patternFOREWORDSuchmemoirs as were left to posterity by Captain Elijah Cobb are fragmentary, a few letters and a narrative of certain voyages, yet they serve to portray with singular fidelity the figure of a New England shipmaster of a century and more ago against the backgrounds of his time. Seafaring has long since ceased to be interwoven with the lives and interests of the American people as a whole. No fact is more difficult to realize than that we were once a maritime nation which, from father to son, earned its bread upon the face of the waters. The abandoned farm with the grassy cellar-hole and the lilac bush surviving by the stone doorstep is the accepted symbol of the Puritan and Pilgrim pioneers. Just as eloquent and significant are the sloping shores of a hundred bays and inlets where the little brigs, sloops, and ketches were built to trade with Virginia, with the West Indies, with the ports of Europe.At the beginning of the Revolution, in fact, there were more sailors than farmers in the coastwise settlements of Maine and New Hampshire. Shipping was the chief industry of Boston. On Cape Cod, where Elijah Cobb was born and raised, the boys followed the sea instead of the plow, and the dry land was merely a roosting place until they were old enough to sign on in a forecastle.The proverbial Yankee traits of canny business dealings, handiness, and resourceful hardihood were bred in those clumsy, home-made vessels. The skipper was also a merchant who bought and sold and bartered the cargoes that filled his holds. His crew risked their own “adventures” in cash or merchandise, while his neighbors ashore owned shares in the vessel and her enterprises. And every voyage was a hazard that might make or break them.Elijah Cobb is well worth bringing to light because he was so completely typical, from his piety and his eccentric spelling to his mastery of difficulties. The romance of the sea meant nothing to him, although he sailed in continual peril of pirate and privateer and of foundering in a gale of wind. Navigation was mostly by guesswork and to us it seems miraculous that he and his kind were able to fetch anywhere at all. What he called a good ship was not much larger than a canal boat, with a few men and boys to handle it. Such was the training school of the shipbuilders and seamen who, in succeeding generations, were to win for the Stars and Stripes on the high seas a commercial prestige that challenged the ancient supremacy of Great Britain and achieved its superb climax in the clipper ship era.With unconscious art Elijah Cobb suggests to us the beginnings of his own career. It could not be better done by the practised hand of a novelist. His father, the master of a brig, dying at sea, left a young widow with six small children in poverty on a forlorn Cape Cod farm.The family could not be kept together. “Some of us, must leave the perternal dwelling & seek subsistance among strangers—my Bror., being the elder, was tried first, but wou’d not stay, & came home crying—I was then, in my 6thyear, & altho” too young to earn my living, a place was offered me, & I left my dear Mother, for that subsistance among strangers which she could not procure for me.”For seven years this brave little codger toiled away from home and then disabled himself by lifting beyond his strength. His dear mother nursed him back to health and, in 1783, when he was in his fourteenth year, he went to Boston to look for a voyage, with his “whole wardrobe packed in a gin case, for a trunk.”You can imagine him wandering down to the long wharf and admiring the “monstrous size” of a new vessel, her great cables and anchors, when the marvelous gentleman steps from her deck, and signs him on for the voyage at $3.50 a month.And so as a cook he sailed away for fever-stricken Surinam, or Dutch Guiana. His wages, together with some presents from the officers, enabled him to bring back a private “adventure” of a barrel of molasses and some dried fruit. The trade with the West Indies had flourished a full century before the Revolution. There was always a market for salted codfish to feed the slaves of the sugar plantations. The return cargoes were largely molasses for distilling New England rum. These voyages had been extended to the mainland of SouthAmerica; to Surinam, where fish and lumber were exchanged for the products of the Dutch East Indies; to Honduras, whose logwood and mahogany were cut for export to England.Young Elijah Cobb escaped the swamp fever and returned with twenty silver dollars to put into his mother’s hands, “probably, the largest sum of money she had possessd.since she had been a widow—& that, from her poor little sick Boy.” No wonder her tears flowed freely, upon the occasion. For some time thereafter he was sailing coastwise and working his way up to a mate’s berth. Then he crossed the stormy Western Ocean and felt qualified for command. He must have been twenty-three years old when he became master of a brig. This was not unusually youthful. Nathaniel Silsbee of Salem, a captain in the East India trade at nineteen, could say of his own family:“Connected with the seafaring life of myself and my brothers, there were some circumstances which do not usually occur in one family. In the first place each of us commenced that occupation in the capacity of clerk, or supercargo, myself at the age of fourteen years; my brother William at about fifteen; and my brother Zachariah at about sixteen and a half years. Each and all of us obtained the command of vessels and the consignment of their cargoes before attaining the age of twenty years, viz., myself at the age of eighteen and a half, my brother William at nineteen and a half, and my brother Zachariah before he was twenty years old.”It was during his first voyage to Europe as a shipmaster that Captain Elijah Cobb showed himself to be a young man of exceptional courage and contrivance. Steering for Cadiz, he learned that it was unsafe to venture too close to Gibraltar and so he changed his course to Coruna in the Bay of Biscay. The swift corsairs of the Dey of Algiers were cruising like wolves to snap up merchantmen and enslave their Christian crews. In his journal Captain Cobb states that “the Algerines were at war with America.” This is not quite accurate, for the United States delayed declaring war on the Barbary pirates until 1801, several years after this.The infant republic, left without any naval force at the close of the Revolution, was compelled to submit to the most humiliating insults and depredations at the hands of these lawless sea rovers. It seems incredible to recall the gifts and bribes that were abjectly paid the Dey of Algiers as tribute, including a handsome new frigate, nor can one read the newspaper account without a blush.Portsmouth, N. H., Jan 20, 1798. On Thursday morning, about sunrise, a gun was discharged from the frigateCrescent, as a signal for getting under way. May she arrive in safety at the place of her destination, as a present to the Dey of Algiers of one of the finest specimens of elegant naval architecture which was ever borne on the Piscataqua’s waters. Richard O’Brien, who was ten years a prisoner at Algiers, took passage in the frigate and is to reside at Algiers as Consul-General of the United States to all the Barbary States. TheCrescenthasmany valuable presents for the Dey, including twenty-six barrels of dollars. It is worthy of remark that the captain, the chief officers and many of the privates of theCrescentfrigate have been prisoners at Algiers.When Captain Cobb prudently went wide of the Strait of Gibraltar, in 1794, the Dey was running amuck among American merchant vessels. As many as ten of these luckless ships had been taken in one cruise of a brig and three xebecks out of Algiers, and more than a hundred Yankee seamen thrown into dungeons to toil under the lash of Arab slave drivers. And honest seamen were begging from door to door in Boston and Salem to collect funds for the ransom of this fellow mariner or that, with whom they had been shipmates. The tourist who visits the Algiers of today, an ornate French metropolis with the ancient Arab town climbing the hill behind it, can behold strongholds whose stones were laid by tortured, perishing sailormen from the land of the brave and the free.Bearing safely away from those ticklish waters, Captain Elijah Cobb found himself out of the frying-pan and into the fire. England had gone to war with France in 1793 when most of Europe was allied in the effort to stamp out the flames of the Revolution. The rights of neutrals were tossed aside. American shipping was ground between two millstones. All was fair in war. British and French cruisers seized our ships for engaging in trade which our own interpretation of internationallaw held to be perfectly legitimate. More than a hundred American vessels were taken by France in 1793 on pretext of trading with England or her colonies.Captain Cobb could find no reason why his voyage to Spain should be molested and he was too stiff-necked to submit without protest. His papers were stolen by the prize master and there seemed to be no means of redress whatever. He had no friends in France, official or otherwise, and his ship was tied up in the port of Brest while a starving populace looted her cargo of foodstuffs. The Reign of Terror was at its height. Chaos and bloodshed ruled in place of government. The guillotine was a law unto itself. In a period of fifteen months, 17,000 persons had been formally executed in France. The number of those who were shot, drowned, or otherwise massacred without pretense of a trial can never be known, but must be reckoned far greater.All of which may have harrowed the soul of Captain Elijah Cobb, but he kept his eye firmly fixed on his own predicament. His ship had to be released and indemnity paid him for detention and loss of cargo. After six weeks of wrangling with minor officials, he resolved to go to Paris and seek satisfaction. A stubborn mariner who shoved obstacles aside, behold him making this dangerous journey with an official courier, for armament loaded pistols and a blunderbuss, in a carriage that was “musquet shot proof” and driving like Jehu night and day, without a wink of sleep all the way from Brest, more than six hundred miles.Undismayed, persistent, Captain Elijah Cobb pursued his way through the weltering horrors of Paris, merely noting that he saw one thousand persons beheaded by “that infernal machine,” the guillotine. Thwarted at every turn, he carried his case to none other than Robespierre himself. The audacity of this Yankee seafarer was amazing. He made dollars seem heroic. His motive was really better than this—the compulsion of duty toward the owners who had entrusted him with the ship and her lading. Citizen Robespierre, Carlyle’s sea-green monster, spoke the word that swiftly untangled the affair.Shortly after this, Robespierre was overthrown and outlawed by the Convention. Trying to commit suicide with a pistol, the bullet did no more than shatter his jaw. And now for the final scene in the Place de la Concorde. Captain Cobb stood there and beheld it with his own eyes, on the 9th Thermidor (July 28, 1794). Robespierre rides on a tumbril, the mangled jaw bound in dirty linen. The Gendarmes point their swords at him to show the people who he is. A woman leaps upon the tumbril and screams: “Thy death rejoices my very heart.Scélérat, go down to Hell with the curses of all wives and mothers!” At the scaffold they stretch him on the ground. Then Samson, the burly executioner, lifts him aloft, wrenches off his coat, tears the dirty linen from his jaw. A hideous cry and the head of Robespierre is shorn from his shoulders.And how does Captain Cobb describe this gigantic episode?As if he were making an entry in a ship’s log. “Before I left the country; I saw Robertspeirs head taken off, by the same Machine—But to return to my induvidual, and embarised affairs….” This was characteristic of the New England breed of seafarers. They are exasperating at times. They saw so much and told so little. The wonders of the world left them unmoved. The pen was an awkward tool to handle and they were as thrifty with words as with pence.You will find Captain Cobb waxing loquacious, however, when it comes to the intricate and difficult business of due bills and foreign exchange or smuggling gold out of France. All this is of value to the modern reader as showing how extremely competent were these master mariners as bankers and merchants. It helps to explain why they became the leaders in their communities when they retired from the quarter-deck, and why they were so successful, as a class, in commercial pursuits ashore. They were literally the first American captains of industry, men accustomed to large responsibilities and the tests of critical emergencies.It throws a curious slant on the moral code of the time to find Elijah Cobb so profoundly pious and yet so ready to bribe and smuggle with a clear conscience. In a way, this point of view was inherited from the American Revolution. The harsh restrictions laid by the mother country on the commerce of her colonies had led to smuggling as an easy road to wealth. In almost every town prominent characters were named who, underBritish rule, had stowed in their attics and cellars goods that were not for the officers of the King’s Customs to see. To these harbors came vessels built for speed and laden with contraband wares gathered in the colonies of France and Spain. And reputable merchants were always ready to run the stuff ashore. Thus, on the very day when the farmers of Middlesex drove the British out of Lexington, John Hancock was to have stood trial for defrauding the Customs.And so Elijah Cobb, pillar of the Universalist church in his later years, is not in the least ashamed to admit that he did a very pretty job of running rum to a crew of skilled smugglers between the Cove of Cork and the Scilly Islands.It was adroit intelligence and knowledge of the world that enabled him to escape from the trap of the British Orders in Council that ruined hundreds of American shipmasters and owners. These high-handed measures aimed against Napoleon, together with his Milan Decree launched in retaliation, made American vessels liable to confiscation in almost every foreign port to which they traded. It was not a proud era in our national history. The time was not far distant when the cry of “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” was to sound the note of the Second War with England.Elijah Cobb, loading a return cargo of wines and dried fruit at Malaga, in 1806, learned that England forbade such a voyage. He decided to take a sporting chance of slipping by the English cruisers in the “Gutof Gibralter.” The wind failing him at the wrong time, he obtained his clearance papers by bribing an official. In the opinion of Elijah Cobb there was more than one way to skin a cat.The intolerable aggressions aimed at American commerce, including the impressment of seamen, had caused President Thomas Jefferson to use the embargo as a weapon in reprisal. If he could not protect American ships and sailors on the high seas, he could, at least, he thought, save them by keeping them at home. Maritime New England had been reluctant to accept an embargo policy. Josiah Quincy had begged Congress to remember that the ocean could not be abandoned by his people “of whom thousands would rather see a boat-hook than all the sheep-crooks in the world.” However, the first Embargo Bill was passed in December of 1807, forbidding the departure of American vessels for any foreign port. The results were futile and disastrous. Ports filled with dismantled ships, counting-houses deserted, grass growing in the waterside streets failed to affect perfidious Albion. Nevertheless, the embargo was tried again in the spring of 1812.Captain Cobb was loading flour at Alexandria, Virginia, for a European voyage when the news of another embargo came like a blow from a clear sky. Hard-bitten New Englander, he had refused to heed the warnings. His own Massachusetts Legislature had denounced such Acts of Congress as unconstitutional, and a hundred towns had adopted resolutions of protest. However, Mr.Madison’s latest embargo was a condition and not a theory, so Elijah Cobb made haste to get to sea before the officials could lawfully stop him. He had twenty-four hours of grace. A gale of wind was blowing, so violent that the ship was almost torn away from the wharf. Here was the efficient shipmaster in action—a hundred tons of stone ballast to be landed, three thousand barrels of flour to be stowed in the hold and secured, provisions, wood, and water to be taken aboard, a crew to be found and signed on, and the vessel cleared at the custom house.Elijah Cobb turned the trick without bluster or confusion. It was the kind of thing he could do extremely well. His portrait is that of a man very resolute and composed, not much humor in the straight mouth and steadfast eye, a good deal of the Puritan afloat. In his sedate way he must have enjoyed what he called “running away from the Embargo.”England and the United States were on the brink of war. This final embargo was frankly intended as a preparation for war. It held American ships in our own ports and saved them from capture while a swift pilot schooner was sent to warn American merchantmen in northern Europe that hostilities impended and they must hasten home or lie up abroad in some neutral harbor. These signs and portents seemed to have escaped the notice of Captain Elijah Cobb. He was oddly unaware of it all, busied with selling his flour in Cadiz at a profit and buying British bills of exchange to reap more dollars.Congress had formally declared war, on June 18, while Captain Cobb was in the midst of his transactions. And when he sailed from Cadiz for Boston, on July 5, “he never felt himself saffer, on account of enemies on the high seas.” Peacefully he jogged across the Atlantic, as far as the Grand Bank, when he was overhauled by a British armed schooner. The subsequent proceedings must upset the conventional notions of the sea warfare of bygone days. All British seamen are presumed to have been ruffianly and outrageous persons. It will be noted that the interviews between Captain Cobb and his captors were conducted with courtesy and friendliness.The merchant skipper was pained and surprised to find that he had fallen into the enemy’s hands. The enemy endeavored to make it as comfortable as possible, trusting that Captain Cobb would “excuse their inquisitiveness.”You will find the dialogue vastly entertaining and not at all as the fictionist would fancy it. Mutual regrets and esteem, the prize politely ordered to St. Johns, the prisoners to be made as comfortable as possible under the circumstances! And then it is your pleasure to meet that fine old Port Admiral of St. Johns, Sir John Thomas Duckworth, who tried to make these unwilling visitors feel at home. “Supercargoes and Gentlemen passengers” were set at liberty.The display of gentlemanly feeling between sailor foemen was not unique in the annals of the War of1812. England was well aware that the maritime interests of the New England coast were out of sympathy with the war and it was policy to avoid provoking them more than possible. “Organize a peace party throughout your Country,” resolved the Massachusetts House of Representatives, after war had been declared, “and let the sound of your disapprobation be loud and deep.” The climax came with the secretly seditious Hartford Convention. The Federalist opposition was stupidly blind to the fact that the war was a defensive struggle against the massed resources of the British Empire. The seafaring population, forgetting the national interests and suffering destruction and blockade, allowed the politicians to lead it by the nose.Captain Elijah Cobb stayed at home on the farm until the end of the war. Then he resumed his voyages to Europe, uneventfully, and engaged in the African trade in 1818, commanding the shipTen Brothers. There was no worse pest hole on earth than the West Coast and its slave ports, no area so indelibly stained with man’s inhumanity to man. A land of treacherous surf and steaming jungle, of tawny beaches and sluggish rivers, the infamies of centuries cursed the names of Goree and Gambia, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, Calabar, Anamaboe, and the Congo. In 1819 the slave trade had been outlawed by England and the United States, but many thousands of the poor wretches were annually smuggled into the West Indies and the southern ports of this country.The barracoons and factories were flourishing when Captain Cobb sailed on his lawful trading voyages to Prince’s Island in the Gulf of Guinea. Like many another American shipmaster he risked the deadly fever in order to sell his goods to the natives and carry home palm oil, ivory, coffee, and gold dust. The most lucrative traffic was in New England rum, muskets, and gunpowder, but Captain Cobb makes no mention of these as in his invoice, and it is fair to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that it would have discredited him in the reputable circles of Boston or Brewster. A man could be a deacon and still peddle Medford rum to the benighted Africans.Captain Cobb stocked his ship with the customary trade goods, gaudy cotton prints, tobacco, beads and brass pots, bandana hankerchiefs, flour and meal, salt beef, pork, and fish, candles, tinware, and crockery. His letters are pretty doleful reading. Several other American vessels were with him at Prince’s Island, their captains ill or dead of fever, his own ship rotten with it. What they called fumigation was crude and ineffectual. They suffered grimly. It was all in the day’s work, and they could only commit themselves “to a mercifull just God who always acts for the good of his Creaturs, & happy would it be for us; if we could always bow with humble submission to His righteous dispensations.”Even this consolation was not enough to make Captain Cobb endure more than two voyages to the Guinea Coast. His ship had to be scuttled at a Boston wharf, sofoul she was with deadly fever, and there was fear that the contagion might spread ashore. This was the end of his seafaring career of nearly forty years. To a ripe old age he dwelt in Brewster, a distinguished citizen and active farmer, “tall & straight of fine figure his face very pleasant to look upon.” The imperious traits of the quarter-deck were carried into his religious activities. As a Universalist he played a lone hand for some years, and “met with violent opposition to his views, yet waxing only the more valiant in the fight, he came off conquerer.”It is the wistful desire of every true sailorman to quit the restless sea and own a farm. This boon was vouchsafed Elijah Cobb and it is fitting to bid him farewell when “the wind has got around to the south” and he is just returning from a visit to the young orchard—a mellowed old gentleman who had lived through the most stirring era of American ships and sailors and had survived hazards innumerable to find a quiet harbor! Not a flamboyant career, but splendidly competent as one reads between the lines. He was one of the pioneers, blood brother of the men who turned landward to tame the wilderness.Ralph D. Paine.Durham, New HampshireApril, 1925.
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FOREWORD
Suchmemoirs as were left to posterity by Captain Elijah Cobb are fragmentary, a few letters and a narrative of certain voyages, yet they serve to portray with singular fidelity the figure of a New England shipmaster of a century and more ago against the backgrounds of his time. Seafaring has long since ceased to be interwoven with the lives and interests of the American people as a whole. No fact is more difficult to realize than that we were once a maritime nation which, from father to son, earned its bread upon the face of the waters. The abandoned farm with the grassy cellar-hole and the lilac bush surviving by the stone doorstep is the accepted symbol of the Puritan and Pilgrim pioneers. Just as eloquent and significant are the sloping shores of a hundred bays and inlets where the little brigs, sloops, and ketches were built to trade with Virginia, with the West Indies, with the ports of Europe.
At the beginning of the Revolution, in fact, there were more sailors than farmers in the coastwise settlements of Maine and New Hampshire. Shipping was the chief industry of Boston. On Cape Cod, where Elijah Cobb was born and raised, the boys followed the sea instead of the plow, and the dry land was merely a roosting place until they were old enough to sign on in a forecastle.The proverbial Yankee traits of canny business dealings, handiness, and resourceful hardihood were bred in those clumsy, home-made vessels. The skipper was also a merchant who bought and sold and bartered the cargoes that filled his holds. His crew risked their own “adventures” in cash or merchandise, while his neighbors ashore owned shares in the vessel and her enterprises. And every voyage was a hazard that might make or break them.
Elijah Cobb is well worth bringing to light because he was so completely typical, from his piety and his eccentric spelling to his mastery of difficulties. The romance of the sea meant nothing to him, although he sailed in continual peril of pirate and privateer and of foundering in a gale of wind. Navigation was mostly by guesswork and to us it seems miraculous that he and his kind were able to fetch anywhere at all. What he called a good ship was not much larger than a canal boat, with a few men and boys to handle it. Such was the training school of the shipbuilders and seamen who, in succeeding generations, were to win for the Stars and Stripes on the high seas a commercial prestige that challenged the ancient supremacy of Great Britain and achieved its superb climax in the clipper ship era.
With unconscious art Elijah Cobb suggests to us the beginnings of his own career. It could not be better done by the practised hand of a novelist. His father, the master of a brig, dying at sea, left a young widow with six small children in poverty on a forlorn Cape Cod farm.The family could not be kept together. “Some of us, must leave the perternal dwelling & seek subsistance among strangers—my Bror., being the elder, was tried first, but wou’d not stay, & came home crying—I was then, in my 6thyear, & altho” too young to earn my living, a place was offered me, & I left my dear Mother, for that subsistance among strangers which she could not procure for me.”
For seven years this brave little codger toiled away from home and then disabled himself by lifting beyond his strength. His dear mother nursed him back to health and, in 1783, when he was in his fourteenth year, he went to Boston to look for a voyage, with his “whole wardrobe packed in a gin case, for a trunk.”
You can imagine him wandering down to the long wharf and admiring the “monstrous size” of a new vessel, her great cables and anchors, when the marvelous gentleman steps from her deck, and signs him on for the voyage at $3.50 a month.
And so as a cook he sailed away for fever-stricken Surinam, or Dutch Guiana. His wages, together with some presents from the officers, enabled him to bring back a private “adventure” of a barrel of molasses and some dried fruit. The trade with the West Indies had flourished a full century before the Revolution. There was always a market for salted codfish to feed the slaves of the sugar plantations. The return cargoes were largely molasses for distilling New England rum. These voyages had been extended to the mainland of SouthAmerica; to Surinam, where fish and lumber were exchanged for the products of the Dutch East Indies; to Honduras, whose logwood and mahogany were cut for export to England.
Young Elijah Cobb escaped the swamp fever and returned with twenty silver dollars to put into his mother’s hands, “probably, the largest sum of money she had possessd.since she had been a widow—& that, from her poor little sick Boy.” No wonder her tears flowed freely, upon the occasion. For some time thereafter he was sailing coastwise and working his way up to a mate’s berth. Then he crossed the stormy Western Ocean and felt qualified for command. He must have been twenty-three years old when he became master of a brig. This was not unusually youthful. Nathaniel Silsbee of Salem, a captain in the East India trade at nineteen, could say of his own family:
“Connected with the seafaring life of myself and my brothers, there were some circumstances which do not usually occur in one family. In the first place each of us commenced that occupation in the capacity of clerk, or supercargo, myself at the age of fourteen years; my brother William at about fifteen; and my brother Zachariah at about sixteen and a half years. Each and all of us obtained the command of vessels and the consignment of their cargoes before attaining the age of twenty years, viz., myself at the age of eighteen and a half, my brother William at nineteen and a half, and my brother Zachariah before he was twenty years old.”
It was during his first voyage to Europe as a shipmaster that Captain Elijah Cobb showed himself to be a young man of exceptional courage and contrivance. Steering for Cadiz, he learned that it was unsafe to venture too close to Gibraltar and so he changed his course to Coruna in the Bay of Biscay. The swift corsairs of the Dey of Algiers were cruising like wolves to snap up merchantmen and enslave their Christian crews. In his journal Captain Cobb states that “the Algerines were at war with America.” This is not quite accurate, for the United States delayed declaring war on the Barbary pirates until 1801, several years after this.
The infant republic, left without any naval force at the close of the Revolution, was compelled to submit to the most humiliating insults and depredations at the hands of these lawless sea rovers. It seems incredible to recall the gifts and bribes that were abjectly paid the Dey of Algiers as tribute, including a handsome new frigate, nor can one read the newspaper account without a blush.
Portsmouth, N. H., Jan 20, 1798. On Thursday morning, about sunrise, a gun was discharged from the frigateCrescent, as a signal for getting under way. May she arrive in safety at the place of her destination, as a present to the Dey of Algiers of one of the finest specimens of elegant naval architecture which was ever borne on the Piscataqua’s waters. Richard O’Brien, who was ten years a prisoner at Algiers, took passage in the frigate and is to reside at Algiers as Consul-General of the United States to all the Barbary States. TheCrescenthasmany valuable presents for the Dey, including twenty-six barrels of dollars. It is worthy of remark that the captain, the chief officers and many of the privates of theCrescentfrigate have been prisoners at Algiers.
Portsmouth, N. H., Jan 20, 1798. On Thursday morning, about sunrise, a gun was discharged from the frigateCrescent, as a signal for getting under way. May she arrive in safety at the place of her destination, as a present to the Dey of Algiers of one of the finest specimens of elegant naval architecture which was ever borne on the Piscataqua’s waters. Richard O’Brien, who was ten years a prisoner at Algiers, took passage in the frigate and is to reside at Algiers as Consul-General of the United States to all the Barbary States. TheCrescenthasmany valuable presents for the Dey, including twenty-six barrels of dollars. It is worthy of remark that the captain, the chief officers and many of the privates of theCrescentfrigate have been prisoners at Algiers.
When Captain Cobb prudently went wide of the Strait of Gibraltar, in 1794, the Dey was running amuck among American merchant vessels. As many as ten of these luckless ships had been taken in one cruise of a brig and three xebecks out of Algiers, and more than a hundred Yankee seamen thrown into dungeons to toil under the lash of Arab slave drivers. And honest seamen were begging from door to door in Boston and Salem to collect funds for the ransom of this fellow mariner or that, with whom they had been shipmates. The tourist who visits the Algiers of today, an ornate French metropolis with the ancient Arab town climbing the hill behind it, can behold strongholds whose stones were laid by tortured, perishing sailormen from the land of the brave and the free.
Bearing safely away from those ticklish waters, Captain Elijah Cobb found himself out of the frying-pan and into the fire. England had gone to war with France in 1793 when most of Europe was allied in the effort to stamp out the flames of the Revolution. The rights of neutrals were tossed aside. American shipping was ground between two millstones. All was fair in war. British and French cruisers seized our ships for engaging in trade which our own interpretation of internationallaw held to be perfectly legitimate. More than a hundred American vessels were taken by France in 1793 on pretext of trading with England or her colonies.
Captain Cobb could find no reason why his voyage to Spain should be molested and he was too stiff-necked to submit without protest. His papers were stolen by the prize master and there seemed to be no means of redress whatever. He had no friends in France, official or otherwise, and his ship was tied up in the port of Brest while a starving populace looted her cargo of foodstuffs. The Reign of Terror was at its height. Chaos and bloodshed ruled in place of government. The guillotine was a law unto itself. In a period of fifteen months, 17,000 persons had been formally executed in France. The number of those who were shot, drowned, or otherwise massacred without pretense of a trial can never be known, but must be reckoned far greater.
All of which may have harrowed the soul of Captain Elijah Cobb, but he kept his eye firmly fixed on his own predicament. His ship had to be released and indemnity paid him for detention and loss of cargo. After six weeks of wrangling with minor officials, he resolved to go to Paris and seek satisfaction. A stubborn mariner who shoved obstacles aside, behold him making this dangerous journey with an official courier, for armament loaded pistols and a blunderbuss, in a carriage that was “musquet shot proof” and driving like Jehu night and day, without a wink of sleep all the way from Brest, more than six hundred miles.
Undismayed, persistent, Captain Elijah Cobb pursued his way through the weltering horrors of Paris, merely noting that he saw one thousand persons beheaded by “that infernal machine,” the guillotine. Thwarted at every turn, he carried his case to none other than Robespierre himself. The audacity of this Yankee seafarer was amazing. He made dollars seem heroic. His motive was really better than this—the compulsion of duty toward the owners who had entrusted him with the ship and her lading. Citizen Robespierre, Carlyle’s sea-green monster, spoke the word that swiftly untangled the affair.
Shortly after this, Robespierre was overthrown and outlawed by the Convention. Trying to commit suicide with a pistol, the bullet did no more than shatter his jaw. And now for the final scene in the Place de la Concorde. Captain Cobb stood there and beheld it with his own eyes, on the 9th Thermidor (July 28, 1794). Robespierre rides on a tumbril, the mangled jaw bound in dirty linen. The Gendarmes point their swords at him to show the people who he is. A woman leaps upon the tumbril and screams: “Thy death rejoices my very heart.Scélérat, go down to Hell with the curses of all wives and mothers!” At the scaffold they stretch him on the ground. Then Samson, the burly executioner, lifts him aloft, wrenches off his coat, tears the dirty linen from his jaw. A hideous cry and the head of Robespierre is shorn from his shoulders.
And how does Captain Cobb describe this gigantic episode?As if he were making an entry in a ship’s log. “Before I left the country; I saw Robertspeirs head taken off, by the same Machine—But to return to my induvidual, and embarised affairs….” This was characteristic of the New England breed of seafarers. They are exasperating at times. They saw so much and told so little. The wonders of the world left them unmoved. The pen was an awkward tool to handle and they were as thrifty with words as with pence.
You will find Captain Cobb waxing loquacious, however, when it comes to the intricate and difficult business of due bills and foreign exchange or smuggling gold out of France. All this is of value to the modern reader as showing how extremely competent were these master mariners as bankers and merchants. It helps to explain why they became the leaders in their communities when they retired from the quarter-deck, and why they were so successful, as a class, in commercial pursuits ashore. They were literally the first American captains of industry, men accustomed to large responsibilities and the tests of critical emergencies.
It throws a curious slant on the moral code of the time to find Elijah Cobb so profoundly pious and yet so ready to bribe and smuggle with a clear conscience. In a way, this point of view was inherited from the American Revolution. The harsh restrictions laid by the mother country on the commerce of her colonies had led to smuggling as an easy road to wealth. In almost every town prominent characters were named who, underBritish rule, had stowed in their attics and cellars goods that were not for the officers of the King’s Customs to see. To these harbors came vessels built for speed and laden with contraband wares gathered in the colonies of France and Spain. And reputable merchants were always ready to run the stuff ashore. Thus, on the very day when the farmers of Middlesex drove the British out of Lexington, John Hancock was to have stood trial for defrauding the Customs.
And so Elijah Cobb, pillar of the Universalist church in his later years, is not in the least ashamed to admit that he did a very pretty job of running rum to a crew of skilled smugglers between the Cove of Cork and the Scilly Islands.
It was adroit intelligence and knowledge of the world that enabled him to escape from the trap of the British Orders in Council that ruined hundreds of American shipmasters and owners. These high-handed measures aimed against Napoleon, together with his Milan Decree launched in retaliation, made American vessels liable to confiscation in almost every foreign port to which they traded. It was not a proud era in our national history. The time was not far distant when the cry of “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” was to sound the note of the Second War with England.
Elijah Cobb, loading a return cargo of wines and dried fruit at Malaga, in 1806, learned that England forbade such a voyage. He decided to take a sporting chance of slipping by the English cruisers in the “Gutof Gibralter.” The wind failing him at the wrong time, he obtained his clearance papers by bribing an official. In the opinion of Elijah Cobb there was more than one way to skin a cat.
The intolerable aggressions aimed at American commerce, including the impressment of seamen, had caused President Thomas Jefferson to use the embargo as a weapon in reprisal. If he could not protect American ships and sailors on the high seas, he could, at least, he thought, save them by keeping them at home. Maritime New England had been reluctant to accept an embargo policy. Josiah Quincy had begged Congress to remember that the ocean could not be abandoned by his people “of whom thousands would rather see a boat-hook than all the sheep-crooks in the world.” However, the first Embargo Bill was passed in December of 1807, forbidding the departure of American vessels for any foreign port. The results were futile and disastrous. Ports filled with dismantled ships, counting-houses deserted, grass growing in the waterside streets failed to affect perfidious Albion. Nevertheless, the embargo was tried again in the spring of 1812.
Captain Cobb was loading flour at Alexandria, Virginia, for a European voyage when the news of another embargo came like a blow from a clear sky. Hard-bitten New Englander, he had refused to heed the warnings. His own Massachusetts Legislature had denounced such Acts of Congress as unconstitutional, and a hundred towns had adopted resolutions of protest. However, Mr.Madison’s latest embargo was a condition and not a theory, so Elijah Cobb made haste to get to sea before the officials could lawfully stop him. He had twenty-four hours of grace. A gale of wind was blowing, so violent that the ship was almost torn away from the wharf. Here was the efficient shipmaster in action—a hundred tons of stone ballast to be landed, three thousand barrels of flour to be stowed in the hold and secured, provisions, wood, and water to be taken aboard, a crew to be found and signed on, and the vessel cleared at the custom house.
Elijah Cobb turned the trick without bluster or confusion. It was the kind of thing he could do extremely well. His portrait is that of a man very resolute and composed, not much humor in the straight mouth and steadfast eye, a good deal of the Puritan afloat. In his sedate way he must have enjoyed what he called “running away from the Embargo.”
England and the United States were on the brink of war. This final embargo was frankly intended as a preparation for war. It held American ships in our own ports and saved them from capture while a swift pilot schooner was sent to warn American merchantmen in northern Europe that hostilities impended and they must hasten home or lie up abroad in some neutral harbor. These signs and portents seemed to have escaped the notice of Captain Elijah Cobb. He was oddly unaware of it all, busied with selling his flour in Cadiz at a profit and buying British bills of exchange to reap more dollars.Congress had formally declared war, on June 18, while Captain Cobb was in the midst of his transactions. And when he sailed from Cadiz for Boston, on July 5, “he never felt himself saffer, on account of enemies on the high seas.” Peacefully he jogged across the Atlantic, as far as the Grand Bank, when he was overhauled by a British armed schooner. The subsequent proceedings must upset the conventional notions of the sea warfare of bygone days. All British seamen are presumed to have been ruffianly and outrageous persons. It will be noted that the interviews between Captain Cobb and his captors were conducted with courtesy and friendliness.
The merchant skipper was pained and surprised to find that he had fallen into the enemy’s hands. The enemy endeavored to make it as comfortable as possible, trusting that Captain Cobb would “excuse their inquisitiveness.”
You will find the dialogue vastly entertaining and not at all as the fictionist would fancy it. Mutual regrets and esteem, the prize politely ordered to St. Johns, the prisoners to be made as comfortable as possible under the circumstances! And then it is your pleasure to meet that fine old Port Admiral of St. Johns, Sir John Thomas Duckworth, who tried to make these unwilling visitors feel at home. “Supercargoes and Gentlemen passengers” were set at liberty.
The display of gentlemanly feeling between sailor foemen was not unique in the annals of the War of1812. England was well aware that the maritime interests of the New England coast were out of sympathy with the war and it was policy to avoid provoking them more than possible. “Organize a peace party throughout your Country,” resolved the Massachusetts House of Representatives, after war had been declared, “and let the sound of your disapprobation be loud and deep.” The climax came with the secretly seditious Hartford Convention. The Federalist opposition was stupidly blind to the fact that the war was a defensive struggle against the massed resources of the British Empire. The seafaring population, forgetting the national interests and suffering destruction and blockade, allowed the politicians to lead it by the nose.
Captain Elijah Cobb stayed at home on the farm until the end of the war. Then he resumed his voyages to Europe, uneventfully, and engaged in the African trade in 1818, commanding the shipTen Brothers. There was no worse pest hole on earth than the West Coast and its slave ports, no area so indelibly stained with man’s inhumanity to man. A land of treacherous surf and steaming jungle, of tawny beaches and sluggish rivers, the infamies of centuries cursed the names of Goree and Gambia, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, Calabar, Anamaboe, and the Congo. In 1819 the slave trade had been outlawed by England and the United States, but many thousands of the poor wretches were annually smuggled into the West Indies and the southern ports of this country.
The barracoons and factories were flourishing when Captain Cobb sailed on his lawful trading voyages to Prince’s Island in the Gulf of Guinea. Like many another American shipmaster he risked the deadly fever in order to sell his goods to the natives and carry home palm oil, ivory, coffee, and gold dust. The most lucrative traffic was in New England rum, muskets, and gunpowder, but Captain Cobb makes no mention of these as in his invoice, and it is fair to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that it would have discredited him in the reputable circles of Boston or Brewster. A man could be a deacon and still peddle Medford rum to the benighted Africans.
Captain Cobb stocked his ship with the customary trade goods, gaudy cotton prints, tobacco, beads and brass pots, bandana hankerchiefs, flour and meal, salt beef, pork, and fish, candles, tinware, and crockery. His letters are pretty doleful reading. Several other American vessels were with him at Prince’s Island, their captains ill or dead of fever, his own ship rotten with it. What they called fumigation was crude and ineffectual. They suffered grimly. It was all in the day’s work, and they could only commit themselves “to a mercifull just God who always acts for the good of his Creaturs, & happy would it be for us; if we could always bow with humble submission to His righteous dispensations.”
Even this consolation was not enough to make Captain Cobb endure more than two voyages to the Guinea Coast. His ship had to be scuttled at a Boston wharf, sofoul she was with deadly fever, and there was fear that the contagion might spread ashore. This was the end of his seafaring career of nearly forty years. To a ripe old age he dwelt in Brewster, a distinguished citizen and active farmer, “tall & straight of fine figure his face very pleasant to look upon.” The imperious traits of the quarter-deck were carried into his religious activities. As a Universalist he played a lone hand for some years, and “met with violent opposition to his views, yet waxing only the more valiant in the fight, he came off conquerer.”
It is the wistful desire of every true sailorman to quit the restless sea and own a farm. This boon was vouchsafed Elijah Cobb and it is fitting to bid him farewell when “the wind has got around to the south” and he is just returning from a visit to the young orchard—a mellowed old gentleman who had lived through the most stirring era of American ships and sailors and had survived hazards innumerable to find a quiet harbor! Not a flamboyant career, but splendidly competent as one reads between the lines. He was one of the pioneers, blood brother of the men who turned landward to tame the wilderness.
Ralph D. Paine.
Durham, New HampshireApril, 1925.