Although all ships of the day were, by modern standards, dangerous in size and rig; though scurvy was the plague of crews in long voyages; though vast breadths of the sea had never been explored, and the wild coasts visited had never been charted; although the first voyages were made when the American people were financially prostrate and the symbol of the American government was utterly powerless, not only in home affairs but in the face of the open and covert enmity of the leading commercial nations of the world,--in spite of all this, the American ship-owners reached out for the commerce of all the earth, and _young men having ambition and ability worked their way to the command of ships before they were old enough to vote_. The picture of one of those boyish sea-captains flinging the Stars and Stripes to the breeze on the far side of the earth portrays, better than anything ever said, written, or done, the spirit of America. CHAPTER VII FRENCH AND OTHER SPOLIATIONS ON July 25, 1785, while the schooner _Maria_, Captain Isaac Stevens, of Boston, was sailing past Cape St. Vincent, on the southwest corner of Spain, she was captured by an armed ship from Algiers, and carried to that port. Five days later the ship _Dauphin_, Captain Richard O'Brien, of Philadelphia, when fifty leagues west of Lisbon, suffered a similar fate. These vessels with their cargoes were confiscated, and the crews, numbering twenty-one men all told, were sold into slavery. In connection with these facts consider a quotation from Lord Sheffield's _Observations on the Commerce of the United States_, published in 1784;-- "It is not probable that the American States will have a very free trade in the Mediterranean; it will not be the interest of any of the great maritime powers to protect them from the Barbary states. They cannot protect themselves from the latter; they cannot pretend to a navy."