordance with this measure, which confessed that the United States was too poor to build a million dollars' worth of wooden ships of war from its treasury, that subscription 230 Kl The Building of the Essex lists were opened at Newbury, Salem, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Norfolk, the citizens of each of these seaports making ready to contribute a frigate as a loan to the government. Even the infant city of Cincinnati sub- scribed toward equipping a galley for the defense of the Mis- sissippi against the French. At Salem, Elias Hasket Derby and William Gray, the two foremost shipping merchants of the town, led the subscription list with the sum of ten thousand dollars each, and in a few weeks $74,700 had been raised in contributions as small as fifty dollars. The Salem Gazette of October 26, 1798, contained this item: " At a meeting in the Courthouse in this town Tuesday evening last, of those gentlemen who have subscribed to build a ship for the service of the United States, it was voted unanimously to build a Frigate of thirty-two guns and to loan the same to the Government; and William Gray, jr., John Norris and Jacob Ashton, Esqr., Captain Benjamin Hodges and Captain Ichabod Nichols were chosen a committee to carry the same into immediate effect." Captain Joseph Waters was appointed General Agent, and Enos Briggs, a shipbuilder of Salem, was selected as master builder. The Master Builder inserted this advertisement in the Essex Gazette: "The Salem Frigate "Take Notice. "To Sons of Freedom! All true lovers of Liberty of your Country. Step forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French insolence and piracy. Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to Salem where the noble structure is to be fabricated to maintain your rights upon the seas and 231 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem make the name of America respected among the nations of the world. Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms of them for knees and rising timber. Four trees are wanted for the keel, which altogether will measure 146 feet in length, and hew 16 inches square. Please to call on the subscriber who wants to make contracts for large or small quantities as may suit best and will pay the ready cash. "Enos Briggs. "Salem, November 23, 1798." So enthusiastic was the response to the call for material that Master Builder Enos Briggs was obliged to have this adver- tisement printed: "The Salem Frigate " Through the medium of the Gazette the subscriber pays his acknowledgements to the good people of the county of Essex for their spirited exertions in bringing down the trees of the forest for building the Frigate. In the short space of four weeks the complement of timber has been furnished. Those who have contributed to their country's defence are invited to come forward and receive the reward of their patriotism. They are informed that with permission of a kind Providence, who hath hitherto favored the undertaking. Next September is the time When we'll launch her from the strand And our cannon load and prime With tribute due to Talleyrand. "Enos Briggs. "Salem, Jan. 1, 1799." The great timbers for the ship's hull were cut in the "wood lots" of Danvers, Peabody, Beverly and other near-by towns of Essex county and hauled through the snowy streets of Salem on sleds drawn by slow-moving oxen, while the people cheered 232 The Building of the Essex them as they passed. The keel of the frigate was laid on the 13th of April, 1799, and she was launched five months and seventeen days later, on the 30th of September, Master Builder Briggs saving his reputation as a prophet by the narrowest possible margin. The Essex was a Salem ship from keel to truck. Her cordage was made in three rope walks. Captain Jonathan Haraden, the most famous Salem privateersman of the Revolution, made the rigging for the mainmast at his factory in Brown Street. Joseph Vincent fitted out the foremast and Thomas Briggs the mizzenmast in their rigging lofts at the foot of the Common. When the huge hemp cables were ready to be carried to the frigate, the workmen who had made them conveyed them to the shipyard on their shoulders, the procession led by a fife and drum. Her sails were cut from duck woven for the purpose at Daniel Rust's factory in Broad Street, and her iron work was forged by the Salem shipsmiths. Six months before she slid into the harbor her white oak timbers were standing in the woodlands of Massachusetts. The glorious event of her launching inspired the editor of the Salem Gazette to this flight of eulogy: "And Adams said : ' Let there be a navy and there was a navy. ' To build a navy was the advice of our venerable sage. How far it had been adhered to is demonstrated by almost every town in the United States that is capable of floating a galley or a gun-boat. "Salem has not been backward in this laudable design. Impressed with a sense of the importance of a navy, the patriotic citizens of this town put out a subscription and thereby obtained an equivalent for building a vessel of force. Among the fore- most in this good work were Messrs. Derby and Gray, who set the example by subscribing ten thousand dollars each. But alas, the former is no more — ^we trust his good deeds follow him. 233 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem "Such was the patriotic zeal with which our citizens were inspired, that in the short space of six months they contracted for the materials and equipment of a frigate of thirty-two guns, and had her complete for launching. The chief part of her timber was standing but six months ago, and in a moment as it were, ' every grove descended ' and put in force the patriotic intentions of those at whose expense she was built. " Yesterday the Stars and Stripes were unfurled on board the frigate Essex and at 12 o'clock she made a majestic movement into her destined element, there to join her sister craft in repelling foreign aggressions and maintaining the rights and liberties of a 'Great, Free, Powerful and Independent Nation.' "The concourse of spectators was immense. The heart-felt satisfaction of the beholders of this magnificent spectacle was evinced by the concording shouts and huzzas of thousands which reiterated from every quarter. "The unremitting zeal of Mr. Briggs, the architect of this beautiful ship, cannot be too highly applauded. His assiduity in bringing her into a state of such perfection in so short a time entitles him to the grateful thanks of his Country and we fondly hope his labors have not been spent in vain, for we may truly say that he has not ' given rest to the sole of his foot ' since her keel was first laid. At least he will have the consolation of reflecting on the important service he has rendered his country in this notable undertaking." The guns of the frigate had been planted on a near-by hill, and as she took the water they thundered a salute which was echoed by the cannon of armed merchant vessels in the harbor. This famous frigate, literally built by the American people, their prayers and hopes wrought into every timber of her with the labor of their own hands, cost a trifle less than $75,000 when turned over to the Government. The Essex was a large vessel for her time, measuring 850 tons. She was 146 feet in 234 The Building of the Essex length "over all," while her keel was 118 feet long. Her beam was 37 feet and her depth of hold 12 feet 3 inches. The height between her gun deck and lower deck was only 5 feet 9 inches. Her mainmast was 85 feet long with a head of 12 feet. Above this was a topmast 55 feet long with a head of 1\ feet, and towering skyward from the topmast her topgallant mast of 40 feet with a head of 15 feet. Her mainyard was 80 feet long. Rigged as a three-masted ship, with an unusual spread of canvas, the Essex must have been a rarely beautiful marine picture when under way. The handling of such a majestic fabric as one of these old-time men-of-war is mirrored in the song of "The Fancy Frigate" which describes how such a ship as this noble Essex was manned by the hundreds of tars who swarmed among her widespread yards: "Now my brave boys comes the best of the fun. All hands to make sail, going large is the song. From under two reefs in our topsails we lie, Like a cloud in the air, in an instant must fly. There's topsails, topgallant sails, and staysails too. There is stu'nsails and skysails, star gazers so high. By the sound of one pipe everything it must fly. Now, my brave boys, comes the best of the fun. About ship and reef topsails in one. All hands up aloft when the helm goes down. Lower way topsails when the mainyard goes round. Chase up and lie out and take two reefs in one. In a moment of time all this work must be done. Man your head braces, your haulyards and all, And hoist away topsails when it's 'let go and haul,' As for the use of tobacco all thoughts leave behind. If you spit on the deck then your death warrant sign. If you spit overboard either gangway or starn You are sure of six dozen by way of no harm." But before this "fancy frigate" of the American navy could get to sea, there was much to be done. Captain Richard Derby of Salem had been selected to command her, but he was abroad 235 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem in one of his own ships and could not return home in time to equip the frigate for active service. Therefore, Captain Edward Preble of the navy was offered the command, which he accepted and hastened to Salem to put his battery and stores aboard and recruit a crew. It is related that when Captain Preble saw the armament that had been prepared for his ship he found the gun carriages not at all to his liking. "Who built those gun carriages," he angrily demanded of Master Builder Briggs. "Deacon Gould," was the answer. " Send for Deacon Gould to meet me at the Sun tavern this evening," ordered Captain Preble. Deacon Gould made his appearance and found Captain Preble waiting with somewhat of irritation in his demeanor. The deacon was a man of the most dignified port and he asked : "What may be your will. Captain Preble.^'" " You do not know how to make gun carriages, sir," exclaimed the fighting sailor. "What's that you say, Captain Preble. What's that you say.^" thundered Deacon Gould. "I knew how to make gun carriages before you were born, and if you say that word again I will take you across my knee and play Master Hacker* with you, sir." Both men were of a hair-trigger temper and a clash was prevented by friends who happened to be in the tavern. Cap- tain Preble proceeded to have the gun carriages cut down to suit him, however, as may be learned from the following entry in his sea journal kept on board the Essex: "26 12-pound cannon were taken on board for the main battery; mounted them and found the carriages all too high; dismounted the cannon and sent the carriages ashore to be altered." * Master Hacker was a Salem schoolmaster of that time. 236 The Building of the Essex The battery of the Essex consisted of 26 12-pounders on the gun decks; 6 6-pounders on the quarter deck; 32 guns in all. During his first cruise at sea Captain Preble recommended to the Secretary of the Navy that 9-pounders replace the 6-pound guns on the quarterdeck which he thought strong enough to bear them, a tribute to honest construction by Master Builder Enos Briggs. The official receipt of the acceptance of the Essex in behalf of the Government of the United States which Captain Preble gave the Salem committee reads as follows: "The Committee for building a frigate in Salem for the United States having delivered to my charge the said frigate called the Essex, with her hull, masts, spars and rigging com- plete, and furnished her with one complete suit of sails, two bower cables and anchors, one stream cable and anchor, one hawser, and kedge anchor, one tow line, four boats and a full set of spare masts and spars except the lower masts and bowsprit, I have in behalf of the United States received the said frigate Essex and signed duplicate receipts for the same. "Edward Preble, Captain, U. S. N. "Salem, Dec. 17, 1799." This receipt was not given until Captain Preble had taken time to make a thorough examination of the vessel, for his first letter to the Secretary of the Navy concerning the Essex was written on November 17th, more than a month earlier than the foregoing document. He reported on this previous date: "Sir. I have the honor to inform you that I arrived here last evening and have taken charge of the Essex. She is now completely rigged, has all her ballast on board, and her stock of water will be nearly complete by to-morrow night. . . . 237 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem I am much in want of officers to attend the ship, and the recruit- ing service. I shall be obhged to open a rendezvous to-morrow to recruit men sufficient to make the ship safe at her anchors in case of a storm. I presume the Essex can be got ready for sea in thirty days if my recruiting instructions arrive soon. The agent, Mr. Waters, and the Committee are disoosed to render me every assistance in their power. "Very respectfully, "Your obedient servant, "Edw^ard Preble, Capt. " To the Hon. Secretary of the Navy, etc., etc." In another letter with the foregoing address Captain Preble wrote: " I beg leave to recommend Mr. Rufus Low of Cape Ann for Sailing Master of the Essex. He has served as captain of a merchant ship for several years and has made several voyages to India and sustains a good reputation. His principal induce- ment for soliciting this appointment is the injuries he has sustained by the French." The crew of the Essex, officers and men, numbered two hun- dred and fifty when she went to sea. It was a ship's company of Americans of the English strain who had become native to the soil and cherished as hearty a hatred for the mother country as they did the most patriotic ardor for their new republic. There were only two "Macs" and one "O'" on the ship's muster rolls, and men and boys were almost without exception of seafaring New England stock. In a letter of instructions to Captain Preble, the Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Stoddard, wrote of the proposed complement of the Essex: "Sixty able bodied seamen, seventy-three ordinary seamen, thirty boys, fifty marines including officers. Able seamen $17 per month, ordinary seamen and boys $5 to $17." 238 The Building of the Essex Captain Preble was greatly pleased with the behavior of the frigate in her first "trying out" run from Salem to Newport. He wrote from sea to Joseph Waters: "The Essex is a good sea boat and sails remarkably fast. She went eleven miles per hour with topgallant sails set and within six points of the wind," He also wrote the Secretary of the Navy after leaving Newport : " I have the honor to acquaint you that the Essex in coming out of the harbor sailed much faster than the Congress, and is, I think, in every respect a fine frigate." Nor was this admiration limited to her own officers, for from the Cape of Good Hope, on her first deep-water cruise. Captain Preble wrote home: " The Essex is much admired for the beauty of her construc- tion by the officers of the British Navy." In company with the frigate Congress the Essex sailed in January, 1800, for Batavia to convoy home a fleet of Ameri- can merchantmen. Six days out the Congress was dismasted in a storm which the Essex weathered without damage and proceeded alone as the first American war vessel to double the Cape of Good Hope. Ten months later she reached the United States with her merchantmen. The Essex had not the good fortune to engage the enemy, for a treaty of peace with France was signed in February, 1801. Captain Preble left the ship because of ill health, and in com- mand of Captain Wm. Bainbridge, she joined the Mediter- ranean squadron of Commodore Richard Dale. She made two cruises in this service until 1805, and played a peaceful part on the naval list until the coming of the War of 1812. At that time the eighteen-gun ship Wasp was the only American war vessel on a foreign station. A small squadron was assembled at New York under Commodore Rodgers, comprising the 239 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem President, Hornet and Essex. Captain David Porter had been given command of the Essex and he sailed with this squadron which was later reinforced by the ships assembled with the pennant of Commodore Decatur. The Essex took several prizes, and fought a fierce single-ship action with H. B. M. ship Alert of twenty guns and 100 men, which he captured. The immortal cruise of the Essex under David Porter began when he was ordered to meet Bainbridge's ships, the Constella- tion and Hornet in South American waters. Failing to find the squadron at the rendezvous in the South Atlantic, in April David Porter headed for Cape Horn and the Pacific in search of British commerce. Early in 1813 he was able to report: "I have completely broke up the British navigation in the Pacific; the vessels which had not been captured by me were laid up and dared not venture out. I have afforded the most ample protection to our own vessels which were on my arrival very numerous and unprotected. The valuable whale fishery there is entirely destroyed and the actual injury we have done them may be estimated at two and a half million dollars, inde- pendent of the vessels in search of me. "They have furnished me amply with sails, cordage, cables, anchors, provisions, medicines, and stores of every description; and the slops on board have furnished clothing for my seamen. I have in fact lived on the enemy since I have been in that sea, every prize having proved a well-found store ship for me." In letters from Valparaiso Captain Porter was informed that a British squadron commanded by Commodore James Hillyar was seeking him. This force comprised the frigate Phoebe of thirty-six guns, the Raccoon and Cherub, sloops of war, and a store ship of twenty guns. "My ship, as it may be supposed after being near a year at sea," wrote Captain Porter, "required some repairs to put her in a state to meet them; which I deter- 240 The Building of the Essex mined to do and to bring them to action if I could meet them on nearly equal terms." With this purpose in mind Captain Porter went in search of the British squadron. In his words: " I had done all the injury that could be done the British commerce in the Pacific, and still hoped to signalize my cruise by something more splendid before leaving that sea." "Agreeably to his expectation," as Captain Porter phrased it, the Phoebe appeared at Valparaiso shortly after the arrival of the Essex in that port. But instead of offering a duel on even terms between the two frigates, the British Commodore brought with him the Cherub sloop of war. These two British vessels had a combined force of eighty-one guns and 500 men, as com- pared with the thirty-six guns and fewer than 300 men of the Essex. "Both ships had picked crews," said Captain Porter, " and were sent into the Pacific in company with the Raccoon of 32 guns and a store ship of 20 guns for the express purpose of seeking the Essex, and were prepared with flags bearing the motto, ' God and Country; British Sailors Best Rights ; Traitors Offend Both.' This was intended as reply to my motto, 'Free Trade and Sailors' Rights,' under the erroneous impression that my crew were chiefly Englishmen, or to counteract its effect on their own crew ... In reply to their motto, I wrote at my mizzen: ' God and Our Country; Tyrants Offend Them.'" Alongside the Essex lay the Essex, Junior, an armed prize which carried twenty guns and sixty men. For six weeks the two American vessels lay in harbor while the British squadron cruised off shore to blockade them, "during which time, I endeavored to provoke a challenge," explained Captain Porter, "and frequently but ineffectually to bring the Phoebe alone to action, first with both my ships, and afterwards with my single ship with both crews on board. I was several times under 241 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem way and ascertained that I had greatly the advantage in point of saiHng, and once succeeded in closing within gun shot of the Phoebe, and commenced a fire on her, when she ran down for the Cherub which was two miles and a half to leeward. This excited some surprise and expressions of indignation, as previous to my getting under way she hove to off the port, hoisted her motto flag and fired a gun to windward. Com. Hillyar seemed determined to avoid a contest with me on nearly equal terms and from his extreme prudence in keeping both his ships ever after constantly within hail of each other, there were no hopes of any advantages to my country from a long stay in port. I therefore determined to put to sea the first opportunity which should offer." On the 28th of March, 1813, the day after this determination was formed, the wind blew so hard from the southward that the Essex parted her port cable, and dragged her starboard anchor out to sea. Not a moment was to be lost in getting sail on the ship to save her from stranding. Captain Porter saw a chance of crowding out to windward of the Phoebe and Cherub, but his maintopmast was carried away by a heavy squall, and in his disabled condition he tried to regain the port. Letting go his anchor in a small bay, within pistol shot of a neutral shore, he made haste to repair damages. The Phoebe and Cherub bore down on the Essex, which was anchored in neutral water, their "motto flags," and union jacks flying from every masthead. The crippled Essex was made ready for action, and was attacked by both British ships at three o'clock in the afternoon. Describing the early part of the engagement Captain Porter reported to the Navy Department : " My ship had received many injuries, and several had been killed and wounded; but my brave officers and men, notwith- standing; the unfavorable circumstances under which we were brought to action and the powerful force opposed to us, were 242 The Building of the Essex in no way discouraged; and all appeared determined to defend their ship to the last extremity, and to die in preference to a shameful surrender. Our gaff with the ensign and the motto flag at the mizzen had been shot away, but 'Free Trade and Sailors' Rights ' continued to fly at the fore. Our ensign was replaced by another and to guard against a similar event an ensign was made fast in the mizzen rigging, and several jacks were hoisted in different parts of the ship." After hauling off to repair damages both the Phoebe and the Cherub stationed themselves on the starboard quarter of the Essex where her short carronades could not reach them and where her stern guns could not be brought to bear, for she was still at her forced anchorage. All the halyards of the Essex had been shot away, except those of the flying jib and with this sail hoisted the cable was cut and the stricken Yankee frigate staggered seaward with the intention of laying the Phoebe on board and fighting M close quarters. For only a short time was Porter able to use his guns to advantage, however, for the Cherub was able to haul off at a distance and pound the Essex while the Phoebe picked her own range and shot the helpless frigate to pieces with her long eighteen-pounders. In the words of David Porter which seem worthy of quotation at some length: "Many of my guns had been rendered useless by the enemy's shot, and many of them had their whole crews destroyed. We manned them again irom those which were disabled and one gun in particular was three times manned — fifteen men were slain in the course of the action. Finding that the enemy had it in his power to choose his distance, I now gave up all hope of closing with him and as the wind for the moment seemed to favour the design, I determined to run her on shore, land my men, and destroy her." But the wind shifted from landward and carried the Essex 243 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem toward the Phoebe, " when we were again exposed to a dreadful raking fire. My ship was now totally unmanageable; yet as her head was toward the enemy and he to leeward of me, I still hoped to be able to board him." This attempt failed, and a little later, the ship having caught fire in several places, "the crew who had by this time become so weakened that they all declared to me the impossibility of making further resistance, and entreated me to surrender my ship to save the wounded, as all further attempt at opposition must prove ineffectual, almost every gun being disabled by the destruction of their crew. "I now sent for the officers of division to consult them and what was my surprise to find only acting Lieutenant Stephen Decatur M 'Knight remaining ... I was informed that the cockpit, the steerage, the wardroom and the berth deck could contain no more wounded, that the wounded were killed while the surgeons were dressing them, and that if something was not speedily done to prevent it, the ship would soon sink from the number of shot holes in her bottom. On sending for the carpenter he informed me that all his crew had been killed or wounded . . . "The enemy from the smoothness of the water and the im- possibility of reaching him with our carronades and the little apprehension that was excited by our fire, which had now become much slackened, was enabled to take aim at us as at a target; his shot never missed our hull and my ship was cut up in a manner which was perhaps never before witnessed; in fine, I saw no hopes of saving her, and at 20 minutes after 6 P. M. I gave the painful order to strike the colours. Seventy- five men, including officers, were all that remained of my whole crew after the action capable of doing duty and many of them severely wounded, some of them whom have since died. The enemy still continued his fire, and my brave, though unfortu- 244 The Building of the Essex nate companions were still falling about me. I directed an opposite gun to be fired to show them we intended no farther resistance, but they did not desist; four men were killed at my side, and others at different parts of the ship. I now be- lieved he intended to show us no quarter, that it would be as well to die with my flag flying as struck, and was on the point of again hoisting it when about 10 minutes after hauling down the colours he ceased firing." Of a crew of 255 men who went into action, the Essex lost in killed, wounded, and missing no fewer than 153 officers, seamen and marines, including among the list of "slightly wounded" no less a name than that of "David G. Farragut, midshipman," who was destined to serve his country a full half century longer on the sea before his great chance should come to him on the quarterdeck of the Hartford in the Civil War. Captain David Porter had been overmatched, fighting his crippled ship against hopeless odds until his decks were such an appalling scene of slaughter as has been recorded of few naval actions in history. But the Salem-built frigate Essex had fulfilled her destiny in a manner to make her nation proud unto this day of the men who sailed and fought her in the harbor of Valparaiso, many thousand miles from the New England ship- yard where a patriotic town of seafarers had united with one common purpose to serve their country as best they could. There was grief and indignation beyond words when the tidings reached Salem that the Essex had been taken, and bitter wrath against England was kindled by the conviction, right or wrong, that Commodore Hillyar had not played the part of an honorable foe in pitting both his fighting ships against the Yankee frigate. This impression was confirmed by that part of Captain Porter's official report which read: "We have been unfortunate but not disgraced — ^the defence of the Essex had not been less honourable to her officers and 245 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem crew than the capture of an equal force; and I now consider my situation less unpleasant than that of Com. Hillyar, who in violation of every principle of honour and generosity, and regardless of the rights of nations, attacked the Essex in her crippled state within pistol shot of a neutral shore, when for six weeks I had daily offered him fair and honourable combat on terms greatly to his advantage. The blood of the slain must rest on his head; and he has yet to reconcile his conduct to heaven, to his conscience, and to the world." In a later letter to the Secretary of the Navy Captain Porter added these charges : " Sir: There are some facts relating to our enemy and although not connected with the action, serve to shew his perfidy and should be )vnown. " On Com. Hillyar 's arrival at Valparaiso he ran the Phoebe close alongside the Essex, and inquired politely after my health, observing that his ship was cleared for action and his men pre- pared for boarding. I observed: 'Sir, if you by any accident get on board of me, I assure you that great confusion will take place; I am prepared to receive you and shall act only on the defensive.' He observed coolly and indifferently. 'Oh, sir, I have no such intention'; at this instant his ship took aback of my starboard bow, her yards nearly locking with those of the Essex, and in an instant my crew was ready to spring on her decks. " Com. Hillyar exclaimed in great agitation : ' I had no inten- tion of coming so near you; I am sorry I came so near you.' His ship fell off with her jib-boom over my stern; her bows exposed to my broadside, her stern to the stern fire of the Essex, Junior, her crew in the greatest confusion, and in fifteen minutes I could have taken or destroyed her. After he had brought his ship to anchor. Com. Hillyar and Capt. Tucker of the Cherub visited me on shore; when I asked him if he intended 246 The Building of the Essex to respect the neutrality of the port: 'Sir,' said he, 'you have paid such respect to the neutrahty of this port that I feel myself bound in honour, to do the same. ' " The behavior of Commander Hillyar after the action was most humane and courteous, and the lapse of time has sufficed to dispel somewhat of the bitterness of the American view-point toward him. If he was not as chivalrous as his Yankee foeman believed to be demanded of the circumstances, he did his stern duty in destroying the Essex with as great advantage to himself as possible. Captain Porter had shown no mercy toward English shipping, and he was a menace to the British commerce, which must be put out of the way. The inflamed spirit of the American people at that time, however, was illustrated in a "broadside," or printed ballad displayed on the streets of Salem. This fiery document was entitled: "Capture of the Essex "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights. " Or, the In-glorious victory of the British with the Phoebe, Frigate, of 36 guns and 320 men and the Cherub, sloop of war, with 28 guns, and 180 men over the unfortunate Essex, Frigate of 32 guns and 255 men. Commanded by Captain David Porter. An action fought two hours and 57 minutes against a double complement of Men and force, by an enterprising and veteran Crew of Yankees." The closing verses of this superheated ballad were: "The Essex sorely rak'd and gall'd; While able to defend her The Essex Crew are not appall'd They Die but do7i't Surrender! They fearless Fight, and Fearless Die! And now the scene is over; 247 The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem For Britain, Nought but Powers on high Their Damning Sins can Cover. They Murder and refuse to savel With MaKce Most infernal! ! Rest, England's Glory in the Grave, 'Tis Infamy — Eternal! ! ! Brave Hull and Lawrence fought your Tars With honorable dealings; For great as Jove and brave as Mars Are hearts of Humane Feelings Our tears are render'd to the brave. Our hearts' applause is given; Their Names in Mem'ry we engrave. Their spirits rest in Heaven; Paroled see Porter and his crew In the Essex Junior coasting; They home return — hearts brave and true. And scorn the Britons boasting — Arrived — by all aroimd belov'd. With welcome shouts and chanting. Brave Tars — all valiant and approv'd. Be such Tars never Wanting. Should Britain's Sacrilegious band Yet tell her in her native land Her Deeds are like her Daring, That should she not with Wisdom haste Her miscreant Crimes undoing. Her Crown, Wealth, Empire, all must waste And sink in common Ruin." One of the seamen of the Essex returned to his home at the end of the cruise and told these incidents of his shipmates as they have been preserved in the traditions of the town : "John Ripley after losing his leg said: 'Farewell, boys, I can be of no use to you,' and flung himself overboard out of the bow port. " John Alvinson received an eighteen-pound ball through the body; in the agony of death he exclaimed: 'Never mind, ship- mates. I die in defence of 'Free Trade and Sailors' Rights' and expired with the word ' Rights ' quivering on his lips. 248 ri ',ij C^yPTURE a •< M \ ^ ' '^■Jfr '? 2!"'"~1.*''^^ "'* S''"'*--** <*« :^h^.rtr,,mrA^'LL.mi ISO y.. ,_. jyc^ DAvru ponrim: 1(1 hooor of h«r A'flmr, >irA, } l«>n« llBOho co.5l«d f„ I XT» elunb Itw - Mi^itato r ,a. *«* fM>(!«, 'lllto' tir'ry '4 11 „ ,._7* ^•8 riw w««, with nl(fl(J gloM. ■ ' lUeift d Ibflr .cclMMtwo. 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