Men who go to sea today in our merchant marine, in positions of command, are, in many instances, graduates of the ships of these latter days of sail.
Looking back, and as time goes it is not so very far away; we can, in our mind's eye, see the great wood-built craft that lined the waterfront of South Street. These were the last of the American sailing ships, entering from, and clearing to, every sea port under heaven. They were not the famous California clippers of an earlier day, or the swift Western Ocean packet ships, or the storied tea ships of the China trade, but they were their legitimate successors. The ships of this last glorious burst of sail, under the Stars and Stripes, were larger craft, vessels built for the long voyage haul, for the grain trade, for the sugar trade, and as carriers of general cargo to the Orient and the western coast of North America.
Most of these ships were laid down in the eighties, and left the yards of Maine to find adventure and preferment in the longer routes of commerce. The Horn and the Cape of Good Hope were their turning points, and they smoked through the hum of the Roaring Forties, as they beat from the Line to Liverpool, laden with California grain, or they ran before the westerly winds, from Table Bay to Melbourne--_Running Their Easting Down_--black hulled, white winged ships, with New York, Boston, Baltimore, or Philadelphia standing out in golden letters on their transoms.
Only the strongest and best found ships, and the most skilful and daring seamen were fit to carry the flag across the world-long ocean courses about the storm-swept Horn, and here again America more than held her own in competition with the mariners of the old seafaring nations of Europe.
Winthrop Lippitt Marvin in his valuable work, "The American Merchant Marine,"[1] pictures this last Titanic struggle of the sea in stirring fashion--
"It was a contest of truly Olympian dignity,--of the best ships of many flags with each other and with the elements. Out through the Golden Gate there rode every year in the later seventies and the eighties, southward bound, the long lean iron models of Liverpool and Glasgow, the broader waisted, wooden New Englanders, with their fine Yankee sheer and tall, gleaming skysails, the sturdy, careful Norwegian and German ships, often launched on the Penobscot or Kennebec, and here and there a graceful Frenchman or Italian. The British were the most numerous, because the total tonnage of their merchant marine was by far the greatest. Next came the Americans. The other flags looked small by comparison. In this splendid grain trade there sailed from San Francisco for Europe in 1881-85, 761 British iron ships and 418 American wooden ships. The Americans were the largest vessels. Their average registered tonnage was 1,634 and of the fourteen ships above 2,000 tons that sailed in 1880-1, twelve flew the Stars and Stripes. The average tonnage of the British iron ships was 1,356.