These were American shipmasters of the old breed, raised in schooners as a rule, and adapting themselves to modern conditions.They sailed for nominal wages and primage, or five per cent of the gross freight paid the vessel.Before the Great War in Europe, freights were low and the schooner skippers earned scanty incomes.Then came a world shortage of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward.The big schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their masters shared in the unexpected opulence.Besides their primage they owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income of a thousand dollars a month.They earned this money, and the managing owners cheerfully paid them, for there had been lean years and uncomplaining service and the sailor had proved himself worthy of his hire.So tempting was the foreign war trade, that a fleet of them was sent across the Atlantic until the American Government barred them from the war zone as too easy a prey for submarine attack.They therefore returned to the old coastwise route or loaded for South American ports--singularly interesting ships because they were the last bold venture of the old American maritime spirit, a challenge to the Age of Steam.
No more of these huge, towering schooners have been built in the last dozen years.Steam colliers and barges have won the fight because time is now more valuable than cheapness of transportation.The schooner might bowl down to Norfolk from Boston or Portland in four days and be threshing about for two weeks in head winds on the return voyage.
The small schooner appeared to be doomed somewhat earlier.She had ceased to be profitable in competition with the larger, more modern fore-and-after, but these battered, veteran craft died hard.They harked back to a simpler age, to the era of the stage-coach and the spinning-wheel, to the little shipyards that were to be found on every bay and inlet of New England.They were still owned and sailed by men who ashore were friends and neighbors.Even now you may find during your summer wanderings some stumpy, weatherworn two-master running on for shelter overnight, which has plied up and down the coast for fifty or sixty years, now leaking like a basket and too frail for winter voyages.It was in a craft very much like this that your rude ancestors went privateering against the British.Indeed, the little schooner Polly, which fought briskly in the War of 1812, is still afloat and loading cargoes in New England ports.
These little coasters, surviving long after the stately merchant marine had vanished from blue water, have enjoyed a slant of favoring fortune in recent years.They, too, have been in demand, and once again there is money to spare for paint and cordage and calking.They have been granted a new lease of life and may be found moored at the wharfs, beached on the marine railways, or anchored in the stream, eagerly awaiting their turn to refit.It is a matter of vital concern that the freight on spruce boards from Bangor to New York has increased to five dollars a thousand feet.Many of these craft belong to grandfatherly skippers who dared not venture past Cape Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda Emerson or the valetudinarian Joshua R.Coggswell should open up and founder in a blow.During the winter storms these skippers used to hug the kitchen stove in bleak farmhouses until spring came and they could put to sea again.The rigor of circumstances, however, forced others to seek for trade the whole year through.In a recent winter fifty-seven schooners were lost on the New England coast, most of which were unfit for anything but summer breezes.As by a miracle, others have been able to renew their youth, to replace spongy planking and rotten stems, and to deck themselves out in white canvas and fresh paint!
The captains of these craft foregather in the ship-chandler's shops, where the floor is strewn with sawdust, the armchairs are capacious, and the environment harmonizes with the tales that are told.It is an informal club of coastwise skippers and the old energy begins to show itself once more.They move with a brisker gait than when times were so hard and they went begging for charters at any terms.A sinewy patriarch stumps to a window, flourishes his arm at an ancient two-master, and booms out:
"That vessel of mine is as sound as a nut, I tell ye.She ain't as big as some, but I'd like nothin' better than to fill her full of suthin' for the west coast of Africy, same as the Horace M.
Bickford that cleared t'other day, stocked for SIXTY THOUSANDDOLLARS."
"Huh, you'd get lost out o' sight of land, John," is the cruel retort, "and that old shoe-box of yours 'ud be scared to death without a harbor to run into every time the sun clouded over.
Expect to navigate to Africy with an alarm-clock and a soundin'-lead, I presume.""Mebbe I'd better let well enough alone," replies the old man.
"Africy don't seem as neighborly as Phippsburg and Machiasport.
