t, swiftest ships driven by the wind and the finest
sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then these early vessels were
conspicuously efficient, carrying smaller crews than the Dutch or
English, paring expenses to a closer margin, daring to go wherever
commerce beckoned in order to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.

By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels
were registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem already
displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was to make
her the most illustrious port of the New World. The first of her line
of shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own ketch
Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few
years he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which
traded coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados,
St. Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading,
flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by the Grace
of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower.... and by God's Grace
bound to Virginia or Merriland."

No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to cross
to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in the
West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or Rhode
Island. The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of commerce in
Puritan New England and its golden gains and exotic voyages allured
high-hearted lads from farm and counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built
at Marblehead, returned from the West Indies and "brought some cotton
and tobacco and negroes, etc. from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch
of Manhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that the
Incorporated West India Company should "allot to each Patroon twelve
black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroes should be found."

It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most needed
and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the most
lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in "rum
and niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle
Passage. The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home
from Guinea in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise:
"For never was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not
ye like of ye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole