Master Mariner

THE LIFE AND VOYAGES OF

AMASA DELANO

Captain Amasa Delano, 1763-1823



BY
JAMES B. CONNOLLY

1943

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CHAPTER XXVII

Hauling the Log

IN SPEAKING OF HIMSELF, Amasa Delano never tried to smoothen the record of what might stand to his discredit with gentle or captious souls ashore--as his cat-o'-nine-tails lashing of those stowaways off the coast of Australia, or his looking out for himself alone when the overloaded boat capsized off the coast of New Holland. So these things were, and if folk will be thinking less of him because of them, then so be it.

A fearless man by all moral and physical standards. He doesn't proclaim it, he doesn't hint at it, but a steady reading of his log discloses a man who is fearless without knowing that he is such.

What Amasa does know, and the knowledge irks him exceedingly, is that members of his own profession do sometimes prate of their bravery, or it may be of their seamanship, when they have done nothing to prove they have either beyond the ordinary. He deprecates the pose of captains who enlarge on the peril of rounding Cape Horn, when, as all captains of good knowledge well know, the so much nearer at home North Atlantic was as dangerous sailing in its ugly moods as ever the Cape Horn waters are. To gullible, innocent folk ashore, the far-distant seas always loom as holding the great perils; hence the tall tales of mariners who like to play the hero to shore folk on their return from sea.

In his spare hours at sea, and ashore between voyages, Amasa had done much reading. "In consequence of my lack of academic education, I have always seized every possibility during my whole life for the improvement of my mind in the knowledge of useful literature and those sciences that are immediately connected with the pursuits to which I have been professionally devoted."

He was acquainted with the history of strong military powers' taking over the lands of weak peoples, and then holding them in political and economic slavery, even in bodily slavery, and, if need be, killing them off when they resisted, then justifying the slavery and the killings before the world by writing down the conquered ones as everything that was vile--as peoples, forsooth, who did not know what was for their own good, but who would, give them time, come to a just appreciation of the beneficent intentions of their conquerors.

To Amasa's way of thinking, such talk was just so much scupperwash. He held some positive ideas about leaving alone people who were going their own way without harm to others, and especially for letting be the gentler and more innocent of the enslaved ones. After viewing the results of imposing a "higher civilization" on such people, he mourns "that the contentment, which appears to accompany people of so few wants, cannot be preserved more perfectly amidst the relations and interests of civilized life." The foregoing was his published view in a day when the white world at large regarded slavery as the natural condition of all black peoples.

In the case of the Pelew Islanders, for whom he held a special affection, he goes at some length into the history of the islanders between Commodore McCluer's first and second visits; that is, the two years after King Abba Thulle had gone in for playing the white man's political game and making use of the white man's weapons of war against his enemies. King Abba, that good man but so innocent in many ways, failed to foresee that his enemies might seize those same war weapons and make use of them against himself and thereby bring disaster upon his hitherto well-conducted and happy island kingdom.

In the peace and quiet of his home, and from a perspective of twenty-five years, Amasa is still lamenting the plight of the Pelew Islanders, who "had lost much of their early simplicity, without gaining the intelligence and virtue of a civilized people. They had mixed their native character and habits with those of the Europeans and not retained the excellencies of either."

American ship captains of Amasa's day were famous for their belligerent Americanism; and having to compete so regularly with foreign captains in high seas commerce wasn't softening that belligerency. Amasa was as stanch an American as any. His officer shipmates of the McCluer expedition recognized his Americanism when they nicknamed him Jonathan. But his Americanism did not include hatred for all foreigners.

Thus, the oldsters of Amasa's day were for keeping alive the bitter memories of the War for Independence; and after the War of 1812 the younger generation was for keeping alive the horrors of the war they knew. Now Amasa as a lad of fourteen had fought, as had also his father, in the American War for Independence; and he had rejoiced with his father in the glorious ending of that war. He had also rejoiced in the successful ending of the War of 1812, but without sharing in the general New England hatred for the English after 1812. He had known many English officers in the East, and he had liked them and was for writing good things of them (as quoted heretofore).

Amasa detested folk who held in hatred all other convictions than what they themselves were born and brought up to. It was his nature to like people, to take them as he found them, let them be who they would. After his first cruise as a young captain to Bilbao, in Spain, he wrote: "The inhabitants are remarkable for good morals, civility, and for their humanity to strangers." Of the South of Ireland and the Irish he wrote: "I found a beautiful country. The inhabitants are the most noble minded, and possess the highest sense of honour of any that I ever was acquainted with."

He also spoke highly of the men and women of the Spanish colony of Chile, and added good words of Spanish justice as he, a foreigner, found it in the courts in Lima. He liked the Portuguese he had met in St. Ubes and Lisbon; and, having a spare hour one night off the west coast of India, he included in his log something of the history of that wise and humane General Albuquerque, early Portuguese Governor of Goa, who was so great a general in the field and equally great as a colonial administrator. He wasn't forgetting the excesses of the French revolutionists in the Île de France or the government officials who came near to confiscating his ship and cargo and leaving him penniless there, yet these painful memories did not prevent him from doing justice in his log to that fine man, the Governor of that same Île de France.

Amasa was well aware that giving voice to these insurgent views was like laying a windward course for his ship in a strong gale at sea. It meant slow, hard sailing. And so, after rereading the immediate foregoing in his rewritten log, he adds: "My remarks may sometimes appear to pay too little deference to popular prejudice; I hope however that what I have always felt may always appear in my expressions, and that is a uniform attachment to all the good and generous qualities of our nature."

When friends took to urging that he put his South Sea experiences into print, Amasa weighed their value or want of it. "No seaman from the United States had enjoyed the same opportunity for observation and discovery in the East Ocean, which was afforded me by the voyage I made with Commodore McCluer, and it may be that the account will be useful to seamen."

As for the usefulness: With only Amasa Delano's published directions for guidance, any half-intelligent cartographer of that day could have plotted--as doubtless some did--a correct and pretty nearly complete chart of the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, and any half-competent shipmaster could find safety in Amasa's sailing directions to any harbor on that chart except, of course, where the contours of those harbors had been altered by some disturbance of nature--as by earthquakes, say--in the meantime.

All the island groups, or nearly all, are there--the Sulus, the Celebes, the Ladrones, the Amboynas, the Timors, the Seychelles, the Galapagos, and the Sandwich Islands. And the great islands--Java, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, Île de France--are there too. Amasa placed them all by latitude and longitude, and added warnings of treacherous currents and shoals--mud and coral shoals--of good and bad anchorages. All the needful information for the safe guidance of any shipmaster who would be sailing those eastern waters is there. And there is safe sailing information on the west coast of South America, the coasts of India and China--as he found them, there they are, and running on to several pages at times. The brief extracts quoted herein are merely by way of giving the sea savor of the master mariner who was Amasa Delano of a century and a half ago.

Whatever port he put in to, mainland or island, Amasa went into immediate action with his seeing eye and insatiate curiosity to find fresh copy for his log. Animal and plant life, birds, fishes, and, of course, human beings--he observed them all, set down what he saw and thought, in his large, legible penmanship, for the benefit of future readers. Frequently his pen would run on for several pages on matters that had nothing to do with handling or navigating a ship.

For putting money in his own pocket, it was a waste of time and energy, but he was that sort. Only brief extracts of such observations are included here, because, original though they may have been with him, much the same information is to be found today, and in less scattered form, in scores of cyclopedias and books of travel.

They may be so found, yes; but, looking back through that modest captain's log of a century and a half ago, a man wonders if it wasn't the inspiration for a few of the biologists and ethnologists who sailed in his wake; who perhaps made safe use, some, without credit to him, of the information he gathered in the frequently dangerous days.

When Amasa found his income from tutoring young gentlemen for officers' billets falling short of a living wage, he agreed to the urging of his friends that he put his sea experiences into print. He had his misgivings before publication. "Lacking an academic education," he allowed his log to be edited by some friends--"who had the benefit of an academic education." And so, let not the rhetorical and inflated phrases, the interminable suspended periods quoted herein be charged against Amasa. No man of action was ever that guilty; but, thanks be, the academic ones let be his sailing directions and his handling of his ship in typhoons, hurricanes, and other manifestations of the anger of the weather gods. The seaman in Amasa doubtless said no, no, to that.

Amasa got little profit from his book. It was weighted down with purely professional matter on Amasa's own account; and the academic editors included too many pages about the birds, the beasts, and the fishes--informative, yes, but of only passing interest even to the specialists, and of no interest at all to the general public.

They failed to interpret the character, the rare personality, the man was. Also they allowed to remain in too many pages of pious moralizations. In his self-righteous moods Amasa could be most exhortatious, but he was dwelling in a community that viewed with suspicion moral suasions coming from other than their own selected ministers. Hence, Amasa's insurgent views were not benefiting the circulation. A man holding to unpopular tenets, and standing up boldly for them, usually has to die, and then stay dead for a long time, before he gets his proper rating.

Amasa's log begins with his departure as navigator of the great ship Massachusetts for the East and ends with his arrival home from that St. Bartholomew voyage just prior to the War of 1812. Of his shore and sea life before these dates, and his shore life afterward, he says nothing.

Why so? Well, he may have thought his early life of no importance; and as for his home life, it is likely that he held the view of most other ship captains of that day, that is, that being pretty much like any other home life ashore it could be of no interest to the world at large.

It is an admirer of Amasa Delano's, a contemporary, who gives us, in a brief sketch, all we know of Amasa's life as boy and man up to the time he signed on as navigator of the Massachusetts. Now that sketch includes the story of the killing and eating of that Indian child by Amasa's uncle in the French and Indian War, and Amasa could surely have prevented the printing of a story written by one who was obviously a fervent admirer. But Amasa did not forbid it. If folk will be thinking the less of him and his forbears for that true record, then so be it. He may have run to self-righteousness on occasions; but he was an incontestably honest sort.

Nor does the friendly, brief biographer say anything of how Amasa made his living, or anything of his home life, after he quit the sea. What he does say--and he allows the reader to make what he will of it--is:

"Amasa Delano was always distinguished, not only as fond of odd and daring enterprise, but as possessing every generous and honourable feeling. And not a single charge of a dishonest or mean action is recollected to have been brought against him. He was a dutiful and affectionate son, and also had the credit of being particularly kind to his sisters. All his acquaintances and neighbors esteemed him for his candor and ingenuousness. He had no malignity or revenge in his composition.

His recent misfortunes and embarrassments are much regretted by his old acquaintances. If be has sometimes erred in judgment, they are firmly convinced that he is not capable of designing to do wrong to others. And it is a matter of regret that a man of his generous and disinterested feelings, and who has made such great exertions to secure a handsome living, should be thus unfortunate at this time of life, which is now approaching to old age, and in which new adventures cannot be resorted to for riches or support."

Amasa's printed log died early; but the memory of the man himself should not be allowed to die. Of his later days in so far as this present biographer can say, the oldsters on the Boston water front of half a century ago liked to gossip of their old-time days. Some among them had sailed with famous captains of half a century before their day, and some such--the earlier ones--had been shipmates with men who had fought in the War of 1812 and who had sailed before that with Captain Amasa Delano in the South Seas. Captain Amasa Delano was well spoken of always by all the old-timers. Their gossip had it that, after quitting the sea he took a clerkship in the Boston Custom House. And there's a picture, not too happy a one, of the stout-bodied sea captain balanced on a revolving stool before a high desk and conscientiously, laboriously copying manifests and other customs papers. While at the Custom House he would now and then be allowed time off to drop in for a smoke and a gam with the captain acquaintances and owners in the shipping offices along the Boston waterfront. Any half-human chief would allow him that time.

Let us leave him there, easing himself into that day when he would be no longer able to make his way to the harbor front and swap tales with captains who had also sailed all the navigable latitudes and come to anchor in their day in a hundred far ports.

Honesty, industry, ability, and courage combined failed to ensure Amasa Delano a competence for his later years. He lacked the moneymaking faculty. He was a notable ship captain in a day of notable ship captains. He was the complete navigator, possibly the most competent of all the merchant ship navigators of his time. He was of the American captains who led the maritime world of their day in enterprise. They were resourceful and daring. Danger? Nothing there to worry a man. No sir. It was part of the day's work, and every trade had its own risk. Typhoons, hurricanes, and a lee shore--they were a trade risk.

Those captains built up a great foreign commerce for their young country; and beyond that, and more vital to the ultimate good of their country, they created a great tradition. And when, after the War of 1812, our merchant fleet was swept from the high seas, new captains took the deck to carry on that tradition.

Today (early in 1943) we are hatches deep, as those old captains would phrase it, in a war of extreme peril to all merchant ships. The old sailing days are gone. It is steamers now, steamer captains and crews, but steamer captains and crews carrying on in the tradition of the captains of the old days, of Amasa Delano's day. Our country owes much to the kind of men they were; and the memory of their kind should not be allowed to die.

And so for the Master Mariner that was Amasa Delano.