BANQUET. 371 



gathered around the throne of Britain, those advisers of Elizabeth who made the name of 

 England immortal, had established the policy of paying liberal bounties from the national 

 treasury to British merchants that England might have a commercial fleet to dominate the 

 seas — and they followed that example. They exempted from military service shipwrights in 

 those days when prowling savages made the musket an inseparable companion of the settler. 



They knew what such exemption from military service really meant — that this aid to 

 merchant sliipping was a concession that might call for payment in their life blood; but 

 they paid it. The result was that shipping- in the colonies developed so rapidly tliat poli- 

 ticians of Europe soon saw in it a peril to England's maritime supremacy, and Sir Joshua 

 Child in his discourse on trade presented in 1668 made this comment, the truth of which 

 was to be so many times re-emphasized: "Of all the American plantations His Majesty 

 has none so apt for the building of ships as New England." Every student of maritime his- 

 tory knows how the colonists developed the shipping industry; how they broke away from 

 old established types and gave the world such merchant craft as had been before un- 

 known. When the Revolutionary War came on the colonists were without a navy ; but they 

 had shipping men, men accustomed to challenge all the dangers of the ocean ; men to whom 

 the tumbling breakers had been playmates in their childhood days; and when Paul Jones 

 made his historic advent to the British Channel he found there had been before him many 

 a little colonial privateer, bravely assailing Britain's proud shipping in its home waters. When 

 the United States had won its independence, but before the government had been formed, 

 there was a period when American shipping was an outcast upon the sea. Those vessels had 

 no national protection; each had to depend upon its own powers to preserve its existence. 



Yet in those days between 1873 and 1789 the fearless ships of the colonists ventured into 

 every sea in increasing nimibers, and in 1789 there were more than forty ships of this feeble 

 country trading beyond the Cape of Good Hope; venturing half-way aroimd the world to 

 China, defying the Barbary pirates and those merciless Malays of the eastern waters. Dur- 

 ing this period there went out from the port of New York the little ship Experiment, built 

 on the Hudson, measuring but 80 tons. Every man in her crew knew not only the sailor's 

 art but he had learned to handle the cannon, the musket and the cutlass ; and with her crew 

 of fifteen men she made the voyage to Canton and return. During that same period, still un- 

 protected, the Columbia of but 200 tons, and her consort, the Lady Washington of but 90 

 tons, ventured around deadly Cape Horn, into the Pacific and circled the globe; finally dis- 

 covering the majestic river which took the Columbia's name, and helped to give this country 

 that marvelous country of the great northwest. 



Such was the spirit of the American shipping men of those days. You Icnow their subse- 

 quent triumphs. How those pioneers in ocean trafific achieved their success is clearly set forth 

 by the British historian of shipping, Lindsey, when he states that the masters of American 

 ships were greatly superior to the British masters. The Americans had the training of mer- 

 chants; they had the inspiration of ownership and initiative; they had the boldness that knew 

 no fear; they demanded of the ocean its treasure as if it was rightfully theirs — and the ocean 

 responded to their dauntless demands. Some of you will remember that way back in the 

 old clipper days, many a time the crew of a foreign vessel, lumbering along under lower top- 

 sails, would see a cloud of snow-white canvas come over the horizon, and soon a "Baltimore" 

 clipper would go booming by, royals flying, rigging singing in the wind, and the lee rail 

 resting in the waters. (Applause.) The men of New York were among the maritime leaders 

 of those days. 



