| CHAPTER I. | COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS |
| CHAPTER II. | THE PRIVATEERS OF '76 |
| CHAPTER III. | OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD |
| CHAPTER IV. | THE FAMOUS DAYS OF SALEM PORT |
| CHAPTER V. | YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES |
| CHAPTER VI. | "FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS" |
| CHAPTER VII. | THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812 |
| CHAPTER VIII. | THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES" |
| CHAPTER IX. | THE STATELY CLIPPER AND HER GLORY |
| CHAPTER X. | BOUND COASTWISE |
The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous from father to son had fought with pike and cannonade to defend the freedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a different destiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and rich cargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag.
Vanished fleets and brave memories—a chronicle of America which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports mysterious and unknown.
The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much to clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing settlement. Like the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had steered across to harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water. The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was that it of