Master Mariner

THE LIFE AND VOYAGES OF

AMASA DELANO

Captain Amasa Delano, 1763-1823



BY
JAMES B. CONNOLLY

1943

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CHAPTER XXVI

Laying to Moorings

WTH ALL THE LONG YEARS of strenuous living behind him, Amasa Delano was beginning to visualize himself as an oldster who would ere long be stowing himself away in a warm kitchen corner on the inclement days, or on the porch outside on sunny days, or on a settle in a taproom, after the custom of oldsters who were for reliving their experiences and from out of them drawing good advice for the youngsters or whoever else would take heed.

Too often the youngsters were for taking no heed, which was frequently their loss, because years coming atop of experience set a man to thinking; and if a man then takes time to look back on what he has been through, he should be drawing many a useful lesson from what he has done. Or from what he has failed to do. A better lesson from the failures, it could be.

Oldsters growing garrulous would too often lay down the law for things they knew no more of than the next. Sometimes less. For himself, he could claim to know as much as the next man, and maybe more than some, of one thing, and that was of ships he had known as master and man before the mast, and what the ships and himself had lived through on high seas and low. Three times he had circumnavigated the globe, and not once in that three times had the keel of his ship touched bottom. Not many shipmasters could say that of themselves. And that did not include all his voyages. No, no. If he could teach folk nothing else, he could teach them something of navigation. So to Amasa's way of thinking, and he would sit at his westerly window on the slope of Beacon Hill and in his spare hours ponder the problems that he had never given the proper time to in his days at sea.

Amasa broke out his old sea logs and brought them to the light of his westerly window. They were written in his bold and legible penmanship, surprisingly legible for a big-fisted sailorman; and yet not so surprising, perhaps, if his thorough way of doing things be taken into account. Navigation had given him trouble at first, but he stood by the study of the problems of it until he had the mastery of them. Penmanship had also given him trouble; but he stayed by it too. He added to the logs the thoughts that came to him as he reread them.

A notable point in Amasa Delano's original log of his voyages is the little he has to say of what sort were his fo'c'sle shipmates when he was himself a hand before the mast, or to say of the crew men of his captain's era. After becoming an officer he comments on other officers, and almost always to praise them; but even in these later years of leisure and quiet at home--and time aplenty for a retrospective summing up--even then he adds no word of the men before the mast. In his original log, after recording that his ship Perseverance and his schooner Pilgrim were ready for sea, he adds that he "shipped sixty prime seamen." Whether he found the sixty of good or bad character, competent or incompetent sailormen after they put to sea--not a word of that; which means that Amasa Delano was very much a ship captain of his period, viewing his crew as a whole, not as individuals.

Thus, several men of the Massachusetts having died of tropic fever on the passage to Canton, and three others having been murdered while ashore in Macao, Amasa accords three lines of his log to these two items. A midshipman dies, and he gives ten times three lines to how the midshipman is rowed ashore and buried there, with all proper ceremony, in Batavia, while minute guns from the ship and long-drawn strokes of the oarsmen in the funeral boat were marking the solemn occasion. A' midshipman was an officer.

The property in his care--that is, his ship and her cargo-- was the great concern of a captain in Amasa Delano's day. Maritime laws were primarily property laws, made first for ship owners, and then for the officers who represented the owners at sea. The welfare of men before the mast rarely concerned a ship owner, and what wasn't the owner's concern wasn't usually an officer's concern.

Amasa Delano accepted the maritime laws of his day as a matter of course. There is no record, and no reason to believe, even after a continued study between the lines of his log, that he ever treated the men of his crew brutally; and there is much reason to believe, as we read between those lines, that he accorded them fair treatment. On his own evidence he could be a severe disciplinarian on occasions, as in the case of those convicts who stowed away on his ship off the Australian coast, then came on deck refusing duty. They hadn't signed any ship's articles, and so what right had he or any shipmaster to make them stand long night watches? Or order them aloft to furl sail in rough weather? These were desperate men who so talked, escaped criminals, some, with the mark of gunshot wounds from prison guards still on them. Desperate men surely. And Amasa then? Visualize him, then, looking down on the desperate ones from his station on the poop, listening gravely as a judge on the bench, nodding his head now and then as if there might be something in what they said, then going into his cabin and emerging presently with his pistols in his belt and telling them that what they would do or wouldn't do was for him to say. Knew their rights, did they? Well, he was captain of his ship, and he knew his captain's rights. Refuse duty, would they? Mutiny on him, would they? Visualize stout-bodied Amasa, then, swaying to the roll of the ship on his widespread feet, his thumbs hooked into his pistol belt. And then? He speaks: "Bosun, seize that man and trice him up, and lay, him twelve lashes on his bare back. And when you've done with him, seize that one at his shoulder, if he is still talking, and lay him the same."

Amasa was within maritime law when he flogged those convict men. And if they had done him bodily harm, or even moved in a threatening manner toward him, and he had shot them dead, any court of law ashore would have cleared him.

Laws for the guardianship of ship property were sacrosanct to Amasa. Mention has been made of his condemnation of privateering after his return from that cruise in the Mars as an eighteen-year-old lad. In the quiet and leisure of thirty-odd years later he adds to that early judgment. That captains--good friends, some--were going in for privateering (War of 1812) did not deter him from proclaiming the evil of it to a listening public.

"In honourable warfare, private property should be respected. This system of licensed robbery enables a wicked and mercenary man to insult an honest sailor, who may have all his earnings invested in his ship, but another man who carries an enemy's flag may plunder him of every cent. The effects of privateering, and the nature of the principle, will make a benevolent man shudder. It is a poor consolation to a man who has his property taken from him that it is done according to law."

Once under way, Amasa continued to speak his mind in the matter of the needless and usually wanton destruction of property by the enemy in war. He strove to read a lesson into it for nations at large, and to make his point he writes as if the destroyed property were enemy property and his country's troops the vandals:

"In honourable warfare, the object is not to do injury to the individuals of a nation with which we are in hostility, but to seize or destroy the property of the government, and to kill, or take captive, the troops by which the war is carried on against us. We wish so to distress, or affect, the rulers of our enemy, that they may do us justice, regard our rights, and wish for permanent peace. If, in carrying on the war, it becomes necessary for us to use, or destroy, the property of our own citizens, we are, as a nation, to divide the burden among the whole, and not to let more than a just portion fall upon the individual."

So for property protection; yet he could grieve for men who lacked for protection in other ways. And so, grieving for that friend who had been tossed into jail and held there until his health was ruined for standing by Amasa in his escape from the customs crooks in St. Bartholomew, Amasa adds to his sea log:

"To throw men into prison for debt or some trifling offence, where they must suffer to such a degree as to injure their mental faculties and destroy their ambition and future prospects in life, without benefiting any one by it, is a practice that cannot be justified, either on the score of good policy or necessity. If those who may have the power to hold men in confinement and cause them to suffer in this manner, cannot be brought to feel for their distress, I think there ought to be a law to put out of their power to hold a man in confinement merely to gratify an avaricious and revengeful disposition."

Amasa, while so pleading, had in mind his own experience in Calcutta, when through no wrong doing on his part he fell into debt and had to flee the port to escape being tossed into jail; and his condemnation of privateering may have come of a biased mind, he being himself a ship owner then. Maybe so; but his arguments remain sound. In the matter of more humane treatment of poor debtors he ventures to make a prophecy:

"I hope to live to see the time when some measures shall be adopted for the benefit of that class of men who may be by misfortunes and events not within their control, reduced to such circumstances as not to be able to fulfill their contracts; and put it out of the power of an unfeeling creditor to make his fellow creatures so wretched as often has been the case. Take into view the man of a noble mind, who has laid six or seven years in jail, condemned by law to pay large sums of money that he never owned; who has had his property sacrificed, when it was out of his power to prevent it; and judge whether it be just or politic to allow him to be farther persecuted. There are but few men, who possess any sensibility, but what will have their spirits broken by such usage, and become wretched and obnoxious to those about them. It is very frequent for men in this situation to take to some bad habits, which prove destructive to themselves and to the good order of society; for it is not common for men to make any exertions even to earn a livelihood, after being so broken down, much more to pay debts, whether just or unjust. To provide by law for such persons, that they should not be held for any greater length of time than three or five years, especially when there cannot be any probability of their ever having anything to pay with, I think would be wise to measure."

The foregoing reads like old stuff today, but it wasn't old stuff in Amasa's day. More people then than now were apt to look askance at folk who fell into poverty. There must be something lacking in the character of men who couldn't pay their lawful debts. Yes sir.

Amasa was always a bit of an insurgent: an insurgent in the War for Independence, as a privateersman, as a man before the mast in blockading days; and so against the French revolutionists in the Île de France, and the corrupt practices of the St. Bartholomew authorities.

Amasa was always a loyal American citizen, as were his people before him. His father too had fought--and suffered severely--in the War for Independence. But being a good, loyal citizen did not mean to Amasa that he should approve every measure the government laid on its people. While still an active shipmaster he had been outspoken in his condemnation of the Embargo Act and the restrictive maritime measures of Jefferson's regime. A great president, Jefferson, but he held some curious views, such as attaching only a minor value to his young country's foreign commerce.

In the peace and quiet of his later years, Amasa was of the same mind about the maritime acts of Jefferson's day:

"An argument may be urged by those who are entirely unacquainted with the subject, that merchants and mariners do not know how to take care of their own property; and that by going to sea with it at an improper time would be liable to lose the whole; and that it may be necessary to lay an embargo for the express purpose of saving them from ruin. Such kind of reasoning as this I will answer in the following manner; that merchants and mariners know what the risque is in sending vessels to sea, much better than legislative bodies do; it being a business that their profession makes them well acquainted with. By their knowledge and experience, and from the information possessed by insurance officers, they can very readily determine whether it will be profitable to risque at sea or not. If the exigencies of the times, or the difficulties in our relations with foreign nations, is not sufficient to destroy the commercial interest of the country, the putting on an embargo will be pretty sure to do it effectually."

Amasa interested himself in naval affairs. Without a powerful navy behind them, American merchant ships could hardly hope to hold the sea. So:

"It would, in my humble opinion, be wise for legislatures to take measure in season to provide a naval force sufficient to protect commerce; and let the navy department be, like that of some other commercial nations, separate from the other branches of the government; to be conducted by a board of admiralty, consisting of the best and most experienced men in the country. Give this board the means and authority to increase and regulate the navy upon a prudent and frugal plan; and not interfere with the commercial concerns of the nation without obtaining their advice on the subject. By adopting this plan and pursuing it with an honest and proper zeal for the public good, I am very much mistaken in calculations if it does not make a nation respected abroad and prosperous at home."

Amasa's interest in the Navy may have been an all-selfish one, he being a ship owner thinking of protection for his property; but he was speaking from a thoughtful mind when he made public the foregoing. And he was probably the first merchant captain of his day to call for a more seamanlike management of our Navy Department.