January 2011

It remains to make one more point which is essential to any attempt to understand the heyday and the long decline of the American sailing ship. It was a time which was very hard on the ships themselves, but it was infinitely harder on the men who sailed them. The foremast hands who took those winged racers so far and so fast were driven much more mercilessly than the ships they manned. The skippers and mates of the packets and the Cape Horners were, as noted, consummate seamen, but they also bore a strong resemblance to Simon Legree. They ruled with belaying pins and knuckledusters, and the human costs of their achievements were often sickening.

Toward the end of the Civil War a Connecticut captain with the felicitous name of Valentine laid urgent siege to a lady’s heart. Lacking the time (or perhaps the money) to have his photograph taken for the cartes de visite then the rage, he substituted a sketch of himself—shown below mounted over a portion of the letter ill-treated by time. What happened to the marital hopes of the rest of the regiment, history fails to record, but Captain Valentine’s suit was in vain.

Pioneers at Sea The Racing Machines The Shanghai Passage

The story of America, we frequently remind ourselves, is the story of the conquest of a continent. It begins at Jamestown, at Plymouth, or wherever one chooses, and goes through forests, mountains, and prairies all the way to the sunset; and it shows a restless, acquisitive, and usually indomitable breed of men converting an immense stretch of land to the uses of a large, energetic, and intricately organized society. The pioneer of course is the hero, complete with such artifacts as the axe, the long rifle, and the covered wagon, going west with prodigious strides, followed presently by the promoter, the sturdy artisan, and the far-seeing man of business. It is a fabulous story, and we could recite it in our sleep.

It is a theory of democracy that a free society will produce men fitted for leadership when leadership is needed. It does this sometimes in unlikely ways. No one could have foreseen, for instance, that frontier Illinois would bring forward an Abraham Lincoln, or that the narrow Knickerbocker society of New York would send up a Theodore Roosevelt, at the precise moment when such men were wanted. But it does happen; not invariably, but often enough to make all the difference.

How this happens is a mystery. Men get hammered into shape, somehow. Occasionally the process is painful, with greatness coming out of what looks like a succession of failures. At other times it looks like nothing more than the simple progression, in a job or profession, of a rather ordinary person who is trying to do nothing much more than make an honest living. Then, when a man of special talents and stature is needed, suddenly there he is.