wonder still that the American privateers, whose men in the forecastle had in many instances commanded ships, should sweep the seas, until the despairing merchants and ship-owners of Great Britain, a nation whose flag had for a thousand years "braved the battle and the breeze" and which boasted proudly and justly that her home was upon the sea, compelled their government to acknowledge as political equals a people who had proved themselves superior upon the ocean.
So in the struggle for a national existence and rights as a nation, the foundations of the maritime power of the United States were laid. The ship-builders and the seamen of the Revolution and the War of 1812 were the forefathers of the men who built and commanded the American clipper ships.
After the Revolutionary War the merchants of Salem, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia vied with each other in sending their ships upon distant and hazardous voyages. Notwithstanding the natural difficulties of navigating, what to their captains were unknown seas, and the unnatural obstacles invented by man in the form of obstructive laws, the merchant marine of the United States steadily increased not only in bulk, but what was of far more importance, in the high standard of the men and ships engaged in it.
Salem took the lead, with her great merchant, Elias Hasket Derby, who sent his barque Light Horse to St. Petersburg in 1784, and soon after sent the Grand Turk first to the Cape of Good Hope and then to China. In 1789, the Atlantic, commanded by his son, Elias Hasket Derby, Jr., was the first
