Don't give up the ship! - role of ships in the early export and import trade of US - Editorial

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Wendell Garrett

Dying words of Captain James Lawrence on board the United States frigate Chesapeake, June 1, 1813

Seaborne trade from New England began in 1636 when Thomas Mayhew and John Winthrop sent a small sloop to Bermuda loaded with corn and smoked pork. After a month-long voyage the vessel returned with oranges, lemons, potatoes - and a tidy profit.

However, not until the first half of the nineteenth century did American ships come to dominate the nation's import and export trade, challenging Britain for the maritime crown of the world. The swift clipper ships, loaded with sail, became particular symbols of American determination and shipbuilding craftsmanship. In 1855 some two-thirds of the tonnage entering and leaving American ports was carried in American ships, and the coastal trade, closed by law to foreigners since the earliest days of the Republic, was even more vigorous.

Between 1825 and 1860 about twenty percent of exports from the United States went to Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Latin America, and twenty percent of the country's imports came back from those countries. Outgoing cargoes were made up of medicine, furniture, food, boots and shoes, iron, carriages, machinery, and horses and mules. The ships returned with sugar, coffee, and hides for the shoe industry.

Scheduled transatlantic packet service was introduced in 1818 with the establishment of the Black Ball Line operating between New York and Liverpool. Full or not full, one of the line's ships would leave from each port on a given day each month. The success of the line spawned a number of imitators, including the Red Star Line and the Blue Swallowtail Line, which both began serving the same route in the early 1820s. In their heyday, the sailing packets carried most of the "fine freight" - passengers, mail, money, and news - to and from Europe. Iron-hulled steam packets presented a serious challenge to the sailing packets in the late 1840s and 1850s. Passengers came to prefer the more efficient and commodious steamships, and the sailing ships were forced to carry iron, coal, and other heavy freight at far less profit.

Already by 1839 the average duration of a westward passage from England to the United States was seventeen days by steam and twice that by sail. By granting subsidies to British steamship lines, the English came to dominate the North Atlantic sea-lanes. Their marine engines were better than the Americans', and the screw propellers they adopted used coal more economically than paddle wheels did. Except in the protected coastal trade, ships flying the American flag appeared less and less often on the high seas, so that with the advent of World War I the United States had to start more or less from scratch to rebuild its maritime power. The passage of the Seamen's Act in 1915 greatly improved the working conditions and safety on board American vessels, but there will probably always be sailors as well as landlubbers who share Samuel Johnson's gloomy assessment of shipboard life. He concluded in 1759 that "no man will be a sailor who had contrivance enough to get himself into a jail, for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company."