CHAPTER VI

EARLY ENTERPRISE OF THE UNITED STATES MERCHANT MARINE

WHEN the War of the Revolution came to an end, the territory of the United States extended along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia, and westward over the Appalachian Mountains as far as the Mississippi River. The population, including slaves, numbered no more than 3,500,000. The settlements have usually been considered in groups--those of New England, of the Middle states, of the Southern states, and, last of all, that most interesting group west of the mountains. Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania were the most populous states. Philadelphia, the largest city, boasted a population of 42,520 in the first census year (1790). New York was second, Boston third, Charleston fourth, and Baltimore fifth. Newport and Portsmouth, though small, were yet ports of importance, and so, too, was Salem.

The interests of the different groups of population of the country were then supposed to be in some ways antagonistic. The Southern states produced tobacco, rice, and indigo for export, and had relatively few ships; wanting low freight rates, they expressed, at times later, the fear of combinations between owners of ships living elsewhere, by which rates would be raised. The seeming antagonisms were magnified by the lack of means of intercourse between them. While roads wide enough for vehicles had been cut from town to town near the coast as far south as Virginia, and a few had been opened into the interior along the routes of armies during the war, the most comfortable way of travelling was by water, and ships were the only means for transporting freight, save only as some goods were carried on mules and wagons into the interior--on one route as far as Pittsburg.

On the whole, a bird's-eye view of the United States showed a wilderness, 820,680 square miles in extent, that had a line of settlements along the coast. The political condition of the country was not unlike its physical--chaotic. The thirteen colonies, having thrown off allegiance to the mother-country, had essayed the formation of a ship of state, but had created only a raft of thirteen logs, if such a simile may be permitted, which chafed each other with growing friction. Congress was nominally the executive, the legislative, and the judicial head of a nation, but the money it issued ceased to circulate, and the bonds, representing borrowed coin and war material, were little better. As a body, the Congress consisted of a score or so of respectable gentlemen who met in a hall hired for the purpose, where they expressed their opinions on matters of international as well as local concern, and then begged the sovereign states to take action. They had no power _to do_ anything--not even to raise the money with which to pay the rent of the hall in which they met.

An examination of the American merchant marine at this time shows that it had fallen far below that of the colonies. In a communication to Congress, 19 ship-builders of Philadelphia said (1789) that while they had launched 4500 tons of shipping per year before the war, "it appears from an average of three years past that we have built only to the amount of 1500 tons annually." Similar complaints were made by the shipwrights of Charleston, Baltimore, and Boston. The Charleston communication was especial interesting. It said:--

"From the diminished state of ship building in America, and the _ruinous restrictions_ to which our vessels are subject in _foreign ports_; from the distressed condition of our commerce, languishing under the _most disgraceful inequalities_, its benefits transferred to strangers ... who _neither have treaties with us_ ... nor are friendly to our commerce," it therefore seemed necessary to ask Congress to consider what ought to be done in the matter (_Am. State Papers_, VII, 9; X, 5-6).

It will help to a comprehension of the condition of our merchant marine if we recall once more the feeling of the English public towards the colonists before the war. While statesmen like Robert Peel fostered the growth of American shipping and commerce by encouraging them in evading the navigation laws, the growth thus fostered roused a strong feeling of ill-will on the part of many patriotic Englishmen. This feeling was entirely natural and unavoidable. It was not alone that the Americans were well able to compete with the mother-country for the carrying trade of the world. Under the influence of environment the Americans were developing into a distinct people. The successful colonial was often and perhaps usually self-assertive and boastful; he was necessarily aggressive. Then, too, he showed a lack of deference in the presence of rank that seemed shocking to the nobility. Men who were doing the world's work in the American wilderness made no efforts to conceal their contempt for royal governors, and the influential part of the people of England accepted the complaining letters of these baffled governors as accurate characterizations of the American people. Because of a sort of race prejudice thus produced, the measures of the king, when coercion was attempted, were heartily approved by the majority of the English people.

Then, during the war, the expelled American loyalists had _ex parte_ stories to tell that added indignation to animosity. The successful American cruisers added to the ill feeling. At the same time the British authorities observed a tendency among the foremost hands in the British navy that was not a little alarming. While their navy lost, in the years from 1776 to 1780, 19,788 men through disease and battle, no less than 42,069 deserted. Some of these deserters were, of course, Americans who had been impressed, but many a good British tar learned about the opportunities in the new land and made haste to go to meet them.

In short, it was through natural and unavoidable causes that the influential Britons came to regard their "American cousins" with a feeling of, say, intense animosity not wholly unmingled with apprehension.

Keeping in mind this mental attitude, recall the fact that a command of the sea was then absolutely essential to the well-being of the British people, and further, that the supremacy which the British then boasted had been obtained, and maintained for a century, by good hard fighting; and further still, that many British thinkers had been alarmed at such American progress as had been manifested even a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Bluntly stated, while the British people had learned to hate the American, they suddenly saw that he alone had shown an ability to dispute that supremacy upon the sea which seemed absolutely necessary for the preservation of their national existence. And as an independent citizen of the world he was in a position to force the issue. It follows, therefore, that the British were naturally led to do all they could to oppose all progress in the United States. The "ruinous restrictions" of which the Charleston ship-builders made mention were a natural sequence of the success of the Revolution.

While the British were thus hostile upon the sea (they were also holding American territory in the West, and inciting the Indians to war), the French and the Spanish were united in an effort to cut off all that part of the United States west of the Appalachians. For civilization was then in the primitive state where men, though they talked about international law, were guided only by unenlightened selfishness, and acknowledged no other court of appeal than that afforded by the sword.

The story of foreign aggressions upon American shipping and commerce will be told in the next chapter, but by way of illustrating conditions in the years following the Revolution, consider one fact regarding the British work of opposition. All American trade with the British West Indies was forbidden, and so strictly was this regulation enforced that thousands of slaves starved to death in those islands for want of the "refuse fish" and other food which the planters had been accustomed to obtain from America; and even some of the poorer white people died for the same reason.

Because of ruined industries, and of a chaotic government at home, and of the ruthless opposition of the nations of Europe, the condition of the people of the United States seemed almost hopeless. So great was the depression of the seafaring part of the population, indeed, that even the optimistic whalers of Nantucket thought about removing their industry to France, and many of them did migrate.

And yet it was in this period of deepest gloom that the American merchant marine first reached out for the trade of the Far East. In the _Journals of Congress_ for 1784 (p. 333) is a paragraph referring to "a letter of the 23d December, 1783, from Daniel Parker, stating, that a ship called the '_Empress of China_' will shortly sail from New York for Canton in China, under the command of Captain John Green, and requesting sea-letters."[5]

No commercial ventures to the East Indies were made in colonial days because, in part, of the monopoly of the East India Company, but chiefly because abundant profitable employment for all available capital was found in various trades nearer home. The fact that ships in the China trade very often made cent per cent was, of course, very well known in the colonies, and colonial merchants had a general knowledge of the cargoes suitable for that trade. They knew, for instance, that ginseng, a root growing wild in American forests, was highly valued in China for its supposed medicinal qualities. Accordingly, when the war ended, and American ships were excluded from such a large part of the trade which they had enjoyed in former days, the ship-owners naturally thought of the trade to the Far East. New York and Philadelphia merchants united in fitting out a vessel which they renamed the _Empress of China_. She measured 360 tons, and the chief part of her cargo was ginseng. Sailing from New York on February 22, 1784, with the sea letter noted above for a passport, she arrived at Canton Roads (Macao) on August 23, and she reached home on May 11, 1785. The profit on the venture was $30,000, which, being only a little more than 25 per cent on the investment, was considered small. Other voyages of the period are worth consideration, if only to illustrate the spirit of the ship-owners of the day.

The most interesting of the China voyages, in this point of view, was that of the sloop _Experiment_, a vessel with one mast and a capacity for eighty tons of cargo, that was built at Albany for the trade of the Hudson River. Captain Stewart Dean, her master, had served in two privateers during the Revolution. She carried six cannon, with a liberal supply of small arms, and her crew numbered fifteen (one account says twenty), men and boys. "Martial music and the boatswain's whistle were heard on board with all the pomp and circumstance of war." She carried out ginseng and brought back tea and silks, with profit; and what is of more importance, perhaps, in this story is the fact that she made the return voyage in four months and twelve days. The record shows what a fore-and-aft rig can do in a round-the-world voyage.

In the same year a Hingham sloop of only forty tons, commanded by a Captain Hallett, sailed from Boston, bound for Canton, but got as far only as the Cape of Good Hope. At that point English ship captains offered Captain Hallett two pounds of good tea for each pound of ginseng he carried, and he was willing to take the profit thus insured rather than risk a longer voyage in the hope of a larger one.

The story of the entrance of Elias Hasket Derby, of Salem, into the China trade is of interest because of the view it affords of a peculiarity of most of the successful ship-owners of the day. Derby considered the possibilities of the trade as early as any one, but while the _Empress of China_ was on her way to Canton, Derby sent his _Grand Turk_ as far as the Cape of Good Hope only. By trading ginseng and provisions to the English captains who were found at the Cape, Captain Ingersoll, commanding the _Grand Turk_, was able to make a fair profit on the voyage; but the main object in view was to learn all about the demands of the Canton trade; and in this he was entirely successful. It may be worth mentioning that Captain Ingersoll also went up the coast of Africa to complete his cargo with gold-dust, ivory, etc., and that he was under orders not to take on slaves, even though he should thereby be able to make a paying voyage out of a losing one. Elias Hasket Derby was one of the few individuals who were far enough ahead of their age to see the iniquity of the trade, but the important feature of the story of the voyage is this, that Derby would take the risks of the voyage to the Cape to obtain information. In the meantime, too, he sent one of his sons to Europe, where he spent several months in a study of the India trade of England and France.

With the knowledge thus gained, Captain Derby despatched the _Grand Turk_ (December 5, 1785) on a voyage to the Far East, but instead of sailing direct to Canton she called at the Isle of France (Mauritius); then she went to the coast of India, and thence to Canton. The trade at Mauritius and on the Indian coast added greatly to the profits of the voyage without increasing the length of time required to a serious extent.

The trade to China thus initiated was so profitable that in 1789 no less than fifteen American ships were in the Canton roads, of which four belonged to Captain Derby. One of the four is worth especial notice. She was the swift _Astræ_, Captain James Magee, Jr., commanding, and Thomas Handyside Perkins, supercargo. More than twenty individual ventures were made in this voyage of the _Astræ_, and a few notes from her outward manifest (list of cargo) will serve well to show the course of trade in those days. Thus Tenney and Brown, of Newbury, sent "9 kegs snuff," and a note in the margin of the manifest tells Captain Magee that "⅓ the net proceeds you are to credit E. H. D.'s account for freight--the other ⅔ to lay out on account of T. & B. in light goods." Opposite the item "1 phaeton and harness complete, with saddles and bridles &c., cased up" is a note saying: "This belongs to Folger Pope ... the net proceeds is to be credited to E. H. D.'s account, as friend Derby is to have the use of the money for freight." David Seas sent "Boxes containing $15,000, 16 casks ginseng, 5570 lbs. This at one-fifth for freight." William Cabot sent a box "containing 21 pieces plate, weight 255 oz. 16 dwts. 12 gr." Rum, wines, beer, fish, flour, "598 firkins butter 32,055 lbs," and spermaceti candles were conspicuous items in the manifest.

Some quotations from Derby's letter of instructions to the captain and supercargo are also interesting. "Make the best of your way for Batavia, and on your arrival there you will dispose of such a part of the cargo as you think may be most for my interest. I think you had best sell a few casks of the most ordinary ginseng if you can get one dollar a pound for it. If you find the price of sugar to be low you will then take into the ship as much of the best white kind as will floor her, and fifty thousand weight of coffee, if it is low as we have heard, ... and fifteen thousand of salt petre, if it is very low, some nutmegs, and fifty thousand weight of pepper; this you will store in the fore peak for fear of injuring the teas. The sugars will save the expense of any stone ballast, and it will make a floor for the teas &c. at Canton. At Batavia you must, if possible, get as much freight for Canton as will pay half or more of your charges.... You must endeavor to be the first ship with ginseng, for be assured you will do better alone than you will if there are three or four ships at Canton at the same time with you." As another of the Derby ships was to be at Batavia on the arrival of the _Astræ_, directions were given for the loading or the sale of that vessel, according as circumstances seemed to require, but special stress is laid upon the necessity of making careful calculations before selling the vessel, in order to be sure that that course would pay better than bringing her home full of cargo. It is manifest that Derby did not care to sell her. "Captain Magee and Mr. Perkins are to have 5 per cent commission for the sales of the present cargo, and 2½ per cent on the cargo home, and also 5 per cent on the profit made on goods that may be purchased at Batavia and sold at Canton, or in any other similar case that may arise on the voyage. They are to have one-half the passage money--the other half belongs to the ship. The privilege of Capt. Magee is 5 percent of what the ship carries on cargo exclusive of adventures. The property of Mr. Perkins, it is understood, is to be on freight, which is to be paid for like other freighters. It is orders that the ship's books shall be open to the inspection of the mates and doctor of the ship, so they may know the whole business" in case of the death of captain or supercargo. "The Philadelphia beer is put up so strong that it will not be approved until it is made weaker; you had best try some of it.... The iron is English weight; ... there is four percent you will gain if sold Dutch weight.... You are not to pay any moneys to the crew while absent from home, unless in case of real necessity, and then they must allow an advance for the money.... It is likewise my order that in case of your sickness that you write a clause at the foot of these orders putting the command of the ship into the person's hands that you think the most equal to it, not having any regard to the station he at present has in the ship.... Lay out for my account fifteen or twenty pounds sterling in curiosities."

The sale of the _Astræ_ is forbidden for this voyage, but "if at Batavia or Canton you can agree to deliver her the next season for $20,000 or $25,000 you may do it." The final paragraph says that while the orders are "a little particular" "you have leave to break them in any part where you _by calculation_ think it for my interest."

As there were fifteen American ships at Canton when the _Astræ_ was there, the market was flooded with American goods. Her ginseng sold for $20,000 less than prime cost. Two of Derby's ships were sold; the other two brought home 728,871 pounds of tea. Although the consumption of the country at that time was only about a million pounds a year, the total imports of the year amounted to 2,601,852 pounds. In the meantime the government had been organized under the Constitution and a duty levied on imports which, in the case of the _Astræ_, amounted to about $27,000. On the face of the documents the voyage of the Astræ was disastrous. But Derby, by petition, obtained the privilege of putting his goods in the warehouse and paying the duty as they were sold and removed. The system of bonded warehouses became common later. And according to the biography of Captain Derby, published in _Hunt's Merchants' Magazine_, his capital was not impaired seriously, if at all, by the voyage.

Another merchant who reached out for trade in strange seas was Captain Ebenezer Parsons, who sent ships to the Red Sea, took on cargoes of coffee for Smyrna, and cleared, in some voyages, from 300 to 400 per cent. A still larger profit was made by Captain Jonathan Carnes, of Salem, in a number of ventures to Sumatra. While at Bencoolen, on that island, he learned by accident that pepper grew wild on its uncivilized northwest coast. Returning to Salem, Carnes imparted his information to Jonathan Peele, who at once furnished the money with which a schooner named the _Rajah_ was built. Carnes armed the _Rajah_ with four guns, shipped a crew of ten men, loaded her with brandy, gin, tobacco, bar iron, and dried fish, and then, in November, 1795, cleared out for the East Indies. These proceedings aroused the greatest curiosity in Boston as well as Salem; for neither owner nor captain would say a word about the destination of the schooner; and this curiosity grew, as the months passed and nothing was heard from the _Rajah_. Accordingly, when, after eighteen months, the schooner came sailing into port loaded to the hatch coamings with pepper, she created more excitement in Salem than any other vessel that entered the port that year. The profit on this voyage amounted to 700 per cent. When the _Rajah_ was fitted for a second voyage in the same secret manner, a number of merchants sent other vessels in chase, hoping to find where she obtained her pepper; but Captain Carnes eluded them all, and once more brought home a cargo at an immense profit. In the third voyage, however, his secret buying place was discovered, and thereafter he had to be contented with the ordinary cent per cent.

One of the most celebrated voyages of the period was that of the ship _Columbia_, Captain John Kendrick, with the sloop _Washington_, Captain Robert Gray, as a tender, to the northwest coast of the continent to trade for furs.

The _Columbia_ was a ship of 240 tons' burden. She could just carry the cargo of an Erie canal boat of the size in use in 1909. The expedition was fitted out by Joseph Barrell and four others. It sailed on October 1, 1787, and arrived at Nootka Sound in September, 1788. On July 3, 1789, Captain Gray sailed for home in the Columbia; and, returning by the way of China and the Cape of Good Hope, was the first to sail around the world under the American flag. The work done by these two captains is chiefly of interest here, however, because of the discoveries made on the coast and of the use the nation made of the discoveries later. For the Strait of Juan de Fuca and adjoining waters were thoroughly explored, the Columbia River was discovered, and its navigable waters were explored. Land was purchased of the Indians, forts were built, and a vessel called the _Adventurer_ (of 40 tons' burden) was launched. The claim thus established by American citizens was used with effect, when it had been made good by subsequent occupation of the land, in settling the boundary between the United States and the British possessions to the north thereof.

The trade on the northwest coast was continued by Boston people with varying results until after the War of 1812, and many interesting stories have been related by those engaged in it. John Ledyard, the American traveller, was first to suggest engaging in it. He was with Captain Cook, when that celebrated explorer was on the northwest coast, and learned that the sea-otter skins, which the Indians had in abundance, could be sold for $120 each in China. On returning home, he almost succeeded in getting Robert Morris to enter the trade, but nothing was done in it until the _Columbia_ sailed.

The voyage of the _Columbia_ did not pay her owners, but those who followed her often made large profits. Perhaps the most interesting venture was one made by William Sturgis. While trading with the Indians (blankets, cutlery, firearms, molasses, and trinkets were then in demand), he learned that the Indians used the skin of the ermine in its winter coat as a currency, and that it was highly valued. Accordingly, Sturgis sent home a fine specimen of the ermine skin, and ordered as many as could be obtained. His correspondent secured 5000 at the Leipsic fair, and on the next voyage Sturgis carried them to the coast, where he traded five, which had been purchased for thirty cents each, for a sea-otter skin. He thus obtained a thousand sea-otter skins, which he sold in China for $50 each, or $50,000 for that part of the venture alone. Mr. Sturgis, in a lecture delivered in Boston, on January 21, 1846, said that he had known of a capital of $40,000 yielding a return of $150,000 in that trade, and in one voyage "an outfit not exceeding $50,000 gave a gross return of $284,000."

In the meantime Captain Derby's young supercargo on the _Astræ_, Thomas H. Perkins, had established a trading house in Canton. He entered the northwest coast trade with success, and in the course of twenty-two years his ships made thirty round-the-world voyages from Boston, by the way of the Horn, the northwest coast, Canton, and the Cape of Good Hope. It is an interesting fact that in the years immediately following the War of 1812 "all the supplies for the British [fur-buying] establishments, west of the Rocky Mountains, were brought from London to Boston, and carried thence to the mouth of the Columbia in American ships; and all their collections of furs were sent to Canton consigned to an American house, and the proceeds shipped to England or the United States in the same vessels." (_Hunt's Magazine_, XIV, 538.)

In connection with the stories that have been told of these voyages to the Far East, consider the following facts in the biography of Captain Nathaniel Silsbee:--

"Among the officers who rose most rapidly to distinction in the service of Mr. Derby, none is more prominent than the Hon. Nathaniel Silsbee, late Senator from Massachusetts. His father had enjoyed the entire confidence of Mr. Derby, and after his death Mr. Derby transferred that confidence to his son.

"In 1790 he appears as the mate and captain's clerk of a small vessel bound to Madeira. In 1792 [when but nineteen years old] he is master of a sloop in the trade to the West Indies, which Mr. Derby impowers him to sell for $350. In 1793, at the early age of twenty years, he is on a voyage to the Isle of France in command of the new ship _Benjamin_, of 142 tons. From the Isle of France he proceeds to the Cape of Good Hope, returns to the Isle of France, and brings his ship home with large profits.

"In 1796 Mr. Derby dispatches him in the ship _Benjamin_ to Amsterdam and thence to the Isle of France, with a credit of $10,000 for his own private adventure. After selling his ship and cargo at a great profit he purchases a new ship of 450 tons for his owner and returns to Salem with a full cargo of East India goods for his owner, and such favorable results for himself as to enable him to commence business on his own account, in which he soon achieved fortune."

When Silsbee, at the age of twenty, was master of the _Benjamin_, on the way to the Isle of France, his first mate, Charles Derby, was nineteen years old, and his second mate, Richard J. Cleveland, was only eighteen. In 1799 this Cleveland made a voyage in a fifty-foot sloop from Canton to the northwest coast of America, and, though hampered by a mutinous crew, he secured there a cargo of furs which sold, on his return to Canton, for $60,000. The outfit had cost him $9000.

Although all ships of the day were, by modern standards, dangerous in size and rig; though scurvy was the plague of crews in long voyages; though vast breadths of the sea had never been explored, and the wild coasts visited had never been charted; although the first voyages were made when the American people were financially prostrate and the symbol of the American government was utterly powerless, not only in home affairs but in the face of the open and covert enmity of the leading commercial nations of the world,--in spite of all this, the American ship-owners reached out for the commerce of all the earth, and _young men having ambition and ability worked their way to the command of ships before they were old enough to vote_.

The picture of one of those boyish sea-captains flinging the Stars and Stripes to the breeze on the far side of the earth portrays, better than anything ever said, written, or done, the spirit of America.