high-steeved bowsprits soaring above pleasant Battery Park and a forest
of spars extending up the East River. In 1790 more than two thousand
ships, brigs, schooners, and smaller craft had entered and cleared,
and the merchants met in the coffee-houses to discuss charters,
bills-of-lading, and adventures. Sailors commanded thrice the wages of
laborers ashore. Shipyards were increasing and the builders could build
as large and swift East Indiamen as those of which Boston and Salem
boasted.

Philadelphia had her Stephen Girard, whose wealth was earned in ships,
a man most remarkable and eccentric, whose career was one of the great
maritime romances. Though his father was a prosperous merchant of
Bordeaux engaged in the West India trade, he was shifting for himself as
a cabin-boy on his father's ships when only fourteen years old. With
no schooling, barely able to read and write, this urchin sailed between
Bordeaux and the French West Indies for nine years, until he gained
the rank of first mate. At the age of twenty-six he entered the port of
Philadelphia in command of a sloop which had narrowly escaped capture by
British frigates. There he took up his domicile and laid the foundation
of his fortune in small trading ventures to New Orleans and Santo
Domingo.

In 1791 he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China
and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and
Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty. So successfully
did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be
the wealthiest merchant in the United States. In that year one of his
ships from China was captured off the Capes of the Delaware by a British
privateer. Her cargo of teas, nankeens, and silks was worth half a
million dollars to him but he succeeded in ransoming it on the spot by
counting out one hundred and eighty thousand Spanish milled dollars. No
privateersman could resist such strategy as this.

Alone in his old age, without a friend or relative to close his eyes
in death, Stephen Girard, once a penniless, ignorant French cabin-boy,
bequeathed his millions to philanthropy, and the Girard College for
orphan boys, in Philadelphia, is his monument.

The Treaty of Amiens brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful
interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips
again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the
only important neutral nati