Chapter XII: The Merchant Marine

A full account of the merchant marine of Cape Cod would require not a chapter but a volume. Its tentative beginnings, its gradual rise to the glory of the forties and fifties, and its inevitable decline, comprise too vast and varied a subject for a condensed narrative. So in this chapter no mention can be made of many names that in their day were great, or of many ships that spread their masters’ greatness from sea to sea. No foreign voyage is insignificant; every captain is in a very real sense his country’s ambassador. Especially was this true in the early days of our nation, when we were yet a people unknown and untested, with the world before us to antagonize or conciliate, and no one but our shipmasters to represent us. These men neither antagonized nor conciliated. Instead, by their shrewdness, resourcefulness, and vigor, they won for their country the reluctant and sometimes acidulated respect of the world.

The Cape has so long been associated in men’s minds with the sea and with those that come and go in ships, so large a part of her population has until very recently been composed of master mariners, either active or retired, and such a wealth of salty tradition has clustered about her name, that the casual observer is deceived with false pictures. He sees the Pilgrim Fathers themselves sailing the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor with their own hands, and shouting orders to each other in a language of tarry technicalities. He sees the very earliest settlements that our forefathers made on the Cape as busy seaports, their harbors white with sails, and the settlers themselves, whenever they happened to be ashore, walking with a nautical roll. But the facts--it cannot be too often emphasized--were very different. It was not until years later that, with their houses built, their mills grinding, and their crops growing, Cape men turned their attention to the two most intricate arts that they ever mastered: the art of building ships and the art of sailing them. The first vessels that they built--aside from fishermen and whalers--were packets to run between Cape towns and Boston and New York. And naturally enough, for the discomforts of overland travel in stage-coaches were so great that only philosophers, like Thoreau, or men of God, like Timothy Dwight, dared face them. Most wise men on the Cape knew the way to China by sea better than they did the way to Boston by land. The Cape-Codder who had once undergone this journey, and who again found it necessary to visit Boston, would wait, if necessary, a month until a chance lumber schooner or fisherman could carry him by water. One man, who by a ghastly accident had been harpooned on a whaler off Provincetown, was rushed to Boston in a whaleboat rowed by a double crew working in relays. It became (and this is a happier motive for the trip) a common practice for young Provincetown and Truro fishermen to carry their sweethearts to Boston in their schooners when the time came for selecting a trousseau. Another incentive for starting packet lines was the enormous quantity of salt that was being made everywhere on the Cape. Much of this was used by local fishermen, but there remained a surplus for export, and the water route was the only way to carry it. There were also occasional cargoes of onions and flax. Thus the appearance of packets was inevitable. They were needed for both passengers and freight, and, with the prospect of sure returns on their investment, local merchants began to build them and to operate them. Framed by townsmen from timber growing near by, commanded and manned by Cape men and boys, these craft were as complete and absolute products of the region as anything made by man can be. The inhabitants regarded them with far more than a business interest. They looked on them with a pride and affection that was curiously allied to the pride and affection that they felt for their husbands, brothers, and sons who sailed them.

There were often two or three packets hailing from a village, and they usually made, among them, three trips a week to Boston and back. One, the Northern Light, of Provincetown, about 1830, ran to and from Boston three times a week from March to December--a performance unparalleled by sail before or since. No vessels of their size were ever kept more immaculate or were more promptly refitted or discarded when they began to show signs of age. Their beauty and comfort were almost as important in their owners’ eyes as their speed and safety. One in particular, the schooner Postboy, of Truro, has been called ‘the finest specimen of naval architecture and passenger accommodation ever seen in Bay waters.’ Her cabin was finished in solid mahogany and bird’s-eye maple; her draperies were of silk. She was at once fast and comfortable, the pride of her captain, Zoeth Rich.

There is no keener rivalry than the rivalry between towns of any district, and no more exciting sport than boat-racing. When these two factors combine, when the men concerned are Yankees, and when the question of pecuniary investment is also involved, the cords of competition will be stretched extremely taut. This was the situation that existed between the Cape Cod packets, their owners, and their captains. No sooner did the Postboy appear at Provincetown than the merchants of Eastham would see what they could do to go her one better. If Truro appeared with a new flier, Wellfleet within a month was laying the keel of a bigger and faster craft. If local timber and local talent were thought unequal to the task, vessels were ordered from other places where it was supposed newer methods obtained, for it is with shipbuilders even as it is with prophets.

The best example of this sort of rivalry occurred between the towns of Barnstable and Yarmouth. Yarmouth, about 1840, had a sloop, the Commodore Hull, that was rightly considered the finest and fastest on the coast. There was not a packet captain on the Bay who had not been chagrined by having her boil up from astern, pass him to windward, and beat him to Boston by a margin that was measured in hours. Barnstable stood this as long as she could, and then two of her leading citizens, Captains Matthias Hinckley and Thomas Percival, went up the Hudson River to contract for a new packet that would beat the Yarmouth wonder. The result was the sloop Mail. On their first rival voyage for Boston, the two vessels crossed Barnstable Bar abreast, leaving behind them two villages wild with excitement, and many wagers between the inhabitants of each. The watchers from the shore could see no change in their relative positions; neck and neck they tore along before a fresh southerly breeze until they were hull down and lost to sight. The new Barnstable vessel, however, fulfilled her destiny and nosed out the Commodore Hull, sliding into Central Wharf a bare three lengths ahead of her rival. But the Yarmouth citizens were loyal and declared that the Mail’s victory was an accident, or was perhaps due to the fact that both Captains Hinckley and Percival had sailed her; and that the Commodore Hull was still the faster sailer.

This famous packet had other rivals right at home--chief among them being the Eagle’s Flight, commanded by Captain Ansel Hallett. The competition between these two Yarmouth vessels was almost as keen as that between the neighboring towns. No records exist to show which was the faster; but there was no doubt in the mind of the bard who composed this lively stanza:

‘O! the Commodore Hull, she sails so dull
It made all the crew look sour,
While the Eagle’s Flight was out of sight
In less than half an hour.’

A trip to Boston by packet, even when there was no one to race against, was by no means a dull affair. For one thing, there was the uncertainty how long the passage would take; it might last anywhere from six hours to two days, and the passengers made the most of their holiday. High and low, rich and poor, were on an equal footing, for the crowded decks and cabins (there were anywhere from twenty-five to fifty passengers on these little vessels) prohibited all exclusiveness. There might be a deep-water captain on his way to Boston to take his ship out to China; he kept the ship’s company entertained with tales of deep waters, while others talked of record fares of cod, great schools of stranded blackfish, of local politics and national policy. The meals were plain, but abundant, and cost twenty-five cents. The fare for a round trip was $1.50.

As soon as a returning packet was sighted at Barnstable or Dennis or Wellfleet, a flag was run up, on a pole perched inland on the highest available hill, to notify the South-Siders. Since oftener than not the vessel was bringing home a shipmaster who had left his vessel in Boston and who was returning to the Cape after a year’s voyaging on the other side of the world, it is easy to imagine the excitement that attended the hoisting of this signal and the scenes that took place at the little wharves along the Bay shore. Joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy they saw, and healthy activity and moderate profits.

The importance of the packets to the Cape, however, was farther-reaching than the mere profits to their owners and convenience to the chance traveler or salt-maker. To be sure, they kept business brisk alongshore with plenty of work for the rigger and ship-chandler and an active turnover for the general storekeeper; so much so that when the railroad finally stretched its way to Provincetown, and the packets by the same token vanished forever, the opinion of one longshoreman, who found himself idle and the wharves empty, was, ‘George, the railroad is a cuss!’ But their real importance was that they served as the primary school for seafaring, and that, unlike some schools, they furnished their pupils with incentive to fare farther and reach higher, until many a youngster who began his career coiling halyards on a Dennis packet, finished on the quarterdeck of a clipper ship, establishing a new record across the Atlantic.

Such a _cursus honorum_ is neither theoretical nor imaginary. Captain Joseph H. Sears, of East Dennis, left the little packet Combine to command full-rigged ships on foreign voyages. So did Captain Dean Sears, of the same town. Mr. Edgar Jones, of West Barnstable, an ex-seafaring man who spent his last years sailing parties around Nine Mile Pond in a jaunty little sloop, and who was in his day first mate of such ships as the Radiant, Comet, and Royal Arch, told the author that his first desire to go to sea came to him when, as a boy, he watched the sloop Mail leaving her wharf in Barnstable for Boston. How could it be otherwise? What youngster could sail into Boston Harbor on the Mail or Modena or Young Tell, and there see the spars of tall ships cutting the sky with their intricate tracery of rigging, or watch the strange and varied cargoes derricked up through their hatches, without longing to join the ranks of the conquerors and command those towering ships that would carry him to the ends of the earth?

So the packets, before they died and became history, opened the eyes of the young Cape-Codders to the roadsteads of the world; and this, if it had been all, would have justified their existence. As to their death, it was inevitable, and was due in the main to two causes. Salt-making began to be abandoned, for salt mines supplanted the old way of evaporation. Then came the railroad, which reached village after village along the Cape until it came roaring into Provincetown and steamed out with everything, passengers and freight, that the packets had carried.

The little vessels themselves fared variously. Some became fishermen; others continued a losing struggle with the railroad until they grew old and were condemned. One, the famous Northern Light, of Provincetown, was sold to owners on the Pacific Coast and was wrecked on her way round, in the Straits of Magellan. Another was sold for a pilot boat in New Orleans.

But steam in another form had already cut heavily into the business of the pioneer packets. The steamboat Naushon in 1857 ran from Provincetown to Boston and touched at other points on the north shore of the Cape. The steamer Acorn, of Sandwich, followed a few years later and plied back and forth until she was sold for a blockade-runner in the Civil War and was sunk by accident off the Carolinas. The George Shattuck and the Longfellow continued until the eighties, when the silting up of all the Cape harbors except that of Provincetown, the increasing efficiency of the railway, and the general depression of all business on the Cape, sounded their knell.

The wider horizons that young Cape sailors had caught glimpses of from the decks of the packets lured them in increasing numbers into deep water. Even before the Revolution, a few had followed the gleam. Timothy Thornton had grown rich by foreign trade as early as 1671, and Chatham boasted a far voyager or two in 1740. But most of the colonial seafaring was for codfish or whales. After the Revolution, however, the case was different. As soon as the new country got her bearings, she started out with energy, tripped over the Embargo of 1807, stagnated through the War of 1812, and then started afresh toward the great decade of the fifties. And from 1815 to 1860, it is safe to say that no part of the Atlantic Coast prospered more mightily than Cape Cod.

One should realize at the outset of this period the fundamental difference so far as the Cape is concerned, between deep-water navigation and the point-to-point work of the packets. The packets sailed from every little creek and harbor alongshore. Such harbors were impossible to vessels of deeper draught; nowhere along the Cape, except at Provincetown, was there a harbor fit for sheltering big ships, nor were there any facilities for loading and unloading them. Our merchant captains, therefore, sailed from other ports--from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore--and returned to their homes on the Cape between voyages only. No Cape town ever saw the graceful hulls and rakish masts of clipper ships tied up alongside her wharves or swinging at anchor in her roadsteads.

On the other hand, the shipowners of every port on both coasts of the United States were eager to get Cape men to command their vessels and transact their business in the far corners of the world. From 1815 to the decline of American shipping in the eighties, her captains carried every sort of cargo to every sort of port; encountered everything that can be encountered at sea (mutinous crews, calms, typhoons) and every sort of trickery that can be encountered on land, from the barefaced shanghaiing of crews to the devious business practices of the Orient. And, to the credit of Yankee resource and valor, it may truthfully be said that they seldom came off losers. It will be worth while to follow some of them to sea.

One of the early long-voyage Cape-Codders was Captain John Kendrick, who was born in Harwich in 1740. He is a proper figure to begin with, not because he was an example of the best the Cape produced, but because he was active at the outset of American seafaring, and, in fact, had helped to create it by commanding the privateers Fanny and Marianne during the Revolutionary War. Four years after the war, a group of Boston merchants, fired by a chance remark of the celebrated Captain Cook, of South Sea fame, decided, since Britain had slammed her doors against us, to take a financial flier by opening a Northwest fur trade. The scheme involved gigantic distances over a route much of which was uncharted. The first leg of the voyage was round the Horn and up to Nootka Sound off the Oregon Coast; thence the course lay across the Pacific to the China Coast, where the adventurers traded their furs for silk; then south and west through the China Sea and across the Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, and northwest across the Atlantic to Boston.

The men who invested their money in so hazardous an enterprize naturally wanted the hardiest and most courageous seaman they could find to take command. They selected Captain Kendrick. He set sail from Boston in 1787 in a stumpy little ship, eighty-three feet long, named the Columbia; with him as first lieutenant, in command of the little sloop Lady Washington, sailed Robert Gray, of Boston. They beat their way round Cape Horn, with flooded decks, the crews rotten with scurvy, cruised north by the west coast of South America, skirted the long coast of California (San Francisco was not then in existence), and finally dropped anchor in Nootka Sound near what is now Vancouver Island.

Kendrick ordered all hands ashore, and built a big shack in which to spend the winter while trading for sea otter with the Indians. At this point the Captain’s character began to disintegrate. He had not shown himself a ‘nimble leader’ (to quote Gray’s phrase) on the way out, but had wasted a month at the Cape Verde Islands and ten days more at the Falklands. Having now at last reached Nootka, he stayed there in idleness all winter, allowing Gray to do all the cruising for skins. In the early summer, when enough had been collected to fill the Columbia, Kendrick, instead of sailing with his cargo to China, turned the command of the larger vessel over to Gray, who promptly set out across the Pacific, leaving the nominal commander of the expedition to his own devices in the Lady Washington.

Kendrick spent the summer pleasantly enough in exploring and trading, and went as far north as Barrell Sound in Queen Charlotte Islands, where the Indians stole some clothing from him. As punishment, he seized two of their chiefs, bound one leg of each down the barrel of a cannon, and pretended that he was about to set them off. The cruel bluff succeeded; the other Indians in terror returned the stolen goods, but the Captain was not satisfied. Realizing that he had burned his bridges so far as trading with these Indians was concerned, he demanded all the skins in the village, paid the usual trade price for them, and headed for China. He took his time, as usual, stopping at one of the Hawaiian Islands, where he found sandalwood growing wild. This suggested possibilities; he left three men there to cut enough for a cargo, and reached China in January, 1790.

Here he spent a year and two months disposing of his skins, and rerigged the Lady Washington as an hermaphrodite brig. Neither a fever which he contracted, nor the hostility of Chinese officials, who made things as hard as they could for him, can account for such a waste of time. Clearly he was becoming demoralized. When (in March, 1791) he finally did leave the China Coast, he was heavily in debt. He headed east and very foolishly visited Barrell Sound again, supposing that the two years which had elapsed had given the Indians time to forget his previous treatment of them. Under pretense of friendly trading, they sprang a surprise attack on his vessel and very nearly took her. But they were finally repulsed, and Kendrick, with wanton malignity, killed as many as he could even while they were retreating in canoes. That he had abandoned all idea of returning home appears from the fact that he bought a great tract of wild land on Vancouver Island from the Indians, and built himself a log house which he called Fort Washington. Here Gray, who again arrived from Boston via Cape Horn, found him living at ease.

After this the Captain made only one more voyage to China. He started another, but got no farther than the Hawaiian Islands, where he found life so agreeable that he spent the last half of the winter loafing about Kauai, where the sandalwood grew. Returning there the next fall, after another summer on the Northwest Coast, Kendrick met Captain Brown, of the British navy, at Oahu, and was killed in an exchange of salutes. The Englishman’s cannon, by some ghastly accident, was loaded. So died a man who had left Boston seven years before a respected merchant captain, and had degenerated into little more than a South Sea trader.

Such was the beginning of the Northwest fur trade, one of the earliest branches of our country’s maritime activity. Other Cape men were quick to follow the long wake of Kendrick--notably Captain William Sturgis, of Barnstable, and his mate and fellow townsman Daniel Bacon. Captain Sturgis forms the sharpest contrast to Kendrick. At sixteen he sailed to the Northwest Coast as foremast hand on the Eliza, of Boston, and returned as third mate. A few years later, after bringing the Caroline back to Boston from the Hawaiian Islands, he was given command of the Atahualpa, one of Theodore Lyman’s vessels, and with Bacon as mate, he made another voyage to the Northwest coast. In 1820, Captain Sturgis retired from the sea to start the firm of Bryant and Sturgis, one of the oldest and soundest Northwest trading houses of Boston. Captain Sturgis’s experiences with the Indians were always of the friendliest kind. He learned their language, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there was as much of the missionary as of the trader in his dealings with them. Apropos of their occasional attacks on American ships, he writes: ‘It would be easy to show that these fatal disasters might have been averted by a different treatment of the natives and by prudence and proper precaution on the part of their civilized visitors.’ But though Captain Sturgis never had any trouble with Indians, he once had a battle with a fleet of Chinese pirates that makes Kendrick’s brush with the natives of the Queen Charlotte Islands look like a cockfight.

It was the Captain’s last voyage in the Atahualpa. She lay one day in August anchored in the Macao Roads. Bacon had been sent ashore on some business or other, and hardly had he landed when a fleet of piratical junks--sixteen in number--swooped down upon the ship. Sturgis, a cigar clenched in his teeth, put up a terrific fight, for every merchantman went armed, and the Captain, although short-handed owing to the absence of Bacon and his boat’s crew, had firearms aplenty and poured out shot after shot from his howitzers, while the crew peppered the decks of the pirates with musket balls. Knowing well enough the character of his assailants, he placed a barrel of powder on deck and announced to his crew that if the pirates once got possession of the ship, he would touch it off and blow them all to eternity together--yellow men and white.

Bacon heard the guns and rushed to the shore with his boat’s crew, where he shoved off, despite the advice of his friends, who told him that it was suicide. How he got through the swarm of pirates and reached the side of the blood-streaked Atahualpa is a mystery; but he succeeded, and owing very largely to this reënforcement, Captain Sturgis was able to keep the Chinamen at bay until he had worked his vessel up to a place of safety under the guns of Macao forts. The commander of the pirate fleet was afterwards captured and executed by the Chinese process of hacking to death, known as ‘the thousand cuts.’ The moral effect of this episode on the pirates was as beneficial as its immediate effect was disastrous to their leader, and American vessels and American masters were from then on regarded with no small respect by the inhabitants of Canton and Macao.

Just before the turn of the century, European wars switched some Yankee shipowners, who were willing to take a long chance for big profits, away from the Northwest Coast, into neutral trade with France. Food was so scarce in that beleaguered country that a cargo of provisions was worth almost any price, but the difficulties involved were twofold--first, to get across the Atlantic without being picked up by a hostile frigate, and second, to collect from the starving Frenchmen. The business called for very different qualifications from those demanded in the Northwest and China trade. Open powder barrels had no effect on naval officers; patience and diplomacy were of more avail than cutlasses in extracting payment from revolutionary Frenchmen; and patience and diplomacy are attributes which we do not always associate with the American temper, least often of all, perhaps, with the temper of American shipmasters. But consider the account that Captain Elijah Cobb, of Brewster, gives us of his difficulties with the French Government and his subsequent visit to Paris.

Captain Cobb was born in 1768 in what is now Brewster, but was then a part of Harwich. At the age of twenty-six he sailed out of Boston in command of the brig Jane bound for Cadiz. This was during the Reign of Terror, when Robespierre was supreme. Cobb’s vessel was captured by a French frigate and taken into Brest. His situation looked hopeless, for his papers had been seized, and without papers his claim to the ship was worthless. He appealed, as a matter of form, to the _chargé d’affaires_, and was told that he must exercise patience and that in time the Government would do the right thing. The officials were as good as their word, for in six weeks Cobb was allowed to sell his cargo, receiving payment in bills of exchange on Hamburg, payable in fifty days. He went to Paris to get back his papers, riding three days and nights without sleep, and passing the remains of a butchered courier strewn about the road, together with fragments of master, postilion, and horses. This was a mild prologue, however, to the scenes he was to witness, for he subsequently watched a thousand persons mount the scaffold to be guillotined.

But the young Yankee captain had something else to do besides standing round at executions. He had to recover his papers, and these were not forthcoming. He pestered the office of what was called ‘the 23rd department,’ until he was forbidden the premises. Then by chance some one told him to try the great Robespierre himself. Cobb, nothing daunted, followed this advice, explained his predicament to the great man, secured the papers, and reached Hamburg just before the French agent there stopped payment.

For the next fifteen years or so Cobb sailed various vessels to various ports, now and then smuggling Medford rum ashore on the Irish Coast, but meeting with no startling adventures until, one August morning in 1812, while returning from Cadiz to Boston, he was captured on the edge of the Grand Banks by an armed British schooner and carried to St. Johns. Here he found about twenty other American captains living in comfortable captivity, and twenty-seven American prize vessels. This was the first he knew of the War of 1812. In the course of a week an exchange of prisoners was made, and all the Americans sailed out of St. Johns, landing two days later in New York, whence Cobb made his way to Harwich and walked in on his wife at midnight. He found her sitting up in bed, reading his last letter and conjuring up in her imagination the horrors of his life in a British dungeon.

It is quite possible that during his comfortable sojourn as prisoner of war at St. Johns, Cobb fell in with another deep-water shipmaster from the Cape--Captain Isaiah Crowell, of Dennis. At all events Captain Crowell was held at St. Johns at about the same time, and, like Cobb, was soon released by exchange. Captain Crowell’s exploits are worth telling, for they typify the sort of experiences that half the Yankee sailors met with during this frenzied epoch in our maritime history. The British Orders in Council, which declared any neutral vessel that cleared from a French port lawful game for His Majesty’s navy, found Crowell and his ship in the harbor of Marseilles. To get out into the broad Atlantic through the bottle-neck of Gibraltar was ticklish work, but doubtless the Dennis captain and his crew enjoyed it--all the more so as they were successful in eluding the British frigates.

But troubles at home were almost as great as dangers abroad. In April, 1812, when Madison’s Embargo was expected at any moment, Crowell was loading at Boston for Lisbon. If the paralyzing decree should arrive before he could clear, his voyage would be lost. Just before the blow fell, therefore, Crowell, with only half a cargo, slipped out of Boston with clearance papers coastwise for Eastport. He arrived there still one jump ahead of the Embargo, dropped across to Campo Bello in British waters, finished loading at his leisure, and set sail for Lisbon. While he was there, war was declared, and on his return trip an English cruiser made a prize of his vessel, and his voyage ended at St. Johns instead of Boston.

Such misadventures were part and parcel of seafaring at this unsettled period. Crowell’s adventures were duplicated by a score of others, for profits were so great that Yankee sailors were determined to make voyages whether or no. They set sail, Madison or no Madison, Embargo or no Embargo. The adventures of Captain Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth, another neutral trader, furnish a good case in point. To call him a neutral trader is to do him scant justice, for in fact there were few experiences that he did not meet sooner or later in the course of his life. He was a whaleman, privateer, merchant captain, Liverpool packet commander, and State Representative; a musket ball had gone in one side of his body and out the other; he had shaken Napoleon by the hand; he had been captured by the French, and rewarded by Lloyds’ for navigating a wreck through a gale. The exploit last mentioned took place in 1807. The ship was the Otis. She lay in the Downs ready to weigh anchor, with a cargo worth £100,000 under her hatches. A sudden gale sprang up; the anchors let go, and the vessel crashed into a frigate that was lying close aboard her. She was badly shattered--so badly that the pilot and a good many of the crew, believing her lost, took to the boats and went ashore. Captain Crocker, with what was left of his crew, got the Otis under way and, crippled as she was, worked her through the gale into Dover. Lloyds’ did not exaggerate when they presented him with a silver cup inscribed with the motto, ‘Forti et fideli nil difficile.’ Perhaps the five hundred pounds that accompanied this mark of esteem was as acceptable to Captain Crocker as the Latin dictum. It was the Cape’s misfortune that this energetic citizen, like many others of her sons, spent most of his life away from his native town.

It is no wonder that the War of 1812, which clipped the wings of our lusty young merchant marine just as it had learned to fly far and fearlessly, was gall and wormwood to Cape-Codders. But they forgot their resentment in the fresh activity that came with the signing of the treaty of peace. To trace the courses that Dennis, Barnstable, and Truro navigators pricked off between 1815 and 1850, would be to draw a network over all the oceans of the globe. Apparently haphazard, these voyages were in truth systematic and very rational, for though the Yankee trader was as ready a gambler as any man, he never crossed the sea on a fool’s errand. Out of the tangled lines of trade that followed the war, there emerged as early as 1816 the glorious but grueling routine of the Liverpool packets. These vessels were built especially for trans-Atlantic work in all weathers--stout craft with more staterooms for passengers than any ships had had before, ample stowage room below decks, and lines that gave them as much speed as could be safely combined with these prerequisites. Their captains were confronted with a task that was new to seafaring men: they had to keep the passengers happy and the line popular. One way to do this was by making quick passages; another was by playing the genial host. There were plenty of drivers to be had in every Atlantic seaport, but to find a driver with the manners of a deep-sea Chesterfield was not so easy. Any swaggering bully who was a good sailor would do to carry cargo. But the commander of a Liverpool packet had to be able to move gracefully among a ship’s company, leaving affability and serenity in his wake. And let no one suppose that the nicest seamanship was not also required of him. If an ordinary merchantman held on till a topsail was blown from the bolt-ropes, nobody knew it except the owner. But if a Black Ball packet lost a sail or sprung a spar, a horde of eager passengers spread the glad tidings to wide-eyed folk on shore, who solemnly vowed that they ‘would never book on a Black Baller, the captains were so reckless!’ If, on the other hand, a cautious commander lengthened his passage by shortening sail, the tongues of the passengers were equally busy. None but the most expert and genteel were fit for the command of an ocean packet, and they must be men of iron as well, for their forecastles were infested with the wildest crews that ever sailed under the flag of a civilized nation. The Liverpool ‘packet rat’ was the incarnation of all the toughness and evil and malice that have clustered throughout the ages about the reputation of sailors. True, the captain no longer donned knuckle-dusters or swung belaying pins himself; he had mates to do such work for him. But he had to be a graduate of the belaying-pin school, for on him rested the ultimate responsibility for the obedience of the crew. Only men of parts need apply.

Such men--to name a few among many Cape-Codders--were John Collins, of Truro, Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth, and Ira Bursley, of Barnstable. From Yarmouth came Allen Knowles and the three Eldridge brothers, John, Oliver, and Asa. None of these men rested content with the Liverpool run. The packet service was only one step in the giant’s stride of their careers.

Bursley was a veteran of more lines than one. He commanded everything in the way of ocean-going packets, from the little Dover, built in 1827 for a short-lived Boston-Liverpool Line, to the Hottinger, of the New York Swallowtail Line, a ship of twice the size, which he was driving back and forth across the Western Ocean twenty years later. Crocker, as has already been seen, figured in every branch of maritime activity, from whaling to the New York-Liverpool trade in what a contemporary newspaper calls ‘the floating palaces’ of the packet lines. He retired after having crossed the Atlantic a hundred and sixty-four times without the loss of a ship. Allen H. Knowles, who lived just across the street from the Eldridges, was given the command of the two-thousand-ton Chariot of Fame, one of Donald McKay’s creations, built in 1853 for the Boston owner Enoch Train. Captain Knowles received her as she left the stocks and took her on her maiden voyage to Liverpool. She remained his vessel for about ten years, the first two of which were spent in the packet trade, the rest as a general merchantman.

One of Captain Knowles’s passages from Liverpool to Boston will give an idea of what a commander might expect in winter. He sailed on January 11, 1854, with a cargo worth half a million dollars and a passenger list of over eighty, most of them in the steerage. The first night out he lost his jibboom in a collision. Ten days later, in mid-Atlantic, the main topsail was blown from the bolt-ropes, and the main yard broken. Knowles had hardly got the yard lowered and the vessel snug when a sea came aboard which carried away four boats and a section of the bulwarks and flooded the cabin. The gale increased until it blew several furled sails out of their gaskets and raised a sea that carried away the figurehead. By Herculean efforts the crew got a new yard slung and new sails bent, but in spite of everything the Chariot made not a mile of progress westward from January 22 to February 7. Again, off Boston, a northwester carried off the last of her spare sails; but Captain Knowles piloted her through a terrific snowstorm into Provincetown, where he got his first night’s sleep for six weeks.

Late in the thirties, E. K. Collins, a nephew of John Collins, of Truro, started the famous Dramatic Line of Liverpool packets. It is not surprising that he gave the command of his flagship, the Roscius, to his able and energetic Uncle John. Captain John showed himself worthy of his vessel. It was during his years in her that he effected the rescue of the fishing schooner Garnet, quite as dramatic as anything in the career of the celebrated actor for whom his ship was named.

Collins later took command of the Shakespeare of the same line, and Asa Eldridge received the Roscius, in which vessel he learned, as will appear presently, all there was to know about trans-Atlantic work under sail. His brother John was at the same time captain of the Liverpool, with Oliver, the third brother of this illustrious family, serving with him as mate. Thus had these men of the Cape--from Falmouth, Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Truro--reached what was then the pinnacle of maritime ambition, the command of crack Liverpool packets. They trod their quarterdecks the lords of creation, taking back-wash from no man alive. To be sure, they admitted Captain Nat Palmer, the young Stonington sailor who was to become the dean of clipper-ship commanders, as an equal, albeit his ship, the Siddons, was not the vessel that the Roscius or the Shakespeare was. But this they did in recognition of Palmer’s sheer greatness.

Mighty as they were, these Cape-Codders were to become yet mightier before they died. They were still unsatisfied and kept looking ahead for new worlds to conquer. They had long to wait, for the dawn of the clipper-ship era was at hand. Space is lacking to discuss the evolution of these wonderful vessels. Suffice it to say that they revolutionized the naval architecture of two nations, ourselves and the British, and became at once the envy and the despair of the other maritime countries of the world. The bows of the clippers, instead of being the bluff, apple-cheeked affairs of the earlier type, were sharp, tapering, and concave, and cut deep into the waves instead of beating flat against them. Then the flare of the hull at the fore-rigging lifted them over the waves and prevented them from being flooded too often. The stems, too, tapered gracefully and no longer squatted flat in the water. The alterations in the design of the hull were hardly greater than the changes in rigging and top-hamper. The masts of the clippers towered to a height hitherto undreamed of, and spread one and in some cases two more courses of sails. These sails fitted as sails had never fitted before, with the result that the clippers, when it came to windward work, sailed like yachts, and would lie closer to the wind than anything of their size afloat. Supplied with such ships from the yards of New York and Boston by such builders as Webb and Westervelt, Hall, Curtis, and McKay, the American captains sailed forth in the fifties and in a year or two had captured the commerce of the world.

The clippers were the most beautifully finished and expensive vessels that had ever been built and were the pride of their owners’ hearts--a pride nicely blended with anxiety when they considered the investment that each ship represented. Handling these wild beauties was ticklish business, requiring far more dexterity, nerve, and experience than was needful for the old-style barrel-bottomed craft that bobbed along comfortably under stumpy masts and seldom came to grief. Even the stalwart packets were eclipsed by these glorious vessels. The owners wanted the best men in the business for commanders, and they got them. Hence the clipper-ship captains became the aristocrats of an already aristocratic profession--the conquerors of the conquerors of the world--and scores of Cape men strode proudly in their ranks.

There was Baker, of the Flying Dragon and Shooting Star; Burgess, of the Whirlwind and Challenger; Kelly, of the Fleetwing; Sears, of the Wild Hunter; Jenkins, of the Raven; Crowell, of the Robin Hood; Sprague, of the Gravina; Dillingham, of the Snow Squall; Stevens, of the Southern Cross; Bearse, of the Winged Arrow; Hallett, of the Phantom; Baxter, of the Flying Scud; Hatch, of the Northern Light. The list might be doubled and trebled, and every name, whether of ship or master, would be of the first magnitude. And it must be emphasized once more that the first magnitude in this case means not merely first among Cape captains nor even among American masters. It means of first magnitude in the world--men who commanded the finest ships afloat--extreme clippers that could leave any other vessel of any other type hull down in half a day.

Before going into particulars about such men as Sears or Dillingham or Hatch, it will be interesting to follow a few of our friends of the packets--like Oliver Eldridge, Asa, his brother, and Ira Bursley--as they forsook the stormy Atlantic and drove their new commands, the clippers, through the wild waters of Cape Horn and into the balmy trades of the Pacific. Even before the full splendor of the era of clipper ships arrived, these men were pacing the quarterdecks of the early medium clippers, which ushered in the extremely sharp models of the fifties. Oliver Eldridge turned his energies to the China trade, and in 1844 was given the command of Russell and Company’s beautiful clipper bark Coquette, built by Samuel Hall in East Boston. Captain Eldridge took her from Boston to Canton in ninety-nine days. Four years later he commanded Warren Delano’s new clipper ship Memnon on her maiden voyage to China. Owners, it seems, had a habit of entrusting their new vessels to Captain Eldridge, for in 1855 Daniel C. Bacon, the retired shipmaster of Barnstable and Boston and President of the American Navigation Club, invited him to take command of the big clipper Titan, which had just taken the water from the yard of Roosevelt and Joyce in New York. Clearly Captain Oliver had profited from his experience as mate of the Liverpool under his brother, Captain John.

Meanwhile, Ira Bursley, having learned as much as he cared to learn about the rigors of Atlantic packet lines, took command of the Maine-built clipper Alert and tried his luck in the California trade. She was a small vessel, and her owners, Crocker and Warren, realizing that Bursley was too good for her, gave him in 1853 a new and larger ship, the Archer. The fact that Captain Cressy, of the Flying Cloud, later commanded the Archer is sufficient indication of her quality. She was a fast sailer even for a clipper. Captain Bursley also commanded on her first voyages the Snow Squall--an extremely sharp little clipper, one of whose voyages will be mentioned anon, when she was captained by another Cape-Codder.

The last graduate of the packets who claims attention as a clipper-ship commander is Asa Eldridge--the most distinguished shipmaster that the Cape ever produced. His career is a varied one. As has been said, he commanded the Dramatic Liner Roscius for a time, and later (after a vacation in 1853, during which he piloted Commodore Vanderbilt’s steam yacht North Star in foreign waters), he returned to this country in time to receive command of a new extreme clipper ship Red Jacket, one of the four fastest sailing ships ever launched. She was designed by Samuel Pook, of Boston, and built during the winter of 1853 by George Thomas at Rockland, Maine. Her owners were Seacomb and Taylor, of Boston. Sharp, lean, and rakish, the Red Jacket was a vessel worthy of Captain Eldridge, and it must have been with deep satisfaction that he stepped on board a real ship again after his profitable but inconclusive sojourn with Vanderbilt’s toy steamer. He cleared from New York on January 11, 1854, for Liverpool, and drove the Red Jacket through rain, snow, and hail to a record passage of thirteen days and one hour from dock to dock. No ship has ever duplicated this run of Captain Eldridge’s, but, as though this were not enough, he had logged four hundred and thirteen miles on one day of the passage, a distance which has been surpassed by only three other sailing vessels in maritime history, the Lightning, the James Baines, and the Donald McKay.

If the thirteen days during which the Red Jacket was crossing the Atlantic are epoch-making in the history of American sail, it may easily be imagined of what importance they are in the maritime annals of the Cape. They place Captain Eldridge at the very summit of his profession and put his name among the world’s half-dozen greatest shipmasters.

Another distinguished commander of this epoch was James S. Dillingham, Jr., of Brewster. At the time of the Civil War he was Captain of the clipper Snow Squall, leaving Penang for New York. He made good time across the Indian Ocean, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was on his way across the Atlantic when he sighted an American auxiliary bark, the Tuskaloosa, which sailed up to windward and partly blanketed him. The vessels lay so close that no speaking trumpet was necessary, and the captain of the Tuskaloosa called out, ‘What ship is that?’ Dillingham replied, ‘Ship Snow Squall, Penang to New York; what ship is that?’ ‘Heave to,’ replied the other, ‘and I will send some one on board to tell you.’ With that a row of portholes in the stranger’s side flew open, presenting a line of cannon; at the same moment the Stars and Stripes was lowered and the Confederate flag run up in its place.

Captain Dillingham did some quick thinking. Without a moment’s hesitation he sang out, ‘Aye, aye!’ but, instead of heaving to, he worked his ship far enough ahead of the Confederate to catch some wind in his forward sails; and, before the Tuskaloosa knew what was going on, the Snow Squall had squared away and was off at a speed worthy of her name and commander. Thanks to a rolling sea, the shots that followed her from the rebel went wild, and every minute increased the distance between the two vessels. The Tuskaloosa hung on till dark, firing all the time, but finally had to abandon the chase. The Snow Squall brought her cargo safe into New York Harbor.

It was for qualities like these that owners entrusted their finest ships to Cape-Codders; and such incidents, of themselves of no great historical importance, become significant for what they reveal of Cape character: a rare mixture of good judgment and daring, with experience and skill enough to carry through an apparently reckless maneuver successfully. It must be remembered, however, that seafaring was not all thrills and adventures, even in clipper ships. Much of it was steady, hard, and discouraging work--sometimes slatting about in the doldrums, sometimes trying for a week to get westward of the Horn when it blew so hard that vessels could not carry sail enough to make anything to windward. There is truth in the remark that Captain Joshua Sears, of East Dennis, made toward the end of his life to a young man who was just beginning his career at sea. ‘Well, my boy,’ he said, ‘I am getting through, and you are just starting in. You have chosen a tough life, but it will make a man of you.’ It certainly had made a man of Captain Sears, for he had risen to the command of the Wild Hunter, a beautiful little clipper that proved to be a gold mine for her owners. This vessel, it will be remembered, was one of those built by the Shivericks at East Dennis.

Another quality which helped to make clipper captains remarkable, was loyalty to their owners--a loyalty that induced them to run grave personal risk, and to perform with their own hands, if necessary, work that even the hardy breed of stevedores or wreckers refused to tackle. An anecdote regarding Captain Daniel Bacon will illustrate this point. He left the sea before the era of clippers began, but was among the first Boston merchants to become their owners when he ordered the famous clipper ship Game Cock to be built for him by Samuel Hall, of East Boston. One of the Captain’s vessels came ashore on Nantasket Beach in a winter gale. Her hull was still sound enough to keep her cargo dry if it was unloaded quickly. Bacon tried in vain to find some one who would undertake the job. It promised to be too cold and wet a business. So he hired an ox-team and went to the beach himself, where he spent the day driving in and out of the water to unload the stranded vessel. The underwriters presented him with the traditional silver tea service.

But it will never do to conclude this account of the clippers and their captains on any such low note as is suggested by a hull stranded on Nantasket Beach. The proper tune is that which the brave westerlies sing through taut rigging, or the music of the surge and swish of the sea as it leaps along a ship’s topsides in the roaring forties. Such was the song in the ears of Captain Freeman Hatch, of Eastham, during his famous voyage from San Francisco to Boston in the Northern Light in 1852. His ship was designed by the celebrated Samuel Pook--the same who had drawn the lines of Captain Eldridge’s Red Jacket--and she was built by the Briggs Brothers in South Boston. Her figurehead was a full-length angel bearing aloft ‘a torch with a golden flame.’ Captain Hatch made the voyage in seventy-six days, a record which stands to this day. His epitaph, which may still be read in the Eastham burying ground, is as follows:

Freeman Hatch, 1820-1889

He became famous making the astonishing passage in the clipper ship
Northern Light from San Francisco in 76 days 6 hours--an achievement
won by no mortal before or since.

In fairness to the memory of Captain Hatch, let the reader reflect that it was the Captain who made the passage and his relatives who composed the epitaph.

It may be asked why the name of Captain John Collins has not been mentioned in connection with the clippers. The reason is not that he lost interest in maritime affairs, but that, inspired by his brilliant nephew, Edward K. Collins, of New York, he was a whole generation ahead of his time. Foreseeing that the days of sail were numbered, he jumped clear over the greatest of our salt-water epochs and landed among the paddle-wheels and side-lever engines of the early days of steam. Edward Collins was a man of parts and imagination. Realizing before most Americans that sailing packets would soon be out of date, he turned his energies toward the organization of a line of passenger steamers that should eclipse the plodding Cunarders. One of his first moves was to make his uncle, Captain John, a partner, and these two were the guiding spirits of the enterprise. In 1847 they secured from the Government the contract to carry the mails for $385,000 a year. Thus encouraged, they proceeded to lay the keels for a fleet of steamers which were to the Cunarders what the McKay clippers were to the sailing packets. They were named appropriately for the oceans of the world, The Arctic, Atlantic, Baltic, and Pacific. Captain Asa Eldridge, whose performance in the Red Jacket was a byword in shipping circles, accepted the Collinses’ invitation to command the Pacific, and all went well until 1855. Then came a series of disasters. The Arctic was rammed in a fog by a Frenchman off Cape Race and went to the bottom in a desperate attempt to reach the Newfoundland shore. Next year the Pacific and Captain Asa Eldridge met an unknown fate somewhere in the North Atlantic. By this tragedy the Company lost a fine ship and the Nation one of its greatest shipmasters. With half their fleet destroyed, the Collinses set to work to rebuild. But a more insidious blow was to come. Economic readjustments led Congress to withdraw part of the mail subsidy that had been keeping the line afloat. This was the thin edge of the wedge which in the course of the next two years was driven steadily into the seafaring interests of the country until by 1858, it struck the heart. The Collins Line went out of business, leaving Great Britain supreme in the Atlantic.

The Collinses were not the only shipowners who, in the late fifties, began to realize uneasily that economic changes were taking place. The successful opposition of British steam, adverse legislation in Congress, the opening up of the West and the accompanying railway expansion that drew capital into a new field where there was no foreign competition--all played their part in driving the American flag from the sea. Our great merchant marine was doomed before the sixties, and would have vanished just as completely, though perhaps not so quickly, if there had never been a Civil War, a Semmes, or an Alabama.

The change crept slowly over the water-front like a long twilight. Merchants and shipmasters alike were at first not quite aware that their day was done. Cape men in particular were incredulous and sailed away as bravely as ever through the lengthening shadows into the sunset. Captain Benjamin P. Howes, one of Dennis’s many shipmasters, was in command of Baker and Morrill’s fine clipper Southern Cross when she was burned by the Florida in 1863. After the war he decided to try his luck in a smaller vessel. Accordingly, he had the little clipper brig Lubra built for him and sailed off with his wife to become a South Sea trader. The Lubra was his last command. She was captured by Chinese pirates in 1866, and Captain Howes was murdered in his own cabin.

Another Cape man, Captain Edmund Burke, of Truro, commanded the bark Azor most of the time from 1854, when she was built, until 1870, when she was sold. This vessel, the most beautiful of Charles Dabney’s Azores packets, sailed back and forth between Boston and the Western Islands with great regularity, carrying passengers, oranges, and wine. A large part of her popularity was owing to Captain Burke, for he was always ready either to crack a joke or to heave to and rescue passengers from a vessel in distress, as he did those of the sinking ship Gratitude in 1865. The maneuver meant trans-shipping three hundred and twenty people in a high sea; to make room for them, Captain Burke threw overboard a large part of his cargo of oranges.

In 1869, when Donald McKay launched the Glory of the Seas, the last of his great fleet of clippers, Cape men were on hand again to command her. Josiah Knowles, of Eastham, was her first captain; Elisha F. Sears, of Brewster, had her for a time; but another Brewster man, Captain Joshua Freeman, Jr., has the record of eighteen years as her commander. As long as there was a living in it, Cape-Codders followed the sea. Scores of them might be mentioned as commanders of the capacious barks and occasional ships that sailed to Calcutta or Hongkong in the lean decades between 1870 and 1890. Captain Frank Hinckley, of the ships Star of Peace and Leading Wind, and Captain Ansel Lothrop, of the Pilgrim, Conqueror, and Agenor, were both Barnstable men. So were John Turner Hall, of the ship Abelino, and Joseph Bursley, of the Victory. Not long ago Captain Howard Allen, who still lives in Hyannis, made six consecutive voyages round the world in his ship the Importer. Even as late as 1897, during the rush to the Klondike, his fellow townsman, Captain Ezekiel C. Baker, took the steamer City of Columbia from New York to the Yukon gold fields. But it is idle to continue; one is overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. Captain Lothrop, who died in 1927, recently compiled a list of the captains whom he could remember from Barnstable village alone. This list, which is in the author’s possession, contains sixty-three names, including both deep-water voyagers and coasters. Similar statistics could undoubtedly be procured from half a dozen other towns on the Cape. Enough surely has been said to show that, as long as it could be made to pay, Cape men continued the losing battle against British steam and sail.

Each year brought them fewer and lighter cargoes. The wealth of the West was making itself felt more and more in Congress, and the Westerner had no interest beyond the fences that bounded his own farm. We ceased to be a maritime nation, and one by one the Cape commanders furled their sails and squared their yards for the last time, left their vessels to the mercy of the ship-breaker, and came home to live. Here, though retired, their influence was almost as beneficial to the Cape as their remoter activities had been. One such man could make village affairs hum, and there used to be not one but scores in most of the Cape towns. Town meetings in those days were handled in quarterdeck style. Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two houses out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports of the world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign countries. They had gained a perspective that measured matters against far horizons, and they kept the Cape mentally alert as long as they lived. When they died, they bequeathed it a salty tradition that has not yet quite lost its savor.