Puritan Seafarers
The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much
to clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing
settlement. Like the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had
steered across to harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected
to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water. The convincing
argument in favor of Plymouth was that it offered a good harbor for
boats and was "a place of profitable fishing." Both pious and
amphibious were these pioneers whom the wilderness and the red
Indian confined to the water's edge, where they were soon building
ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the Kennebec colony.
Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the Puritans
who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing carpenters and
shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak so close at hand into
keelsons, frames, and planking. Two years later, Governor John
Winthrop launched his thirty-ton sloop Blessing of the Bay, and sent
her to open "friendly commercial relations" with the Dutch of
Manhattan. Brisk though the traffic was in furs and wampum, these
mariners of Boston and Salem were not content to voyage coastwise.
Offshore fishing made skilled, adventurous seamen of them, and what
they caught with hook and line, when dried and salted, was readily
exchanged for other merchandise in Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe.
A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives in
the ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden
schooners are fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker,
took their pay in shares. They became part owners, as did likewise
the merchant who supplied stores and material; and when the ship was
afloat, the master, the mates, and even the seamen, were allowed
cargo space for commodities which they might buy and sell to their
own advantage. Thus early they learned to trade as shrewdly as they
navigated, and every voyage directly concerned a whole neighborhood.
This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more
interested in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the
Great Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on
the Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trails to
the country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginia had
discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slave labor to
toil for them, and they were not compelled to turn to the hardships
and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander, hampered by an
unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow sufficient food, with
land immensely difficult to clear, was between the devil and the
deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere in the
colonies the forest was an enemy to be destroyed with infinite
pains. The New England pioneer regarded it with favor as the stuff
with which to make stout ships and step the straight masts in them.
And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its course
before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic trade route,
causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and economist, to lament
in 1668 that in his opinion nothing was "more prejudicial and in
prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of
shipping in her colonies, plantations, or provinces."
This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered in
almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova Scotia to
Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. It was
not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with crews of trained
artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log houses was the row of
keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter weather too rough for
fishing, when the little farms lay idle, this Yankee
Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shape the timbers, and
it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, a ketch, or a brig,
mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth to London, or Cadiz, or
the Windward Islands--some of them not much larger and far less
seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at a liner's davits.
Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the ornate, top-heavy
cabins and forecastles of the foreign merchantmen, while invention,
bred of necessity, molded finer lines and less clumsy models to
weather the risks of a stormy coast and channels beset with shoals
and ledges. The square-rig did well enough for deepwater voyages,
but it was an awkward, lubberly contrivance for working along shore,
and the colonial Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat
fore-and-aft sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which
required fewer men in the handling.
Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude
beginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which
should one day comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the
wind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then these
early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carrying smaller crews
than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to a closer margin,
daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in order to gain a dollar at
peril of their skins.
Back to: Plymouth and New England Colonies
