Early Ship-building in Philadelphia and Colonies—Paul Jones—Joshua Humphreys—“Alliance”—Truxtun—Embargo—Decade following War of 1815—“Rebecca Sims”—Inauguration of Packet Lines—Thomas P. Cope—Decay of Eastern Trade in Philadelphia—Auction Sales of Cargoes.
The historical value of the character and career of individuals must be rated by their share in and impress upon the events of their time. This is equally true of success and failure. For example, the most famous man of modern time terminated his career in the most colossal failure known to history,—Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet, if we judge by the interest the civilized world takes in every shred of his history and by the perennial halo that envelops his name, people do not think about either his triumphs or his disasters, but fix their attention 12singly upon the impress he made upon civilization.
On the other hand, George Washington ended his career in success and glory. But few, except students and pedants, know much about Washington beyond that he was the founder of a new nation and the Father of a new country which a century after his death has become the most formidable on earth.
Thus, in either case, whether of success or of failure, both gigantic, mankind rates the importance of each by the impress he made upon the events of his time and by its enduring character.
Viewed broadly, the Europe of to-day as compared with the Europe of 1775 is as completely the creation of the popular forces incarnated in Napoleon Bonaparte, as the American Republic of to-day as compared with the revolted Colonies of 1775 is the creation of the popular forces whose exponent George Washington was. From this point of view, the fact that one failed while the other succeeded in the personal sense cuts no figure whatever.
CLIPPERSHIP MORNING LIGHT
These observations, while they have none other than a general relation to our immediate subject, are pertinent to the main thread of our theme. The real test of greatness in an individual, and therefore of the historical value of 13his character and career, being the impress he makes upon the events of his time, it follows that, unless the mention of a man’s name instantly suggests some great thing or things that he has done, or in a masterful way has helped to do, that man was not great; he made no impress upon his times, and his biography can possess no historic value. But whenever the name of a man stands as the exponent of some great thing done or as the symbol of notable achievement, then the character and career of that man belong to history, and the obligation devolves upon literature to suitably perpetuate his memory.
This, the prime test and condition of enduring fame, has been fulfilled by the subject of this memoir, Charles Henry Cramp. Not alone in his own country, but in Europe and Asia,—from St. Petersburg to Tokio,—the mention of his name instantly suggests triumphs in the science of naval architecture and marine engineering and successes in the art of building ships. However, before proceeding to a history of the career and life-work of Mr. Cramp himself, it seems proper to survey the historical antecedents of his science and his art in his own field of action.
The art of naval architecture and the industry of ship-building were almost coeval with 14the primitive establishment of the English-speaking race on the American continent, and this was more particularly true of Philadelphia than of any other place. In the earliest grants of land to settlers, William Penn invariably included a clause requiring them, when clearing the land granted, to “spare all smooth and large oak-trees suitable for ship-timber.”
In 1685, three years after Penn arrived in the Colony, it was reported to the Lords of Trade in London that “six ships capable of sea-voyage and many boats have been built at Philadelphia.” From this early beginning the industry grew rapidly, until in 1700 four yards were engaged in building sea-going ships alone, besides several smaller concerns which built fishing-boats and river-craft. Two rope-walks, two or three block-makers’ shops, and several other special manufactories of ship-building material, had been put in operation. At first the spar-iron work needed was brought from England, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century all the ship-smithing required for Philadelphia-built ships was done on the spot.
The first four yards were located at different points along the beach, between the foot of Market Street and the foot of Vine Street, and 15there they remained until about the middle of the eighteenth century. By that time the value of that part of the river front for commercial wharf purposes had increased to such an extent that the ship-building industry could not afford to hold it. In the meantime new yards had been established down as far as South Street, others as far north as the present foot of Fairmount Avenue. Obedient to this law of trade the four older yards moved their plants either northward or southward, as convenience or economy might dictate. But after 1744 no ships were built between Market and Vine Streets. The last of these original shipyards of Penn’s time to succumb was the largest and most important one in Philadelphia. It was owned and managed by Mr. West, who was at that time the leading ship-builder in the Colonies; and the ground his shipyard occupied had been deeded to him by William Penn in part payment for a ship he had built for Penn several years before. He removed to the present foot of Green Street.
In 1750-51 two ships were built in West’s new yard, which exceeded in size any merchant vessels previously constructed in America. One of them was of three hundred and twenty and the other of four hundred tons burthen. They were sent to England with cargoes of 16colonial produce, and on arrival at London were both bought by the East India Company and placed in the regular East India and China fleet. They were as large as any merchant vessels built in England up to that time, and of superior model and construction. One of them—the larger of the two—remained on the list of the East India Company more than thirty years; and in 1751 had for one of her passengers to India, Warren Hastings, who was going out to Madras as a young clerk in the Civil Service, to become the first Governor-General of British India, and founder of the British Empire in Asia.
During this period, the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a new scheme of ship-building commended itself to the enterprise and ingenuity of Philadelphia shipwrights. This was the construction of what they called “raft-ships.”
The local supply of ship-timber in the forests of England, particularly of frames, knees, keels, and the larger spars, had begun to decline to the danger-point by 1750. The size of ships, both for commerce and for war, was constantly increasing. This increase incessantly involved the use of longer and heavier timbers for frames, larger knees and futtocks, and thicker planking. Meantime the forests of 17England became smaller and smaller. The great old trees had been cut down and sawed or hewn up, and the younger stems had not found time to grow in their stead.
Indeed, before 1750, England had begun to import ship-timber from the Baltic; but it was mostly deal boards used for cabin-work, ceilings, sheathings, etc. Now she began to look to her American Colonies for the heavier materials. It was difficult to load and stow this kind of timber through the hatchways of the ships then available. The ingenuity of Philadelphia shipwrights met this obstacle by building the timbers themselves into the form of ships, and they were then navigated across the Atlantic to be broken up on arrival in British ports. These “raft-ships” were built with bluff bows and square sterns, their sides being several feet thick. To make them water-tight, they were sheathed with two thicknesses of boards which “broke joints,” and were caulked. The largest of these, called the “Baron Renfrew,” measured the equivalent of five thousand tons in a regular merchant ship. She got safely across the ocean, but went ashore on Portland Bill in a fog and broke up. Most of her timber, however, was picked up by English and French vessels which cruised for weeks in search of it. Among the mast-timber 18she carried was one white pine tree ninety-one feet long by four feet eight inches diameter at the butt inside the bark. This tree was used for the mainmast of the “Royal George,” a three-decker then building at Chatham (1774). It was doubtless still in the ill-fated ship when she heeled over and went down at Portsmouth in 1782. The “Baron Renfrew” was the last of the “raft-ships.” The oncoming Revolution stopped all kinds of commerce for eight years, and though after the peace ship-timber was again exported to England, it went as hold or deck cargo in regular vessels.
Summing up the colonial period, it may be said that, while the records were imperfectly kept and some lost, enough is extant to show that between 1684 and 1744 one hundred and eighty-eight square-rigged ships and over seven hundred brigs and schooners, besides immense numbers of boats, river-sloops, fishing-yawls, etc., were built at Philadelphia. Her only rival in the Colonies during that period was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but Philadelphia held the ascendency over all in the size and total tonnage of her ships.
That the Colonies should have developed the ship-building industry from their earliest existence was natural and necessary. If you take a modern map of the United States and 19draw from Maine to Georgia a heavy black line averaging one hundred miles back from the general trend of the sea-coast, you will have in close approximation the geography of colonial settlement at its maximum. In this belt, this “narrow fringe of civilization,” were concentrated for more than a century all the energies of English-speaking pioneers, rapidly increasing in numbers and incessantly augmenting the products of enterprise and industry which, from surplus over home consumption, had to seek markets over sea.
In those early days the population kept within easy reach of the coast or of the arms of the sea and estuaries which abound from the Savannah on the south to the Penobscot on the north. The back country, forming the eastern or Atlantic slope of the Appalachian chain, was little more than a hunting and trapping ground or a field for primitive trade and barter with the Indians. As for the vast “hinterland,” west of the Alleghenies, it was, up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when the final struggle between England and France for supremacy on this continent began, an unbroken wilderness, inhabited only by hostile savages, and unknown to any white men except the Jesuit priests and the cunning traders of French Canada.
20For all these reasons, the gaze of the English-speaking colonists from the earliest settlements to the beginning of the conquest of Canada was always bent toward the sea, and all their enterprise and energy were directed to the commerce of the ocean. Under such conditions, the development of skill in ship-building was inevitable; and with that necessity was also bred a scientific alertness in marine architecture itself which, as soon as political independence freed its scope, became supreme throughout the civilized world.
The outbreak of the Revolution of course, for the time being, put an end to merchant ship-building in all American ports. But in Philadelphia the paralysis was only temporary, and the energies heretofore directed toward construction of ships for the uses of peace were soon turned to the conversion of available merchantmen into vessels of war or privateers, and the building of new frigates ordered by Congress. The first American squadron, that of the ill-starred Commodore Esek Hopkins, was composed entirely of merchant vessels taken up in the harbor and converted into men-of-war in the shipyards of Philadelphia during the autumn of 1775.
It was in the selection and conversion of these four merchantmen into cruisers that Paul 21Jones, founder of the American navy, first gave to the United States his energies and his talents. Thus Philadelphia was the birthplace of a new sea-power, and her shipyards have ever since been the foremost contributors to its growth, until even now, though only a century and a quarter old, it has achieved imperial rank.
In November, 1775, Congress authorized the construction of six 32-gun frigates and seven other war vessels of less dimensions. Four of the frigates were allotted to Philadelphia shipyards. They were the “Washington,” the “Randolph,” the “Delaware,” and the “Effingham.” The first two were frigate-built from their keels, but the “Delaware” and “Effingham,” to save time, were built upon frames already on the stocks for merchant ships when the war began. On this account they were not quite as large as the regular frigates and rated twenty-eight instead of thirty-two guns.
From 1775 till the peace of 1783, Philadelphia yards built a great number of privateers and converted a few ships for the “State Navy,” as it was called, that is to say, ships provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and assigned to the Continental service. One of these, a converted bark of two hundred 22tons and mounting sixteen 6-pounders, has passed into fame as the “Hyder Ali.” Under Lieutenant Joshua Barney she took the “General Monk,” a regular sloop-of-war, mounting fourteen 9-pounders and four 6-pounders. The “Hyder Ali” was a small French bark which arrived at Philadelphia with military supplies early in February, 1782. She was at once bought by the State and placed in Humphrey’s yard for conversion into a cruiser. Within six weeks she was put in commission, and she took the “General Monk,” April 8, about two months after her arrival in port as a merchant vessel. This was the last capture of an English man-of-war in the Revolution.
The peace of 1783 found Philadelphia possessing only thirteen merchant vessels, all built before the war and nearly all of which had served as privateers during the conflict. No new merchant keel had been laid in a Philadelphia yard between 1775 and 1782; but the industry revived with wonderful energy. From 1782 to 1787, one hundred and fifty-five vessels were built, of which fifty-six were square-rigged ships averaging over three hundred tons. From this period on the progress was very great. The outbreak of the wars of the French Revolution in 1793 at once threw a vast carrying trade into American bottoms, the United 23States being for a long time the only neutral maritime nation. By the year 1801, when the treaty, or truce, of Amiens was signed, nearly three hundred sea-going ships were owned in Philadelphia, all home-built, and fourteen shipyards were in operation,—eight in the northern or Kensington and six in the southern or Southwark district. These were all first-class shipyards, building the largest full-rigged ships of that epoch. In that period and for a long time afterward the leading Philadelphia shipyard was that of Joshua Humphreys, in Southwark, and its proprietor and manager was himself the foremost naval architect of his time. When Congress, in 1794, authorized the construction of six frigates, and thereby laid the foundation of what we call the modern or “regular” navy, as distinguished from the old Continental navy of the Revolution, prominent ship-builders were asked to submit plans, the government then having no naval constructors. The plans of Mr. Humphreys were adopted for all six frigates. Three of them embodied a distinct advance in size and weight of armament over vessels of similar rate in other navies, and were classed as 44-gun frigates. The other three were designed as 38-gun frigates, and were an improvement upon the 36-gun ships of European navies. These six ships 24were built by contract,—one of the forty-fours and one of the thirty-eights at Philadelphia; one forty-four at Boston; one at New York; one thirty-eight at Baltimore, and one at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In addition to these, a 32-gun frigate, the “Essex,” was built at Salisbury Point, Massachusetts, by private subscription, and given to the government.
CLIPPERSHIP MANITOU
Mr. Humphreys had the contracts for the Philadelphia-built frigates, and on May 10, 1797, he launched the 44-gun frigate “United States,” which was the first ship of the regular navy to be water-borne. Thus to Philadelphia belongs the credit of having fitted out the first squadron of the Continental navy in 1775, and of launching the first ship of the regular navy in 1797. In 1799, Mr. Humphreys completed a third frigate, named the “Philadelphia.” This ship is described in some histories as a “forty-four,” and in others as a “thirty-eight.” As a matter of fact, she was neither; but properly rated, under the rules then in vogue, as a 40-gun frigate. This difference was due to the fact that she carried thirty long 18-pounders on her gundeck as against twenty-eight 18-pou............