cco crop, with slave labor to toil for them, and they were not
compelled to turn to the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New
Englander, hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow
sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, was between the
devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere
in the colonies the forest was an enemy to be destroyed with infinite
pains. The New England pioneer regarded it with favor as the stuff with
which to make stout ships and step the straight masts in them.

And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its course
before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic trade route,
causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and economist, to lament in
1668 that in his opinion nothing was "more prejudicial and in prospect
more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in
her colonies, plantations, or provinces."

This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered in
almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova Scotia to
Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. It was
not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with crews of trained
artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log houses was the row of
keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter weather too rough for
fishing, when the little farms lay idle, this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades
plied his axe and adze to shape the timbers, and it was a routine task
to peg together a sloop, a ketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which
to fare forth to London, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them
not much larger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs
at a liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the
ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign merchantmen,
while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer lines and less clumsy
models to weather the risks of a stormy coast and channels beset with
shoals and ledges. The square-rig did well enough for deepwater voyages,
but it was an awkward, lubberly contrivance for working along shore,
and the colonial Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat
fore-and-aft sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which
required fewer men in the handling.

Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude beginnings
foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which should one day
comprise the nobles