is Boston pier, or the Long Wharf, which
extends from the bottom of State Street 1,743 feet into the harbor. Here
the principal navigation of the town is carried on; vessels of all burdens
load and unload; and the London ships generally discharge their
cargoes.... The harbor of Boston is at this date crowded with vessels. It
is reckoned that not less than 450 sail of ships, brigs, schooners,
sloops, and small craft are now in this port."

New York and Baltimore, in a large way; Salem, Hull, Portsmouth, New
London, New Bedford, New Haven, and a host of smaller seaports, in a
lesser degree, joined in this prosperous industry. It was the great
interest of the United States, and so continued, though with
interruptions, for more than half a century, influencing the thought, the
legislation, and the literature of our people. When Daniel Webster,
himself a son of a seafaring State, sought to awaken his countrymen to the
peril into which the nation was drifting through sectional dissensions and
avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening
metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting
rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both
known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the
picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors of the sea were on every
tongue. The story is a familiar one of the Boston clergyman who, in one of
his discourses, described a poor, sinful soul drifting toward shipwreck so
vividly that a sailor in the audience, carried away by the preacher's
imaginative skill, cried out: "Let go your best bower anchor, or you're
lost." In another church, which had its pulpit set at the side instead of
at the end, as customary, a sailor remarked critically: "I don't like this
craft; it has its rudder amidships."

At this time, and, indeed, for perhaps fifty years thereafter, the sea was
a favorite career, not only for American boys with their way to make in
the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of New
England seamanship, "Two Years Before the Mast," was not written until the
middle of the nineteenth century, and its author went to sea, not in
search of wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry
Dana, many a young man of good family and education--a Harvard graduate
like him, perhaps--bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and
made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to lear