He was born in Detroit, Michigan, December 28th, 1872, prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Andover, and was graduated from Yale in the Class of 1894. As an undergraduate he was a leader in many of the college activities of his day, and within a brief period of his graduation was called upon to assume heavy responsibilities in the management and direction of numerous business enterprises in Detroit; where he was also a Trustee of the Young Men’s Christian Association and of Grace Hospital. His untimely death, from heart disease, on October 4th, 1919, deprived his city of one of its leading citizens and his University of one of its most loyal sons. _Table of Contents_ Page Foreword 1 Biographical Sketch 17 Letters 85 _Illustrations_ Elijah Cobb _Frontispiece_ Ship _Ten Brothers_ _facing page_ 56 Port Charges in 1811 88 Ivory, Coffee and Palm Oil: a Typical Bill of Lading 96 [Illustration: decorative line] _FOREWORD_ Such memoirs as were left to posterity by Captain Elijah Cobb are fragmentary, a few letters and a narrative of certain voyages, yet they serve to portray with singular fidelity the figure of a New England shipmaster of a century and more ago against the backgrounds of his time. Seafaring has long since ceased to be interwoven with the lives and interests of the American people as a whole. No fact is more difficult to realize than that we were once a maritime nation which, from father to son, earned its bread upon the face of the waters. The abandoned farm with the grassy cellar-hole and the lilac bush surviving by the stone doorstep is the accepted symbol of the Puritan and Pilgrim pioneers. Just as eloquent and significant are the sloping shores of a hundred bays and inlets where the little brigs, sloops, and ketches were built to trade with Virginia, with the West Indies, with the ports of Europe.