EI LA a ae ere — i SOT COS On Ie INT Om ne Tht ew ee eee Te HH ey pte en EEN MEE C Ue Le ght ty yh ae pee ere er es <<. Sopp rr enege tee. noe slat Sete ae eR WUE ROO DEBE GH Euan THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY 387 Q245 ae Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. U. of I. Library Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https ://archive.org/details/taleofourmerchanOOcart THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS “As for those who say that men did but use the wind as an instrument for crossing the sea, and that sails were mere machines to them, either they have never sailed or they were quite unworthy of sailing. It is not an acci- dent that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into their creation, and they ex- pressed him very well; his cunning and his mastery, and his adventurous heart.’—H1LartrE BELioc, On a Great Wind. fHE Lic ReRy if the HAIYERSITY OF ILLINOIS ON THE NEW YorK WATERFRONT, ABOUT 1840. THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS BY CHARLES E. CARTWRIGHT With Illustrations from Drawings by the Author NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FirrH AVENUE Copyright, 1924 By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ; a Corw Wh Aw ow 245 Me Cire PREFACE HIS book, as its title implies, endeavors to describe the agencies which have contributed to place the United States among the great seafaring nations. Our people, including the later accessions, derive in over- whelming majority from stocks which back through all the ages have made maritime history. Bringing to the first settlement of the country a heritage of aptitude for the sea, the pioneers turned at once to its exploitation, with an energy that did not fail to arouse the attention, and finally the concern, of the parent-nations, which saw in it a menace to their maritime interests. With daunt- less tenacity and daring, in the teeth of obstacles that would have discouraged a feebler breed, they fared sea- ward in quest of ever-growing trade, in ships that asked no odds from any rivals. After the stress and trial of the first thirty years of the young Republic, an era of expansion began, to cul- minate by the middle of the nineteenth century in a fleet which, backed by the records of its performances, might fairly claim the leadership of the maritime world. Sea- faring and agriculture were at this time the basic indus- tries of the American people, and in the former pursuit most of the great fortunes of the day were acquired, Vii 974133 \ Vill PREFACE bringing into the country capital, which to a degree hardly realized at present, served to found the great in- dustrial expansion of later years. Then our people, for causes which are now coming to be recognized as natural and inevitable, turned from the active pursuit of foreign seafaring to undertake the titanic task of opening up and organizing the vast in- terior of the country. Absorbed in the imperative labors and exactions of domestic struggles, they gave little attention to voices which were raised from time to time, to call their attention to the constant dwindling of the deep-sea fleet that still rode under our flag. At the time of the Spanish War; again during the Boer War, when our British cousins were forced to divert much of their shipping from the usual trade routes; once more when our battleships, circling the world, had to depend on foreign tonnage to keep them provided with fuel, thoughtful men among us were deeply concerned at the maritime situation. But the explosion of 1914 jarred the nation into an attitude of attention to the inadequacy of its resources on the sea. By the time it became necessary to take a hand in the great conflict, the people had become thor- oughly aroused by the looming gravity of the demand for ships, and the close of hostilities found us with a deep-sea fleet in being, or under construction, which by 1920 counted some eight million tons of modern mer- chant shipping, brought into existence under the lash of war, and unprovided with commercial equipment abroad of the sort which results from normal growth in times of peace. Can this shipping be incorporated into the fabric of our business and industrial structure? Any PREFACE 1X attempt to answer this question in its political and finan- cial bearings would be presumptuous here, even if the scope of the volume did not forbid it. It would raise a myriad of debatable issues which are changing their aspect from day to day, so that any opinions that might be advanced would already be of doubtful value by the date of publication. The purpose here has been to emphasize the fact that at all times the urge to the sea has been apparent in the American people: to visualize the ships they have created —to deal with the sequences and origins, which taken in their entirety, make up our maritime history—right up to the present time. In dealing with ships, rigs, and models, many mu- seums and collections have been visited and studied, both here and abroad. Material has been gathered and compared, and wherever doubts might arise, the most authentic sources available have been consulted in the endeavor to select facts and figures of unquestioned authority. Sketches have been made, often from origi- nals difficult of access. Finally, the author has drawn upon a personal relation with ships and seafaring people during a number of years. ~The manful part that our compatriots have played— their direct lineage, including the great majority of the later accessions, with the sailor-peoples of history—form the strongest warrants for confidence in our future on the sea. : if ; aii Fel 4 is « ly ‘ , i by A we ai, em Loe yy Ana ‘ae Aue: py ey Yin } CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. SAILORS WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG. . . I Si ELARDY SAILORS) OF THE NORTH) 0) 3) a III. THe ARGOSIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY . 40 IV. THE STUART AND GEORGIAN MERCHANT SHIPS 59 V. CoLONIAL MARITIME BEGINNINGS . . . . 79 Vib Tae eV ARINERS ‘OF SALEM od leo fi) ante VII. THe TRADE-SHIPS OF A HUNDRED YEARS AGO .. 125 VIII. THe SEABOARD CITIES, 1820-1860 . . . . 146 Peele INORTH ATLANTION PACKETS wie yO g65 X. THE WHALEMEN OF NEw ENGLAND. . . . 183 roe ORY CLIPPER HIPS) 6h eae i ae QOr Pe DH LAKE ANDORIVER MEN Wo Ook a eae XIII. THe Passinc oF THE SAILING SHIP. . . . 233 XIV. THE GREAT NEw FLEET OF THE WAR-TIME . . 250 owe bat LRADE-SHIPS OF. LO-DAY: cota seen 263 xi * * ; re . 3 Ao | ‘ Ati } iy v at ‘ is Ng 2} " teri Ake T 44 it OR (4 : ah Peta ty ait Wo ih j + i ed ARM ge ia } % « ‘ Petit f yas 4 SS AAe ake } 4 Epa Cee \ iy ” “ltl SA! re i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ON THE NEW YoRK WATERFRONT, ABOUT 1840 . . . Frontispiece PAGE EGYPTIAN SHIPPING ON THE ANCIENT NILE ...... 5 BeDeRSE OE ENTECONTER eal hile hia ear eer ra Mas Re a Eee RE “VARY TRIREMED able, Qh eh Sow 8) 10 ae AON aS A RoMAN MERCHANT SHIP (ABOUT A.D. 200) . . . . . . I3 SOME DETAILS OF ANCIENT SHIPS, RESEMBLING SOME MODERN FEATURES . . BOG PA ESAs Babe ea Oman okie ita i THE ““GoGsTAD SHIP”? RESTORED. . . Pails Wat Nae eee AN ENGLISH SHIP OF THE THIRTEENTH GuNrirys: dee Wey Or ets A THIRTEENTH CENTURY VENETIAN SHIP . , . . .. . 27 ““THESE WERE THE FirST LIGHTHOUSES”. . par ear ss 29 AN ASTROLABE OF THE TYPE USED BY Corumavs ale dnl trembeteg PAGS INSTRUMENTS USED BY THE EARLY DEEP-SEA NAVIGATORS. . . 43 Ie EN TI (RN TUIRN SHEDS ail rir (a geen o beta eh Lud ead Oo HURT alk ea STEERING AN ELIZABETHAN SHIP , . . ... - 46 Bebtselrion PISNACH AND (rALLEON ory acto. bla ela dolce 51 MEIDETCH, cLORD 5 fe. +5 , StL ahalats arene Oak AFTERPART OF A LARGE MERCHANTMAN,. ABOUT Mey RACK SEEN 3 4 EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DuTcH INDIAMEN. .. . 71 CUTTER AND LUGGER, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . 75 TYPES OF RIGS AND VESSELS COMMON IN COLONIAL Days . .. . 81 AT GLOUCESTER THE FIRST SCHOONERS WERE BUILT, . . 85 ‘“THE ROUGH SEAPORT TOWNS SWARMED WITH SAILORS, RIGGERS, AND KINDRED ARTISANS” . . . nad Latha eet tet need HULL-PROFILES OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN VESSELS a ed eS ‘VENOMOUS PIRATES OUT OF SALLEE AND MOGADOR” . . 105 THE OLD-TIME MERCHANTS WATCHED THE OFFING FOR INCOMING RE Om A tee Berge ty foo Nahi. gd III A FAsT AND FAMOUS SALEM PRIVATEER OF 1812—THE AMERICA TA TIO SALEM SHIPS IN HARBOR, ABOUT 1800 . .. . . AMERY bY A CRACK AMERICAN EAsT INDIAMAN OF A HUNDRED YEARS Aco 129 DIAGRAM SHOWING SPARS AND RIGGING ON A LARGE SHIP’S MAIN- MACE PENE MIL 2 Vy Sts) | 5 0 Hielhl wale, Wolfie Vem muy ey LOS xiii XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE ** BOARDING ‘THE ‘ORESTACK) (la ti.c' ty potiatenie ae) pnd cae ae DuGram ror TACKING SBIR i coerce ay eee ie ee LOADING SHIPS AT A GULF PORT, BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR . .. .. 155 BOARDING-HOUSE RUNNERS ... . hry yas 159 ‘‘LISTENED SPELLBOUND TO THEIR YARNS OF INDIA AND THE SouTH SBA VISLANDS/71').;5: (ohare tse ke Ap er a oes 8 Rae a OLD-TIME PACKET-SHIPS MEETING AT SEA ... . . . . 167 AN EARLY STEAMGHIP)1.5 55. AUC een iret ons aL Set ny ar Roe SAILING DAY. . . : 2 fiw Neer hw aN alae Rm aan ad ages ‘‘A FLARE WAS ALWAYS Carmien INTHE (WAIST Ve eee. 7 A PACKET-SHIP OF VTHE "FIFTIES (3°. SS 404A 6 ae ee BL AN EARLY WHALING SLOOP. . 2 WOOD gees 185 A “SPOUTER’”’ ON THE RBMISG Grounns ot hg dic a itl ad Oren Ce A “‘NANTUCKET SLEIGH-RIDE” . ~% gc ate gn OE cone eae nea ON AN OLD-TIME WHALESHIP ant ee OS A CLIPPER SHIP COMPARED WITH A TYPICAL VESSEL OF THE PRE- CLIPPER PERIOD 6. (00), bo \ act hee A tee Come, BO CLIPPERS RACING THROUGH THE TRADES FAN ety eis SINGLE AND DouBLE Top-SAIL R1ics ON NINETEENTH CENTURY GHIPS/ UO Tie to eae ? eras tel eat elle wee eee BYGONE TYPES ON THE GuEar LAKES Stohr ears 1 ote, A eae ier ae ‘‘BROADHORN’’ FLATBOATMEN ON THE MISSISSIPPI. . . tye 15, ABOVE: AN EARLY MISSISSIPPI RIVER PACKET, ABOUT 1835. BELow: AN UP-TO-DATE RIVER STEAMBOAT AT THE LEVEE. 229 A‘uTRANS-PACIFIC, MAatL-LINERNOF 1867 lois Piel ae eee ee A WoopEN FORE-AND-AFTER, AND A STEEL SQUARE-RIGGER OF THE NINETIES 4\G eyes et Uses aie est Ue 1 Rand rie ha eR AN AMERICAN COASTING LINER, 1900 oy omy tah a ae a 242 A LAKE ORE-SHIP DISCHARGING CARGO. . .... . 248 In A WAR-TIME SHIPYARD. .. . 5 Tea Rs 253 ONE OF THE FABRICATED SHIPS OF 5350 DEap- WEIGHT TONS 250 ABOVE: ARRANGEMENTS OF BULKHEADS ON AN OIL-TANKER. BELow: A BETHLEHEM-BUILT ORE-AND-OIL SHIP. 77205 A CRAMP-BUILT MoToR-SHIP OF 12,375 TONS AND A SECTIONAL DIAGRAM SHOWING CARGO-SPACE AND FUEL-OIL STORAGE OF A Motor-sHIp. . . BAA it AY eas 2 aR Ue Bee ir A ‘535”’ IN THE PANAMA CANAL Can ke nl ap owen ea tan {fs § AN OIL-FIRED SHIP BEING SUPPLIED WITH FUEL A WPA et Sieh L.A dig, THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS ts t mA a! 42) ‘ Phe i ) in iv) iyi y iS y Pu ea). } ; se be ai THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS CHAPTER I SAILORS WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG N the memories of our youth we shall all of us find evidence enough that man has remained a web-footed animal. He begins very young to find prodigious amuse- ment in paddling about the shores or the river banks, in launching little boats, in wading, or learning to swim. Was there ever a healthy lad who was not keen to get into a boat, to go rowing, or sailing, or fishing? With these little voyages his young imagination connects the tales he hears or reads about pirates and discoveries, about adventure on the sea, with its mystery and ro- mance. Then if he lives near a seaport, or on the lakes, or even near a river, he is sure to be interested in the boats he sees, the ships, the steamers, or fishing vessels, and in the manly business of handling them. To the American boy this interest is part of his heri- tage. He comes of seafaring stock, with a proud and stirring history of ocean activities. Even when his home is inland, the instinct is in his blood. This was strikingly 2 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS shown by the young fellows from interior States who flocked into our ships during the World War, and who so quickly showed aptitude and skill in the sailor’s trade, even though many of them had never seen the ocean before. The War and its demand for shipping have left us with a great fleet of merchant vessels of all kinds. Everywhere people have been thinking of ships and of the ocean, to a degree that has not been so apparent since the great days of our flying clippers, sixty-five years ago, when Yankee vessels, for a time, had no worthy rivals on the seven seas. A ship is a very complex and interesting affair. It has taken hundreds, yes, thousands of years to develop as we know it today, and I propose to tell my readers how it has grown, step by step, from the earliest ships of which we have knowledge into the mighty steamship of today. The first floating contrivances, we may be sure, the skin canoes, the rafts, and dugouts of primitive men could not have differed much from the crude boats made by savages of low development in various parts of the world today. What fears and doubts, what superstitious dread of the unknown must have filled the minds of aboriginal men before they dared to venture out on the face of the waters! How slow and halting was their progress, as they learned, little by little, to direct their craft, to make the wind work for them by stretching a skin on a bough and steering with a branch or a rude paddle! But the sea is at once a highway and a hunting ground, and the value of floating transportation, as well as the WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG 3 resource of fish to serve as food, could not fail to appeal to the most primitive minds. So that boats of various kinds must have appeared very early indeed in the his- tory of the human race, and as civilization slowly de- veloped, the arts of shipbuilding and navigation came into being and grew along with it. None of the fabrics contrived by man have shown a more careful instinct, or more unwillingness to abandon the tried for the untried, than the ships he has built. So we have a very gradual, continuous chain of improvement, one century follow- ing in the steps of the previous ones, in a way hardly shown so clearly in any other man-made object, as is the case with the ship. Even today there are vessels in active service which show, in the construction of their bows, vestiges of the influence of the beaks, or rostra, that appear on the triremes of the Greeks and Romans, and there is a decided likeness between the hull-form of a modern racing yacht like the Resolute and the ships of ancient Egypt, which are the first of which we have accurate records. What were they like, the merchantmen of Ancient Egypt? Well, the drawing I have made of one of them sailing up the Nile has been taken from a wall painting believed to date back to about 1600 B.c. We have an excellent idea, from the models and frescoes found in the temples, and from old Egyptian accounts which the scholars have deciphered, how they looked, where they voyaged, and how they were handled by their crews. Most amusing little reproductions of them have been taken from the tombs, and can be seen in our musetums. The resemblance they bear to certain aquatic birds, such as the duck or swan, is so striking that there can 4 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS be no doubt that the first hull-forms were adapted from these creatures. As long ago as five thousand years before the Christian era the Egyptians had reached a high degree of civilization and carried on an active float- ing commerce. Much of it was up and down the Nile. They also navigated the Red Sea, and fleets were sent south and east to the “Land of Punt,” whence they brought incense for their religious ceremonies. In cer- tain boats in use at the present time on the Nile a sail- form quite similar to that of the ancient ships is still employed and it may be regarded as the forerunner of the “lateen” sail used everywhere in the Mediterranean. When the great trading community of Carthage, which was founded by the Pheenicians, came into being, its sailors took their ideas of shipbuilding from the Egyptian craft. They became a famous race of seamen, explorers, and fishermen, and their mercantile marine dominated the Mediterranean commerce for a long period. These daring navigators are said to have pushed entirely around Africa past the Cape of Good Hope, to have crossed the rough Bay of Biscay to Britain in search of tin, the North Sea to Norway, and some have even credited them with having reached the coast of South America more than two thousand years before the time of Columbus! Their ships reached a length of more than three hundred feet, being propelled, like all the early vessels, by both sails and oars, and were often richly decorated. They were provided with a beak or ram for fighting, a feature that was later employed by the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks adopted the ideas and vessel-types of the Phcenicians, with little change, when they became in their turn a seafaring people. “ATIN’ LNGIONY AHL NO ONIddIHS NVILGADG Titer a de 7 : yi - Be po tty Le WO Uf Yi UTP y oo ) ] LG NNER tata: pats 4 Mish AS UA = fs SE vip Aa mt A | , WU UUKY fy Bu Cae NAIM = =] vA A ie \> bay wf ¥ j ‘ ; oF pena WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG ” As far back as 1300 B.c. they were engaged in naviga- tion, and in their age of glory they built interesting and picturesque forms of sailing and rowing craft. One of the early types was the “‘penteconter” which had twenty- five oars to each side, as shown in the picture. Later on they constructed “biremes” and “triremes”’ from the models of the Phcenicians, with two or three rows or banks (benches) of oarsmen, one above the other. The A GREEK ‘ PENTECONTER.’’ merchant vessels depended more on their sails, and less on their oars, than those used for war. The tendency to build large craft propelled by oars has lasted in the Mediterranean all through history right down to our own times. For that matter the use of “sweeps” or long Oars, was general in fairly large seagoing vessels in Northern Europe and in America till well into the nine- teenth century. The Greeks also built “quadriremes,” “quinquiremes,” and so on. The manner of arranging the oarsmen in such craft has been much discussed by scholars, and the question is hard to settle. I incline to the opinion that 39 66 8 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS, several rowers were placed at each oar in the larger craft, so that they might not be too high and unwieldly, and that we are not to accept the terms applied to these ships as meaning that six, or eight, or even more tiers of oars could have been placed one above the other. The Greek practice was to haul their ships up on the shore when not in use, and they were always provided with ladder-like gangways for embarking or landing their crews, as is shown in the pictures, a feature which had come down to them from the Egyptians. Our mod- ern inland river steamboats carry contrivances which are used in a similar way. All the Greek vessels were provided with heavy oaken keels to take the strain of hauling ashore, being sheathed with green planking, for they did not understand the art of bending hard, seasoned timber in the steam box, as was done by shipbuilders of later times. They caulked the seams with tar and tow packed into the joints. The hulls were painted fancifully, and decorated with figures and friezes of mythological or historical subjects. The sails were dyed in brilliant tints, such as purple for royalty, or they might be black, for mourning. These vessels were provided with gear much like that in use aboard modern ships, such as lead-lines for soundings, flags and lights for signaling; and anchors not unlike those employed at the present time. Their navigation was, of course, of the nature of coasting, since they maneuvered in narrow seas, among many islands, and they had no compasses or instruments to determine their whereabouts. Amidships they were fitted with screens or washboards to keep out the spray. The merchant vessels were built much broader in proportion to their "LNOg OLNI STASSHA INVHOAT DNIAOANOD) ANTAL UVM WAIT VW a i eS? —— =: Leta ah 4 wa a wt f¢ i WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG II length than the warships, a feature that lasted in modern vessels till recent times. They carried one or two masts with a single sail on each, and they shortened sail by “brailing” it up to the yard, which was not lowered or hoisted, but always remained aloft. The lines for brail- ing passed over the sail and back to blocks on the yard, through which they led down to the decks, so that the sail could be loosed or furled in the manner of a curtain. There might be as many as eighteen of these brailing lines. The same method is followed still on the lateen- rigged craft of the Mediterranean, and it differs little from the clew- and bunt-line system used on modern square-rigged vessels. Very often the Greek galleys had eyes painted on each side of the bow, just as have all Chinese junks at the present time. “No habee eye, how can see?” the Chinaman will ask you. A volume could be written anent the ways of sailormen, in all climes and ages, in the decoration of ships. For many centuries the seas were everywhere a chosen hunting-field for pirates and corsairs. The Greek and later, the Roman ships carried castle-like structures from which missiles could be hurled down upon their enemies. The building of similar constructions for this purpose lasted till quite recent times, from which survives our word “forecastle.” It is interesting to learn that a reproduction of an ancient trireme, about 150 feet long, and carrying 130 Oarsmen, was built in France in 1861. It was found handy of management and quite fast. The ancient ships of Greece, we are told, would usually cover about 60 marine miles a day, being sometimes pushed to 130. (A marine mile is 6080 feet.) 12 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS When Rome began to grow strong and populous, con- ditions made it imperative that she should be powerful on the seas. Her teeming population required an ever- extending carrying-trade to supply its needs, and the merchant marine thus created had to be defended. Her ships followed the Greek models, and were still largely oar-driven, the trireme being a common type, and great fleets were employed in trading to and from Egypt and the East. There is in the Dialogues of Lucian a graphic account of the voyage of one of the corn ships from Egypt, about A.D. 120, which, after being driven out of her course by heavy gales, was forced to bear up through the 7“gean Sea to the Piraeus, the port of Athens. She had been no less than seventy days at sea. She was 130 feet long, with a depth of 29 feet, and was 30 feet wide. Her stern bore a gilded goose-neck rising high above the water, and her foresail was dyed a brilliant flame- color. She had two masts, the forward one slanting outward and ahead at a sharp angle—the forefather, so to speak, of the modern bowsprit. It is evident that the ancient sailors had léarned the principle of the “center of effort’—that the sails must be so placed that the leverage of the mast is exerted under the pressure of the wind at a point not far from the center of the hull, so that the vessel can be easily steered. Those who go a-sailing in small boats which have a tendency to gripe, or to carry a lee helm, will recognize the application of this principle, and its im- portance. The Roman ship which I have chosen for representation, adapted from a relief found near the mouth of the Tiber, will commend itself to those having any practical experience, as being a well-balanced and WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG 13 seaworthy vessel. She shows a striking resemblance to the ships of the Middle Ages, and the details of her rig- ging shown in the ancient relief are very similar to those found many generations later, in sailing ships. The lines for brailing up the sails pass through rings instead of dhe = LZZZ Ea oa ea Seas SEES AGE eS ee —————— ite = Sg =D ¥ Bye Diy Jf" Y) 1 BD ASSN Z 3 lps & . if, NAS 4; ‘ ES y j y " ee Ee, =< SSS ——— A RoMAN MERCHANT SHIP. (ABOUT A.D. 200) pulley-blocks, working as curtains are sometimes op- erated. Some of these ancient vessels must have been quite sizeable craft, for we are told in the Acts of the Apostles that there were 276 souls with St. Paul in the vessel in which he was wrecked. It was centuries before men learned the art of “beat- ing” or working a vessel under sail toward the wind. 14 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS Thus we are told in the Acts XXVII: 15, “when the ship was caught, and could not bear up into the wind, we let her drive.’ This is borne out by the rig of our Romar ship in the drawing, for it readily appears that she could be sailed only with the wind aft or abeam. I shall re- turn to this subject further on, in dealing with the han- dling of sail ships. The oarsmen on these ancient craft were not Romans, but were recruited or impressed from the subject races about the Mediterranean. One is reminded here of the Barbary corsairs of the early nineteenth century, whose galleys bore a strong resemblance to those of the an- cients. ‘These were manned by unfortunate slaves or prisoners, among whom were not a few poor fellows captured out of American ships. Man-power has always been cheap about the Mediterranean, which probably ac- counts for the persistence of large oar-driven craft in those latitudes long after they had disappeared from more northern fleets. During the first century we find other types of ves- sels, adapted to different purposes, developing among the Romans. A common one was the Liburnian galley, which was a lightly built form of bireme or trireme. These vessels are described as being aphract—that is, with the upper deck open at the sides. They were later superseded by larger war vessels. Recent discoveries in Tunis have given us something like a complete catalogue of the types of Roman trading vessels of about A.D. 200 varying from rafts and rowing boats to horse-barges, or Iippagi, and larger cargo boats (actuarii). Among these was the corbita, from which was derived the word “corvette,” applied in later times to a sloop of war. It WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG 15 is interesting to note, in these ancient craft, the begin- nings of methods which developed, step by step through the ages, into the complicated gear of the nineteenth cen- tury sailing ship. When Cesar prepared to invade Britain, in 55 B.c., he established a shipyard at Boulogne, on the north coast of France. His first attempt was a failure, his fleet being badly shattered by a storm. He must have had an abun- HALYARD ANCIEN? BL OCh ROMAN ANCHOR TREENA/L FASTENING OF ANCIENT SHIP SOME DETAILS OF ANCIENT SHIPS, RESEMBLING SOME MODERN FEATURES, dant supply of skilled labor to depend on, for his invad- ing force, in the following year, required 600 ships. That the Romans were competent in naval construction is borne out by the fragments of a Roman ship now in the London Museum. These relics, dug up near West- minster, are believed to date from the third century. The vessel was about go feet long, and was remarkably well constructed, quite up to modern standards in many respects. 16 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS Virgil tells us, in stately stanzas, of the race of the ships of Sicily: Four galleys first, which equal rowers bear, Advancing, in the watery lists appear, The speedy Dolphin, that outstrips the wind, Bore Mnestheus, author of the Memmian kind: Gyas the vast Chimzra’s bulk commands, Which rising, like a tow’ring city stands; Three Trojans tug at every lab’ring oar Three banks in three degrees the sailors bore Beneath their sturdy strokes the billows roar. Sergesthus, who began the Sergian race, In the great Centaur took the leading place; Cloanthus on the sea-green Scylla stood, From whom Cluentius draws his Trojan blood. —ineid, V. (Dryden’s Translation) He continues with a stirring account of the race, and the victory of the “sea-green Scylla” over her rivals. During the greatest period of the Roman power they built immense water-basins, in which actual naval battles were fought by quite large fleets. These pools were surrounded by seats for spectators very much like a modern football stadium. In the late years of the Empire, vessels were built which rivaled in magnificence, and even in size, the great passenger liners of today. It is hard to realize that we may be able to judge, at the present day, and by actual witness, of the splendor of these vessels. Yet there are now lying at the bottom of Lake Nemi, near the Cam- panian coast, two Roman galleys of the period of Cali- gula (A.D. 37-41) built by that emperor for his pleasure cruises, one of which is about 450 feet long, and the ~ WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG 17 other about 90. These vessels were first located in the fifteenth century, and since then divers have brought up many objects from them at various times. They have been thoroughly examined and measured by the divers under the direction of antiquarians, to study the details of their construction. Aboard of them were found decks paved with beautiful mosaics, statues of bronze, and various ornaments and utensils of ancient fabrication. Such wonderful feats of salvage are nowadays being performed in the raising of sunken vessels that it seems within the range of possibility that these antique galleys may yet be exposed to view. We are well informed, through old sculptures and models, as to many details of the later Roman ships. How they were rigged and handled is clear to anyone having some little nautical knowledge. Thus, in the Roman merchantman I have drawn, the “deadeyes” for setting up the shrouds, and the purchases for getting the mainstay down taut are almost identical with the devices for the same purposes in quite modern vessels. The larger merchant ships of this period are thought to have measured about 150 tons, the registry of a good- sized Bank fishing schooner of the present time. And so we have seen the Egyptians, starting with the suggestions given them by the aquatic birds, building their combined rowing and sailing vessels. These were employed on the Nile or in short trading voyages, for the Egyptians were not naturally a maritime people, and were much less warlike than the other races that fol- lowed them around the Mediterranean. Then the Phe- nicians improved greatly on their methods and showed a real nautical genius, venturing far out to sea, rounding 18 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS Africa, trading to Britain, and dominating for a long time the sea-borne traffic of the Mediterranean. From the types of vessels they constructed were developed those of Greece, and they played an important part in the picturesque history of that wonderful people. The Romans, following in their wake, became the masters of the ancient world, and employed their shipping as one of the great agencies of their mastery, building vessels of many types, for many purposes, and thus laying the foundation for the shipwrights of later ages by the skill they acquired in this difficult and interesting art. No details have come down to us of ships from the Roman times till the end of the ninth century. A little glimmer of light is thrown on the subject by the Tactica of the emperor Leo, which tells us of Byzantine galleys, double-banked and having 25 rowers on a side. It is evident, however, that the Romans left a foundation for the methods of build and rig, which reappear in the ships of the Middle Ages, methods with details of gear and equipment surprisingly similar in many respects to those of quite recent times. CHAPTER II HARDY SAILORS OF THE NORTH Ny LE mighty empires were growing and dying about the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean, the forefathers of the dominant sailor-races of today were roving around the Baltic and North Sea coasts, spending their time in tribal wars and endless struggles with fog and wintry seas. Through the mist and drifting rack of northern sea history have come down to us stirring tales of valor and hardihood on the gray and bitter waters, where our ancestors learned to sail the restless ocean, and to wring from Father Neptune his reluctant consent to their undertakings afloat. Epics and sagas seasoned with the salt spray, lore of warriors and maidens, Vikings and Valkyries, fill the Norse legends, and through them sounds the hoarse refrain of the northern sea, chanting the praise of our rough heritage, the pasture and highway of the mariner. Here was born the sea tradition, common to the Norse- man, the Briton, and the American, which has played so large a part in the growth of the British Empire and the American Republic. Certain it is that love of the sea and of ships, in the British race, is due to the Norse blood brought into Britain during the constant raids and forays, the accounts of which fill the Anglo-Saxon 19 20 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS Chronicle. There is no evidence of its existence among the ancient Britons, and they had no ships to oppose the Romans when the latter invaded the island. A number of vessels of the “dugout” type have been unearthed in different parts of England, notably one at Brigg, in Lincolnshire, which is 48 feet 6 inches long. This boat was found in 1886, and shows traces of benches for oarsmen. All these dugouts belong, prob- ably, to the Stone Age, as they contain no metal, and from their general resemblance to others brought to light in Denmark and about Bremen they are regarded as being of Viking origin. Crude as were these early craft, the Vikings came at length to develop ships and methods that show a striking aptitude for the art of sea- faring. The theory has been advanced, and it seems a reasonable one, though we have no actual record, that the Phoenicians may have penetrated into Scandinavian waters, and thus influenced the Norsemen in their ship- building. However this may be, our Viking ancestors built ships of striking beauty of model, with plenty of sheer to make them “‘sea-kindly,” sharp at bow and stern and bearing high carved emblems curving up from stern and after end, vessels which are so cleverly designed that shipwrights of modern times have been glad to fol- low their lines in fast-sailing craft even of very recent construction. _ Perhaps the most striking example among the many Viking vessels unearthed is the one known as the “‘Gog- stad ship.” It was an ancient custom of the Norsemen to bury their deceased chiefs or heroes in their ships, a high mound being raised over them. The exploration of these mounds has led to the discovery of a number ai}: Sa SSS = SSS — ~>> = ogy =< pe A CRACK AMERICAN EAST INDIAMAN OF A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. i” at) Rv Sots At ‘ r. ate ok A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 131 ends of the yards, studdingsails for light weather. Our ships were everywhere recognized by sails of snowy cotton duck, set as flat as possible, of very different aspect from the baggy hemp canvas of other vessels. Very early in our maritime history American skippers became noted for their habit of driving their ships, and carrying sail to the limit of strain on the top-hamper.. Our vessels, as Dana tells us, were manned by smaller crews than similar European ships, but so superior was the quality of their seamanship that they far surpassed their rivals in the shortness of their voyages from port to port. This is borne out by a record of some of the Massachusetts-built Canton traders of the period we are dealing with. Manned by less than a score of men, their voyages were one-third shorter in time than those of the East India Company ships. On a tonnage of less than one-third of that of the British vessels, which had crews of 125 men, they carried half as much cargo. That the English should feel uneasy at the performance of these ships was natural. The most important ropes of the running rigging for setting and handling the sails were the halyards, for hoisting and lowering the yards and canvas; the braces, attached to the ends of the yards for swinging them, and the sheets for hauling out and trimming the sails. There were besides all kinds of minor gear—lifts, foot- ropes, gaskets, clew-lines, buntlines, reef-tackle, and so on, which make up the bewildering tangle, so puzzling to the novice, of the rigging of a ship, but which have no mysteries to the sailor, The sailing ship, thus bolted, braced, stayed, and rigged, was perhaps the most unique and interesting 132 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS fabric ever contrived by man. How many generations —yes, ages—of trial and invention she represented, and how clearly the successive contributions of these gen- erations can be traced! In the re-study of the past, now so active, she well deserves to be taken into account, not only as a social agency, but for her influence on the whole course of mechanical development. A typical vessel, such as we have been considering, might carry two heavy bower-anchors, a somewhat smaller stream-anchor, and a still smaller kedge-anchor or two. As chain cables were not introduced till 1812, and did not for some years come into gen- eral use, she would be provided with hemp cables for anchoring, which took up a great deal of room in the hold and were a constant source of anxiety on a rocky or coral bottom, owing to the danger of their chafing through. A heavy timber, known as the cat- head, projected out on each side of the bow for the purpose of attaching the tackle by which the anchor was hoisted, and which was hauled in by the windlass, to a “chantey” chorus which kept time to the rhythmic stamp of the sailors, as they strained to their task at the hand- spikes. Making sail on such a vessel, with a smart mate and a hearty crew, was an affair of system and discipline. When the ship was “hove short’ so that the cable stretched right up and down to the anchor, the crew swarmed aloft to cast the gaskets off the furled sails. This done, one man remained at the bunt, or center of each yard, ready to let go at the word. The rest scrambled down on deck to man the sheets and halyards. The mate hailed the yards “all ready?” and as the answer \) Ss - ee) yYyg- \- A, nasser ansnne- \ \ \) PS — AD 2 Ae ae, by - (i a a A "-~- - ee Nis” amr LILI Ns . eT ; 4 ear ArT dh — rath ~] Le ee 2 ee oe oe moh st Sm | LT Samy a ‘a lim DIAGRAM TO SHOW THE PRINCIPAL DETAILS OF SPARS AND RIGGING ON A LARGE SHIP’S MAINMAST, 1820-30. A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 135 came “‘aye, aye, sir!” he gave the order “let go!” and in an instant the loosened canvas opened out from deck to masthead. The topsails were hoisted to another chorus and “sheeted home” by hauling out the lower corners. The yards were swung to trim the sails to the wind, the anchor brought up to the cat-head, and the ship was under way. The chantey songs, or “shanteys” in sailor language, were a feature of the old seafaring which is but a memory in these days of machinery. A good chantey man, it was said, was worth ten more hands in a watch. These hoarse choruses, full of the spirit of humming gales, and the rhythm of sweeping seas, had come down, in some cases, from our English forebears, but most of the songs in use on American ships probably began with the negro roustabouts in the Southern ports. The songs were of four kinds: the capstan chantey, sung to a march-time as the men stamped around the capstan; the halyard chantey, to a rhythm fitting the effort of heavy hauling, as in hoisting or lowering the yards; the bowline chantey, used on short pulls, for “boarding the foretack” or other jerky heaving movements; and the pump chantey, to the up-and-down strokes of the brake-pump. The “‘shantey man” or leader, led the song, the men alternating with him in the chorus. To the mate, these songs were a very important factor in the handling of his crew, for he judged their temper by the spirit with which they were sung. Just as our soldiers in the late war were encouraged in chorus singing, the oldtime sailors were urged to “strike a light!’—to start a song—by the mate, as a means of stirring up their morale. Hoarse, uncouth, and sometimes ribald, the old 136 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS chanteys are yet full of the haunting spirit of the sea. I have not the space to quote largely from the chantey- songs, but a few stanzas may not be out of place: Away Rio (Capstan chantey) The ship she’s a-sailin’ out over the bar, Away, Rio! Away, Rio! The ship she’s a-sailin’ out over the bar, We're bound to the Rio Grande. Oh, away, Rio! Oh, away, Rio! Oh, fare you well, my bonny young gal We’re bound to the Rio Grande. HAuL AWAY THE BOWLINE (Bowline chantey) Haul on the bowline, the main and foretop bowline, "Way, haul away, haul away, Joe! Haul on the bowline, the packet-ship’s a rollin’, "Way, haul away, haul away, Joe! Haul all together, we’re sure to make her render, "Way, haul away, haul away, Joe! Haul, my bully boys, we'll either break or bend her, "Way, haul away, haul away, Joe! WHISKEY JOHNNIE (Halyard chantey) There up aloft the yard must go, Whiskey for my Johnnie! I thought I heard the old man say, Whiskey for my Johnnie! We’re bound away this very day, Whiskey! Johnme! [ll treat my men in a decent way, Oh, whiskey for my Johnnie! eee) M Ma\ ae * Lae Mn Uf M(t. ’ Ae i i if a { Na AY i) 4 Packet Line \ Bord & MHINCKEN aN gents 8 . FreightoPassage os BOARDING-HOUSE RUNNERS—"‘ ALMOST READY TO KISS THEM IN WELCOME.”’ aie Bm ts, ‘aa Giyay Ne vay) SEABOARD CITIES, 1820-1860 161 awaiting them on the wharf, almost ready to kiss them in welcome that they might get the poor fellows into their clutches and rook them out of everything they had. While there were cases of brutality, no doubt, on some of our ships, the captains and mates were usually men of character and intelligence, and a willing and able seaman was sure of fair treatment by such men. They were often forced to be severe by the character of the people they had to handle, who were not infrequently impostors who knew nothing of the duties of a ship. A good deal of sympathy has been wasted on these fel- lows, as well as useless pity regarding the food supplied to them. The fact of the matter was that Jack preferred his salt beef and pork, his duff and lobscouse, when it was of good quality and sufficient quantity, as it usually was. It was simple fare, but a man could work better and grow stronger on such provender than on delicate food, though Jack, to be sure, has always claimed his privilege of grumbling. In the little towns along the coast all the boys learned to swim, to handle boats and fishing gear, almost as soon as they learned to read. They knew every stay or hal- yard on a pink or schooner, and went fishing on the Banks often at ten or twelve years of age. They cruised in their dories to the seaports near by to knock about among the shipping, to admire the lofty Indiamen, and to study the mysteries of their rigging; to delight their hearts with the figureheads, the shining brasswork, and the wonders of knotting and splicing. They saw bronzed seamen who had voyaged to the shadowy East, and listened spellbound to their yarns of India and the South Sea Islands. These were the lads who grew up to 162 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS command our packets and clippers in their years of man- hood. The salt spray was in their blood and the call of the hoarse old ocean drew them to their chosen pro- fession. The sailor of the early nineteenth century was a fa- ‘*LISTENED SPELLBOUND TO THEIR YARNS OF INDIA AND THE SOUTH- SEA ISLANDS.” mously handy man, deft at many trades. He made his shore-going costume himself in his watch below aboard ship—his bell-bottomed loose trousers of duck, his broad- collared shirt of flannel or checked cotton and his shiny tarpaulin hat, made of canvas or braided sennit and tarred, in the shape of a modern flat straw hat, with a SEABOARD CITIES, 1820-1860 163 yard of fluttering ribbon round it. He rigged himself out to impress the people ashore, with a certain profes- sional pride. In 1833 Ralph Waldo Emerson pro- nounced him “the best dressed of mankind.” As times went on this nautical vanity pretty well disappeared, and he dressed like any other laborer. Those who knew the sea, however, could always tell the sailorman by the rolling swing of his walk, the hooked fists calloused by the handling of ropes, and the sheath-knife in his leather belt. The deep-sea sailorman could do marvelous things in the way of marlinspike work.. He could make rose-knots and Turk’s-heads, cross-pointing and coach- whipping, so that the incoming ships from China and India always looked their best after their long voyages, during which the men were kept busy getting them taut and trim to enter port. The influence of the shipping on the aspect of our twentieth-century ports has become confined to the water-fronts, and is largely hidden behind the sky- scrapers and lofty structures about the docks. The com- ing and going of great vessels, each of which has a dozen times the average capacity of the old sailships, is hardly noticed by the great mass of the people. The steamships are shorn of the lofty top-hamper of former days and are not apparent, except at the waterside. Of course, there will always be much of fascination for those who care to look for it, in the mighty steel vessels and the busy toil of the docks and shipyards. It is well to recall, however, that in the old days countless men arose in the morning to note the direction of the wind and the character of the weather, with its bearing on their sea-directed activities for the coming day. The 164 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS homes of the merchants were within a stone’s throw of the water-fronts, and they lived in the very shadow of the shipping. News of the sea was all-important, and the papers featured it from day to day. All this has, of course, definitely passed from our modern cities with their endless diversity of interests. Yet it may help us in some degree to a clearer under- standing of the seafaring achievements of our fore- fathers if we note the intense specialization of the sea- board communities, which resulted, for a time, in giving our people the maritime leadership, both in the manage- ment and in the superior quality of their ships, over all their competitors. CHAPTER IX THE NORTH ATLANTIC PACKETS Wit the peace was signed in 1814, and the ques- tions at issue with Great Britain had been settled, our ocean-borne commerce found itself in a state of collapse. The Atlantic ports were full of dismantled shipping, which had lain idle during the war, and the seafaring population, now that privateering was ended, found itself without employment. But the downfall of Napoleon, and the prospect of peace in Europe encour- aged our merchants to turn with high hopes and the utmost energy to the extension of trade and the building of ships. It was imperative from the start that a regular and dependable system of communication with Europe should be established. In colonial times and just after, the securing of cargo space and the transportation of passengers was a haphazard business, one that could rarely be planned ahead with much confidence. Some of the large Southern planters maintained vessels of their own, which made leisurely voyages back and forth with tobacco and a few local products, on which passage might be secured, if circumstances permitted. Other trading vessels might take passengers if such were of- fered, but they made no special bid for that class of business. It was merely an incidental. But the need 165 ~ 166 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS had arisen for a special service equipped for the packet trade. The term “packet” was applied to a vessel run- ning regularly between certain ports with passengers, cargo, and the mails, as distinguished from vessels that might be chartered for any voyage, or those employed in trading from port to port, wherever business might offer, for the account of their owners. The first regular New York-Liverpool service, pioneer of the great steam transatlantic trade of today, was the Black Ball line, which started in 1816 with four stout little ships of about 400 tons, the Amity, Courier, Pa- cific, and James Monroe. ‘These were the ancestors, as one may say, of the mighty vessels, registering up to and beyond 30,000 tons, that we know today, and for nearly forty years, as long as the North Atlantic packet trade was conducted in sail ships, it remained in the hands of Americans. Perhaps some of my readers may have seen copies of the old newspapers of the early nineteenth century, with their rows of announcements, each with a quaint little woodcut of a ship under sail in the corner, of the sail- ings of the packet ships. The people of the seaboard cities were very proud of their packet lines, and the greatest interest was taken in the competitions and the records of the ships, which had a highly sporting char- acter. ‘They averaged in the early days of these lines, 23 days to England, and 40 home again, the fastest pas- sages being about 16 days, sailing eastward. The ship’s long-boat was lashed amidships, and carried a regular menagerie, sheep, pigs, geese and chickens, with a little house on the main hatch, in which was a cow or two, for milk, for in those days there were no canned pro- rans Ni { ‘a \ \ ONS ni aah ' A Nh) ine \ i\\ OLD-TIME PACKET-sHIPS MEETING AT SEA. (A “Brack BALL” Anp a “DRAMATIC” LINER.) NORTH ATLANTIC. PACKETS 169 visions, and no cold-storage holds for fresh meat. Some- times in heavy weather the whole family was carried overboard by the seas, a sad misfortune for the passen- gers as well as the live stock. The cabins aft were lighted in the evening with candles and whale-oil lamps, and though no doubt they would seem very dismal to the pampered travelers of today, they were thought luxuri- ous at that simple period. New packet lines soon followed the Black Ball, to London and Havre as well as Liverpool, the Red Star, Swallowtail, and Dramatic Lines, Enoch Train’s from Boston, and Cope’s and Girard’s lines out of Philadel- phia. When the Erie Canal was opened in 1825, there was a veritable boom in the New York shipping trade. Larger ships began to appear, though for a long time they did not exceed 700 tons. During this entire generation our ships ruled the “Western Ocean’ as the sailors call the North Atlantic. It is said that in spite of the vast increase in tonnage nowadays the ocean is by no means so “populous” as in former times. There were then many small ships, which were apt to remain longer in company when they met. They would hail and speak one another, instead of rushing past with their signal numbers flying as at pres- ent, and when several vessels sailed at about the same time they might sight one another repeatedly on the way across as they tacked and shortened or set more sail. The Black Ball vessels all bore a large painted black ball on their foretopsails, just below the close-reef band. The Dramatic Line packets were named after famous actors or dramatists, and showed a diagonal cross reach- ing nearly from corner to corner on the foretopsail. 170 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS The famous Dreadnought had an upright red cross, to distinguish the Red Cross Line. The skippers of these ships, as well as the vessels themselves, were well-known to the whole public, and were splendid seamen and men of character. The packets were manned by a special type of men, known as the roughest and toughest class of sailors afloat. They were called “packet rats,” and were mostly shipped in Liverpool, never going on long voyages. It was the first mate’s business to handle these desperados, and he had no easy task. Many a time they had to be beaten into submission with a heaver or a marlinspike, and the ship’s officers always went armed. American-born sailors were rare among these crews, most of whom were of the class then known as “Liver- pool Irishmen.” These fellows were not, like the long-voyage sailor- men, expert in “marlinspike seamanship’—in knotting and splicing, and similar skilled work, their duties being limited to the handling of ropes and sails at sea, and they needed to be agile and smart in these duties, for the packets were driven night and day, winter and sum- mer, across the Western Ocean, and they made or left their ports whatever the weather might be without loss of time for fog or storm, for ice or snow. Like most ships of their day, they were painted black with a white port-streak, and were kept taut and trim, the necessary “tuning up’ being done in New York by riggers and shipwrights, instead of at sea by the crew as in other ships. In the early forties larger packets were built, up to and over 1000 tons register. There was constant racing between them, and great rivalry among the crack ships. NORTH ATLANTIC PACKETS 171 The outward trip to England was made at this period by four different ships in fifteen days, which was equal, or superior to the steamships of the day. The first steam vessels to enter the North Atlantic trade were British owned, and the Sirius in 1838 is usually regarded as the first ship to demonstrate the practicability of steam in the regular service, crossing aay iil mane! at Nan ie Ni uke AN EARLY STEAMSHIP. in 18 days from London. The sail-ship skippers re- garded the early steamships with contempt and dislike, and usually made it a point to run past them as close as possible, to show their superior speed. Of course, the steamships of that day all carried as much sail as the sailing vessels, as indeed they continued to do for many years. They were all paddle-boats, and it was not until 1853 that iron screw propelled vessels appeared. The 172 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS Great Western, launched in 1838, made passages of a a little more than 12 days, and her example is said to have furnished the inspiration for the Cunard Line, started in 1840 between Liverpool and Boston. The best known of the packet commanders was Captain Samuel Samuels of the Dreadnought. He has left a most entertaining record of his sea life in the volume entitled From the Forecastle to the Cabin. The Dreadnought may be regarded as the culmination of the sailing packet type. She was built at Newburyport especially for Captain Samuels by a syndicate of New York merchants—E. D. Morgan, Francis B. Cutting, David Ogden, and others, who conducted the Red Cross Line. She measured 1413 tons and was 210 feet long. She sailed on her first voy- age to Liverpool on December 15, 1853, and during the ten following years, under Captain Samuels’ command, she made a most remarkable record, in 1859 making the fastest passage ever accomplished by a sailing packet ship—13 days 8 hours, corrected time. She made many other fast runs, her best westward trip being 19 days. On account of the prevailing winds in the North Atlan- tic, due to the influence of the earth’s revolution, the best sailing records are all on the eastward run. Captain Samuels writes: “On our first voyage outward bound, we crossed Sandy Hook bar with the then crack packet ship Washington, Captain Page. We landed in Liverpool, and took on a cargo and two hundred immi- grants, and met her off the northwest lightship bound in as we were running out. On our way home we crossed the bar the day after the steamer Canada sailed for Bos- ton, and when the news of her arrival reached New York, we were reported off the Highlands.” NORTH ATLANTIC PACKETS 173 Speaking of the crews, he tells us: “The Liverpool packet sailors were not easily demoralized. They were the toughest class of men in all respects. They could stand the worst weather, food, and usage, and put up with less sleep, more rum, and harder knocks than any other sailors. They would not sail in any other trade. They had not the slightest idea of morality or honesty, and gratitude was not in them. The dread of the belaying pin and heaver kept them in subjection.” These fellows would not use a knife on one another, but woe to any other unfortunate sailor who was on a packet ship for the first time. They would plunder him and stab him if he protested. On one occasion Captain Samuels, who had a practice of making these black- guards strip and disgorge their plunder on entering port, was outwitted by them for a time, but undertook a little detective work, and discovered a couple of them fishing stolen clothing out of a cask from which they drew their drinking water. In 1859 he shipped a crew of them who belonged to a desperate gang called the “Bloody Forties.” He had an officer search the forecastle and deprive them of their weapons. A day or two later they mutinied and refused to perform duty unless one of their number who had been put in irons for insolence to the captain should be set free. For several days the ship was handled by the officers and boys, but finally with the aid of some of the immigrant passengers the mutineers were beaten and starved into subjection. Referring to his vessel, Captain Samuels says: “She was never passed in anything over a four-knot breeze. She was what might be termed a semi-clipper, and pos- sessed the merit of being able to stand driving as long 174 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS as her sails and spars would stand. By the sailors she was nicknamed the ‘Wild Boat of the Atlantic,’ while others called her the ‘Flying Dutchman.’ Twice she carried the latest news to Europe, slipping in between the steamers. The Collins, Cunard, and Inman Lines were the only ones at that time. There are merchants still (in 1887) doing business in New York who shipped goods by us which we guaranteed to deliver within a certain time or forfeit freight charges. For this guar- antee we commanded freight rates midway between those of the steamers and those of the sailing packets.” * The brave old Dreadnought was wrecked in 1869 while on a Cape Horn voyage. Her crew were rescued after being fourteen days adrift in the boats. The sailing packets played a most important part in the development of the United States, for it was in these ships that the great rush of immigration, from Ireland and from Germany after 1848, found its trans- portation. These poor people were crowded into the steerage, and were required to provide and cook their own food. As the duration of the trip, especially in winter, was a very uncertain matter they sometimes suf- fered great hardships. In heavy weather the hatches were battened down, and the people were often pros- trated with seasickness and unable to cook, so that deaths from actual starvation are said to have occurred. The descendants of these immigrants are many of them prosperous and prominent citizens today, senators, gOv- ernors, merchants, or manufacturers, and among the best of Americans. 1From The Forecastle to the Cabin. By Captain S. Samuels. (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1887.) ba SAILING Day. ont \) ia : ee ‘be ts 1 a ca . aa #4 ii, mei) lao); NORTH ATLANTIC PACKETS 177 If I have told at some length of the darker side of sailing travel in the old days, it is by way of emphasizing the contrast with the comfort, even luxury which prog- ress has brought about in sea voyaging. But we may be sure that traveling on “the noble American vessels which have made their packet service the finest in the world” (as Dickens wrote in 1842) had its interest and pleasure in many features that must have been especially delightful. There is a charm to sailing that applies to no other kind of movement. The rhythmic swing of the vessel, the sense of being in the hands of elemental forces, the straining sails and humming cordage, the mystery and power of the sea—these things appeal to the dormant seafaring instinct in our blood. An ocean voy- age in the old days was an adventure. It was the sort of navigation that Drake and Columbus had known. The people of any American community, except in a few seaport towns, who had crossed the ocean were few in number, and the business of making such a journey was a much more complicated matter than in the present day. It was necessary to engage passage a long time ahead, on the crack ships sometimes a year in advance. The time required for the voyage might be greatly length- ened by adverse winds or stormy weather. Quite often the captain acted as passenger agent as well as skipper, and travelers were invited to make their arrangements with him. The ship might be boarded at the wharf, or in the stream, or even outside the harbor, off Sandy Hook. There was at that time a class of boat- men who conducted a sort of marine taxicab business— Whitehall boatmen they were called—from Whitehall Landing at the Battery. Frequently, late passengers 178 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS would be rowed out to the ship from that point, as she made sail in the stream. There were few tugboats, and the ships always worked out under sail unless the wind was dead ahead. Any landsman would have taken a breathless interest in the business of getting the ship under way—the thrashing of loosened canvas and the stamping and shouting as the topsails were sheeted home and the yards mastheaded—all these activities, of a sort we shall never see again, would fill any normal youngster with delight and admiration. Perhaps a little later on when the old packet began to lift her forefoot to the long gray rollers, and to bury her bluff bows in the sweeping seas, with the spray flying over the knight- heads, he would begin to get a little dizzy, and to feel like paying his penalty to old Father Neptune, but that was a passing drawback, and he would soon get his sea-legs. In the cabin gentlemen in high collars and “stocks” gathered ceremoniously with ladies in vast hoop-skirts by the light of the oil lamps, swinging in gymbals to the rolling of the ship, under the low carlins of the ceiling. The cooks and stewards were Negroes, as in the American hotels of that day. The table for meals ran lengthwise of the cabin, and was fitted with “fiddles” or frames to keep the dishes from sliding off in rough weather. Overhead was a rack for extra dishes, glasses, cruets, and so forth. The staterooms opened off the cabin very much as they do on the older steamboats still in service on the rivers. In very rough weather no passengers were allowed on deck, and one could only read, sleep or play cards, or listen to the cease- less creaking and groaning of the timbers, so different NORTH ‘ATLANTIC PACKETS 179 on a sailing craft from the chattering and trembling vi- brations of a great steel steamer. A white light was carried at the bowsprit-cap at night as port and starboard lanterns had not then come into use. A flare was kept ready in the waist at all times, to warn passing vessels or signal for the pilot. The In- ternational flag-signal code, the wireless telegraph, the steam siren, and all such modern devices were undreamed of by the old-time sailormen. The Liverpool pilot gen- ‘‘A FLARE WAS ALWAYS CARRIED IN THE WAIST,” erally came aboard off Point Lynas at the entrance to the Mersey River, but on westward trips the American pilots ran far out to sea. The New York pilot of the old days was quite a public character, and always wore a tall hat when he boarded an inbound vessel. When the British companies, with the strong assist- ance of their government, started the first transatlantic steam lines, it was in the face of much doubt. An emi- nent British scientist in 1835 pronounced the possibility 180 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS of steam transatlantic navigation as chimerical as that of making a voyage to the moon. Three years later the Sirius made her first trip, though she exhausted her coal outside Sandy Hook, and had to burn resin and Spare spars to get up the harbor. She excited as much comment as did the dirigible airship R. 34 when she arrived here in 1919. Said a New York newspaper of the time: “What may be the ultimate fate of this ex- citement—whether or not the expenses of equipment and fuel will admit of the employment of these vessels in the ordinary packet service—we cannot pretend to form an opinion; but of the entire feasibility of the passage of the Atlantic by steam, as far as regards safety, com- fort, and dispatch, even in the roughest and most bois- terous weather, the most skeptical must now cease to doubt.” Various attempts were made to run steam vessels by the American shipping lines, all of which were unprofitable, during the ten years following. It would seem as if the very skill and efficiency they had acquired in the opera- tion of sailing ships encouraged doubt and _ hostility against steamers. Lower New York at the time was placarded with posters headed “Sail vs. Steam” and vaunting the superiority of the former. Meanwhile the Cunard Line was established in 1840 with a British mail contract for $425,000 a year, between Liverpool and Boston, touching at Halifax. To meet this challenge, the Collins Company, which had conducted the Dramatic Line of sail packets, built four fine American steamships —the Aquitanias of their period—which met with un- deserved misfortune and failure, one being sunk in col- lision, with a loss of two hundred and twenty-two lives, NORTH ATLANTIC PACKETS 18I while another was never heard from after leaving Liver- pool for New York. Soon afterward the line was dis- continued. The sailing ships continued to carry passengers across the Atlantic up to and for some years after the Civil War, but had to give up the losing game in the end. A PACKET-SHIP OF THE ’FIFTIES TOWING INTO THE MERSEY. The last sailing vessel regularly employed in the trans- atlantic passenger trade known to the writer was a little barque called the Sarah, which ran between Boston and the Azores till the early ‘nineties. All the American vessels in the ocean passenger trade, both steam and sail, were built of wood up to 1860, and followed in rig and model, the traditional lines of the sail 182 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS craft, slowly developed from ancient times down through the ages. The details of the masts and yards, the meth- ods of securing the standing rigging, the form of the bows, all show a family resemblance with the ship-types of ancient and medieval times. Once the simple prin- ciples of directing a vessel under the impulse of the wind had been worked out, they remained unchangeable, though each generation added its improvements in gear and hull construction. Yet we can confidently affirm that a ship’s crew of, say, the time of Columbus would have soon been able to handle such a ship as the Dread- nought, had it been possible to place them aboard of her. Any boy who learns to sail a boat, in his summer sport on the lakes or harbors, acquires more or less knowledge of these elementary principles, and would soon be able to grasp their application on the largest square-rigger afloat. The North Atlantic packet service was a splendid school of hardy seamanship, in which were bred many of the men who commanded our peerless clippers dur- ing the years of their glory. It was a fine phase of our maritime history, in which the daring and resource of the American sailor and merchant found worthy expres- sion. CHAPTER X THE WHALEMEN OF NEW ENGLAND HE pursuit of the whale can be traced back for many centuries. Hakluyt tells us that as far back as A.D. 890 the hide of the whale was used for cables. The English sought the Greenland whale all through the sixteenth century, and the Dutch were especially active in the industry at the time of the Plymouth settlement. When the coast pioneers gathered along the New England shores, seeking for every resource that might offer itself, in their hard struggle for existence, they did not fail to profit by the occasional whales that came astrand, as still happens now and then. From the fat of these animals they extracted oil and spermaceti for their lamps and candles, to light them in the long winter evenings, when icy gales were raging and the breakers thundered along the coast. Sighting the whales that spouted offshore, they nat- urally cast about them for means of using this resource, and they began to put out in their little smacks and boats to capture them. They would tow the carcasses in to the beach, build fires, and boil out the oil from the blubber. Of course, this led them farther and farther out to sea as the game grew scarce and wary, so they built 183 184 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS larger vessels with better equipment, and organized in a simple way for a better division of labor in the various operations. Before long it was found that the whale products might be utilized as a commodity of trade. Ships were loaded for England with the oil, and the traffic centered in several of the smaller ports about the southern shores of New England—New Bedford, New London, Sag Harbor, and other towns, and above all, on the little island of Nantucket, twenty-eight miles off the coast in the open ocean. So began this grandiose hunt for the mighty game of the deep sea, destined in later years to cover the Pacific from Cape Horn to the Arctic and clear across to the waters of Japan. These early whaling sloops were broad-bottomed, sturdy little vessels, carrying square topsails which were trimmed by braces leading forward to cleats on the bow- sprit. They were manned by thirteen men: two six-man crews for the boats, and a cook who was the ship-keeper when the boats were off. The greasy, reeking blubber was stowed into casks after being stripped off by a spiral cut around the carcass of the whale, which was turned over as it floated alongside by means of a block at the masthead. No doubt it was a most offensive cargo in hot weather, when some days might elapse before it could be gotten ashore. The extending range of the industry soon led them to the Bay of St. Lawrence and even to Greenland. They coasted along the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas and worked well out into the North Atlantic. These longer voyages made it necessary to construct “try-works’ aboard their boats to boil out the oil, instead of bringing the blubber ashore for that operation, and the industry WHALEMEN OF NEW ENGLAND 185 took on a character that changed little, in its methods, as long as whaling remained active. The Revolutionary period checked the whaling indus- try for a time, and pathetic tales of distress and starva- tion have come down to us, of cold and misery in the little communities. But no time was lost, once peace was AN EARLY WHALING SLOOP. declared, in getting the business under way again. One of the Nantucket whaleships, the Bedford, claims the honor of having been the first vessel to show our flag in English waters after the war. By this time the whalemen had found their way to the Pacific, which was destined to be the scene of their greatest activity. Their imbroglios with the Spaniards 186 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS had the same serio-comic character as those of the Salem skippers, referred to in a previous chapter. They would cruise up and down the west coast of South America, the Andes just lifting on the horizon, get a partial cargo of sperm oil, then bear away around Cape Horn, filling up with right whale oil on the coast of Brazil. Such a voyage might last two years. The War of 1812 brought another period of bitter distress, but the strife once over, the industry entered upon its palmy days, lasting till petroleum and coal-gas replaced whale oil as a lighting medium. A few vessels still cruise in pursuit of the whale for the bone, and there is a certain demand for the oil for soap-making. As some kinds of whale- and fish-oil will not congeal in freezing weather, they are also useful in the lubrication of delicate instruments. As a great industry, however, whaling has ceased to exist. Some idea of its magnitude about 1840 is given by figures which placed it third in rank among Massachusetts industries. New Bedford was for a time the fifth port in shipping of the United States. Profits in some cases reached I00 per cent on a single two- to four-year voyage. There is a record of one voyage during the Civil War which netted 363 per cent. But the burly little ships, so stout of build and quaint of model, have nearly all disappeared. Their durability was astonishing. Three of them have records, respectively, of 79, 90, and 97 years of service. ‘As late as 1920 a barque built in 1841 was fitting out at New Bedford for a voyage. Only a few years ago a number of them might still be seen about New Bedford harbor, squatting, sea-worn, and picturesque, against the wharves. WHALEMEN OF NEW ENGLAND 187 The species of whales sought were mostly of three kinds. There was the deep-sea sperm whale, often combative, but valuable for his superior oil and above all, for the waxy substance called spermaceti, taken from the head and used largely for candles. Then there was the right whale, so-called, which yielded the cheaper “train-oil.”’ From it was also taken the whalebone, which forms a sieve or strainer in the mouth for the minute marine creatures on which it lives, its throat or gullet being of surprising smallness. In the Arctic waters was found the bowhead, ‘or Greenland right whale, also giving oil and bone. The summer visitors who flock in our day to the little island of Nantucket find interest in the old houses in the town, with their roof-platforms, from which it was usual in the whaling days to watch for the inbound ships. The island is rich in the lore of its far-flung ocean enter- prises of a century ago, when it was a hive of industry with its rope-walks, sail-lofts, and warehouses, and its ships crowded the little harbor. The cooper and the blacksmith, the sailmakers, and kindred artisans all de- pended for their livelihood on the success of the whale- ships, and put their best efforts into their tasks, The boys of those days flocked about the wharves, practising the use of the harpoon on floating logs, learning to swim and manage boats, and growing strong and active against the day when their turn would come to go whaling. Their great ambition was to become “boat-steerers” and to wear the “chock-pin” thrust through the upper button- hole, which was the distinctive badge of the man who had taken his whale. As time went on, the larger vessels found the harbor 188 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS of Nantucket too shallow, and New Bedford took the lead as a whaling port. There, too, may be seen many a fascinating heirloom, in the shape of ship-models and objects carved from whalebone by the sailors in their leisure hours on the whaling-grounds. The voyages of the whale ships averaged about three years. Three long years of ceaseless rolling up and down the ocean wastes, covering the vast expanse of the Pacific, rarely entering a port or getting a word from home! The vessels were ships, barques and sometimes brigs, not often more than four hundred tons, of special and distinctive appearance, unlike any other craft. Stout, heavy, and bluff in the bows, they carried every- thing necessary, as far as foresight could provide, for cruising in latitudes when havens were few and far apart, and where a ship could not be sure of finding materials for refitting, so that she had to carry them herself, and depend on her crew for her ability to keep the sea. There was no difficulty in identifying a “spouter” off soundings. The whale-boats, usually five in number, were slung on cranes or davits of wood along the rail. A high housing at the stern served for the storage of whaling gear. ‘At the mainmast-head were slung two heavy blocks, or pulleys, for the tackle used in stripping the blubber from the whale. Aloft on the main royalmast was the crow’s-nest, sometimes a barrel, sometimes merely a ring-support, from which the look- out scanned the surface of the sea to the horizon, watch- ing for the steamy spouting of the whale against the wrinkled background of the waters. Day affer day, as the old blubber hunter rolled under easy sail on the long Pacific swell, the masthead man studied the ocean from WHALEMEN OF NEW ENGLAND 189 his lofty viewpoint, to hail the deck when whales were sighted. “There she blows, blows—ah, blows! four points off the lee bow and sperm whale!” would rouse the men be- low, to start a scramble for the boats, for there was keen rivalry between the crews to be the first in “going A “SPOUTER’? ON THE WHALING GROUNDS. on” as the term was—making fast to the ponderous prey with the harpoon. j The whale-boat, twenty-eight feet long and of beauti- ful model, light but strongly built, carried five oarsmen, pulling oars of different lengths, so arranged as to keep the balance when the harpooner, or bow-oarsman, stood up to hurl his iron. The sixth man—the boat-steerer— guided his course with a twenty-foot oar working 190 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS through a grommet or loop on the stern-post. The har- poon had a pivoted toggle-point which turned at right angles to the thirty-inch shaft after penetrating the whale. This shaft was set on a six-foot pole of oak or hickory. To the shaft was attached a line, so fastened with seizings along the pole that it could be released if necessary. The whalers became perhaps the most skilful small-boatmen the world has ever seen. Let us follow their movements as they approach the monster, running up under their spritsail if the wind serves, if not, driving the boat along like the trained oarsmen they are. As the whale is a red-blooded mammal, not a fish, he must rise to the surface from time to time to fill his lungs with air, which gives them their opportunity. As they swing to the stroke, they watch the boat-steerer, who directs the course so that they may come in from behind on the whale. As they close up on him the odor of the whale, like rank seaweed, reaches them, and the har- pooner stands up at the word. The boat shoots over the broad tail-fluke and ranges up alongside. “Now! Give it to him!” roars the boat-steerer, and the iron is flung. “Starn all, hard! Slack line and starn!” The boat gives a backward spring as the men strain at their oars to shoot clear of the convulsive start of the creature. Now the bow-oarsman grasps the harpoon-line, faces forward on his thwart, and brings the strain well back from the bow, so that the boat rides alongside and parallel to the running whale. At the first favorable moment, the line is hauled in to bring the boat close up behind the lateral fin, from which position a ten-foot lance, with a sharp oval head, can be thrust into his vitals. As the boatmen hasten to pull clear of his dying struggles, he begins to . CE 4 "a A , 5: A “NANTUCKET SLEIGH-RIDE’’—IN TOW OF A RUNNING WHALE. 194 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS While the men in the boats were battling with a whale, those remaining aboard maneuvered the ship as near as possible to the scene of action, awaiting the “flurry.” As soon as the whale floated “fin out” on his side, the carcass was secured alongside the vessel by means of a chain around it near the tail, so that it lay with the head toward the stern, and the arduous work of cut- ting-in commenced. This was begun by making a hole in the gristly tissue near the eye, to afford a purchase for the immense hook, which swung from the tackle rove through the blocks at the masthead. As the men on deck swayed away on the fall, the blubber began to unwind somewhat as does a spiral puttee, assisted by men with sharp, long-handled spades to under-cut the strip, or “blanket.” As the carcass turned the long band of oily fat, from eighteen inches to four or five feet thick, slowly rose to three-quarters the height of the lower mast. At the word “board blanket-piece” the strip was cut across and swung inboard, a fresh grip for the next hoist being previously taken below the cut. The blubber was low- ered into the hold as fast as it came in, while an expe- rienced man, standing on a stage slung over the side, cut off the immense head, one-third the length of the whale. From this was bailed out the pure spermaceti, found in a liquid form in the central part, known as the “case.” This was the most valuable part of the oil, often amounting to more than twenty barrels. Meanwhile the try-works were started, the fire being kindled under the kettles with scraps left from the cut- ting-in of a previous whale. These pots were set in a brick structure constructed on deck amidships. In them the blubber, cut up in slices, was tried out, and the oil a Gio Louth a -. 17 a == x ———— = So Ss : - Ste SA ; ““TRyING-OUT”’ ON AN OLD-TIME WHALESHIP. Jt vat . 4 Lf lee Vi owe if) a an es) An ie WHALEMEN OF NEW ENGLAND 107 was then stowed in barrels. The whale-ships carried a supply of these, knocked down into staves, which were assembled by the ship’s cooper. The task of cutting-in was continued till all the blubber was disposed of, often lasting clear through the night, the smoky glare of the try-works lighting up the sails and rigging, and making a lurid picture on the lonely ocean. The right or bone whale is a very different creature from the sperm whale. The latter frequents the deep sea, its food being the squid or octopus, found on the bottom, which it cuts up with its sharp-toothed lower jaw, so dangerous to the whalemen. The right whale, a sluggish creature, feeds by straining the water through the immense sieve of whalebone which lines its mouth, as it plows along, swallowing the mollusks and minute organisms which compose its food down the narrow orifice of its throat. It was usually attacked about the head, which would have been very dangerous with the sperm whale, as well as useless, for the harpoon would not pierce its tough surface. The right whale oil was inferior in quality, and it yielded no spermaceti. The oil taken from the sperm whale in summer contained much more of this material than that of winter, and as the waxy substance was hardened by the cold, and the clear oil could be separated, this winter oil was in demand for out-door lamps, since it would not thicken in frosty weather. In all the whaling ports, living as they did on this one industry, the whale and his product, the fathers and brothers who sailed in his pursuit, and the ships and their voyages were the exclusive topics of interest. These towns came thus to have a special local color and char- 198 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS acter, traces of which still remain. The crews of the whale-ships usually numbered between thirty and forty men, several times the number carried by trading ships of the same tonnage. This provided four or five six- men crews for the boats, besides coopers, cooks, and ship-keepers. The proportion of native Americans was larger than on the cargo ships, but there were also “Western Islanders’ from the Azores, Indians, and Kanakas picked up about the Pacific Islands. Honolulu was a great rendezvous for the whalemen, who played no small part in preparing the islands for their future Americanization. In the old days the Nantucketers always spoke of the Pacific whaling grounds as “the other side of the land.” It is to be feared that some of the old-time skippers “hung their consciences on Cape Horn” on the voyage out, for some sad tales have come down of their deal- ings with the natives of the islands, and of their clashes with the Spaniards in the ports of call along the west coast of South America. One of these resorts was Payta in Peru, where they would put in for supplies, and where they frequently got into very hot water indeed with the Peruvians. Off this coast lay the Galapagos Islands, which were uninhabited by man, but which abounded in immense crawfish, turtles, iguanas, seals, and other aquatic animals. Here they would go for water, and to feast on the great turtles, which were considered a tooth- some delicacy after a monotonous diet of salt beef and ship’s biscuit. Then they would square away for the offshore grounds, between the Galapagos and the Hawai- ian Islands, often extending their voyages to Japanese waters. WHALEMEN OF NEW ENGLAND 199 In later years they cruised to the Arctic Seas in greater numbers until the time of the Civil War, at the close of which the Confederate cruiser Shenandoah made sad havoc among them, burning twenty-six of the vessels within a few weeks. The old whale-ships, being built strictly for their practical fitness for a special task, showed little of the smartness affected by the packets and clippers of their day. There were, of course, a few crack vessels, as the fancy of an owner here and there might permit him to indulge in such luxuries, but as a rule the vessels re- flected the homely simplicity of their Yankee builders. Their masts stood straight up and down; speed being useless in their business, they were wall-sided, bluff, and square on the stern-transom. They came as near being indestructible, with their heavy scantling and sturdy top- hamper, as any work of human hands can be, and it was rare indeed for one of them to suffer greatly from gales or to require extensive repairs to the hull. The whale-oil, working into every nook and cranny of the frame, acted as a preservative against decay. Lasting as a number of them have right up to our times, they afford a special interest for the ship student, who finds in them examples of constructive methods peculiar to the older ship-builders and long since obso- lete in more modern craft, such as the almost vertical stern-posts; the bow-timbering identical with that of the ship of the forties; and the moldings and hand-wrought details that hark back to colonial days and earlier. Thus they play a distinctive part in the genealogy of the American merchant marine. Coming home from a three- or four-year voyage, with 200 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS their patched sails blackened by the smoke of the try- works and their paint rusty and seaworn, they looked as they were, the rough tools of livelihood handled by rugged and practical men. Yet nobody who loves a ship and feels the character she takes on from years of buffeting the oceans, could fail to be impressed by the quaint old “spouters” as they laid along the New Bed- ford wharves but a few years since—picturesque sur- vivals of a bygone time, tough and honest as the men who manned them. } CHAPTER XI THE LORDLY CLIPPER SHIPS & the middle of the nineteenth century approached, the United States came to possess as fine a seafar- ing population as the world has ever seen. Men bred for generations to daring and resource in the different mari- time ventures of the nation, tanned by the suns and hardened in the gales of all the oceans, backed by able and far-seeing merchants, with a wide and well-informed public interest behind them, stood ready to seize the new opportunities that were offering. The decks were cleared; the hardy sailors were ready, trained to the minute; and destiny was about to open to them the most inspiring epoch that has thus far occurred in the history of our seaborne commerce. When, in 1832, the ship Ann McKim was built at Baltimore, the first large vessel based on the lines of the small and speedy Baltimore clippers and their successors appeared on the sea. She at once became famous among seafaring men for her speed and beauty, and other build- ers, inspired by her example, set about to rival her suc- cess. Capacity to carry cargo, joined to the influence of a conservative spirit which has always been common among those connected with the sea, had hitherto ruled in the design of ships. It was not till this period that 201 202 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS the proponents of newer methods had been able to get a real chance to apply certain ideas that had been de- veloping among them, in the light of their recent studies. Just as it happened with the steamboat, and later on, with the aeroplane, men in many different places were striving in new directions to a common end, and it was apparent that the dawn of a new epoch in ship-construc- tion was at hand. Guesswork and rule-of-thumb were being superseded by scientific efficiency. In the same way, too, as it has happened with so many other inven- tions, it was to happen that one man was to strike the note with a ship-type that should embody the new ideas that were becoming current, and that should identify his name, above all others of his time, with the special innovations that marked the change. This man was John W. Griffeths, a young ship- designer in the employ of Smith & Dimon of New York. It was felt that in spite of the success of the Aun McKim, of 493 tons, the Baltimore clipper model was not well adapted to larger vessels, approaching one thou- sand tons register. Pondering on this problem, Griffeths imagined a design in which the stem was drawn forward into a long sharp entrance, with concave or hollow lines; the widest beam was brought further aft; the quarters were raised, to relieve the hull from the drag of the stern in its progress through the water. He exhibited a model embodying these ideas, which were then thought quite revolutionary. In spite of much discussion and resulting opposition, a firm of shipping merchants, How- land & Aspinwall, influenced somewhat, no doubt, by their experience with the Ann McKim, which they owned for a time, undertook to build a ship on the plans ‘ao01lua dg WAddITD-dud AHL AO TASSAA TVOIGAL V HLIM GAAVdINOD dIHS WAddIIO VY GLE POVNNOL . oe KLOVIVG ae SB! _ HLINTT - 0491 - Yadd!1Dd YINYOSI TWD $y. of Ge gf Sor & of § 477 / -- FTHIS 00g FIWNNAL og HLIWIYVG as SEU HWLOWF? + OF - dIWS-L3MOb¥d DILNYILY + * 9 Ohhh a fh, ee iy THE CORDLY. CLIPPER SHIPS 205 proposed by Griffeths. Thus was born the famous Rainbow, first of the true or extreme clipper ships, launched in 1845. The term “clipper” had become familiar through its application to the small Baltimore craft mentioned, pre- vious to 1820. These vessels were not especially sharp forward, resembling their French progenitors on that respect, as well as in their rounded cross-section, indic- ative of stability and power to carry sail. They were followed by a class of two-masted vessels known as “Aberdeen clippers,” employed in the British coasting trade, and built at Aberdeen, Scotland. Somewhat later on there appeared a number of small, fast vessels used in the lucrative opium trade between China and the East Indies, of which some were owned in England and some in the United States. They were mostly schooner- rigged, and were known as “opium clippers.” The Rainbow, of 750 tons, however, was the first typical full-rigged clipper ship. She was the center of a storm of criticism during her construction, but she made a remarkably fast and suc- cessful voyage on her second trip out and back from Canton, China, bringing home herself the first news of her arrival out. Her captain, John Land, claimed that she was then the fastest ship in the world, and the truth of his claim was generally recognized. She was im- mediately followed by the celebrated Sea Witch of 890 tons, a ship which has to her credit a series of the fastest records in our marine annals. The wonderful achievements of these vessels, and the splendid ships which followed them in swift succession, form a stirring chronicle. Their deeds were in great 206 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS degree due to the men who commanded them, for the stern old ocean has never seen their superiors in nerve, skill, and energy. These consummate sailors carried royals and studdingsails when many a foreigner was wallowing about with two reefs in his topsails; they drove along day and night, round the Horn to San Francisco and across to China, with rackings on the topsail halliards and locks on the chainsheets, so that weak-kneed or frightened seamen might not tamper with the gear; they made voyages that have never been equaled under sail for speed and daring, before or since, reducing by one-half or more the time required for pas- sages to China, to Australia, or to California, so that for a decade they skimmed the cream of the ocean freights of the world. Of these great sea captains there was none more popu- lar than was Captain Bob or “Bully” Waterman. Born in New York, he went to sea at the age of twelve. At twenty-five he commanded a ship and made five voyages round the world. His exploits in the former New Orleans packet ship Natchez, which he had once brought home from Canton in 78 days, were the talk of the city, and when the Sea Witch was launched, his fine reputa- tion gave him the command of that beautiful clipper. During the three years following, he made a series of fast voyages to China and back, around the Cape of Good Hope. One of these passages took him to Canton in 104 days. Another brought him flying home in 77 days, from the same port. It is only in very recent years that steamships have been able to exceed these records. Waterman commanded some of the finest vessels out of New York, and during eighteen years never called FHE LORDLY CLIPPER SHIPS 207 on the insurance underwriters for a dollar of loss or damage. Another noted clipper captain was Josiah Creesy, born in that home of many sailors, Marblehead in Mas- sachusetts. Like the rest of his web-footed generation, he grew up in boats along the shore and breathed the air of spacious voyaging, coming to command the fa- mous Flying Cloud when she made her passage to San Francisco in the record time of 89 days, which has never been beaten, and probably never will be, by any sailing ship. The names of these men, and others like them— Palmer, Dumaresq, Lauchlan McKay, and their col- leagues—stand high on the honor roll of American sea- manship. Among the ships built at this period, just before the shining lure of California gold was to bring out a stately fleet of flying skysail clippers, none was more justly renowned than the Oriental; first to land a tea cargo from China in England, after the British Navigation Laws had been amended, throwing that trade open to American ships. She reached London, 97 days out from Hong Kong, with 1600 tons of tea in December, 1850, and aroused a furore of interest with her spreading yards and raking masts, her mahogany deck-fittings and gleaming brasses. The British Admiralty requested per- mission to take off her lines in dry-dock, as an example to their shipbuilders. By this time the rush to California was in full swing. Every sort of craft—whale ships, packets, brigs, and schooners, anything that would sail—was being freighted with men and goods, bound for the gold mines. Cargo space rose to $60 per ton of forty cubic feet, amounting 208 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS in some cases to more than the value of the vessels when ready for sea. 3 Under the stimulus of this feverish activity there came into being a fleet of long-armed square-riggers that sur- passed anything that had ever been seen on the seas, and which will probably never again be equaled by sailing ships. They swept around the Horn to California in a swift and triumphant succession. ‘Thence, squaring away for China, they loaded teas for London, or for our Atlantic ports, in Canton. After swinging clear around the globe by the Cape of Good Hope, they in many instances paid for themselves and yielded large profits within a year from their launching. This period, from 1850 to 1860, saw the climax of our shipping in- dustry, as prepared by the hardy and tenacious men who for two hundred years had been showing their mettle on the oceans of all the world. The competition of steam was hardly felt as yet. For a time the British tea trade was almost entirely in the hands of Ameri- cans, whose ships commanded nearly double the freight rates of their competitors. The exploits of these vessels were eagerly followed by the public, whose sporting in- terest in them surpassed even that of later years in the races for the America’s cup. The San Francisco voyage, coming under our coasting-trade laws, was of course not open to foreign vessels sailing from the ports of the Eastern seaboard, but rivalry was keen between our ships and under its stimulus their records aroused the greatest interest everywhere. Of the first nondescript fleet that started for Cali- fornia at the news of the gold discoveries, few ever left the harbor of San Francisco, for their crews and officers THE LORDLY -CLIPPER SHIPS 209 deserted them to rush to the mines. The examples of the first clippers had furnished new light to owners and builders on the matter of speed. The yards were well prepared to meet the new situation, so that no time was lost in the launching of the California fleet. Starting with the Celestial, they followed in quick succession, thirteen by the end of 1850, every one of which made a splendid record. When, in the course of that year, seven ships contested for the speediest run, the excitement was general, and the betting fast and furious. The Sea Witch, in the capable hands of Captain Waterman, car- ried off the prize in a passage of 97 days, being driven around Cape Horn in the height of the Southern winter. All of the ships made creditable runs, averaging 112%4 days, about seven weeks under what had previously been considered a fine passage—160 days. ‘The largest of them was less than 1100 tons register. With the opening of the year 1851 the new vessels coming off the ways showed a rapid increase in tonnage. Here were ships of a type never seen before, sharp, and powerful, with top-hamper that would have startled the conservative mariner of earlier days. The use of steel for spars and rigging had not yet been developed, and the skill and judgment of builders and riggers were tested to the utmost to give the necessary strength aloft. The spreading wings, borne on wooden spars sustained by Russian hemp standing-rigging, carried a terrific strain as the lofty clipper drove through the seas. This year saw the launching of the Flying Cloud, of the Northern Light, the Comet and the Witch of the Wave, the Swordfish and the Ino. ‘These six ships all made speed records that will probably not again be ever equaled 210 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS under sail. The first-named clipper, holder of the San Francisco blue ribbon, will never be forgotten by the American sailor. Of 1783 tons, 225 feet long, she car- ried three “standing” skysail-yards above her royals, yards which were not hoisted aloft when the sails were set as had been the earlier practice, but remained in place. When she returned from her record voyage, the wooden wedges, or “fids’” that had secured her topmasts were exhibited in the Astor House, all broomed and splintered —an impressive evidence of the hard driving she had been through. Of the thirty-one California clippers launched in this year, the largest was the Challenge, of 2006 tons, with a ninety-foot mainyard. Her skipper was “Bob” Water- man. His crew on her first voyage proved as desperate a set of ruffians as ever disgraced a ship’s forecastle. Only two of them were Americans, and but six out of sixty-four in the crew were competent to handle the wheel. Disease, due to their filthy habits, broke out among them, at one time laying up seventeen, of whom five died at sea. Early in the voyage, the mate was at- tacked by four of them at once, and Waterman going to his assistance with an iron belaying pin after they had inflicted twelve knife-wounds on him, wielded it so vigorously as to cause the death of two. Three others were killed by falling from aloft off Cape Horn. In spite of his tragic voyage, Waterman brought his ship into San Francisco in 108 days—a remarkable example of nerve and resolution. It was at this time that the Flying Cloud made her triumphant passage, the result of which is recorded in her log as follows: “Aug. 30th. Sent up foretop-gallant- Mp pry, / MMO ty, List CLIPPERS RACING THROUGH THE TRADES, ee 9 A Wey m | i + t * x THE CORBY CLIPPER CSAIBS 213 mast. Night strong and squally. Six a.m. made South Farallones bearing northeast 4% east; took a pilot at 7; anchored in San Francisco harbor at 11:30 A.M. after a passage of 8g days 21 hours. In this year also occurred the historic race between the Raven, the Typhoon, and the Sea Witch. Driving through the long gray rollers, thrashing to windward off the Horn, sweeping to the northward through the trades, first one ship, then another, in the lead, they came into port in the order given, one day apart. Here was heroic sailing, which makes a Sandy Hook yacht race seem tame indeed. It was in this year, too, that the Surprise raced the Sea Witch to San Francisco and won twenty thousand dollars for her backers; then, squaring away for China, she loaded tea for London and earned for her owners fifty thousand dollars over her entire cost and expenses on the voyage. Such were the feats of the clippers dur- ing the “flush times.” As these ocean fliers came homing in from their maiden voyages it was found that in most cases the gear aloft had been so racked and strained in the wild driving they had been sent through that it would need much over- hauling and in some ships replacement. This called out much study and effort by shipwrights and designers in the devising of better methods, for the sparring and rig- ging of the new vessels, of still greater tonnage, that were coming off the ways. The new fleet of 1852 brought out thirty-three fine clippers, of which the most notable was the Sovereign of the Seas. This ship, the work of that veritable genius in the art of shipbuilding, Donald McKay of Boston, creator of the Flying Cloud, 214 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS proved a marvel of speed and beauty. She measured 258 feet in length, registering 2421 tons, by far the larg- est vessel of the year. On her first and only voyage to San Francisco, under the command of Lauchlan McKay, a brother of her builder, she was almost totally dis- masted in a gale off Cape Horn; was rerigged at sea, kept going all the time, and made the run in 103 days. On her homeward passage she covered during one period of 11 days, the distance of 3562 miles. On the 18th of March her run was 411 miles, an average rate of 17% knots an hour, allowing for her gain of 10° 30’ in longi- tude.* Then, sailing from New York to Liverpool, she reached her port in 13 days 23 hours. Her speed far exceeded that of the Cunard steamship Canada, which left Boston on the same day. In the following year no less than forty-eight ships were added to the clipper fleet. The queen among them, the four-masted Great Republic, may be regarded as the culminating example of the type. She was, when launched, 335 feet long and registered 4555 tons. Her mainyard was 120 feet in length. Her builder, McKay, intended her for the Australian trade, and she loaded in New York for her first voyage. On the eve of sailing she caught fire at her dock and was burned to the water’s edge. The hulk was raised and rebuilt, being bought by A. A’. Low & Brother of New York, and she then measured 3357 tons, still remaining the largest merchant vessel afloat. The Great Republic, like several others of the new 1 All distances, here and elsewhere, are given in marine miles of 6080 feet. THE LORDLY CLIPPER SHIPS 215 ships, was fitted with double topsails. This innovation, American in origin like so many improvements in the sailing ship, soon became, and has remained, universal the world over. As now applied, all square-rigged ves- sels have their topsails divided horizontally by an addi- , le a, fe ane : I SINGLE AND DouBLE ToRPSAIL RIGS ON I9TH CENTURY SHIPS tional yard into upper and lower topsails. The lower topsail yard, slung on a standing truss to the cap at the head of the mast, does not hoist or lower. The upper topsail, when dropped in heavy weather, can be handled in the lee of the lower one and secured with comparative ease by a few men, while the enormous hoist of the old 216 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS single topsails required the entire crew to smother and reef the great sheet of thrashing canvas in a blow. This rig, devised in 1853 by Captain Howes of Brewster, Massachusetts, is also now applied in large ships to the top-gallantsails. The year 1854 was the final one in which ships of the extreme clipper type were built. The Romance of the Seas, the last McKay vessel of this class, carried skysails and royal studdingsails clear across the Pacific from San Francisco to Hong Kong on one of her voy- ages in this year, never once shortening sail during the entire passage. California was now getting better or- ganized, after the first headlong rush for the gold mines, and the shipping interests were becoming stabilized. A type of ship which could carry more cargo and stand up better under the strain of hard driving was developed. These “medium clippers’ were by no means deficient in speed, and would at the present time be regarded as very sharp and heavily rigged. One of them, the An- drew Jackson, afterwards equaled the record of the Flying Cloud. ‘The latter ship, still in the hands of Captain Creesy, repeated her performance of 1851. Creesy commanded a naval vessel during the Civil War, and died at Salem in 1871. With the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851, people began pouring into Melbourne and Sidney in multitudes, and our ship-builders took advantage of the enthusiasm to launch some of the finest sailing ships ever designed. The great work of Lieutenant Maury, of the United States Navy, had provided the deep-sea navigator with data regarding the winds and currents, reduced to a scientific basis, which were of priceless value PHE LORDLY CLIPPER: SHIPS, 217 in enabling them to shorten their voyages to all parts of the world. The Australian voyage, out around Cape Horn and home by way of the Cape of Good Hope, made the circuit of the entire globe. Many of our ships, among them the Sovereign of the Seas, were chartered by British merchants for this trade. One of these ves- sels, the Red Jacket, most famous of the Maine-built clippers, made the splendid record out and back from Liverpool of 142 days of actual sailing time. The firm of James Baines & Co., of Liverpool, desir- ing to build the finest ships the world could offer for the Australian trade, ordered from McKay of Boston four notable vessels—perhaps the greatest quartet of wooden clippers ever constructed—the James Baines, 2515 tons; the Lightning, 2082 tons; the Donald McKay, 2598 tons; and the Champion of the Seas, 2448 tons. To those four were added the Japan and Commodore Perry, each of 1964 tons, also built by McKay. In care of construction, beauty of finish, and power to carry sail, these ships represented the ultimate examples of their builder’s unrivaled genius. On her maiden run to Liverpool to be turned over to her owners, the Lightning covered in one day’s sailing the amazing distance of 436 miles, the greatest single day’s performance ever made under canvas. The James Baines made Rock Light, off Liverpool, in the record time of 12 days 6 hours. On her first Aus- tralian voyage she swept around the world in 132 days. Her log records one instance of passing a foreign ship under double-reefed topsails, while the Baimes was carry- ing a main skysail and going 17 knots! The fastest hourly rate of speed ever made by a sailing vessel of 218 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS which we have authentic knowledge was made by this ship on June 17, 1856—21 knots an hour. Such were the deeds of American ships and sailors in this, the proudest epoch of our seafaring. The schooner yacht America had carried off the blue ribbon of the sea—the Queen’s Cup—off Cowes in 1851. Our sailing ships were unrivaled the world over. For a period our sea trade surpassed that of Great Britain, measured by profits and efficiency of operation. Ship for ship our vessels led the ocean commerce of the world. A majestic fleet, commanding twice the freight rates of their nearest foreign competitors, dominated the China tea trade. The majority of the large American fortunes of the day came from shipping and related enterprises, and this capital came a few years later to play a large part in the building of the transcontinental railroads. We should not forget that it was twenty-three years before the speed record of the Lightning was approached by a steamship—the Arnzona (1887)—which reached eighteen knots an hour on her trial trip. The former ship had averaged half a knot faster for twenty-four hours. In none of the great races for international honors, by sailing yachts built especially for speed, is there any authentic instance of records approaching those of the clipper ships of seventy odd years ago. These records, be it remembered, were made by vessels which depended on the form of the hull for stability, built to carry sail in all weathers, and engaged in the freight commerce of the world. Yachting is a noble sport, but its vessels are rarely of any value for other purposes, depending as THE LORDLY CLIPPER SHIPS 219 they do on outside ballast in the form of weight sus- pended on a fin keel. In the “fifties, and up to as late as 1875, many fine and speedy ships were built in Great Britain to compete with our clippers, and with the British steamships that were making their appearance in the long-voyage trade. These vessels, fast in light or moderate winds, adapted to the Chinese tea trade, made a great many excellent voy- ages. The most careful and impartial analysis of their records, however, fails to show them the equals of our clippers in the heyday of their prosperity. These noble American ships were all built of wood, and were painted black, sometimes with a gold or crim- son stripe about the hull. The lower masts were usually painted white up to the tops, with the lower yards and bowsprits black. To an impressive air of power and speed they added a trim and yacht-like beauty, quite dif- ferent from the iron sailing ships of later years. They are gone, with the men who sailed them, but the vision of the lordly clipper, her high-tiered skysails and wide- winged stun’s’ls against the background of the long gray seas, sweeping round Cape Horn with the sea-birds squalling in her wake, still dwells in the mind, an inspir- ing memory to those who love ships and the ocean. CHAPTER XII THE LAKE AND RIVER MEN ERY early indeed in our history the great mid- continental lakes and water-courses became the scene of hardy effort in the quest for openings into the wilderness. Following the ways of the Indians, the fur seekers of the Hudson Bay Company furrowed the waters of Superior in their bateaux and canoes, and even built a canal where now the busy “Soo” detours the falls of Ste. Marie, providing their little waterway with a lock, which has since been reconstructed by the Gov- ernment, that travelers might view it. The first sailing craft to appear on the lakes of which we have account was the Griffon, a little brigantine built in 1679 by La Salle on salt-water lines. She was of 60 tons, armed and manned by sailors from the ocean, and in her La Salle explored Lake Erie from where Buffalo now drives its busy commerce, passing into Lake Michigan and Green Bay. After that, for many long years, the lonely off- shore waters of the vast lakes saw hardly a sail. A cen- tury later, or thereabouts, six sloops and three schooners made up the whole fleet on Michigan, Huron, and Erie. The rugged voyageurs and half-breeds preferred the bateaux and canoes to which they were accustomed, and the sail craft were largely handled by salt-water men. 220 LAKE AND RIVER MEN 221 After the War of 1812, with its historic lake battles, the inrush of settlers and the consequent need of supply- transport provided the lakes with a rapidly growing fleet, among whose varied types of craft were not a few size- able square-riggers. Leading into the trackless wild from the lake shores, every stream or inlet served as a road to be traveled in some floating vehicle—a canoe, or rough flatboat, or a dugout. A few of the shore BYGONE TYPES ON THE GREAT LAKES, THE TRIANGULAR “ RAFFIE”’ FORETOPSAIL WAS PECULIAR TO THOSE WATERS, towns took on something of the aspect of seaports, with lighthouses at Buffalo and Erie. In the year 1818 a steamboat, the Walk-in-the-Water, was placed on the route from Buffalo to Detroit. Four years later, when she was lost in an October gale, the people of the latter settlement felt the greatest concern at being thus de- prived of regular communication, but only a few years had passed when other little steamboats began to appear, forerunners of the impressive fleets that now pass in con- 222 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS stant succession up and down the lakes, and which crowd the “Soo” Canal, locking through day and night all summer long. The need of free communication between Huron and Superior was felt from the very beginning of lake navi- gation. The way through.the Saint Mary’s River was barred by the “Sault,” or leap, of Sainte Marie, so named by the early French explorers, a waterfall of consider- able size. When, therefore, the importance of the copper de- posits along Lake Superior became apparent, steps were taken to build a canal around the falls, resulting in the first “Soo”? Canal, opened in 1855. There were at that date nearly twelve hundred vessels employed on the lakes, an increase of fivefold within twenty years. Ex- perience in great lake navigation, so rapidly expanding in volume, brought with it a knowledge of the special problems to be met, very different, but equally exigent of courage and resource to those of the ocean. Always on a lee shore, with uncertain anchorage and rare havens of shelter, the lake sailor needs skill and alertness to keep out of trouble in the sudden gales, the high, short ~seas, and the bitter cold water of these inland oceans. His seamanship in its special field is of a very high order indeed. The early sailors on the lakes brought with them, naturally, their salt water methods which had to be adapted to the new conditions. They built luggers and sloops and schooners with square topsails, as well as brigs, and even full-rigged ships, like those on the ocean. Having to feel their way in uncharted waters, to run in and out of the streams, or to seek sudden shel- ter from the gales, they learned to build vessels of light LAKE AND RIVER MEN 223 draft and broad beam, using the unseasoned timber, sometimes unfamiliar to them in its application to ship- building, which was found in the shore forests. The boatmen of the fur-trading companies employed, besides the birch canoes of the Indians, barges and bateaux, which were large flat-bottomed boats for poling or row- ing, of shallow draft. It is probable that the feverish activity of the latter part of the War of 1812, which resulted in the building of vessels of really large tonnage, may have led to some valuable lessons, as to the possibility of employing ships of considerable draft on the lakes. One of these war- ships, the New Orleans, measured 3200 tons displacement. Her great hull, which was never launched, moldered away on the stocks near Sackett’s Harbor. At Kings- ton, Ontario, a ship of 3000 tons, the St. Lawrence, was set afloat by the British, but the war ended before she saw real action. This vessel drew no less than twenty- seven feet, when fully equipped with stores and battery. An old print in the Toronto Public Library, depicting the action between the American sloop-of-war Pike and the British Wolfe in 1813, shows two full-rigged ships, with staysails, spritsails, and all the gear of ocean war- ships of the period. It is hard nowadays to realize that such vessels actually sailed the lakes, but it is not so many years since people were living who had seen them. Some ten years ago the hulk of Perry’s old flagship in the battle of Lake Erie, the Niagara, which had iain submerged for eighty-eight years, was raised and floated at Erie. She showed a beamy, shallow hull, of which the seams had been “payed,” or coated, with lead, a practise said to date back to the Armada. 224. THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS The traffic of the lakes, keeping pace with the rapid influx of immigration in the first half of the nineteenth century, grew very fast through that period. The schooner, with a square, and in some cases a triangular topsail with a single lower yard, was the favorite rig. This three-cornered topsail, called a “‘raffie,’ was pecu- liar to the lakes. Steamers, usually side-wheelers, be- came more numerous, with a few wooden screw-pro- pellers. All the early steam craft on the lakes used wood for fuel. Guns were fired as signals, then bells came into use, and it is of interest to know that the first steam whistle was employed at Rochester in 1844. In the same year the first steamer of more than 1000 tons in the United States was built at Cleveland. It was in 1840 that the screw steamer Vandalia made its appearance at Oswego, and six years later there were twenty-six pro- pellers on the lakes. The fleet at this time comprised, besides, 67 side-wheel steamers, 3 barques, 340 schoon- ers, and 64 brigs. The last of the lake brigs disappeared in 1869. I shall have more to say further on of the amazing development of lake shipping during the last fifty years, brought about through the grain and ore trade, and the interesting ships of special build and enormous size that ply up and down the inland seas for seven months in the year. During the early time while the lake sailors were lay- ing the bases of the present mighty structure of our fresh-water shipping trade, other venturesome pioneers were threading the continent on the rivers beyond the Alleghanies. As the problems and difficulties they had to meet were novel, the methods employed came to take on a special character, unlike those common in older LAKE AND RIVER MEN 225 lands, and the influence of these methods still survives, above all on the Mississippi Valley waterways. We scarcely realize today how great a volume of im- migration poured into this portion of the country at a very early date. The Revolution was hardly over when the settlers were rushing in by the thousands, using the rivers as their roads into the rich new territories. In this ready tendency to take to the water may be traced the influence of the seafaring ancestors of our people. There have been instances in history of civilizations which were brought to a stand by their water-barriers, but the North American pioneers saw in their lakes and rivers the highways for further penetration, and while the hardy men of the coast were faring to distant seas, their brethren were pushing into the wilderness in their scows and flatboats by the water roads of the Near West. The principal northern route into the country about the Great Lakes was that by way of the Mohawk Valley. Carrying over the divide between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, they worked down that stream to Oneida Lake, taking the Seneca River for the Western settlements, while the Oswego River to Lake Ontario served as the way to Canada and the Far West. Be- ginning with “pirogues”’ or dugouts, canoes of larger capacity, more than thirty feet long, were used by the traders, then bateaux of red cedar with high bows and sloping sides, having no keels. Later came the Macki- nac boat, a sort of barge for towing or poling, and at the height of the Mohawk River traffic, the “Durham boats,” from which were adapted the first boats used on the Erie Canal. The rivermen became very expert in 226 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS propelling these craft, which were worked up-stream with long iron-shod poles provided with a shoulder- piece. They would crouch on their hands and knees in the forward part of the boat, the pole braced in the hollow of the shoulder, and crawl aft along the length a if — Woy ah “<4 ““BROADHORN’’ FLATBOATMEN ON THE MISSISSIPPI. of the gunwale, throwing the entire weight of the body against the pole—an acrobatic performance that required special training. Just as the Great Lakes provided a water-borne route into the Northwest, the Ohio River carried the pioneers through to the Mississippi River, and the tide of traffic began early to flow along its mighty current. Reckless, LAKE AND RIVER MEN 227 rugged men clad in buckskin, wearing coonskin caps with the tail left on at the back, swarmed on the flat-boats ; rough, shallow scows which were sold for lumber at New Orleans. These boats were guided by long oars extending far out on either side, from which they took the name “broadhorns.” Below the junction of the Wabash with the Ohio, at Shawneetown, Illinois, the boatmen of the Ohio ended their westbound journey. Down the yellow flood of the Mississippi, from Cairo to the Gulf, the broadhorns drifted, their crews amusing themselves with rough merriment, fiddling, dancing, and horse-play, with an occasional not unwelcome battle with the lurking Indians along the banks. The up-river voy- ages were made in keel-boats, which were poled, or dragged with ropes, in toilsome struggle against the current. The river-life bred a class of men whose stoical endurance of hardships together with their skill in deal- ing with the vagaries of the restless, ever-shifting Mis- sissippi, set them specially apart among the different elements of the pioneer population. Mark Twain, who had been a Mississippi steamboat pilot, has told us about these people in Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mis- Sisstp pi. In the application of steam to vessel-propulsion, which came about at the very time when the demand for the exploitation of new water routes was becoming urgent, the early rivermen possessed an instrumentality unknown to their forefathers. Having the maneuvering advan- tages of the various forms of oar-driven craft, the river steamboat permitted the employment of much more roomy and dependable units of transportation. This 228 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS would never have been possible with sail-craft, requiring broad water-stretches for beating against adverse winds, and difficult to manage in swift currents. The river steamboat therefore came to rank very high among the agencies of our national expansion. In its early form its hull-construction clearly reflects the influence of the salt-water tradition. A print of 1833 shows the projecting bow, with the topsides run- ning back to a semi-elliptical stern pierced by a horizon- tal row of windows, as in ocean vessels of the time. The hope was strong in the early days, that means might be found of shipping the produce of the river valley directly through to the ocean, and thence oversea, in ves- sels that could make the entire voyage without breaking bulk. A full-rigged ship, the St. Clair, was taken clear down the Ohio from Marietta as early as 1800, con- tinuing her voyage down the Mississippi and round to Philadelphia. The experiment was not repeated, how- ever, and as time went on and steamboats multiplied on the river, it came to be accepted that special types of craft would be required to deal with the often baffling conditions met with in navigating the turbid stream. Eventually, the river boats came to take on their fa- miliar character, which has changed little for many years. Of shallow draft and light construction, fitted with wood-burning engines of low-pressure type, they coughed their way up and down the lonely reaches of the Mississippi River, to rouse the shore villages into mo- mentary excitement by their passage, the only contact the river people had with the outside world. The hey- day of steamboating was reached in the days just before EWORL ceed i MEMPAIS & EY, LOLS ABOVE: AN EARLY MississippI RIVER PACKET, ABOUT 1835. BELow: AN UP-TO-DATE RIVER STEAMBOAT AT THE LEVEE. Syd ow i ae ke Poi ie ey 4, fea ot Tee y ORE Baer (oN LAKE AND RIVER MEN 231 the Civil War. Mark Twain was then a pilot on the river, and he has left us an account which preserves the very color of that unique period of Mississippi River life. Right into the heart of the continent to the point where Kansas City now stands and beyond, the way was found up the Missouri, while the Red River, the Arkan- sas, and the Tennessee provided routes of penetration into vast areas which would find in them, when the need should come, their outlets toward the sea. Here, then were developing new conditions which would have an immense influence on our ocean shipping. The coast dwellers, who had looked outward over the horizon for a field of effort, began to take account of the widening opportunities brought into notice by the opening of the inland seas and rivers, and their capital, so largely brought in by their seafaring enterprise, began to be diverted from oversea employment by the expanding trade of the interior. Already the energies of the Amer- ican people, turning to the creation of the mightiest net- work of internal transportation that the world has ever seen, were swinging away from the ocean, where so much splendid history had been made, to these inland activities, whose history was just beginning. With due pride in our nautical achievements, we cannot withhold our praise from the rugged men who traveled the lakes and rivers into the trackless wilds, to whose pluck and tenacity we owe the conquest of the Central territory, and ultimately the opening up of the great Northwest. The shipping tonnage employed on the Great Lakes to- day and in coast-to-coast voyaging, the Panama Canal, the immense development of our iron, steel, and fuel 232 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS resources, with their bearing on our future deep-sea fleet, whenever we may choose to follow the ocean again— as sooner or later we must—all these we owe to the water-borne pioneers. CHAPTER XIII THE PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP Ng now we have arrived at a period which, lasting some fifty-five years, saw our foreign carrying- trade decline to about one-seventh of its former volume, as measured by the proportion moved in our own ships. We are coming to see now that this decline was inevit- able, under the influence of the great and necessary task of internal development. And yet, if during these years we lost our oversea position, we gained in compensation the mighty water-borne commerce of the Lakes, and a coasting-fleet that continued to keep us among the lead- ing maritime powers of the world. After the triumphs of our sailing ships in the ’fifties came a short period of depression, such as the carrying trade has always had now and then to encounter, on the heels of which the Civil War broke out, with its demands on the merchant fleet for naval and transport tonnage. In the course of the strife many ships were also burned or captured, and others sold to foreign owners. Mean- while the progress of iron ship-building abroad was over- coming the great advantage due to our timber resources. With the increasing employment of steamships had ap- peared the policy of granting subsidies to their builders by foreign governments. The Suez Canal, open in 1869, 233 234 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS shortened the voyage to the Far East, permitting many steam vessels to carry enough bunker coal for the pas- sage, so that our ships could no longer compete with them under sail, in the general carrying-trade to India or China. Means might conceivably have been found of meeting these adverse conditions, but the attention of our people was turning from the sea to the mighty possibilities of domestic expansion. Incident to this expansion was the demand for rail-development, which absorbed money and energy that might, under other circumstances, have sought employment on the ocean. The dazzling lures of gold and silver mining, of coal and iron and the fabu- lous wealth of the newly opening West diverted the limited man-power of our still youthful country to ac- tivities within the confines of our national domain. Great industries, drawing on the raw materials taken from the soil, were appearing, to provide our people with goods they had been obliged to import in earlier years, while tariffs for the protection of these industries made it increasingly difficult for our ships to find return car- goes, so necessary if they were to show a profit. Pe- troleum was fast replacing whale-oil, and our “‘spouters” found their greasy harvests no longer in demand. Rail- roads were stretching clear across the continent, to com- pete with the Cape Horn clippers. It must be said, too, that our people, who had seen Fulton’s Clermont open the era of steam navigation, and who had sent the first steam vessel—the Savannah —across the Western Ocean in 1819, were dilatory in turning from sail to steam. The prestige of our sailing ships was no doubt a factor in this backwardness, to a PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP 23 large extent. There was some reason for it, for even today most cargo steamships would be hard put to it to equal the records made on long voyages, such as that to Australia, by the flying clippers of the ‘fifties. When the Lightning ran 436 nautical miles in twenty-four hours there was not a steamship afloat that could come within a hundred miles of it. Indeed, it was a genera- tion before it was equaled under steam, and there are few cargo vessels that can surpass it at the present day. Our marine engineers hardly kept pace, up till twenty- five years ago, with the changing developments which led up to the perfect triple-expansion engine. Iron hull construction, too, was backward with us, in the light of British progress from 1860 onward, and our builders clung too long to the paddle-wheel in their deep-sea steamers. As far back as 1843 an iron ship, the Bangor, had been built on the Delaware. Ericsson, who first demonstrated the screw propeller in 1837, spent most of his life among us. The fact was that the laggard progress of these innovations in our merchant fleet re- flected the influence of our superlative wooden sailing ships. When the change came from iron to mild steel, a material which is stronger, more easily worked and which permits of lighter hull-construction than does iron, our builders were still further distanced by their competitors in the handling of this new metal—a handi- cap that lasted a number of years. I have before mentioned the ill-starred Collins fleet of North Atlantic steamships, which, in their day, led the van in this service. These vessels, built of wood and propelled by paddle-wheels, were designed by Steers of America fame. They were by far the finest passenger 236 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT, SHIPS ships of their time the world over. Sectional jealousies, joined to the disasters which befell two of them, com- parable with the loss of the Titanic a few years ago, were fatal to the enterprise. Thus failed our bid for leadership in the steam traffic of the North Atlantic, at the period when this important business was just begin- ning, and it passed into British hands, where it has con- tinued, in the main, ever since. A Trans-Paciric MAIL-LINER OF 1867. Many interesting American steamships were, how- ever, built and employed in other services during the decade from 1860 to 1870. An outstanding example of our best steam vessels of the time was the Vanderbilt, a side-wheeler of 3361 tons, then regarded as the fast- est steamship afloat. She was presented by Commodore Vanderbilt, her owner, to the government at the outbreak of the Civil War, and rendered useful service in the blockading squadron. | In the transpacific trade our flag flew over the Pacific Mail lines to the Orient and to Panama. At the latter PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP, 237 port mails and passengers, usually accompanied by a shipment of gold from the mines, were transshipped across the Isthmus to Aspinwall (now Colon), whence they were carried to New York in steamships which, with the Pacific vessels, composed what was then the finest and most modern fleet under our flag. Our over- sea trade on the Pacific, unlike that of the North Atlan- tic, continued to employ a number of steam liners all through the years up to the World War, to show our flag in the Far East. It is well to bear in mind that, while our foreign deep- sea fleet was losing ground, as compared with its posi- tion in earlier years, we were by no means abandoning the sea. The sailing trade around the Horn lasted, in some degree, right up to the opening of the Panama Canal. Out of Boston sailed many a tall square-rigger bound for India or Australia with ice from the New England lakes—a trade that held on till well into the eighties. This period saw the development of the splen- did schooners with four, five, even up to seven masts, such fore-and-afters as had never before been dreamed of. Many of them surpassed the tonnage of our largest ships of earlier days, and their lines showed, and still show, their family resemblance to the typical American sailing ships whose evolution we have traced from far back into antiquity. No doubt the American clipper sailing ship reached her finest expression in Donald McKay’s Great Republic. Types of fuller-bodied ships, stout, able, and hand- some, continued, however, to come from the Maine builders for many years after the Civil War. The last specimen of these wooden square-riggers was the four- 238 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS masted Aryan, in 1893. The iron sailing ship Dirigo was also a fine example of their skill. She was sunk early in the World War by a German submarine. The Down-East ship-builders still retain their well-merited reputation, and many of their shipwrights contributed their experience to the wooden fleet constructed during the War emergency. One of their ships, the Henry B. Hyde, a full-built vessel, deeply loaded, is credited with a passage from New York to San Francisco in 102 days, as late as 1909. A’ special interest attaches to the last of McKay’s great sailing ships, the Glory of the Seas, launched in 1869. Although she was by no means an extreme clip-' per, she was a very beautiful ship, which proved in 1874 by a ninety-five day record from New York to San Francisco that adverse conditions had not deprived our sailors of their skill. Her last Cape Horn voyage was made in 1885, and she was still afloat as a refrigerating ship at Tacoma, as late as 1921. Our monopoly of the coasting-trade has served to keep alive the breezy tradition of the sailing ship. Long after our square-riggers had grown scarce off-soundings, the coast horizon was flecked with the white sails of our handsome schooners, brigs, and barkentines, beginning to bear the special interest which attaches to a passing and romantic phase of seafaring. Meanwhile it was being found profitable to make up long tows of barges in the coastwise, lake and river trades. In the wake of powerful towing steamers the bulkier freights—coal, lumber, and so on—could thus be moved with great econ- omy. Many a lofty sailing ship, with her spars re- moved, has ended her days in this traffic. The full story PASSINGV OF THE, SAILING SHIP 239 of the risks and hardships of the barge trade has yet to be told, of wintry seas and breaking hawsers, of despair- ing men lost on drifting derelicts. Such a tale would remind us that seafaring, even in this twentieth century, still remains the most perilous of human occupations. SN 5 Bs 7 = aloes = ie Yh ("Ait A AN aS : ‘iit, Res Mes; AN f_ Y A Woopen FoRE-AND-AFTER, AND A STEEL SQUARE-RIGGER OF THE ’ "NINETIES. In tracing the course of the slow decline of our over- sea shipping we yet find repeated instances of native apti- tude for the sea. No better seamen are to be found than the fishermen out of Gloucester, first home of the schooner, and the neighboring ports. Far out to the eastward they ply their trade, accepting the ever-present risks of being sunk by the rushing transatlantic liners, or the loss of dories and their crews on the foggy banks 240 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS in search of cod and halibut, while closer inshore the mackerel are pursued from March till November, and whenever the glass (the barometer) begins to fall, the fishermen must bear away to seaward lest they be caught in a northeaster with the land close under their lee. The men who fish the outer banks—Brown’s Bank, La Have, and Western Bank, St. Peter’s, and the Grand Bank of Newfoundland—work the year around. Their skill and daring have become legendary. The schooners engaged in this industry, built on yacht-like lines, fast and able, are unequaled in the fishing fleets of Europe. They bear the honorable stains of toil, for they follow a rough, hard-driving trade, but whoever knows vessels will ap- preciate the craftsmanship of the men who have worked together to produce them, among them some of our most skilled designers of racing yachts. Studies initiated by the United States Fish\Commission in the early ’eighties with a view of providing the Bank fishermen with schooners that should be seaworthy as well as fast brought about the present type. Its starting point was the Fredonia, designed by Edward Burgess of cup-de- fender fame. She was 114 feet long, displacing 188 tons. Some years later the famous designer Crownin- shield (a descendant of the great Salem shipping family of that name) produced a model with the greatest draft at the bottom of the sharply raking stern-post, the fore- foot being cut away like a racing yacht, under a long overhanging bow. ‘These fishing schooners are justly renowned abroad, as they deserve to be. The racing between them and the Nova Scotia boats, manned with equal skill, has the keenest sporting interest. In all our vessels, whether driven by steam or borne PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP 241 along by the wind, can be traced the influence of our sea heritage. We are told that a scientist can construct the entire frame of a prehistoric monster froma fragment of bone—a tooth or a knee-joint. Just so the men of the sea could tell us, blindfolded, by the shape of a lathe- turned stanchion or the section of a moulding, whether a ship was American-built or not. Some of these details have persisted since the earliest days, and they reappear in the lake vessels and the river steamboats. With the tendency of our people to go at their problems in direct and practical ways, it is not surprising that they have shown the way with so many of the labor-saving devices that have characterized our ships. The same mental processes that led them to be first to bend a sail to the bare cross-jack-yard, to divide the topsails into the handy double rig, since universal, to apply hollow water-lines to their speedy vessels, reappear in the later vessels. | The Great Republic had been the first sailing ship to employ steam power for hoisting the sails and working the pumps, and the large schooners of the late nineteenth century went the limit in their steam appliances for han- dling sails and anchors, for steering-gear and even for electric lighting. The same tendency, be it said, ap- peared in the planning of the wartime Emergency Fleet. During these years the Great Lake builders created immense cargo vessels on original lines, “whalebacks,” “ore-pigs,” and the like, peculiar to the grain, coal, and ore trade on those waters, influenced by a season of, say, seven months in the year, when these bulk cargoes must be moved in tremendous volume, and they accom- plished wonders in their methods of operating them. 242 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS Meanwhile our protected coasting-trade set afloat a fleet of modern steamships unequaled in similar traffic elsewhere in the world. Along the North River docks of New York these liners offered (and still offer) an impressive perspective of seagoing vessels, stich a coast- ing-fleet as could not be rivaled in any foreign port in either hemisphere. Their voyages around Cape Hatteras to the Gulf were and are a test of staunchness and skill oe ee ae wea aa = 7 . AN AMERICAN COASTING LINER, 1900. calling for all the qualities required in deep-sea naviga- tion in any ocean. Many of the coastwise steamships in these and other services have exceeded the tonnage of most transoceanic merchant ships, and they show specially American features. The paddle-wheel steamship, direct descendant of Ful- ton’s Clermont, lingered in our deep-sea marine till well into the ’seventies, and our unrivaled lake and river services have always employed the paddle-wheel in many of their boats. In spite of its obvious advantages at sea, PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP 243 the screw propeller had met with the difficulties that attend all innovations, but by 1880 the application of the paddle-wheel to important ships in the foreign trade was hopelessly out of date. It is said that twin screws had been tried experimentally on the Hudson very early in the nineteenth century. However this may be, the cruiser Pawnee of Civil War days was equipped with twin screws, and Griffeths, her designer, even advo- cated the triple-screw ship at that early date. When the British steamer City of Paris, which afterwards figured in the American Line, appeared in 1888, it may be said that the case was won for the twin-screw method of propulsion in merchant vessels. The chance of dis- ablement from a fracture of the tail-shaft was thus re- duced by one-half, while a ship could also be maneuvered in the event of injury to the rudder by the alternate use of the propellers. After the eighties, great modern building and repair plants grew up, favored by government contracts for warship construction. South of Philadelphia on the Del- aware River, at Newport News; about New York; at Weymouth Fore River in Boston Harbor; at the Union Iron Works, near San Francisco; and at various other points were developed shipbuilding yards which were able within a few years to demonstrate their ability to meet any problems in the construction of modern ocean- going vessels. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, it became apparent that the sea-coast yards were over- coming the technical handicaps in modern steel ship- building and engine design that had so long hampered them. The new ships they were producing were well up to the standards of the best foreign practise. 244 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS The brave old square-riggers were growing fewer and fewer off-soundings, and more and more the sailorman was drifting “into steam.” The sullen clang of slice- bar and shovel, wielded by brawny, streaming stokers in the dazzling glare of open furnace doors was coming to replace the stamping cadence of the watch on deck to the hoarse topsail chantey, and greasy engineers, la- boring in the oily reek of the engine room, intent and taciturn, watched over the mighty masses of steel, as they rocked and thrust in their ceaseless task for days and weeks on end. To enter upon a technical treatise on marine engineer- ing would demand too much space for a work of this kind, but perhaps we may here venture to consider, in a general way, the progress made previous to the World War. In the form of engine which was employed in the earlier steamships, the steam passed from the boiler into the cylinder, thence, after expending but a fraction of its energy, into a condenser to be cooled into water again, and from there back into the boiler. This was followed in 1854 by the compound engine, in which the live steam passed through more than one cylinder before conden- sation. The triple-expansion engine, as its name im- plies, improved on the existing compound engines by using additional cylinders to extract more of the heat energy from the steam, and the quadruple-expansion engine went further in the same direction. Toward 1900 ships were provided with two, and even four, sets of engines, and about this time appeared the turbine. In this type, the live steam was driven through a “rotor” mounted directly on the propeller drive-shaft and pro- PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP 245 vided with a number of thin curved blades against which the steam was forced, thus causing it to revolve much in the manner of a turbine waterwheel in a mill. This engine, direct in its action instead of reciprocating, re- quired no cranks or connecting-rods, and thus did away with much vibration, and could besides be of much less weight and size than the older types. Smaller turbines were provided for reversing the propellers. What might be called the turbine phase of marine propulsion, result- ing from the improvements devised in England by the Hon. C. A. Parsons, came in with the Allan liner Vir- ginian in 1905, and within a year of that time such engines were being built in the United States. By this time, as a result of the efforts to find a fuel less bulky of stowage and more easily handled in the fireroom than coal, ships were being equipped with ap- pliances for the burning of oil under the boilers. The oil, being pumped into tanks aboard the vessel and fed through pipes to the heating points, did away with the troublesome shoveling and trimming incidental to coal. Ships for deep-sea voyages could stow oil enough, in many cases, to make their entire round voyages with- out being obliged to stop at coaling points which were often out of their most direct routes. The development of the internal combustion engine for automobiles and motor craft soon brought about, as was to be expected, a type of heavy-duty marine engine for large vessels. This was known as the Diesel engine, from its German designer. It consumed crude or slow-burning fuel oil in a row of upright cylinders, driving its crank-shaft in much the same manner as does the automobile motor. Its compactness and economy 246 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS led to its installation in many of the newer vessels, with excellent results. ? During the period which saw the advent of the great liners, sail power had gradually been reduced on steam- ships. In the early days after its introduction, steam had been merely auxiliary to the sails; then the sails had been auxiliary to the steam engines; finally, the sails disappeared altogether, and the masting with its com- plicated network of standing and running rigging, which derived from our most ancient nautical forebears, was replaced by mere poles for signaling and derricks for handling cargo. A sailing ship’s hull is forced along through the water by the pressure of the wind applied to immense levers in the form of masts, working often at a wide angle from the perpendicular. A steam vessel is pushed by a propeller wheel at her stern acting against the inert medium of the water. The differences in their behavior, under the influences of wind and wave, had naturally been the subject of much study. It was not till the com- promises required, so long as steamships carried sail- power, were no longer necessary, that many of the les- sons could be applied. The years from 1885 to the open- ing of the new century saw a very rapid departure, therefore, from the traditional ship-forms based on sail- propulsion. Steam vessels became flat on the floor, with keels running fore and aft along the outside on the “bilges,”’ where the flat bottom rounds up into the up- right sides, to reduce rolling in a seaway by the resist- ance. When the twin-screw steamship with triple- expansion engines became the standard in marine prac- tise much experiment went on, which still continues, in- PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP 247 fluenced by the additional propellers added on the later ships, in order to find the best form for the stern. The double bottom first appeared on the famous Great Eastern in 1858. When she tore an immense hole in her outer skin on a submerged rock, and remained tight and dry within, its value was demonstrated. The obvi- ous military advantages of the water-tight compartment system, too, had led to its development on warships to a high degree, and merchant vessels soon came to be divided into many inner cells, or boxes, which could be insulated from one another by water-tight doors between in the bulkheads, controlled from the bridge. Our withdrawal from the deep-sea carrying-trade made it necessary for our constructors, in order to fol- low the rapid developments abroad, to send representa- tives oversea, who were permitted by the courtesy, par- ticularly of the British builders, to perfect their knowl- edge in the plants and technical schools, This had its bearing on the vessels launched in the twenty years pre- ceding the Great War. The postal subsidy act of 1891 produced the St. Paul and St. Lomis, the first strictly modern transatlantic liners built in the United States. Some ten years later the Kroonland and Finland were built on the Delaware, while not long after a number of fine up-to-date steamships, of which the Manchuria may be taken as a representative, appeared in the lines running out of San Francisco. Notable as well were the great freighters built for the China trade out of our northwestern ports by the late James J. Hill. One of these, the Minnesota, did useful service in 1918 in the transport of troops to France. While these liners, in common with similar vessels all over the world, showed 248 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS only differences of detail from generally accepted prac- tises, they served to demonstrate that American builders, given an opportunity, were prepared to construct modern steamships equal to any in the world. The Great Lakes cargo carriers developed during this , iy f} Wy fy WY) A LAKE OrE-sHIP DISCHARGING CARGO. later period, which have largely succeeded to the odd whale-backs, so suggestive of the submarine, and to the steel towing barges, are enormous in size, holding per- haps fifteen thousand tons of ore. They are built of steel, high forward with a deck-house for the officers, on which is the navigating bridge. Then for several hundred feet, broken only by hatches for loading and PASSING OF THE SAILING SHIP, 249 discharging, runs the level deck, aft to the structure at the stern which houses the engines. The intermediate part of the hull is merely a huge steel trough to hold the red earthy ore, and can be filled or emptied in a few hours. American constructors, working in a native field, have here produced a unique type of cargo ship reduced to its simplest possible form. Not the least interesting feature of the lake trade is the titanic machinery for the dock-handling of these rough bulk cargoes. Rows of towering “bucket-unloaders,’ swaying in ponderous rhythm, transfer coal or ore at the rate of unbelievable thousands of tons in the course of a few hours. In 1914, at the outbreak of the War in Europe, our merchant fleet had a capacity of nearly twelve million dead-weight tons, of which less than one-tenth was em- ployed in trade with foreign ports. The two years fol- lowing, under the pressure of the sudden and immense demand for tonnage, saw many ships diverted from domestic to oversea employment. As it became evident that we were certain to be involved in the strife, meas- ures were taken to meet the situation, leading finally to the tremendous effort of 1918. The Emergency Fleet has been termed the greatest single industrial feat ever undertaken in history. It has been compared with the building of the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China. We are now to take account of this mighty effort, and of its results. CHAPTER XIV THE GREAT NEW FLEET OF THE WAR-TIME if I were concerned primarily with the economics of our shipping, I might go to great length in detailing the causes and costs of our prodigious effort during the World War in ship-building. But all that is recent, and those details may easily be found in the press of the last few years. My task is to trace the relation of this effort to our nautical tradition, and to picture How the ships and sailors sprang into being within a few short months. No such maritime expansion was ever known before in the history of the world, nor could any other nation have accomplished it. We have seen how, for almost a century in our his- tory, our ships were regarded as vital to our national welfare; how from the halting and difficult struggles of colonial beginnings, overcoming the handicaps of war, our wide-winged clippers came at length to be the noblest examples of merchant vessels on the seven seas; how the business of manning and handling them commanded the pride and interest of the nation. We have outlined the causes that led to our virtual withdrawal from the deep-sea carrying-trade, so that while three-fourths of our oversea commerce was carried in American ships in 1850, sixty years later they handled less than one-tenth; 250 > FLEET OF THE WAR-TIME 251 and we have also seen how the latent aptitude of our people for the sea has continued, in spite of all, to mani- fest itself, Our coastwise and lake traffic employed nearly seven million tons of shipping at the outbreak of the War. Our modern shipyards, though few in number, had demonstrated their ability, in naval and ocean-liner con- struction as well as in the fine ships they built for the coasting-trade, to produce vessels equal to any in the world. No prophet, or son of a prophet, however, could have foreseen that our merchant fleet would increase in two short years, from 1918 to 1920, by nine and a half mil- lion tons. Under the stress of war, vessels were built of wood and of concrete as well as of steel. The old- time shipwright, that wizard with the adze and topmaul, suddenly found himself called upon to impart his skill to hundreds of novices who had never seen a large vessel before. The wooden hulls were afloat in hundreds by the end of the War, destined to swing idly at their anchors in forlorn squadrons, but they had served a pur- pose. Said Admiral Benson of the Shipping Board: “We built many ships that were undesirable, to be sure, but they were only like the shots that were fired on the battlefields and never hit anything. It was inevitable some ships of this character should be turned out, but in the main the fleet built during the great emergency was good and favorably compared with foreign ships.” The notable fact was that we had men competent to build and handle all kinds of ships, and that such men were far more numerous than most people would have supposed. Men were found, as well, to repair the Ger- we eH PONE IG Ab at Race - iene PS iain agian OR - 252 THE TALE OF OUR MERCHANT SHIPS man ships interned in our ports, and to handle them with surpassing skill. These liners had had their boilers deliberately ruined by dry-firing and important parts of their machinery had been destroyed. The great Levia- than had been the Vaterland, largest ship in all the world, and she was making round trips, to France and back, all through the summer of 1918. For months she moved what came to an average of 400 men a day across the ocean. The Dutch vessels in our ports supplied more than half a million tons of available shipping, while other ships—British, Scandinavian, or Japanese—were chartered besides. From the Pacific a number of vessels were rushed through the Panama Canal to the Atlantic side, and the coastwise and lake fleets supplied a quantity of useful tonnage. Thus, before the ships of the Emer- gency Fleet began to come off the ways, might be found specimens of ship-construction in our merchant marine typical of many nations, and adapted to various pur- poses. Starting with this great fleet, it became imperative / to add new shipping out of our own national resources, to the utmost limit of our power. We can all remember the slogans, “ships will win the war,” “a bridge of ships to France,” and the rest. When, at the date of the Armistice, there were along our coasts no less than 384 centers of ship-construction with 1284 launching ways, more than double the number existing in the rest of the entire world, it might fairly be claimed that a thing without precedent in history had been accom- plished. With the close of the War it became necessary to take stock of our shipping: to separate the vessels which Ga FIN |r cea gh NN Ee sree | CUA erm S| en) eeeene |e al ue ol WON biter Wil (A WIE’, 24 al ARN In A WAR-TIME SHIPYARD. FLEET OF THE WAR-TIME ase might profitably be used on the trade routes of the ocean from those which, built under the inexorable urge of war, with its hurry and waste were not of types adapted to peace-time purposes. The fleet of the former class, containing hundreds of fine modern vessels, gives us ample ground for legitimate pride. Taken together with the admirable personnel set afloat during the war-effort, it proved beyond cavil that seafaring skill, equal to any conceivable demand, still resided in the American people. Even those who are but superficially informed about our manufactures know that the principle of quantity production by standardized methods is a native develop- ment.