The coastwise merchant trade, on the other hand, has been jealously guarded against competition and otherwise fostered ever since 1789, when the first discriminatory tonnage tax was enforced.The Embargo Act of 1808 prohibited domestic commerce to foreign flags, and this edict was renewed in the American Navigation Act of 1817.It remained a firmly established doctrine of maritime policy until the Great War compelled its suspension as an emergency measure.The theories of protection and free trade have been bitterly debated for generations, but in this instance the practice was eminently successful and the results were vastly impressive.Deepwater shipping dwindled and died, but the increase in coastwise sailing was consistent.It rose to five million tons early in this century and makes the United States still one of the foremost maritime powers in respect to saltwater activity.
To speak of this deep-water shipping as trade coastwise is misleading, in a way.The words convey an impression of dodging from port to port for short distances, whereas many of the voyages are longer than those of the foreign routes in European waters.It is farther by sea from Boston to Philadelphia than from Plymouth, England, to Bordeaux.A schooner making the run from Portland to Savannah lays more knots over her stern than a tramp bound out from England to Lisbon.It is a shorter voyage from Cardiff to Algiers than an American skipper pricks off on his chart when he takes his steamer from New York to New Orleans or Galveston.This coastwise trade may lack the romance of the old school of the square-rigged ship in the Roaring Forties, but it has always been the more perilous and exacting.Its seamen suffer hardships unknown elsewhere, for they have to endure winters of intense cold and heavy gales and they are always in risk of stranding or being driven ashore.
The story of these hardy men is interwoven, for the most part, with the development of the schooner in size and power.This graceful craft, so peculiar to its own coast and people, was built for utility and possessed a simple beauty of its own when under full sail.The schooners were at first very small because it was believed that large fore-and-aft sails could not be handled with safety.They were difficult to reef or lower in a blow until it was discovered that three masts instead of two made the task much easier.For many years the three-masted schooner was the most popular kind of American merchant vessel.They clustered in every Atlantic port and were built in the yards of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia,--built by the mile, as the saying was, and sawed off in lengths to suit the owners' pleasure.They carried the coal, ice, lumber of the whole seaboard and were so economical of man-power that they earned dividends where steamers or square-rigged ships would not have paid for themselves.
As soon as a small steam-engine was employed to hoist the sails, it became possible to launch much larger schooners and to operate them at a marvelously low cost.Rapidly the four-master gained favor, and then came the five- and six-masted vessels, gigantic ships of their kind.Instead of the hundred-ton schooner of a century ago, Hampton Roads and Boston Harbor saw these great cargo carriers which could stow under hatches four and five thousand tons of coal, and whose masts soared a hundred and fifty feet above the deck.Square-rigged ships of the same capacity would have required crews of a hundred men, but these schooners were comfortably handled by a company of fifteen all told, only ten of whom were in the forecastle.There was no need of sweating and hauling at braces and halliards.The steam-winch undertook all this toil.The tremendous sails, stretching a hundred feet from boom to gaff could not have been managed otherwise.Even for trimming sheets or setting topsails, it was necessary merely to take a turn or two around the drum of the winch engine and turn the steam valve.The big schooner was the last word in cheap, efficient transportation by water.In her own sphere of activity she was as notable an achievement as the Western Ocean packet or the Cape Horn clipper.
The masters who sailed these extraordinary vessels also changed and had to learn a new kind of seamanship.They must be very competent men, for the tests of their skill and readiness were really greater than those demanded of the deepwater skipper.They drove these great schooners alongshore winter and summer; across Nantucket Shoals and around Cape Cod, and their salvation depended on shortening sail ahead of the gale.Let the wind once blow and the sea get up, and it was almost impossible to strip the canvas off an unwieldy six-master.The captain's chief fear was of being blown offshore, of having his vessel run away with him! Unlike the deep-water man, he preferred running in toward the beach and letting go his anchors.There he would ride out the storm and hoist sail when the weather moderated.
