It would not be easy to say whether the sailor’s lot has been lightened or not, by the substitution of steel for wood, of steam for sail.  Perhaps the best evidence that the native-born American does not regard the change as wholly a blessing, is to be found in the fact that but few of them now follow the sea, and scarcely a vestige is left of the old New England seafaring population except in the fisheries—­where sails are still the rule.  Doubtless the explanation of this lies in the changed conditions of seafaring as a business.  In the days which I have sketched in the first chapter, the boy of good habits and reasonable education who shipped before the mast, was fairly sure of prompt promotion to the quarter-deck, of a right to share in the profits of the voyage, and of finally owning his own ship.  After 1860 all these conditions changed.  Steamships, always costly to build, involved greater and greater investments as their size increased.  Early in the history of steam navigation they became exclusively the property of corporations.  Latterly the steamship lines have become adjuncts to great railway lines, and are conducted by the practiced stock manipulator—­not by the veteran sea captain.

Richard J. Cleveland, a successful merchant navigator of the early days of the nineteenth century, when little more than a lad, undertook an enterprise, thus described by him in a letter from Havre: 

“I have purchased a cutter-sloop of forty-three tons burden, on a credit of two years.  This vessel was built at Dieppe and fitted out for a privateer; was taken by the English, and has been plying between Dover and Calais as a packet-boat.  She has excellent accommodations and sails fast.  I shall copper her, put her in ballast, trim with L1000 or L1500 sterling in cargo, and proceed to the Isle of France and Bourbon, where I expect to sell her, as well as the cargo, at a very handsome profit, and have no doubt of being well paid for my twelve months’ work, calculating to be with you next August.”

[Illustration:  AN ARMED CUTTER]

In such enterprises the young American sailors were always engaging—­braving equally the perils of the deep and not less treacherous reefs and shoals of business but always struggling to become their own masters to command their own ships, and if possible, to carry their own cargoes.  The youth of a nation that had fought for political independence, fought themselves for economic independence.

To men of this sort the conditions bred by the steam-carrying trade were intolerable.  To-day a great steamship may well cost $2,000,000.  It must have the favor of railway companies for cargoes, must possess expensive wharves at each end of its route, must have an army of agents and solicitors ever engaged upon its business.  The boy who ships before the mast on one of them, is less likely to rise to the position of owner, than the switchman is to become railroad president—­the latter progress has been known, but of the former I can not find a trace.  So comparatively few young Americans choose the sea for their workshop in this day of steam.