America is again facing forward to the sea. The ancient thrill of the wide salt spaces, of the broad horizon beyond which adventure beckons us, appeals once more to the youth of America. We are living in times when the great importance of the sea as a career comes home to us at every turn. The sea is the great bulwark of our liberty, and by the sea we must persevere or perish in the world struggle of Anglo-Saxon democracy against the powers of autocratic might.

When America returns to her own, she builds upon foundations of tradition that have their footings on the solid bed rock of the republic. One glorious era of our sea history was followed by another, and as times progressed the breed of seamen ever rose capable and triumphant to the necessities that called them forth.

The Revolutionary sailors, and those of 1812, were followed by the great commercial seamen of the clippers. The mighty fleets of the Civil War astonished the world, and in the period just previous to our seafaring decline of a score of years past, the great sailers flying the Stars and Stripes spread their white cotton canvas on every sea.

Their story has never been adequately told. They are not to be measured in terms of tonnage, or in the annals of swift passages from port to port. Their contribution to the legends of the sea remains obscure. They carried a tradition of hard driving, and were a phase of our sea life that formed and forged the link between the old and the new, between the last days of sail and the great new present of the America of steam and steel.

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.

"The wooden yards of Maine had seen their opportunity and built in quick succession many great ships and barks of from 1,400 to 2,400 tons, very strongly constructed on models happily combining carrying capacity with speed, loftily sparred, and clothed with the symmetrical, snow-white canvas for which Yankee sailmakers were famous the world around. These new vessels were not strictly clippers, though they were often called so. They were really medium clippers; that is, they were less racer-like and more capacious than the celebrated greyhounds of the decade before the Civil War. They could not compete with steam; their owners knew it. But they were launched in confident hope that they were adapted for the grain trade and for some other forms of long-voyage, bulky carrying, and that they could find a profitable occupation during their lifetime of fifteen or twenty years. They were just as fine ships in their way as the extreme clippers, and in all but speed they were more efficient. They were framed with oak, and ceiled and planked with the hard pine of the South. They were generously supplied with the new, approved devices in rig and equipment."

In the last years of the nineties there were many survivors of this noble fleet of American sailers still in the long voyage trade. Ships like the El Capitan, the Charmer, the A. J. Fuller, the Roanoke, and the Shenandoah, were clearing from New York for deep water ports, and South Street was a thoroughfare of sailors, redolent of tar, and familiar with the wide gossip of the seas, brought to the string pieces of the street by men from the great sailing ships.

Then the crimp still throve in his repulsive power, and the Boarding Masters' Association owned the right to parcel out, fleece and ship, the deepwater seamen of the port. The Front Street House and a score of others held the humble dunnage of the fo'c'sle sailor as security, cashed his "advance" and sent him out past the Hook with nothing but a sparse kit of dog's wool and oakum slops, a sheath knife and a donkey's breakfast.

Those were the hard days of large ships and small crews. In clipper days, a flyer like the Sovereign of the Seas carried a crew of eighty seamen, and most of them were as rated—A.B. The ship A. J. Fuller, in the year 1897, left the port of New York, for the voyage around Cape Horn to Honolulu with eighteen seamen, counting the boy and the carpenter, the Fuller being a three skysail yard ship of 1,848 tons register.

It may be interesting to compare the size and crew of the Sovereign of the Seas, as given by Captain Clark in his great book, "The Clipper Ship Era,"[2] with the dimensions and crew of the ship A. J. Fuller.

This condition, of small crews and large ships, brought to the seven seas a reputation for relentless driving and manhandling that has clung to the minds of men as nothing else. The huge American ships were the hardest afloat, and that remarkable booklet, "The Red Record," compiled by the National Seamen's Union of America, in the middle nineties, carries a tale of cruelty and abuse on the high seas that must forever remain a blot upon the white escutcheon of sail.

These ships bred a sea officer peculiar to the time—the bucko mate of fact as well as fiction. These were hard fisted men, good sailors and excellent disciplinarians, though they lacked the polish acquired by sea officers of an earlier day when the sailer was often a passenger carrier, and intercourse with people of culture had its effect upon the men of the after guard. Also, the sea had become less attractive as a career. The boasted "high pay" of the American Merchant Marine, was $60 per month for the Chief Mate; $30 per month for the Second Mate, and $18 per month for an A.B.—at least such were the magnificent wages paid on the A. J. Fuller of New York in the year 1897.

The mate, to earn his two dollars a day, and keep, had to be a seaman of the highest attainments. His was a knowledge won only after a long hard apprenticeship at sea. He had to have the force of character of a top-notch executive, combined with ability and initiative. Then too, he was supposed to be a navigator, a man having at least a speaking acquaintance with nautical astronomy. In addition to this he might be as rough and as foul mouthed as he saw fit, and some of them were very liberal in this respect.

Then men still signed articles, voyage after voyage, for the long drill around the Horn, or, to vary the monotony, if such it could be called, made the voyage to Australia, or to China or Japan. In the main, however, American ships clearing from New York carried cargoes to the West Coast of the United States, or to the Hawaiian Islands, where they came under the protective ruling of the coastwise shipping laws, and were not compelled to meet the stringent insurance rates of Lloyd's that barred American sailing bottoms from fair competition with the British.

The sailor men of that day were still real seamen, at least a large number of real seamen still clung to the remaining ships. They were experts, able to turn in a dead eye in wire or hemp, and could cast a lanyard knot in the stiff four-stranded stuff that was later on replaced by screws and turn buckles when metal hulls succeeded those of wood.

With the passing of the wooden ship—the wooden square rigged sailer—went the American sailor, for comparatively few steel sailing ships were built in the United States. With the sailor went the romance of bulging canvas and of storm stripped humming bolt ropes. The tragedy, and the hardships of the long voyages passed away, and with that passing is gone much of the actual physical struggle with the wind and sea that made the sailor what he was.

The square rigged breed of sailors, while not dead yet, for the old salts die hard, has, by force of circumstances, failed to rear a younger generation to take its place. But the old spirit of sea adventure is as strong as ever; the ocean rages as loud, and lies as calm, as in the days of departed glory. It is still the world route to foreign trade, and a more ample domestic prosperity. Americans are again turning toward the sea, are heeding its age old wisdom, and are building and handling the newer craft of steam, and coal, and oil, with as much skill and success as they did the sailing craft of old.

On the following pages is recorded for the seamen and landsmen of today, a personal story of one of the last voyages around Cape Horn in a wooden ship propelled by sail alone—a ship without a donkey engine, a wooden Bath-built packet at her prime in point of age and upkeep. The advance notes have been cashed by the boarding masters, who have left the crew in tow of their crimps, and, after deducting for board and slops, the last remaining dollars have been blown in on the Bowery under the watchful eyes of the runners, who see to it that the men are delivered on board.

Our ship is the A. J. Fuller of New York, Captain Charles M. Nichols, and she waits her crew, ready to cast off from her berth in the East River at the turn of the tide, at daybreak on December 5, 1897, having cleared for the port of Honolulu, capital of the Republic of Hawaii, with a general cargo consigned to the old island house of Brewer and Company.