THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE

CHAPTER I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS

The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water
which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later
generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and
held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook
this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more
extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime race
whose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous
from father to son had fought with pike and cannonade to defend
the freedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a different
destiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and rich
cargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag.

Vanished fleets and brave memories--a chronicle of America which
had written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will
be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like
those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports
mysterious and unknown.

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