Vanished fleets and brave memories--a chronicle of America which
had written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will
be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like
those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports
mysterious and unknown.
The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so
much to clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a
fishing settlement. Like the other Englishmen who long before
1620 had steered across to harvest the cod on the Grand Bank,
they expected to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water. The
convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was that it offered a
good harbor for boats and was "a place of profitable fishing."
Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the wilderness
and the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where they were
soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the
Kennebec colony.
Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the
Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing
carpenters and shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak so
close at hand into keelsons, frames, and planking.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25