The Story of the American Merchant Marine. John Randolph Spears
alt="Charleston Harbor"/>
An Early View of Charleston Harbor
From a print in the possession of the Lenox Library
Comparisons, though sometimes odious, may be excused when instructive. The conditions of life in Canada led the French to devote themselves to furs only. The Dutch at Manhattan Island were absorbed in furs and the trade of the West India Company. The Virginians and the English West Indians devoted themselves almost exclusively to producing tobacco and sugar by means of slave labor.
Under the conditions of life in New England, the people became perforce farmers, growing their own food; loggers, cutting timber in the near-by forest for use in building houses, fishing smacks, and ships; fishermen, going afloat in the smacks and then curing the catch on the beach; seamen, who, blow high or blow low, carried the catch in their own ships direct to the consumer; traders, meeting the competition of the keenest merchants in the world; inventors, who, when unable to do their work by methods already in use, promptly improvised something new that would serve the purpose.
CHAPTER III
EVOLUTION OF THE SMUGGLER AND THE PIRATE
AMONG the first acts of the English Parliament for the regulation of the commerce of the American colonies, notable here, was that passed in 1646, by which it was provided that no colonial produce should be carried away to foreign ports except in vessels under the British flag.
Since the days of Raleigh, who had done his utmost to create the sea habit among his countrymen, the English people had been growing jealous of the enterprising Dutch, who then were carrying the commerce of the world. This act was a measure to restrain the freedom of the Dutch carrying trade and to give it to English (including colonial) ships. In 1650, although England was yet torn by civil war, Parliament prohibited all foreign ships from trading with the colonies without first obtaining a license. A year later came the culminating act of the Protector's Parliament, "the famous Act of Navigation," as McCulloch calls it (London edition, 1839, p. 817). It provided that no goods produced or manufactured in Asia, Africa, or America should be imported into any part of the English domain except in ships belonging to English subjects whereof the master and more than half the crew were Englishmen. The importation of European goods was prohibited except in English ships, or ships belonging to the country where the goods were produced, or those of the country from which they could only be or were most usually exported. As is well known, this act was intended as a final blow at the Dutch carrying trade.
Consider, now, that "shipping" means one thing, "commerce" or "trade" another. While modern American "commerce" is increasing in a way that seems marvellous, American shipping has been almost entirely driven from the foreign "carrying trade." The English enactments relating to the colonies, from the settlement of Virginia down to and including the "famous Act of Navigation," were all designed to favor all colonial commerce as well as shipping.
After the Restoration, Parliament passed what is known as the Navigation Act of 1660, which was followed by another in 1663, which was still more stringent. The object of these laws, as expressly stated in the later act itself, was in part "the maintaining the greater correspondence and kindness between subjects at home and those in the plantations; keeping the colonies in a firmer dependence upon the mother country; making them yet more beneficial to it; … it being the usage of other nations to keep their plantation trade exclusively to themselves."
To this end it was first "enacted" (to quote McCulloch), "that certain specified articles, the produce of the colonies, and since well known in commerce by the name of enumerated articles, should not be exported directly from the colonies to any foreign countries, but that they should first be sent to Britain, and there unladen (the words of the act are, laid upon the shore), before they could be forwarded to their final destination. Sugar, molasses, ginger, fustic, tobacco, cotton and indigo were originally enumerated; and the list was subsequently enlarged by the addition of coffee, hides and skins, iron, corn [i.e. grain], lumber, &c."
That is to say, the colonists were compelled to take the enumerated products to England and there lay them "upon the shore." The restriction was laid upon the "commerce" of the colonists; there was no restriction upon the use of colonial ships.
The writer begs the indulgence of intelligent readers while he treats this matter as if for a kindergarten. From the days of McCulloch to the present time no one has sufficiently emphasized the difference between commerce and shipping, a distinction that must be made entirely plain before one can see clearly just how these navigation acts affected the American merchant marine.
Having compelled the colonies to send all their enumerated products to England (it was not necessary to sell them there; they could be reëxported under certain regulations), Parliament went still further in its effort to maintain a "greater correspondence and kindness" between the colonists and the home subjects, by enacting, in 1663, that "no commodity of the growth, production or manufacture of Europe, shall be imported into the British plantations but such as are laden and put on board in England, Wales, or Berwick-upon-Tweed," and in English-built shipping with an English crew.
The export trade of the colonies was to be restricted for the benefit of the merchants of England; so also was this import trade. Whether so intended or not, the restrictions resulted in a lowering of the prices of the colonial enumerated products when sent to England, because the market was glutted. At the same time the prices of the European products, which the colonist wished to buy, were, with few exceptions, greatly enhanced. The colonial producer was robbed by the artificial reduction of the selling price of his products, and the artificial increase of the price he paid for his European goods—robbed twice by arbitrary laws.
In 1672 Parliament passed another act still further to increase the "correspondence and kindness" existing between the colonials and the subjects living in the mother-country. A heavy tax was laid upon the commerce between the colonies.
"By these successive regulations," says Robertson, "the plan of securing to England a monopoly of its colonies … was perfected."
It should now be interesting to note the actual influence of all this legislation upon the colonial merchant marine. On July 4, 1631, Massachusetts had launched her first ship, a vessel of 30 tons. In 1676 Randolph reported that her people owned 30 ships of from 100 to 250 tons' burden, 200 of from 50 to 100 tons, 200 of from 30 to 50 tons, and 300 of from 6 to 10 tons, the latter being chiefly fishing smacks, though some were engaged in the coasting trade. The colony owned 430 vessels as large or larger than the Blessing of the Bay. Many ships were also owned in the other New England colonies. In 1678 New York owned "5 smale ships and a Ketch" that were in the coasting trade.
Sir Josiah Child, a notable Englishman engaged in the trade with America, said, in a book which he wrote on commercial matters:—
"Of all the American plantations his Majesty has none so apt for building of shipping as New England, nor any comparably so qualified for the breeding of seamen, not only by reason of the natural industry of that people, but principally by reason of their cod and mackerel fisheries." And to this he adds a statement which for the first time gave expression to what has since been known as the "American Peril." He said, "And, in my poor opinion, there is nothing more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies."
All this is to say that while Parliament had passed three acts that were confessedly intended to prohibit a part, and hamper all of the colonial trade, except that with the mother-country; and while these acts had proved injurious and vexatious to the colonial producers and merchants, the colonial shipping, the merchant marine, had had such a vigorous growth that it was alarming the ship-owners who lived in England.
This condition of affairs becomes all the more interesting when it is remembered that a restriction of colonial trade was likely to affect colonial shipping indirectly,