shipbuilders of England and Holland came to seek their fortunes in the New World. In the winter of 1724-25 the shipwrights of London complained to the Lords of Trade "that in the eight years ending in 1720 they were informed that there were 700 sail of ships built in New England, and in the years since as many if not more, and that the New England trade had drawn over so many working shipwrights that there are not enough left here (in London) to carry on the work." Therefore, the English shipwrights asked that colonial-built ships be excluded from all trade except that with Great Britain and her colonies, or that the colonists be forbidden to build ships above a certain size.

Of course no such policy as this could be adopted. It would simply hasten insurrection. In 1769, in spite of the jealousy of English shipyards, the colonies built and launched 389 vessels, 113 of them square-rigged, and 276 sloops and schooners. These sloops and schooners, by the way, after the custom of the time, carried, most of them, square topsails. It was a great fleet to put afloat in a single year, but the annual waste then from wreck and other casualties of the sea was far larger, relatively, than it is at present. A small ship, well built and well equipped, is perhaps as safe as a great one, but the builders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although they were clever men at their profession, did not have the tools and machinery for working their excellent and abundant wood which modern practical science has made available. Ship for ship, the older vessels were not so strong as the wooden vessels of the nineteenth century.

The scarcity and high cost of metal fastenings confined the early builders to relatively light materials. Moreover, the high sterns, the clumsy forecastles, and the drooping bows, which American common-sense finally managed to abolish or reduce, were long a grave source of weakness.

1 Journal of House of Commons, 1792, page 357.

It is probable that very few of the old ships could pass the rigid marine inspection of to-day and secure insurance from careful underwriters. But small, feeble, scantily equipped, and crudely rigged as were these old merchantmen, the majority of them managed to make safe and profitable voyages. The more one studies the ancient models, the greater admiration grows for the patience, the courage, and the seamanlike skill of the mariners who, all their lives through, fought in these frail craft the fierce gales and giant surges of the North Atlantic.

CHAPTER III

AFTER THE REVOLUTION

American Vessels shut out of British Trade- Helplessness of Our Unprotected Shipping - A Few Bold Voyages to the far East The "Empress of China" and the "Experiment". More Loss than Profit The Demand for National Encouragement

THE years between the treaty of peace in 1783 and the setting up of the first Federal government under the Constitution in 1789-"the critical period of American history," as Dr. John Fiske well calls it—were years of struggle and discouragement for the American merchant marine, as well as for all other interests of the young country, free and independent but not yet compacted into a nation. Privateering had kept the Yankee maritime spirit alive throughout the war, and this immediately began to manifest itself in more adventurous voyages than the colonists had ever known. Such a prompt revival of a form of activity which had caused England acute concern before the war and was largely responsible for her defeat, aroused the intense wrath of the English Tories. They set themselves to devising plans to choke the ambition of the young sea power of the West. In one point our oceancarrying trade was very vulnerable.

Before the Revolution colonial vessels as British craft had built up an important commerce with the British West India islands. The American colonies and these southern islands were natural customers, the one of the other. The colonies had an abundance of the products of the temperate zone, corn, dried fish, lumber, horses, and cattle, which could be exchanged to advantage for the West Indian sugar,

coffee, cotton, rum, and indigo. Before the war the colonial trade with the British West Indies amounted to $17,000,000 or $18,000,000 a year. But when the colonists won their independence, their merchant ships, of course, lost their British nationality and became foreign ships, which were forbidden under heavy penalties to visit the British West India possessions. Pitt, the younger of the name, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, endeavored to introduce the principle of reciprocity into West India commerce. But he was unsuccessful. The British shipowners arose in furious remonstrance. An Order in Council of July, 1783, proclaimed that hereafter the trade of the British West Indies must be carried on in British ships, owned and manned by British subjects. This was a deliberate blow at the shipowners and shipbuilders of America. It banished American vessels from a rich and important trade, but grave as were its effects upon our marine, the results to the British islands themselves were far more terrible. Between 1780 and 1787, fifteen thousand slaves died from sheer starvation,1 because the American brigs and schooners no longer brought them dried fish and corn, and their own crops had been wasted by hurricanes.

A writer of the time declared that "The Ministry suppose they have now put a finishing stroke to the building and increase of American vessels," and it was added that three hundred sail of West Indiamen, already afloat, would be destroyed by this discrimination. It is estimated that when the Revolution began one third of the seagoing merchant ships which flew the British flag were of American construction. They could be built more cheaply in this country, for the material was abundant all along the Atlantic seaboard, and the wages of labor were not much higher than Old World wages. A white oak vessel before 1775 cost perhaps $24 a ton in New England, and a live

1 Professor James Russell Soley, "The Maritime Interests of America," in "The United States of America," edited by Professor Nathaniel S. Shaler.

oak ship about $38 a ton. But in Old England or on the Continent an oak ship could not be built for less than $50 a ton.

Excitable Britons, in 1783 and afterward, saw in their imagination their country's shipyards transferred to the Merrimac, the Hudson, and the Delaware, and king's frigates launched by Yankee hands at Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. To save British shipbuilding from what seemed to be sure ruin, the British government straightway refused British shipowners the privilege of purchasing vessels built in America. As a further protection, an Order in Council restricted the American products which could lawfully be imported into England in American ships to such crude materials as pitch, tar, turpentine, and indigo, and masts and bowsprits from our forests. Moreover, it was insisted that American ships should bring to England only the products of the particular States in which their owners resided. In view of the distracted condition of the American States of that day, this stipulation was certainly sardonic.

But British post-bellum hostility to our merchant shipping reached its height in the extraordinary pamphlet of Lord Sheffield, who coolly argued that the Barbary pirates, preying on the defenceless commerce of the United States, were really a blessing to Great Britain. Franklin wrote that London merchants had cynically declared that "if there were no Algiers, it would be worth England's while to build one!" In 1783 and for some years afterward Americans had no reply to make to this insolence. England could proclaim and enforce any hostile policy toward our ships and sailors which she happened to choose. We could make no consistent and effective retaliation, for no strong central government had yet been established.

In 1785 New York imposed a double duty on goods imported in British ships. Massachusetts and New Hampshire adopted navigation acts, forbidding British