, nutmeg
and cloves from Malaysia. Such merchandise had been bought or bartered
for by shipmasters who were much more than mere navigators. They had to
be shrewd merchants on their own accounts, for the success or failure
of a voyage was mostly in their hands. Carefully trained and highly
intelligent men, they attained command in the early twenties and were
able to retire, after a few years more afloat, to own ships and exchange
the quarterdeck for the counting-room, and the cabin for the solid
mansion and lawn on Derby Street. Every opportunity, indeed, was offered
them to advance their own fortunes. They sailed not for wages but for
handsome commissions and privileges--in the Derby ships, five per cent
of a cargo outward bound, two and a half per cent of the freightage
home, five per cent profit on goods bought and sold between foreign
ports, and five per cent of the cargo space for their own use.

Such was the system which persuaded the pick and flower of young
American manhood to choose the sea as the most advantageous career
possible. There was the Crowninshield family, for example, with five
brothers all in command of ships before they were old enough to vote and
at one time all five away from Salem, each in his own vessel and three
of them in the East India trade. "When little boys," to quote from
the memoirs of Benjamin Crowninshield, "they were all sent to a common
school and about their eleventh year began their first particular study
which should develop them as sailors and ship captains. These boys
studied their navigation as little chaps of twelve years old and were
required to thoroughly master the subject before being sent to sea....
As soon as the art of navigation was mastered, the youngsters were sent
to sea, sometimes as common sailors but commonly as ship's clerks, in
which position they were able to learn everything about the management
of a ship without actually being a common sailor."

This was the practice in families of solid station and social rank, for
to be a shipmaster was to follow the profession of a gentleman. Yet the
bright lad who entered by way of the forecastle also played for high
stakes. Soon promoted to the berth of mate, he was granted cargo space
for his own adventures in merchandise and a share of the profits.
In these days the youth of twenty-one is likely to be a college
undergraduate, rated too callow and unfit to be intrusted with the
smallest business responsibilities and