considerable number of craft and men. Three thousand miles of ocean
separated Americans from the market in which they must sell their produce
and buy their luxuries. Immediately upon the settlement of the seaboard
the Colonists themselves took up this trade, building and manning their
own vessels and speedily making their way into every nook and corner of
Europe. We, who have seen, in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century,
the American flag the rarest of all ensigns to be met on the water, must
regard with equal admiration and wonder the zeal for maritime adventure
that made the infant nation of 1800 the second seafaring people in point
of number of vessels, and second to none in energy and enterprise.

[Illustration: THE SHALLOP]

New England early took the lead in building ships and manning them, and
this was but natural since her coasts abounded in harbors; navigable
streams ran through forests of trees fit for the ship-builder's adze; her
soil was hard and obdurate to the cultivator's efforts; and her people had
not, like those who settled the South, been drawn from the agricultural
classes. Moreover, as I shall show in other chapters, the sea itself
thrust upon the New Englanders its riches for them to gather. The
cod-fishery was long pursued within a few miles of Cape Ann, and the New
Englanders had become well habituated to it before the growing scarcity of
the fish compelled them to seek the teeming waters of Newfoundland banks.
The value of the whale was first taught them by great carcasses washed up
on the shore of Cape Cod, and for years this gigantic game was pursued in
open boats within sight of the coast. From neighborhood seafaring such as
this the progress was easy to coasting voyages, and so to Europe and to
Asia.

There is some conflict of historians over the time and place of the