The Coastwise Trade with Virginia
By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels were
registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem already
displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was to make her
the most illustrious port of the New World. The first of her line of
shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own ketch
Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years
he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which traded
coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St.
Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading, flavored
in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by the Grace of God in
the good sloop called the Mayflower . . . . and by God's Grace bound to
Virginia or Merriland."
No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to
cross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in
the West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or
Rhode Island. The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of commerce
in Puritan New England and its golden gains and exotic voyages allured
high-hearted lads from farm and counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built at
Marblehead, returned from the West Indies and "brought some cotton and
tobacco and negroes, etc. from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch of
Manhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that the
Incorporated West India Company should "allot to each Patroon twelve black
men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroes should be found."
It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most
needed and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the
most lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in
"rum and niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle
Passage. The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home
from Guinea in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise:
"For never was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not ye
like of ye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is full
of them. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, for I
purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is very scarce.
We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, so that ships that
used to carry pryme slaves off is now forced to take any that comes. Here
is seven sail of us Rum men that are ready to devour one another, for our
case is desprit."
Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture beyond
all computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned by governments,
at length rending the nation asunder in civil war and bequeathing a
problem still unsolved--all this followed in the wake of those first
voyages in search of labor which could be bought and sold as merchandise.
It belonged to the dark ages with piracy and witchcraft, better forgotten
than recalled, save for its potent influence in schooling brave seamen and
building faster ships for peace and war.
These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers so
manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. It was not merely a matter
of small vessels with a few men and boys daring distant voyages and the
mischances of foundering or stranding, but of facing an incessant plague
of privateers, French and Spanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of
freebooters under no flag at all. Coasts were unlighted, charts few and
unreliable, and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the
days of Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking in
ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the First Church
of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of July 25, 1677: "The Lord
having given a Commission to the Indians to take no less than 13 of the
Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men . . . it struck a great
consternation into all the people here. The Pastor moved on the Lord's
Day, and the whole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day
following as a Fast Day, which was accordingly done . . . . The Lord was
pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which was looked on
as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there had been 19 wounded men sent
into Salem a little while before; also a Ketch sent out from Salem as a
man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches. The Lord give them Good
Success."
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