With the growth of American shipping it was inevitable that American sailors should go privateering. The love of adventure was born into the people who lived where salt spray gave a tang to the odors of a pine forest. Armed ships from Boston hunted Dutch merchantmen as long as the Hudson region was called New Amsterdam. American sailors ate broiled rawhide with Morgan on the banks of the Chagres River. Kidd came from London to New York seeking sailors born in the Highlands of the Hudson, because they were, of all men in the world, best fitted by experience and natural inclination for the work he had in hand. Franklin at one time expressed the hope that the American coast would never shelter such hosts as were found in Algiers and Tripoli, and the thought was founded on his knowledge of the eager determination to get on in life, at all hazards, which the conditions of life in America had generated. The most important era in the apprenticeship of the colonial merchantmen was that passed in fighting the French and Spanish during England's long struggle for commercial supremacy in the eighteenth century, a period during which New York alone commissioned 48 vessels, carrying 675 guns and 5530 men. As affording interesting views of the work done by the American seamen at that time, consider some of the incidents of the siege of Louisburg, for while the siege was a land contest, it was carried on by men the majority of whom, perhaps, were sailors, and the incidents to be recalled were, at any rate, peculiarly characteristic of the New England foremast hand. The armed ships numbered thirteen, and ninety merchantmen were chartered to carry the men. The number of ships then owned in the colonies at that time is nowhere stated, but it was not difficult to gather this fleet in New England. Although the heavy masonry forts at Louisburg mounted 42-pounders, the heaviest guns the fleet carried were 22-pounders; but 42-pounder shot were cast for the expedition, and taken along, because every man in the fleet was entirely confident that 42-pounders would soon be captured from the enemy.