Voyages of Trade and Adventure describes When the Puritan planters arrived in 1630 to set up the capital of their Bible Commonwealth, Boston was a hilly, treeless peninsula, covered by blueberry bushes, surrounded by mud flats and shallows, the whole lying virtually hidden from the sea by a maze of islands. Dubbed “Lost Town“ by the sailors who threaded their ships through the harbor’s many islands, this mean and sad little settlement had few virtues. Its earliest defenses were a few cannon set behind a mud-walled fort. The houses huddled around the small cove were of thatch, beam, brush, and clay. For wood, the colonists had to row over to the islands: they brought hay in on flat scows, cattle and corn were kept on outlying farms. Whenever a ship came up the harbor, rich and poor lined the seaside, ready to barter whatever they had for shipboard provisions. Yet this unlikely settlement soon developed into the commercial center of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1634 a visitor to the town could describe its port as the “fittest for such as can Trade into England, for such commodities as Countrey wants, being the chief place for shipping and Merchandize.
During its first decade, Boston supplied the arriving Puritan settlers with the necessities of life in the New World livestock, seed plants, and other provisions. After 1642, when open hostility in England between Royalist and Puritan factions stayed the Puritan emigration, the Boston merchants went in search of more remote markets, and for the next fifty years they scoured the world’s seaboards for places to trade. In 1642, Boston’s first ship, the Trial, carrying barrel staves and fish, set sail for Faial in the Azores, where it traded its cargo at a good profit for wine, sugar, and other local products. The next stop was the West Indies, where some of the Faial merchandise was traded for cotton, tobacco, and iron the last scavenged from local wrecks. The little ship soon returned home with a glorious profit. Boston embraced mercantile commerce, and for centuries prospered on the “triangular trade”: buying and selling commodities from a first port for those of a second port, which might ultimately turn a profit in a third (and occasionally into a fourth, fifth, and sixth).
Such ventures did not always meet with success. In 1646, the elders of the New Haven colony bought a ship of somewhat dubious construction (it leaned dangerously in any strong wind or waves), an early effort of the Narragansett Bay shipwrights, and loaded the vessel with 70 young men and the settlement’s produce, with the plantation’s high hopes of becoming a great mercantile center. The ship sailed off that winter into an icy fog and was never seen again, except, some argue, in the spectral mirage of a storm-battered ship that shimmered over New Haven harbor the following summer.
In Boston, however, shipbuilding was a strongly regulated and inspected activity, and a Boston made craft, though perhaps not the best in the world, could be expected to hold together for at least a few voyages.
With these ships loaded with fish, wood, and corn brought to Boston from outlying seavillages by smaller vessels the Boston merchants set out on “voyages of adventure,” gambling that they could turn a profit somewhere. On their return, they filled the little city with odd cargo, often glutting the market. Someone even brought back a stuffed alligator, which, probably from want of a purchaser, was ceremoniously presented to the governor. The more utilitarian cargo was traded with the coasting captains, who distributed it among their shoreline customers.
In 1663, a traveler through the town could characterize the Puritan mercantile elite as “damnable rich” inexplicably covetous and proud.
By 1700, Boston’s population of some 7,000 odd souls exceeded that of all but a few of England’s largest cities. It had become a “company town” whose income depended almost entirely upon the shrewd shipping ventures of a few Puritan merchants: the codfish aristocracy. Down on the docks, wharfmen unloaded the tar, lumber, corn, cattle, furs, fish, and other raw produce from the many coasters. Nearby, larger ships took aboard these goods for reshipment to England and the West Indies. Warehouses lined the wharves; carters wheeled supplies in through the great street doors, and tackles hoisted barrels up into the upper stories.
Craftsmen converted hides to shoes, pelts to hats, fat to candles, all for shipment aboard vessels bound for places where raw materials and artisans were scarce. Most important of all the crafts was that of shipbuilding.
The shipyards, set up in small fields along the water’s edge, were each worked by a master shipwright and his half dozen assistants. Here they collected various sizes and types of wood; then with saw and adze skillfully shaped the timbers that would be put together into a vessel. A shipyard’s only structures were simple sheds, serving as office, warehouse, and shelter.
A complex of buildings surrounded the yards, warehouses and work sheds housing the many allied trades. Of these, sailmaking, ropemaking, blockmaking, and ironmaking were the most essential. The more established shipbuilding areas also had carvers, coopers, instrument makers, and specialized gangs who contracted out to set rigging or make masts and spars.
Sails were manufactured in sail lofts, large open buildings or the raftered upper floors of warehouses. Here workers laid out and sewed together pieces of canvas (usually imported). Rope was made in great lengths from hand-spun twine twisted together into thick cables out in the nearby fields. Soon sheds appeared, only a dozen feet wide but hundreds of feet long to accommodate the lengths of rope needed. Blockmakers carved the large wooden pulleys needed for the ship’s rigging. Blacksmiths hammered out the anchors, bolts, plates, chains, and other nautical ironwork. By the mid-eighteenth century southeastern Massachusetts had a thriving industry converting bog ore into iron for the shipbuilding industry.
In Boston, as elsewhere, the waterfronts containing these shops, lofts, and yards were rabbit warrens of buildings, their sides open to the carts and wagons constantly trundling the cobbled streets. Here leather-aproned men could be seen working their trades, while children played in the piles of wood shavings. The smell of salt air and hot tar permeated the atmosphere, and ships’ masts towered above the roofs.
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