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24 _ The Passing of the Ol THE Marine REVIEW nou d Sea Captains of Our Once Renowned Fleet. of Clipper Ships Few indeed are left of the old ship masters of 50 years ago, and before the close of another decade it is pos- sible that not one of those- practical resourceful seamen will be left above the sod, to tell again and again with pardonable pride of the achievements and daring of the seamen of their day. Sailors they were in every sense of the word, for steamers in the mer- chant service were few indeed. Their Alma Mater was the vessels of our "great coasting and West India fleets of the 30s and 40s of the last cen- tury. They graduated with the high- est honozs, when from the early 50s to the close of our civil war, they com- manded-our then great fleet of world- renowned clipper ships. Using the sailor phrase comple: ary to our able and trusted officers, "He came on board through the hawse- pipes and worked his way aft to the quarter deck." And in the average seven years that completes the course from the apprentice to the master, they not only became proficient as navigators and skillful seamen, but in a greater or less degree acquired> the cunning of the merchant or _ super- cargo, often buying their cargoes or chartering their ships for important undertakings; dealing direct with the merchant or shipper, without the aid of the middle-man, and thus adding power and importance to the already absolute control of the situation. It was the ruie, too, almost without ex- ception, that the master should be financially interested in the vessel he commanded; owning, as the case might be, from one-sixteenth to a quar- ter of a vessel. There can be no doubt in the minds of those familiar with the history of our merchant marine, that the seamen of the old school, from the days Elias Haskel Derby, Joseph Peabody, Wil- liam Gray, Samuel Endicot H. Ray- nolds, and others, old merchant cap- tains of Salem and Boston, dating from the middle of the seventeenth century (pioneers of our trade inthe far east) to the men that commanded our fleet of overseas ships, at the close of our civil war, were the peers in the pro- fession that thave 'never since been equalled. And in the 'decades of the 30s to 'man, the boat and fire drill, By F. D. Herriman the 60s, in the last century, in which we are now particularly interested, the comparatively few. officers now liv- ing who sought and obtained employ- ment in English tramp steam- ers, or in ocean liners, after our fleet of sailing ships had disappeared from the face of the waters, will tell you, that it is not possibles under existing conditions to make seamen of the old stamp, of the deck hand of the mod- ern built steamer. If we except the duties of the quartermaster, the lands- there 4s nothing to be learned in the art of seamanship as we understand the meaning of the word. The full-rigged sailing ship is. not only the most complete institution for the training of the apprentice in all branches of seamanship, but a mov- ing, pitching, rolling gymnasium of the greatest perfection for the devel-- opment of muscle and self reliance. The hand work, and daring displayed to an ordinary audience 'by the athlete in our gymnasiums on shore, where a net is stretched beneath the perform- er, 'to give asstirrance that should he fall he would receive no harm, is child's play compared with the nerve and feats of daring that are hourly displayed, day and night, on board a full-rigged sailing ship at sea. _ Watch the 15-year-old royal boys, among whose duties, are the loosing and furling of the royals and skysails, at the top cf the tapering masts, 160 ft. or more above the heaving, surg- ing ocean. At times with a strong beam sea, these little chaps, on their high perch, would' be describing an arc in the air of 50° or 60°. Clinging like monkeys to ithe mast and rigs ging, when she gave. an extra deep roll, and again working like little bea- vers, to gather up the sail when the ship for a moment became steady. The climax for nerve and daring came when they would work their way -to the very end of a royal or skysail yard, to recover a lost gasket that was streaming from the end of 'the jacket- stay far out to leeward, this: position, the ship takes a deep roll, the little chap spreads--his. feet on .the foot rope, contracts all his muscles, grasps the yard: with. both arms, closes his eyes, murmurs-a_ lit- If, when in the fishes from the royal yard. tle prayer, all in the space of a few seconds, and waits the return to nor- mal conditions; when he works his way into the bunt and completes the furling of the sail. Often the lads would return to the deck after ac complishing their task with pallid faces, not from fear, but from sSea- sickness that they were striving man- fully to overcome. At stich times, the lads would have the heartfelt sympa- thy of the humane captain or deck officer, for they, too, as boys, had fed Tt 4s a well-known fact, that the quickest and surest way to overcome the malady is to keep moving in the watch on deck and, if possible, divert the mind by some interesting work. To the reader who can- recall the however, busy scenes in our New England ship yards, immediately following the rush for the gold fields' of California, or . who is familiar with the history of. our merchant. marine. following the discovery of gold on our Pacific coast, will note that the most famous of our ships for speed and fast passages were | built in the years 1849 to '55. They were built exclusively for the Califor- nia trade, and everything in their con- struction, excepting the necessary strength, was sacrificed for speed. Our shrewd and enterprising mer- chants of the east saw the golden harvest that awaited -the arrival of the much-needed necessaries of life among the thousands that had flocked- from all parts of the world to the gold fields, and no expense was spared to rush the building of these vessels that they might with the least possible de- lay proceed to their loading berths and receive the general merchandise that congested warehouse and wharf. Under ordinary circumstances, the extremes resorted to in the construc- tion of these vessels would have made them financial failures when compared with ships that preceded as well as followed this extreme type of vessel. Their dead weight capacity was but a trifle more than their gross tons measurement. So fine were their lines, and so taut and massive were their spars, rigging and general equip- ment; carrying an excess of spare spars, sails and cordage, that so 'in-~ creased their displacement, that they