The Sea

From the time the first settlers discovered they could not expect much from the soil of New England, the sea played a major role in the region's economy.

In colonial times, New England prospered from fishing and trade. One kind of trade was the "triangular trade": New Englanders brought sugar up from the islands of the West Indies, used the sugar to make rum, took the rum to West Africa and traded it for slaves, and then sold the slaves in the West Indies.

Cod was the main fish export. Its importance was reflected everywhere - from graveyards, where an inscription reads:

    Captain Thomas Coffin

    Born Jan. 7, 1792. Died Jan. 10, 1842.

    He has finished catching cod,

    And gone to meet his God

to the Massachusetts Legislature, where the "Sacred Codfish" was prominently hung.

The American Revolution disrupted trade with England, and New Englanders had to find new trading partners. They soon were trading with Russia, Sweden, and even China. Whaling became an important activity. As the whaling industry grew, so did New England seaports like New Bedford, Salem, Marblehead, and Nantucket.

The mid-1800s were the era of the Yankee clipper ships. These elegant wooden ships, built in New England, were designed for speed and broke many records. When the 1849 Gold Rush suddenly populated San Francisco, clippers took goods to California. The trip around Cape Horn at the tip of South America was dangerous but worth it. The miners had gold and not much else. In California, goods were worth twenty times what they were worth in the East!

Since these trips were long and captains did not socialize with their crew, many captains took their wives along for company. The women from New England sea towns often knew as much about sailing as the men. When Captain Patten fell ill of brain fever while rounding Cape Horn in a storm, Mary Brown Patten, his 19-year-old wife, took command and sailed the ship safely to San Francisco.

The discovery in the 1850s of underground sources of oil marked the decline of the whaling era in New England. The days of the clipper ship ended even more quickly. The clippers simply could not compete with the metal steamships developed in England in the 1860s.

By the late 1800s, the sea no longer played such an important role in New England's economy. But money earned from the sea was used to build factories. The result was a new direction for New England's economy.

Randee Falk: Spotlight on the USA; Oxford University Press, 1993, page 22 f.