Even then
these early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carrying
smaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to a
closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in order
to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.
By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand
vessels were registered as built in the New England colonies, and
Salem already displayed the peculiar talent for maritime
adventure which was to make her the most illustrious port of the
New World. The first of her line of shipping merchants was Philip
English, who was sailing his own ketch Speedwell in 1676 and so
rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years he was the
richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which traded
coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St.
Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading,
flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by
the Grace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower . . . .
and by God's Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland."
No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to
cross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be
sold in the West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses
to Boston or Rhode Island.
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