The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the high seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century.Yet with an immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers increased their trade and multiplied their ships in the face of every manner of adversity.The surprising fact is that most of them were not driven ashore to earn their bread.What Daniel Webster said of them at a later day was true from the beginning:
"It is not, sir, by protection and bounties, but by unwearied exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly and resolute spirit which relies on itself to protect itself.These causes alone enable American ships still to keep the element and show the flag of their country in distant seas."What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent eighteenth century may be inferred from the misfortunes of Captain Michael Driver of Salem.In 1759 he was in command of the schooner Three Brothers, bound to the West Indies on his lawful business.Jogging along with a cargo of fish and lumber, he was taken by a privateer under British colors and sent into Antigua as a prize.Unable to regain either his schooner or his two thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for home.Another owner gave him employment and he set sail in the schooner Betsy for Guadaloupe.During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and carried into port by a French privateer.On the suggestion that he might ransom his vessel on payment of four thousand livres, he departed for Boston in hope of finding the money, leaving behind three of his sailors as hostages.
Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag of truce to indicate his errand.This meant nothing to the ruffian who commanded the English privateer Revenge.He violently seized the innocent Mary and sent her into New Providence.Here Captain Driver made lawful protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with vessel and cargo--an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court of the Bahamas.
Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois and rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the ransom money.As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French frigate snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw them ashore at Santiago, where for two months they existed as ragged beachcombers until by some judicial twist the schooner was returned to them.They worked her home and presented their long list of grievances to the colonial Government of Massachusetts, which duly forwarded them--and that was the end of it.Three years had been spent in this catalogue of misadventures, and Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless against such intolerable aggression.They and their kind were a prey to every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill his own pockets.
Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these undaunted Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on blue water until shortly before the Revolution the New England fleet alone numbered six hundred sail.Its captains felt at home in Surinam and the Canaries.They trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and the North Sea or bargained thriftily in the Levant.The whalers of Nantucket, in their apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay, Guinea, and Brazil.It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries.No climate that is not a witness to their toils.Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which more than half were from Nantucket.Eight years later there were one hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331 barrels of oil valued at $358,200.In size these vessels averaged no more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered their way half around the watery globe and comfortably supported six thousand people who dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and having no other industries.
Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share of the catch and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his own.
