Once at peace, England attended to her Navigation Acts and her customs duties. Goods once again were being sold in America at six times their value in England. Profits, freight charges and taxes made up the difference. The Molasses Act, an old legislative chestnut— honored usually in the breach—was restored and, worse, enforced. Writs of assistance—types of search warrants—were liberally issued in order to stamp out Yankee smuggling. Lord Sheffield warned England that shipbuilding in the Colonies was still gaining fast on the mother country. Some 20,000 tons were built in 1769, 24,000 in 1771, and 26,000 the following year. Smugglers and contrabandists already formed a new and well-to-do caste in American society.
For all their merchant vessels—Massachusetts alone was said to have had one ship for every one hundred inhabitants—the Colonies, of course, had no fighting ships of their own. They had always depended on the Royal Navy. Now, after 1776, the Royal Navy was intent on mopping them up. Thirty merchantmen were hastily armed and converted into quasi-warships by the thirteen American states but they were makeshift warriors at best. “Gentlemen seamen” were encouraged to sign on privateers though there was no shortage of qualified sailors. By the outbreak of the Revolution there were more people in Maine and New Hampshire, for example, employed in sailing and shipbuilding than in agriculture. These “gentlemen sailors” were not sailors at all but shopkeepers, clerks, professional men and God-knows-what-all. The privateers sailed out of the smaller ports— Marblehead, Salem and Beverly. They had to. The British had occupied Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston and Savannah. The flimsy American navy was no match for the British and was soon swept from the seas by Britannia’s frigates. The converted merchantmen did a good job of stinging the British lion, by raiding commerce and thereby raising insurance rates, but muskets and cutlasses were no match for broadsides and landing parties of Royal Marines.
Somehow or other, the American states muddled through their trial and the war was won. After Yorktown, the American merchant fleet had to be rebuilt. New England had lost practically all of its bottoms, some thousand ships. The whaling fleet was reduced; the fishing fleet all but destroyed. A sour-grapes Britannia did not choose to trade with her rebellious cousins so the New Englanders looked desperately for a market other than the Thames. The country was poor and floundering in a depression. It looked seaward for help. In 1784 the United States found it, in China. Samuel Shaw took the Empress of China—a 360-ton, copper-sheathed, modern vessel—from New York with a cargo of ginseng root, almost as beloved by Chinese as rhinoceros horn. The Empress of China reached Whampoa, on the Canton or Pearl River, on August 23, 1784. Supercargo Shaw got a cool reception at first but Yankee stubbornness paid off. When he returned to New York fifteen months later it was with a profit of $30,000 for his backers. Shaw became U.S. Consul in Canton, organizing a flourishing trade for Americans with the hongs operated by factors like Kwan Houqua—worth, himself, in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars. The New Englanders did not become paupers, either.
British merchants tried to divert Americans from China by buying up their cargoes at the Cape. The Yankees did riot mind this. They just hurried back home and then returned to China anyway. Elias Derby’s Peggy opened the India trade to Yankees with a cargo of cotton about this time and his Grand Turk followed the example of Shaw’s Empress in the China Seas. Too soon, however, the China market was glutted with ginseng and salt fish. So, heeding the advice of the fabulous John Ledyard, Bostonians tried their hands at fur trading with China via the Pacific Northwest Coast of America. They first sent the Columbia and Lady Washington under Captains John Kendrick and Robert Gray in 1787. This voyage to Nootka represented a Bostonian investment of $50,000. The Yanks found Britishers already on the scene. Captain John Meares, as a matter of fact, was indulging in shipbuilding, launching the Northwest America while the Americans were there. The New Englanders got right down to business, not in the least disturbed by the presence of the Britons. They traded $100 worth of chisels for $8,000 of pelts which Gray took to the China coast in the Columbia. After unloading the skins at $750 apiece, he took on a cargo of tea and sailed home around the world to Boston. This first circumnavigation by an American captain took three years and 41,899 miles but it firmly established Uncle Sam as one of the merchant marine powers of the world.
The lot of the American sailor at this time was still pretty fair. An ordinary seaman got $5 a month, an A.B. perhaps $7.50. Soon, as the China trade boomed, A.B.s were worth $18. By the year 1812, according to Senator Lloyd of Massachusetts, American seamen were averaging wages of $22.50 per month!
In 1796 Captain Jonathan Carnes brought a load of pepper home to Salem from Padang, Labuan, and other secret Sumatran ports. It was selling at thirty-seven cents a pound in the East Indies; it brought his backers a fantastic 700 per cent profit in Salem. By 1805 the pepper port of Salem was exporting to Europe seven and a half million pounds of the stuff per year, as rivals tracked down Carnes’s secret Spice Islands ports.
In 1791 Captain James Rowan brought the first American vessel, the Eliza, through San Francisco’s Golden Gate to trade with the Spaniards. That same year, Captain James Devereux took the ship Franklin to Japan to begin, along with the Eliza, the short-lived pre-Perry period of U.S.-Japanese commercial intercourse. In 1802 Nathaniel Bowditch made his great contribution to our merchant marine and all others, when he published his Practical Navigator. Later, Matthew F. Maury brought new glory to our merchant service with his Physical Geography of the Sea.
Before the War of 1812 shipowners discovered the great craving for ice in the West Indies—all mat rum and no ice! By 1856, according to Board of Trade reports, 146,000 tons of ice were shipped out of Boston every year to American, West Indian, East Indian, Filipino and Australian ports. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, American shipowners appeared, already, to have acquired the Midas touch. Trade was booming. Any sailor worth his salt could get a berth and at first-rate wages. When John Barry, the first Commodore of the United States Navy, left the merchant marine, he called it “the finest and first employ in America,” and so it was—for a time.
The shipping trade caused Philadelphia to double its population in the years 1790-1800. Congress helped the merchant marine by putting a 10 per cent discount on import duties for cargo hauled to America in American bottoms. Other legislation followed. By 1790 Robert Fitch was drawing the curtain on the age of steam. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin exploded the cotton trade into an export business of gigantic proportions. Our shipyards were turning out fleeter and fleeter ships, every sixth of which was “sold foreign.”
Our merchant marine was not entirely free of annoyances, however, during this period. Both France and Britain were seizing our ships during the Napoleonic Wars. And Britain seized our men. Our neutrality was a farce. In only seven years the French captured $20,000,000 worth of our cargo by deliberately luring our ships to Europe and entrapping them in French-held ports. To protect our cargoes, the United States built the frigates Constitution, United States and Constellation and attracted the cream of our seafaring men to duty by offering them wages of $15 to $17 per month, almost double that of an A.B. in the merchant trade. (Later, however, A.B.’s wages would zoom to more than twenty dollars.) The United States whipped France in a series of sharp actions which constituted our Undeclared War with France. This “police action” should have taught us the intimate relationship between a merchant marine and a navy, but it did not. Once the quasi-war was over, the Government made the mistake (which was to become habit-forming in our history) of cutting the Navy to the bone. Ships were sold or decommissioned. Instead of blasting Algerine galleys out of the water, the United States preferred to pay heavy tribute to the Barbary pirates for the privilege of doing business with Europe. Britain had her own troubles with the Barbary Coasters but enjoyed their harassment of the United States. (This prevented the Mediterranean from becoming a Yankee lake.) Duri
ng this first decade of the nineteenth century, our Navy languished but our merchant fleet doubled.
As landsmen began to look westward toward an always retreating frontier, the wages of laborers on shore crept past the rate for skilled seamen who were still getting around $10 a month in pre-war days. The sailors complained but no one listened. They tried direct action, going on strike in New York in November 1803. They demanded $14 a month. They marched through the streets, singing and shouting and colliding with constables. What did they get? They got sore throats, lumps on the head, a few weeks in jail and—$10 a month.
Many Britishers joined the American merchant marine, for ten dollars looked good to them. They could easily buy a forged certificate of American citizenship for about a dollar on any water front. The Royal Navy began to ignore these documents. Anyway, they claimed, “Once an Englishman, always an Englishman.” They stopped U.S. ships and impressed men whom they took to be British subjects. And they took for British subjects those tars who appeared to be the most able-bodied among the seamen. When Silas Talbot took out writs of habeas corpus to rescue impressed American seamen from the British Royal Squadron at Jamaica, as early as 1797, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker commanded his officers to ignore them. If Americans on board British vessels tried to get word to an American consul, they were brutally flogged. Two frigates lay right off New York, virtually blockading the port, making every incoming ship heave to. One of the frigates, in firing on the sloop Richard, killed a sailor, John Pierce, in 1806. This death would not be forgotten by America’s war hawks. President Jefferson built seventy little gunboats but did little else, preferring strict neutrality in the troubles which were, after all, those of Napoleon and John Bull, not Uncle Sam. With Jefferson’s embargo of 1807, exports dropped from $49,000,000 to $9,000,000. Idle ships clogged the harbors of New England even though the smugglers worked overtime. The British grew more and more high-handed and the embargo was junked after sixteen months. By 1810 our deep-sea commercial fleet stood at 984, 269 tons, a high point in our history. It would not reach this figure again until 1843, and then it would skid down to only 820,000 tons in 1900, in spite of the phenomenal growth of the United States.
The jingoist war hawks got up a list of 6,000 men reputed to have been impressed into the Royal Navy from American ships. The anti-war faction in New England released a rival list which reported only thirty-five bona fide cases of impressment and only twelve of these involved Americans. Boston did not want a war with her best customer. Who the devil cared about a few miserable seamen out of 40,000 mariners, anyway? The war hawks cared. At least they cared superficially, when it suited their purpose—which was to get the United States into a war with Great Britain. Britain’s repeal of the Orders in Council, which had stopped our ships bound for the continent, came too late. War was declared on June 18, 1812, by the United States, ready to face Great Britain’s 800-vessel navy with our sixteen warships and a rabble-in-arms of 7,000 men.
The War of 1812 began with a few naval victories for the United States such as the Constitution’s capture of the Guerriere, thanks to the Yankee frigate’s crew of skilled merchant mariners, many of whom, in the words of Captain Isaac Hull, “had never been on an armed vessel before.” But, subsequently, the United States suffered a sequence of disastrous defeats on both land and sea. By sheer weight of numbers, the Royal Navy swept the American coast. Only privateers had a heyday against the British, slipping out through the blockade. Commanders like Wild Tom Boyle of the Chasseur raided the English coast and Boyle even announced a paper blockade of all ports in Great Britain and Ireland as a one-man answer to the Royal Navy’s blockading of our ports. When Napoleon fell, veterans poured ashore to help Pakenham conquer New Orleans. They found they had a b’ar by the tail in Louisiana, however, and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Andy Jackson’s western sharpshooters. But the war was ended and, once again, Uncle Sam set about rebuilding a shattered merchant fleet.
In 1819 the Savannah crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool partially under steam. The United States, however, still preferred to place her blue chips on the fleet sailing craft of Baltimore and New York. A group of New Yorkers, in 1816, had pooled their resources, setting up the Black Ball Line of transatlantic packets—the Amity, the Pacific, the Courier and the James Monroe. Daring, driving captains working hard-pressed crews made faster and faster passages to England and back. The Red Star Line and the Swallow Tail Line followed. The Yanks began to take away the tea trade from the Lime-juicers at this time, too, with remarkable passages by Bully Waterman, Phil Dumaresq and others.
And the sailor? What of him, the “sterling seaman” of, say, 1816, when on the Cleopatra’s Barge even the Negro cook had known his navigation? He was no more. Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he crossed the Atlantic on one of Enoch Train’s packets, took notice of the crew: “Jack has a life of risks and incessant abuse, and the worst pay.” In Boston the seamen had a spokesman in the sky pilot, Father Edward Thompson Taylor, an ex-sailor himself. An orphan, Taylor had gone off to sea at the ripe old age of seven. Taken prisoner from the Black Hawk by the British in the War of 1812, he found his calling when he began reading prayers to fellow prisoners in Halifax. Upon his return to New York he founded the Seamen’s Bethel and for forty years tried to help the poor sailor. His efforts were not enough to arrest the plunge toward degradation of the sailor’s trade.
Now, more and more of the forecastle contingent were foreign-born. America as well as Britain bred a race of “packet rats”—English and Liverpool Irish of the lowest class and instincts, handier with a dagger than a sail needle. What Americans there were tended to be green farm boys who arrived on ship in everything from homespuns to buckskins. They were called “joskins” and “raynecks” (greenhorns). They were ridiculed and hazed mercilessly by the packet-rat scum. Though once the nation had proudly sent its sons to sea, parents now would as soon send their boys to the Tombs. At the same time that agriculture, the frontier and the growing cities were calling young men landward, influential colleges like the University of Pennsylvania were using for texts such works as Thompson’s Social Science and National Economy, which preached “[Jeremy] Bentham thought the worst possible use that could be made of a man was to hang him; worse still is to make a common sailor of him.”
With all the deterioration of personnel in Yankee commercial fleets, it was still strictly “no contest” between the Americans and Britons in the 1840s and 1850s. The Yankees, with their fleet “greyhounds of the sea,” simply outclassed the limeys. English sailors jumped to U.S. ships whenever possible for the better pay, food and equipment. Although the Dutch put a steamer into operation to their American possessions, the United States banked on bigger and better sailing craft. John W. Griffiths designed ships “with a dolphin’s head and a mackerel’s tail.” William H. Aspinwall’s Rainbow, with its dead-rise hull, its racy, yachtlike lines, burst upon the scene to help steal the China tea trade away from the Britishers. With the California Gold Rush, the American merchant marine hit its zenith. The finest sailing ships in the world, bar none, were counted in its fleets—the Stag Hound, the Flying Cloud, the Telegraph, the Challenge and other beauties from the yards of William H. Webb or Donald McKay. Given any kind of breeze these extreme clippers could outrun the lumbering steamships of the day. (But, sometimes, there was no wind.)
Ships like Captain Samuel Samuels’ Dreadnought, nicknamed “The Wild Boat of the Atlantic,” and “The Flying Dutchman,” were the most beautiful vessels ever built. But many of them were “blood boats.” Americans built them but foreigners manned them. Wages had dropped to $8 a month as more hands were required to man giants like the Challenge or the Great Republic. The foreguard got more and more incompetent and the afterguard grew tougher apace. Successful skippers had to become drivers, cracking on all sail, and the sobriquet “Bully” became common. Bully Waterman, Bully Forbes, Bully Hayes and Bully Hale (of the Splendid) were men who earned this unc
omplimentary epithet.
Technical advances in shipbuilding were dramatic and inspiring but they were in no way paralleled by any advance in the social condition of their personnel. Quite the contrary. The sailor remained disenfranchised, bereft of simple civil rights, denied the life of a family man. Once a ship was at sea, the captain was lord and master, dictator and tyrant. Once in deep water, windjammermen’s few rights went overboard. There was “no law off soundings.” Nor were there holidays or Sundays off soundings, either. The Philadelphia Catechism was no joke:
Six days thou shalt labor
And do all thou art able
And on the seventh
Holystone the deck and scrape the cable.
Flogging was prohibited by a statute of 1850 but nothing was said about the laying on of hands, belaying pins and marlinspikes. Seamen lived hard and died hard. The American sailor became America’s “Forgotten Man,” at the very time the beautiful ships he was crewing were making unforgettable history on the seas. When anyone thought of them at all, it was in a patronizing, tut-tutting, paternalistic way. As Robert Morton Hughes wrote in Admiralty Law, “They are improvident and wild, easily imposed upon and the constant prey of designing men.” Truly, sailors were more to be pitied then censured. They were kept at sea by violence and the threat of punishment by laws making their leaving a “hell ship” a crime. As a result of the notorious Challenge case, leading newspapers like the influential Daily Alta California briefly called for “the protection of our seamen,” but their concern was short-lived.
Edward K. Collins tried to answer the Challenge of Samuel Cunard’s English steamers in 1847 with his Collins Line. He was helped by an 1845 Act of Congress which subsidized mail lines “to provide efficient mail services, to encourage navigation and commerce, and to build up a powerful fleet for use in case of war.” For a brief bit, the Collins Liners beat the Cunarders. But, after losing two ships, the American line began to fall behind its competitor. Congress gave up the mail subsidy and the American merchant marine was whipped. If the entire nineteenth century is the story of the decline of the American merchant marine, the years 1861-1875 form a chapter of pure disaster. The proportion of our foreign commerce carried in our own ships sank from 65 per cent to 26 per cent. The Civil War continued the disruption of our merchant fleet, as did the clanking steamers of European powers. Confederate privateers and batteries destroyed a million tons of shipping. At the war’s end, the ebb tide had really set in. The United States merchant marine lagged far behind that of Great Britain. Wallowing in the latter’s wake, she still clung to the faith in wind ships while all the world hailed the seagoing “kettles” and began to “retool” for the Suez Canal. By 1869 the. North American continent was belted together with the twin bands of steel of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. Boxcars now began to gnaw away at the freightage customarily piled on docks and in American holds.
Shanghaiing Days: The Thrilling account of 19th Century Hell-Ships, Bucko Mates and Masters, and Dangerous Ports-of-Call from San Francisco to Singapore Page 2