As for the American merchant marine, it was full of British seamen. Beyond
doubt inducements were offered them at every American port to desert and
ship under the Stars and Stripes. In the winter of 1801 every British ship
visiting New York lost the greater part of its crew. At Norfolk the entire
crew of a British merchantman deserted to an American sloop-of-war. A
lively trade was done in forged papers of American citizenship, and the
British naval officer who gave a boat-load of bluejackets shore leave at
New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up.
Other nations looked covetously upon our great body of able-bodied seamen,
born within sound of the swash of the surf, nurtured in the fisheries,
able to build, to rig, or to navigate a ship. They were fighting sailors,
too, though serving only in the merchant marine. In those days the men
that went down to the sea in ships had to be prepared to fight other
antagonists than Neptune and AEolus. All the ships went armed. It is
curious to read in old annals of the number of cannon carried by small
merchantmen. We find the "Prudent Sarah" mounting 10 guns; the "Olive
Branch," belied her peaceful name with 3, while the pink "Friendship"
carried 8. These years, too, were the privateers' harvest time. During the
Revolution the ships owned by one Newburyport merchant took 23,360 tons of
shipping and 225 men, the prizes with their cargoes selling for
$3,950,000. But of the size and the profits of the privateering business
more will be said in the chapter devoted to that subject. It is enough to
note here that it made the American merchantman essentially a fighting
man.

The growth of American shipping during the years 1794-1810 is almost
incredible in face of the obstacles put in its path by hostile enactments
and the perils of the war. In 1794 United States ships, aggregating
438,863 tons, breasted the waves, carrying fish and staves to the West
Indies, bringing back spices, rum, cocoa, and coffee. Sometimes they went
from the West Indies to the Canaries, and thence to the west coast of
Africa, where very valuable and very pitiful cargoes of human beings,
whose black skins were thought to justify their treatment as dumb beasts
of burden, were shipped. Again the East Indies opened markets for buying
and selling both. But England and almost the whole of Western Europe were
closed.

It is not possible to understand the situation in which the American
s