The Old Merchant Marine: A Chronicle of American Ships and SailorsPaine, Ralph Delahaye
History
The Old Merchant Marine: A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors
Paine, Ralph Delahaye
Merchant marine -- United States -- History
In later years the Yankee crews were to be found in the ports where the
old customs survived, the long trading voyage, the community of interest
in cabin and forecastle, all friends and neighbors together, with
opportunities for profit and advancement. Such an instance was that of
the Salem ship George, built at Salem in 1814 and owned by the great
merchant, Joseph Peabody. For twenty-two years she sailed in the East
India trade, making twenty-one round voyages, with an astonishing
regularity which would be creditable for a modern cargo tramp. Her
sailors were native-born, seldom more than twenty-one years old,
and most of them were studying navigation. Forty-five of them became
shipmasters, twenty of them chief mates, and six second mates. This
reliable George was, in short, a nautical training-school of the best
kind and any young seaman with the right stuff in him was sure of
advancement.
Seven thousand sailors signed articles in the counting-room of Joseph
Peabody and went to sea in his eighty ships which flew the house-flag
in Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, and the ports of Europe until 1844. These
were mostly New England boys who followed in the footsteps of their
fathers because deep-water voyages were still "adventures" and a career
was possible under a system which was both congenial and paternal.
Brutal treatment was the rare exception. Flogging still survived in the
merchant service and was defended by captains otherwise humane, but
a skipper, no matter how short-tempered, would be unlikely to abuse a
youth whose parents might live on the same street with him and attend
the same church.
The Atlantic packets brought a different order of things, which was to
be continued through the clipper era. Yankee sailors showed no love for
the cold and storms of the Western Ocean in these foaming packets which
were remorselessly driven for speed. The masters therefore took
what they could get. All the work of rigging, sail-making, scraping,
painting, and keeping a ship in perfect repair was done in port instead
of at sea, as was the habit in the China and California clippers, and
the lore and training of the real deep-water sailor became superfluous.
The crew of a packet made sail or took it in with the two-fisted mates
to show them how.
From these conditions was evolved the "Liverpool packet rat," hairy and
wild and drunken, the prey of crimps and dive-keepers ashore, brave and
toughened to every hardship afloat, climbing aloft in his red shirt,
dungaree breeches, and sea-boots, with a snow-squall whistling, the
rigging sheathed with ice, and the old ship burying her bows in the
thundering combers. It was the doctrine of his officers that he could
not be ruled by anything short of violence, and the man to tame and
hammer him was the "bucko" second mate, the test of whose fitness was
that he could whip his weight in wild cats. When he became unable to
maintain discipline with fists and belaying-pins, he was deposed for a
better man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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