sh waters; but no
effort was made by the British men-of-war--always plentiful there--to
maintain the neutrality of the port. For sailors to be robbed or murdered,
or to fight with desperation to avert robbery and murder, was then only a
commonplace of the sea. Men from the safety of the adjoining shore only
looked on in calm curiosity, as nowadays men look on indifferently to see
the powerful freebooter of the not less troubled business sea rob,
impoverish, and perhaps drive down to untimely death others who only ask
to be permitted to make their little voyages unvexed by corsairs.

From a little book of memoirs of Captain Richard J. Cleveland, the curious
observer can learn what it was to belong to a seafaring family in the
golden days of American shipping. His was a Salem stock. His father, in
1756, when but sixteen years old, was captured by a British press-gang in
the streets of Boston, and served for years in the British navy. For this
compulsory servitude he exacted full compensation in later years by
building and commanding divers privateers to prey upon the commerce of
England. His three sons all became sailors, taking to the water like young
ducks. A characteristic note of the cosmopolitanism of the young New
Englander of that day is sounded in the most matter-of-fact fashion by
young Cleveland in a letter from Havre: "I can't help loving home, though
I think a young man ought to be at home in any part of the globe." And at
home everywhere Captain Cleveland certainly was. All his life was spent in
wandering over the Seven Seas, in ships of every size, from a 25-ton
cutter to a 400-ton Indiaman. In those days of navigation laws, blockades,
hostile cruisers, hungry privateers, and bloodthirsty pirates, the smaller
craft was often the better, for it was wiser to brave nature's moods in a
cockle-shell than to attract men's notice in a great ship. Captain
Cleveland's voyages from Havre to the Cape of Good Hope, in a 45-ton
cutter; from Calcutta to the Isle of France, in a 25-ton sloop; and
Captain Coggeshall's voyage around Cape Horn in an unseaworthy pilot-boat
are typical exploits of Yankee seamanship. We see the same spirit
manifested occasionally nowadays when some New Englander crosses the ocean
in a dory, or circumnavigates the world alone in a 30-foot sloop. But
these adventures are apt to end ignominiously in a dime museum.

A noted sailor in his time was Captain Benjamin I. Trask, master of many
ships, rule