Ships Of America S Merchant Fleet

This book presents a comprehensive historical analysis of merchant shipping on the high seas and associated shipbuilding under sovereign U.S. jurisdiction from precolonial times to the present. It identifies U.S. policy developments that have affected the merchant marine and shipbuilding industries.

When the Twentieth Century opened, the American sailor was almost extinct. The nation which, in its early and struggling days, had given to the world a race of seamen as adventurous as the Norse Vikings had, in the days of its greatness and prosperity turned its eyes away from the sea and yielded to other people the mastery of the deep. One living in the past, reading the newspapers, diaries and record-books of the early days of the Nineteenth Century, can hardly understand how an occupation which played so great a part in American life as seafaring could ever be permitted to decline. The dearest ambition of the American boy of our early national era was to command a clipper ship—but how many years it has been since that ambition entered into the mind of young America! In those days the people of all the young commonwealths from Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. Without railroads, and with only the most wretched excuses for post-roads, the States were linked together by the sea; and coastwise traffic early began to employ a 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.

Encyclopedic resource recounts sailing histories, vital statistics of 322 vessels: voyages, cargoes, tonnage, builders, shipboard life, and more. 195 black-and-white photos and illustrations.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Story of the American Merchant Marine" by John Randolph Spears. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Tells what was required of the British ships in various phases of the war, how they met them and the costs involved.

This book gives a fascinating history of the American merchant marine. The book contains thrilling stories about brave Americans, their love for the sea, and adventures at sea in the 1600s and 1800s. In this book, the author focuses on American merchantmen, the American navy, privateers, and fishermen, as well as discussing the American revolution and post-revolutionary war dangers to merchantmen and the Federal legislation enacted to promote and protect the American sea trade. The book contains the following: Colonial Adventures in Little Ships - The Privateers of '76 - Out Cutlases and Board - The Famous Days of Salem Port - Yankee Vikings and New Trade Routes - Free Trade and Sailors' Rights - The Brilliant Era of 1812 - The Packet Ships of the "Roaring Forties" - The Stately Clippers and her Glory - Bound Coastwise.