The wonderful effectiveness of our seamen at the date of which I
am writing as well as long subsequently to it was largely due to
the curious condition of things in Europe. For thirty years all
the European nations had been in a state of continuous and very
complicated warfare, during the course of which each nation in turn
fought almost every other, England being usually at loggerheads
with all. One effect of this was to force an enormous proportion
of the carrying trade of the world into American bottoms. The old
Massachusetts town of Salem was then one of the main depots of
the East India trade; the Baltimore clippers carried goods into the
French and German ports with small regard to the blockade; New
Bedford and Sag Harbor fitted out whalers for the Arctic seas as
well as for the South Pacific; the rich merchants of Philadelphia
and New York sent their ships to all parts of the world; and every
small port had some craft in the coasting trade. On the New England
seaboard but few of the boys would reach manhood without having
made at least one voyage to the Newfoundland Banks after codfish;
and in the whaling towns of Long Island it used to be an old saying
that no man could marry till he struck his whale. The wealthy merchants
of the large cities would often send their sons on a voyage or two
before they let them enter their counting-houses. Thus it came about
that a large portion of our population was engaged in seafaring
pursuits of a nature strongly tending to develop a resolute and
hardy character in the men that followed them. The British
merchant-men sailed in huge convoys, guarded by men-of-war, while,
as said before, our vessels went alone, and relied for protection
on themselves. If a fishing smack went to the Banks it knew that it
ran a chance of falling in with some not over-scrupulous Nova
Scotian privateer. The barques that sailed from Salem to the Spice
Islands kept their men well trained both at great guns and musketry,