As early as 1717 hundreds of ships in the year were clearing from Boston and Salem for Newfoundland and “British plantations on the continent,” for “foreign plantations,” and the West Indies and the Bay of Campeachy, for European ports and Madeira and the Azores. And when all Europe was exhausted by the Napoleonic struggle, the United States, neutral and safe three thousand miles away, snapped up the carrying trade of the world; from fish cargoes for the hungry combatants the transition was easy to more varied commodities. Their own wars, French and English, had been good training schools for men of enterprise, and immediately the Cape Cod sailors were to prove their mettle in this new era of adventure. They bought shares in the ships they sailed, and profited, and bought more. Some of them, shrewd traders by instinct, gave up the sea for an office ashore, and as East India merchants laid the secure foundation of more than one snug urban fortune that survives to-day. CHAPTER VIII OLD SEA WAYS I Sixty years ago the thread snapped in that fine sea-piece of the American foreign trade, and now the calling and time of those deep-water sailors are dead as Nineveh. But Old Cape Cod was one with the illimitable seas and the spot most loved by men for whom the ocean was a workroom where fortunes might be made to spend at home. No picture of these men could be complete without the background of their life afloat. For five decades Yankee ships were weaving at the great loom of the Western Ocean to set the splendid colors of European adventure into new patterns of romance. Their tea-frigates raced around the “Cape” to the Far East; they took the short cut about Scotland to bargain with Kronstadt and Hamburg and Elsinore; barques and brigantines and full-riggers caught the “brave west winds” at the right slant and made record voyages past old Leeuwin, the Cape of Storms, standing out there to give them a last toss as they “ran down by” to Port Philip and “Melbun” and Sydney; clipper ships, the fastest under sail that have ever been known, winged their way around to “Frisco” in the great days of ’49. Cargoes sold there at a fabulous price, and then, short-handed, perhaps, because of desertion to the gold-fields, the great ships rushed by San Diego and Callao, rich ports enough for other times, and, storm or shine, swung ’round the Horn, “... the fine keen bows of the stately clippers steering Towards the lone northern star and the fair ports of home,” to load again, and return by the path they had come.