At the beginning of the Revolution, in fact, there were more sailors than farmers in the coastwise settlements of Maine and New Hampshire. Shipping was the chief industry of Boston. On Cape Cod, where Elijah Cobb was born and raised, the boys followed the sea instead of the plow, and the dry land was merely a roosting place until they were old enough to sign on in a forecastle. The proverbial Yankee traits of canny business dealings, handiness, and resourceful hardihood were bred in those clumsy, home-made vessels. The skipper was also a merchant who bought and sold and bartered the cargoes that filled his holds. His crew risked their own “adventures” in cash or merchandise, while his neighbors ashore owned shares in the vessel and her enterprises. And every voyage was a hazard that might make or break them. Elijah Cobb is well worth bringing to light because he was so completely typical, from his piety and his eccentric spelling to his mastery of difficulties. The romance of the sea meant nothing to him, although he sailed in continual peril of pirate and privateer and of foundering in a gale of wind. Navigation was mostly by guesswork and to us it seems miraculous that he and his kind were able to fetch anywhere at all. What he called a good ship was not much larger than a canal boat, with a few men and boys to handle it. Such was the training school of the shipbuilders and seamen who, in succeeding generations, were to win for the Stars and Stripes on the high seas a commercial prestige that challenged the ancient supremacy of Great Britain and achieved its superb climax in the clipper ship era. With unconscious art Elijah Cobb suggests to us the beginnings of his own career. It could not be better done by the practised hand of a novelist. His father, the master of a brig, dying at sea, left a young widow with six small children in poverty on a forlorn Cape Cod farm. The family could not be kept together. “Some of us, must leave the perternal dwelling & seek subsistance among strangers--my Bro^{r.}, being the elder, was tried first, but wou’d not stay, & came home crying--I was then, in my 6^{th} year, & altho” too young to earn my living, a place was offered me, & I left my dear Mother, for that subsistance among strangers which she could not procure for me.” For seven years this brave little codger toiled away from home and then disabled himself by lifting beyond his strength. His dear mother nursed him back to health and, in 1783, when he was in his fourteenth year, he went to Boston to look for a voyage, with his “whole wardrobe packed in a gin case, for a trunk.” You can imagine him wandering down to the long wharf and admiring the “monstrous size” of a new vessel, her great cables and anchors, when the marvelous gentleman steps from her deck, and signs him on for the voyage at $3.50 a month.