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Updated: May 31, 2025
He read the catalog. Then he telegraphed to me to wire him a loan of one hundred dollars. For the catalog gave the date of one schooner's building as 1804. He knew it used to be a hard-and-fast custom of ship-builders to put a silver dollar under the mainmast of every vessel they built, a dollar of that particular year. He bought the schooner for $70.
It was as if, some great manufacturing enterprise had been set on foot, and the world had suddenly awoke to the hidden capabilities of the situation. A great dockyard and arsenal suddenly revealed themselves rising like an exhalation where ship-builders, armourers, blacksmiths, joiners, carpenters, caulkers, gravers, were hard at work all day long.
It was 800 feet long and 250 broad proportions which practical ship-builders ridiculed, but Cosmo, as original in this as in everything else, declared that, taking into account the buoyancy of levium, no other form would answer as well.
To recur to an illustration I have employed in my previous books, the old ship-builders thought that ships were bound to be built of wood and not of iron, because wood floats in water and iron sinks; but now nearly all ships are made of iron.
Then the locust, a wood unknown to the ship-builders of Europe, gave us the nearly certain assurance that this doomed craft had been a countryman. At first, we were all too much occupied with our interesting discovery to bethink us of Smudge. At length, I turned to observe its effect on the savage.
It is for ship-builders alone, who determine the localities, to judge whether, in the present state of things, the freight of merchant-vessels be not far too high to admit of sending to Europe large quantities of roughly-hewn wood; but it cannot be doubted that Venezuela possesses on its maritime coast, as well as on the banks of the Orinoco, immense resources for ship-building.
In England the czar, though managing to see much outside the ship-yards, worked steadily at Deptford for several months, leaving only when he had gained all the special knowledge which he could obtain. His admiration for the English ship-builders was high, he afterwards saying that but for his journey to England he would have always remained a bungler.
You would also have to send from Nueva España two skilled ship-builders, two forges, and two dozen negroes from those that your majesty maintains at the harbor at Vera Cruz who might be taken without causing any shortage. Pitch, oakum, and grease, which are not to be had here, could be made without any further cost.
Yet the industry throve, not only in the considerable yards established at Boston and other large towns, but in a small way all along the coast. Special privileges were extended to ship-builders. They were exempt from military and other public duties. In 1636 the "Desire," a vessel of 120 tons, was built at Marblehead, the largest to that time.
I saw him, however, soon after that looking somewhat anxiously, I thought, up at the mountain, from which wreaths of smoke were ascending somewhat thicker than usual; and I heard him urging Mr Thudicumb to hasten on with the vessel. "Tanda and I will prepare stores as fast as we can," he observed. The ship-builders hurried off with their tools, but he and Tanda and Oliver remained behind.
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