Gathering Storms

1859

When first it was said she would be sent to the River Plate, I took it for another distant trade, though farther inland than most. It was only later, when reports came north of the Paraguay Expedition, that I understood she had been sent not merely to a market, but into the course of events already underway.

It was said the trouble in Paraguay arose from a slight given to one of our vessels some years before, though such things were not uncommon in waters where authority was uncertain. What distinguished this instance was not the offense, but the answer to it. A squadron was sent where it was thought that a delegation alone might have prevailed, carrying with it the military means to insist upon being heard.

The barque Pathfinder became employed in carrying coal for the squadron, which included several war vessels and steamers dependent upon such supply.^⁠[1]

Paraguay, situated as it was upon the upper rivers and hemmed in by the stronger neighbors of Brazil and Argentina, found it wiser to receive the commissioners than to contest them. Thus the matter, that began in violence in Paraguay, was ended in agreement—though not without first showing how such agreements are sometimes obtained.

Portland Press Herald, June 2: Sailed from Cienfuegos (Cuba) May 17th, barque Pathfinder, Sleeper, New York.

Portland Press Herald, June 9: Port of New York, Arrived 8th, barque Pathfinder, Sleeper, Cienfuegos.

After discharging a cargo of cattle hides, tallow, and Argentine wool in New York, she sailed to Rockland for such maintenance as she required and took up lime for the New Orleans market at the end of August.^⁠[2]

Portland Press Herald, November 17: At New Orleans, Rambler and Pathfinder for New York soon.

1860

At the turn of the year, the Pathfinder was again in New Orleans making arrangements through her agents for cargo and passengers for Bordeaux off the coast of France.^⁠[3] By early February, however, her destination shifted to Genoa in the Mediterranean, and notices reported she was filling the last space in her hold with freight and taking passengers for the passage.^⁠[4] When she finally cleared on February 11th, she carried a substantial cargo of 703 bales of cotton, 3,600 staves, and forty hogsheads of tobacco.^⁠[5]

New Orleans was unlike any port I had ever seen, but I heard many an account of it—rich beyond measure in trade and movement, yet shadowed always by the knowledge upon what foundation much of that wealth rested. Cotton filled the levees, ships crowded the river, and fortunes were made from a commerce that reached from the plantations of the South to the counting houses of New York and Boston and onward to Europe besides.

Since John Brown’s raid upon Harpers Ferry in the autumn of ’59, tensions ran high throughout the country. Feeling between the free states and slave states had reached a fervor that winter, yet most still spoke as though some settlement must surely be reached in the end, as had been done before. Even so, there was an uneasiness beneath it all that a man could feel plainly enough in the ports and counting houses where so much trade depended upon Southern tobacco, cotton and the markets beyond.

Men in Maine who would never own a slave themselves nevertheless profited by the labor of those who did, whether they cared to admit it plainly or not. It was the same paradox in every port my ships sailed, and I could not deny it.

Henry Hopkins sent word from Massachusetts that my sister Sylvania died on January 30th. She was nearest my own age of all my brothers and sisters, and to lose her in her fortieth year saddened me nearly as much as when George had passed. There were but four of us remaining then. Mary and her husband William Graves had gone northward to Presque Isle to farm. Margareta and her husband Oliver Butler lived in Appleton, a day’s long carriage ride away. Louisa and Sophia lived in far-off Illinois—leaving me the only child of Nathaniel and Louisa Graves still living in South Thomaston.

By the spring of 1860 the Pathfinder crossed the Atlantic into the Mediterranean trade, carrying her cargo to the old ports of Genoa and Sicily. On April 16th she was reported arrived at Genoa.^⁠[6]

Those 3,600 oak staves, made in New Orleans after having been floated down the Mississippi River and bundled tightly for the hold, were enough to make near a hundred great wine casks once raised and hooped by Sicilian coopers.

It was a strange commerce when considered closely. Cotton picked by enslaved hands in the American South might cross the ocean in Northern ships, pass through foreign mills and looms, and return again to the world as finished cloth, so that few who handled the final goods ever saw plainly the labor from which they came.

The tobacco traveled in great hogsheads, enormous round casks bound fast with iron hoops and packed so tightly with cured leaf that each one weighed near half a ton or more. Rolled aboard by tackle and gangplanks with much shouting from the stevedores, they settled heavily into the hold among the cotton bales and staves, where they would remain for the long crossing outward.

No man aboard could mistake such cargo once it had been loaded. The scent of the tobacco worked itself into the very timbers of the ship, rich and earthy at first, though sharper and sweeter in the heat below decks where the leaf continued to sweat and settle within the casks. Mixed with the smell of cotton, oak staves, tar, damp rope, bilge-water, and the lingering odors of earlier cargoes, it became part of the peculiar atmosphere every deep-water vessel carried within her hold. A man coming up from below after checking cargo or pumps would bring the smell back up with him upon his clothes.

Yet for all its weight and pungency, tobacco was valued freight, compact for its worth and much sought after in foreign markets. A ship carrying such cargo stood to earn well upon a successful voyage, and owners watched those outward passages with particular interest until word came safely home again.

By June 10^th, the Pathfinder reported at Palermo from Licata,^⁠[7] the latter a busy port upon the southern coast of Sicily. Such voyages were seldom hurried. A ship might spend weeks moving between ports, discharging portions of cargo, arranging new freight through agents and brokers, and waiting upon favorable markets before taking on a full outward load for America.

By the time she cleared Genoa, Licata, and then Palermo for home, the Pathfinder’s hold had taken on an altogether different character from that with which she had sailed from New Orleans. Where once there had been cotton, tobacco, and oak staves, there were now fruit boxes stacked carefully within the hold, pipes, casks of wine and olive oil, sacks of almonds and raisins, together with sulfur gathered out of Sicily.^⁠[8] When she arrived in Philadelphia on August 5th, she was reported as having 1,047 boxes of lemons and thirty boxes of oranges.^⁠[9]

To us at home, these scattered notices in distant papers were often the only word of where she lay, whether loading beneath the heat of a Sicilian summer, outward bound through the Strait of Gibraltar, or at last safely making the Delaware Capes with another voyage behind her.

Before autumn was well advanced she had again taken cargo southward from Philadelphia and Baltimore for Galveston.^⁠[10] When word reached us that another gale had battered the Gulf in the first days of October—the worst wind many there could remember—I could not help but worry for the Pathfinder and her crew. It was not until after the middle of the month that we learned how badly she had suffered.

A landsman might read such a notice quickly enough and think little of it, but any man familiar with ships knew well what it meant. To lose canvas in such weather was no small matter, for a ship depended upon her sails not only for progress but for steerage and survival amid heavy seas. Torn canvas flogging loose in a gale could wreck spars and rigging outright if not secured, and men were often forced aloft in the storm itself to cut it free.

Bilge-pumps were the vessel’s defense once water had found its way into the hold. Long wooden brakes were manned by the crew in shifts, the men walking them up and down hour after hour to draw the seawater up from the bilges below. Eight hundred strokes an hour meant relentless labor day and night while the ship labored heavily in the Gulf seas with damaged sails and rigging no less—every timber straining, and the men below listening always for any sign that the water might be gaining upon them faster than the pumps could clear it.

For six days she remained at sea after the gale before reaching Galveston. I could not help but picture the crew at those pumps in the darkness, exhausted and soaked through with saltwater, yet still holding the vessel together by their own endurance as much as by the strength of her hull. That there had been no loss of life, and that the leak was thought to be above the copper, was a relief I did not soon forget. It meant her hull itself had not been mortally damaged.

She lay in Galveston for repairs while securing a cargo of cotton for an American port, together with lumber and grain intended for the Caribbean trade, where she might later take on sugar, molasses, and rum while awaiting favorable winds to carry her north again. To think of those warm islands as another Maine winter began settling over the coast brought old memories strongly back to me—the taste of sweet mangoes, peppered chicken, bright sun upon cobbled streets, and the long emerald waters stretching beyond the harbor mouths.

The coming election was discussed everywhere that autumn—in the newspapers, from lecture platforms, in stores and taverns, and among men standing about the lime wharves waiting on the tide. Maine papers of opposing politics argued the matter daily, each certain the other was leading the country toward ruin. By November there seemed no escaping the feeling that the Union itself had entered dangerous waters.

Maine was by then largely Republican in sentiment, though not without strong Democratic voices, and no subject stirred sharper feeling than slavery and the Southern trade. Yet for all the moral certainty spoken from pulpits and lecture halls, many Northern fortunes—including those of shipowners, merchants, banks, and mills—had long been tied in one way or another to cotton raised by enslaved hands. A vessel might load lime in Thomaston, cotton in New Orleans, and carry that same freight onward to Northern factories or European markets. Few men engaged in such commerce could claim themselves wholly apart from it.

Slavery had already been abolished through much of the British Caribbean before I built my first ship. Trade shifted accordingly while those emanciapted were paid starvation wages, had no politcal power and could not own their own land.

Voyages to Brazil, where enslaved labor still underpinned vast plantations producing sugar, coffee, and cotton for the world’s markets, became increasingly profitable. Commerce seldom troubled itself greatly over such distinctions so long as there was money to be made.

The whole country seemed bound together in that contradiction, though by then the bonds themselves appeared to be fraying.

When next spoken of, the Pathfinder had reached Barbados, and not long afterward she was sighted south of Cuba while standing northward for New York City.^⁠[11] She was then moving along the old island routes, carrying freight northward while winter was beginning to settle over the coast of Maine.

Abraham Lincoln was elected on November 6th, and by that time many believed the Southern states would soon leave the Union. Even before official word of the early secessions came, the country already felt divided in spirit, and the uncertainty touched nearly every port where ships loaded cotton or waited upon any Southern trade.

As events in the South darkened, Captain Sleeper and those of us concerned in the Pathfinder’s ownership thought it wiser for a time to keep her in the Atlantic and foreign trades rather than risk too much upon the Gulf routes. There was already hesitation enough in the markets, and no man could yet say what might become of the Southern ports should a united secession truly come. A profitable vessel was too valuable a property to place carelessly in troubled waters.

On November 29th, the Pathfinder cleared Boston for Havana^⁠[12] with chiefly dried cod, lumber, flour, and staves—all goods much in demand throughout the island’s immense plantations. Abolition had not reached Cuba. There the barque would take on sugar, molasses, tobacco, cigars, and coffee for New England markets.

Even as I watched Mercy at her stove and our two little girls happily at play beside the hearth, the year seemed to be closing under a gathering uneasiness. What would become of a country so politically and morally divided, yet still pressing ever westward? Would the coming winter prove as severe as the one that had nearly crushed us the year before? Would another spring fever or influenza again carry off friends and relations, as sickness had done so often since ’57? And would my ships continue safely upon the seas, earning enough to carry my family forward through whatever years and possible calamity that lay ahead?

NOTES

¹ The National Era (Washington, D.C.), March 24, 1859

² The Courier (New Orleans), September 20, 1859: “Arrives Dimanche (Sunday), Barque Pathfinder 20 jours de (20 days) Rockland, ME., a Creevy et Farwell 2er district.

³ New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, January 7, 1860

⁴ Times-Picayune (New Orleans), February 4, 1860

⁵ New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, January 13 and 15, 1860

⁶ New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, May 10, 1860.

⁷ New York Daily Herald, July 13, 1860

⁸ By the 1860s Sicily had become one of the world’s chief sulfur exporters, supplying industries that ranged from gunpowder manufacture to textile processing and fertilizers. The mines themselves were infamous for dangerous conditions and the widespread labor of poor children employed underground hauling ore.

⁹ Philadelphia Public Ledger, August 6, 1860

¹⁰ Charleston Daily Courier, October 17, 1860: “Spoken—On Sept. 29th off this port, by the pilot boat Nonpareil, the Pathfinder of Thomaston, eight days out from Baltimore for Galveston.

¹¹ Baltimore Daily Exchange, December 3, 1860: “Bark Pathfinder, from Philadelphia, was at Barbados November 8th.” New York Daily Herald, November 24, 1860: “Spoken—Bark Pathfinder, from Galveston for New York November 15, latitude 20°20', longitude 80°30'.”

In nineteenth-century shipping reports, “spoken” meant that a passing vessel had sighted or communicated with another ship at sea and later reported the encounter upon reaching port. The reported coordinates place the Pathfinder in the Caribbean Sea south of Cuba and west of Jamaica.

¹² Philadelphia Inquirer, December 31, 1860