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Updated: May 5, 2025
To form some idea of its effects at a period when the nation engrossed most of the carrying trade of the world, let us imagine a message from Washington announcing that Congress, after a few midnight-sessions, has suddenly resolved to withdraw our ships from the ocean, and to export nothing from New York, or any other seaport; that it requires the merchant to dismantle his ships and leave them to decay at the wharves; that it calls upon two hundred thousand masters and mariners, who now plough the main, to seek their bread ashore; that it forbids even the fisherman to launch his chebacco-boat or follow his gigantic prey upon the deep; that it subjects the whole coastwise trade to onerous bonds and the surveillance of custom-house officers; that it interdicts all exports by land to Canada, New Brunswick, or Mexico.
Little remains to mark the site, but the white palm-fringed strand gleams in the sunlight and is caressed by the blue waters just as in Columbus' day. The harbor at the mouth of a stream flowing down from the mountains is small and shallow, but it is occasionally visited by coastwise vessels in search of cargoes of mahogany and other woods from the nearby hills.
The seeds of it were scattered on hot, dry, still days by pipe and cigarette, by sparks from donkey engines, by untended camp fires, wherever the careless white man went in the great coastwise forests. The woods were like a tinder box. One unguarded moment, and the ancient firs were wrapped in sheets of flame.
The government in California had not men sufficient to handle its own few antique guns in its few coastwise forts, let alone a surplus for the purpose just described. And to cap all, provided the garrisons had been available and could have been placed, it would have been physically impossible to have supplied them with provisions for even a single month.
When they got back the turmoil was on the wane in the streets; night hid the glare of the posters; and the tide, finding the noise abated and being at the flow, told an old tale that he had learned in his youth about the deeps of the sea, the same which he had told to coastwise ships that brought it to Babylon by the way of Euphrates before the doom of Troy.
I do not care to remember. A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of it. But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and killed when a man's strength came to me, only the lines of my life were cast at the time in other places.
The experiment in tolls to be made by the President would doubtless disclose how great a burden of tolls the coastwise trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific coast could bear without preventing its usefulness in competition with the transcontinental railroads.
He carried his blankets and his clothes in a bulky pack on his sturdy shoulders. When he had his money, he rose to go, to catch the coastwise steamer which touched the Inlet's head that afternoon. Hollister helped him sling the pack, opened the door for him, and they met Myra Bland setting foot on the porch step. They looked at each other, those two.
"Go back with the pilot!" the captain cried. "Why, you young idiot, there is no pilot! Coastwise steamers don't carry pilots. I am my own pilot. There is no pilot going back!" You ought to have seen Scott's face! Nobody said anything. We all just stood and looked at the captain. Tears began to come into the eyes of Tom Myers and his brother George.
They forbade all coastwise trade in the British Isles except in British vessels, all trade from abroad except in British ships or in ships belonging to the country whence the imported merchandise came, all trade between English colonies by outsiders, and all trade between the colonies and foreign countries, except in the case of a few enumerated articles.
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