The masters who sailed these extraordinary vessels also changed and had to
learn a new kind of seamanship. They must be very competent men, for the
tests of their skill and readiness were really greater than those demanded
of the deep-water skipper. They drove these great schooners alongshore
winter and summer, across Nantucket Shoals and around Cape Cod, and their
salvation depended on shortening sail ahead of the gale. Let the wind once
blow and the sea get up, and it was almost impossible to strip the canvas
off an unwieldy six-master. The captain's chief fear was of being blown
offshore, of having his vessel run away with him! Unlike the deep-water
man, he preferred running in toward the beach and letting go his anchors.
There he would ride out the storm and hoist sail when the weather
moderated.

These were American shipmasters of the old breed, raised in schooners as a
rule, and adapting themselves to modern conditions. They sailed for nominal
wages and primage, or five per cent of the gross freight paid the vessel.
Before the Great War in Europe, freights were low and the schooner skippers
earned scanty incomes. Then came a world shortage of tonnage and
immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big schooners of the
Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their masters shared in
the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they owned shares in their
vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently their settlement at the end
of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income of a thousand dollars a month.
They earned this money, and the managing owners cheerfully paid them, for
there had been lean years and uncomplaining service and the sailor had
proved himself worthy of his hire. So tempting was the foreign war trade,
that a fleet of them was sent across the Atlantic until the American
Government barred them from the war zone as too easy a prey for submarine
attack. They therefore returned to the old coastwise route or loaded for
South American ports--singularly interesting ships because they were the
last bold venture of the old American maritime spirit, a challenge to the
Age of Steam.

No more of these huge, towering schooners have been built in the last dozen
years. Steam colliers and barges have won the fight because time is now
more valuable than cheapness of transportation. The schooner might bowl
down to Norfolk from Boston or Portland in four days and be threshing about
for two weeks in hea