n the sailor's calling.
The sons of the great shipping merchants almost invariably made a few
voyages--oftenest as supercargoes, perhaps, but not infrequently as common
seamen. In time special quarters, midway between the cabin and the
forecastle, were provided for these apprentices, who were known as the
"ship's cousins." They did the work of the seamen before the mast, but
were regarded as brevet officers. There was at that time less to engage
the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than now, and the sea
offered the most promising career. Moreover, the trading methods involved,
and the relations of the captain or other officers to the owners, were
such as to spur ambition and promise profit. The merchant was then
greatly dependent on his captain, who must judge markets, buy and sell,
and shape his course without direction from home. So the custom arose of
giving the captain--and sometimes other officers--an opportunity to carry
goods of their own in the ship, or to share the owner's adventure. In the
whaling and fishery business we shall see that an almost pure communism
prevailed. These conditions attracted to the maritime calling men of an
enterprising and ambitious nature--men to whom the conditions to-day of
mere wage servitude, fixed routes, and constant dependence upon the cabled
or telegraphed orders of the owner would be intolerable. Profits were
heavy, and the men who earned them were afforded opportunities to share
them. Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman
need stay long in the forecastle. Often they became full-fledged captains
and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier, for boys went
to sea at ages when the youngsters of equally prosperous families in these
days would scarcely have passed from the care of a nurse to that of a
tutor. Thomas T. Forbes, for example, shipped before the mast at the age
of thirteen; was commander of the "Levant" at twenty; and was lost in the
Canton River before he was thirty. He was of a family great in the history
of New England shipping for a hundred years. Nathaniel Silsbee, afterwards
United States Senator from Massachusetts, was master of a ship in the East
India trade before he was twenty-one; while John P. Cushing at the age of
sixteen was the sole--and highly successful--representative in China of a
large Boston house. William Sturges, afterwards the head of a great
world-wide trading house, shipped at seventeen, was a