s almost as much
commercial as nautical, and many of the shipping merchants who formed the
aristocracy of old New York and Boston, mounted from the forecastle to the
cabin, thence to the counting-room.

In a paper on the maritime trade of Salem, the Rev. George Bachelor tells
of the conditions of this early seafaring, the sort of men engaged in it,
and the stimulus it offered to all their faculties:

"After a century of comparative quiet, the citizens of the
little town were suddenly dispersed to every part of the
Oriental world, and to every nook of barbarism which had a
market and a shore. The borders of the commercial world received
sudden enlargement, and the boundaries of the intellectual world
underwent similar expansion. The reward of enterprise might be
the discovery of an island in which wild pepper enough to load a
ship might be had almost for the asking, or of forests where
precious gems had no commercial value, or spice islands
unvisited and unvexed by civilization. Every ship-master and
every mariner returning on a richly loaded ship was the
custodian of valuable information. In those days crews were made
up of Salem boys, every one of whom expected to become an East
Indian merchant. When a captain was asked at Manila how he
contrived to find his way in the teeth of a northeast monsoon by
mere dead reckoning, he replied that he had a crew of twelve
men, any one of whom could take and work a lunar observation as
well, for all practical purposes, as Sir Isaac Newton himself.

"When, in 1816, George Coggeshall coasted the Mediterranean in
the 'Cleopatra's Barge,' a magnificent yacht of 197 tons, which
excited the wonder even of the Genoese, the black cook, who had
once sailed with Bowditch, was found to be as competent to keep
a ship's reckoning as any of the officers.

"Rival merchants sometimes drove the work of preparation night
and day, when virgin markets had favors to be won, and ships
which set out for unknown ports were watched when they slipped
their cables and sailed away by night, and dogged for months on
the high seas, in the hopes of discovering a secret, well kept
by the owner and crew. Every man on board was allowed a certain
space for his own little venture. People in other pursuits, not
excepting the owner's minister, entrusted their savings to the
supercargo, an