small and weak.

The American spirit had ceased to concern itself with the sea as the
vital and dominant element. The footsteps of the young men no longer
turned toward the wharf and the waterside and the tiers of tall ships
outward bound. They were aspiring to conquer an inland empire of prairie
and mountain and desert, impelled by the same pioneering and adventurous
ardor which had burned in their seafaring sires. Steam had vanquished
sail--an epochal event in a thousand years of maritime history--but the
nation did not care enough to accept this situation as a new challenge
or to continue the ancient struggle for supremacy upon the sea. England
did care, because it was life or death to the little, sea-girt island,
but as soon as the United States ceased to be a strip of Atlantic
seaboard and the panorama, of a continent was unrolled to settlement,
it was foreordained that the maritime habit of thought and action
should lose its virility in America. All great seafaring races, English,
Norwegian, Portuguese, and Dutch, have taken to salt water because there
was lack of space, food, or work ashore, and their strong young men
craved opportunities. Like the Pilgrim Fathers and their fishing
shallops they had nowhere else to go.

When the Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind--taut, serene,
immaculate--were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic
and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig
and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight
of a huge carcass alongside. With a poor opinion of the seamanship
of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among their
favorite chanteys:

Oh, poor Reuben Ranzo,
Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo,
Oh, Ranzo was no sailor,
So they shipped him aboard a whaler,
Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo.

This was crass, intolerant prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of
appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there
were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars,
and trimming the yards to a hair. On a voyage of two or three
years, moreover, there was always plenty of time tomorrow. Brave and
resourceful seamen were these New England adventurers and deep-sea
hunters who made nautical history after their own fashion. They
flourished coeval with the merchant marine in its prime, and they passed
from the sea at about the same time and for similar reasons. Modernity