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Updated: June 12, 2025
I daresay there are yet a few shipmasters afloat who remember Falk and his tug very well. He extracted his pound and a half of flesh from each of us merchant-skippers with an inflexible sort of indifference which made him detested and even feared. Schomberg used to remark: "I won't talk about the fellow. I don't think he has six drinks from year's end to year's end in my place.
Unlike the deep-water man, he preferred running in toward the beach and letting go his anchors. There he would ride out the storm and hoist sail when the weather moderated. These were American shipmasters of the old breed, raised in schooners as a rule, and adapting themselves to modern conditions. They sailed for nominal wages and primage, or five per cent of the gross freight paid the vessel.
It was impossible to be vexed with him. "You have met some very remarkable shipmasters, if all you say be true," she cried. "Sailors are queer folk, believe me. That same brig, Flower of the Ocean, an' a pretty flower she was, too all tar an' coal-dust, with a perfume that would poison a rat put into Grimsby one day, an' the crowd went ashore.
Kadin, who drew the charts for Tebenkof's Atlas of Alaska from the surveys made by the Russian Navigators; Tarantief, who engraved the maps on copper-plate at Sitka; and many of the shipmasters and accountants in the employ of the Company, were the product of the educational institutions of Sitka. In the time of the greatest prosperity there were five schools.
Captain George Crowninshield obtained permission from the Government to sail with a flag of truce for Halifax, and he equipped the brig Henry for the sad and solemn mission. Her crew was picked from among the shipmasters of Salem, some of them privateering skippers, every man of them a proven deep-water commander. It was such a crew as never before or since took a vessel out of an American port.
It was true romance, also, when the first American shipmasters set foot in mysterious Japan, a half century before Perry's squadron shattered the immemorial isolation of the land of the Shoguns and the Samurai.
One of the shipmasters exhibited to his friends a pair of native shoes fancifully gilded. Another, with more foresight, brought home five hundred pairs, ungilded, and offered them for sale. They were thick, clumsily shaped, and heavy, but they sold. There was a demand for more. In a few years half a million pairs were being imported annually.
Merchants hastened to consign the merchandise long stored in their warehouses; shipmasters sent out runners for crews; and ships were soon winging their way out into the open sea. For three months American vessels crossed the ocean unmolested, and then came the bitter, the incomprehensible news that Erskine's arrangement had been repudiated and the over-zealous diplomat recalled.
First he retailed the news to the Merchants' Exchange, to be bulletined on the blackboard and read by Captain Noah's friends; next he called up the secretary of the American Shipmasters' Association, of which the deceased had been a member, and lastly he communicated the sad tidings to the water-front reporters of all the daily papers.
It may seem strange to people who are entirely unacquainted with the methods of shipmasters and officers generally in the American mercantile marine that a sailor should have such a deadly objection to sail in one of their vessels; but those who know the hideous brutalities which continually occur on such ships will quite understand the feelings of a man who finds himself on a vessel which would probably have been manned willingly if it had not a bad character among seamen.
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