Continued… We moved on to a room called “On The Water.” The first exhibit was about Atlantic maritime trade. The exhibit about the early days of trade focused on tobacco (more on tobacco processing), sugar, rum, and the slaves who were imported to grow and process these crops.
With so much valuable cargo criss-crossing the ocean, piracy flourished, peaking at about 1720. Several of the museums that we’d visited over the last few months had mentioned that, with so many places to hide in the Chesapeake, piracy had been a problem there. The notorious pirate Black Beard was killed in 1718. But what we hadn’t seen in any of the other museums was that before he died, he had intentionally sunken one of his ships, called Queen Anne’s Revenge. In 1996, divers found the wreck. They didn’t find any treasure, so Black Beard must have walked off with it, but they did find lots of other cool artifacts. Most were basic boating items, such as lead patches to fix leaks and barrels to store food. We found out that when capturing ships, pirates would sometimes use the cannons to shoot a bunch of nails, pelting the victims with shrapnel that tore sails and harmed the people on deck.
A sign explained that privateers were different than pirates, and that the privateers were essential to winning the Revolution and War of 1812. It gave more detail than we’d seen before about how important privateering was to the economy: Shipyards built the vessels; sailmakers and blacksmiths made essential components for the ships; banks financed them; insurance companies insured them; gunsmiths made cannons, guns and ammunition; coopers made storage barrels and kegs, and farmers and grocers supplied the food. The museum didn’t say this, but we remembered learning at the Star Spangled Banner Museum that Mary Pickersgill had made her living primarily from making flags for ships.
Prior to the War of 1812, ships set sail whenever their cargo hold was full, so the shipper and receiver never knew how long the transit would be, nor did the passengers know exactly when their boat would leave/arrive. After the war, steam engines started being added as auxiliaries to sailing ships. At that point, the boats couldn’t carry enough fuel to cross an ocean, the engines had high operating costs, and the engines were unreliable, but having an engine helped mitigate weather constraints and allowed ships to start experimenting with set time schedules. The scheduled sailings were very successful and created a boom in the shipping industry, especially with passengers crossing the Atlantic.
The majority of people crossing the Atlantic traveled on packets, which were ships that carried mail/cargo in the holds, had a few cabins for the wealthy, and the majority of poor people traveled in the steerage area. The cabins were tiny spaces with a bed, linens and a washbasin, and they had ventilated doors that opened out into a common area where people ate and socialized. Cooked meals were provided. The steerage area had bunkbeds in a common area; the same area where they ate and socialized. They had had to bring their own bedding. They were given limited quantities of food that they had to cook for themselves in a small, shared galley (kitchen), which led to many fights over who could use the kitchen when and for how long. The steerage area was usually crowded, dark, damp, dirty, smelly, unsanitary, and often infested with rodents and/or insects. Diseases spreading amongst the passengers was a common problem. In the 1840s and 1850s, the US and Europe enacted laws requiring better living conditions onboard the ships. Meanwhile, the 1840s was when ships powered solely by steam began crossing oceans.
Transporting up and down the US east coast was just as important and international trade. Raw goods would be shipped from one region to another by boats, such as cotton shipped north to textile mills or granite from Maine shipped down for building construction.
The next display was about inland waterways (navigable rivers). It started by saying that before roads and trains, water was the most efficient method of transporting goods to market. The majority of prosperous cities were on major waterways, such as New Orleans and Cincinnati. New Orleans was both an important ocean port and an important inland river port, connecting the American heartland with the rest of the world. By the 1820s, cotton, grain, pork and other agricultural products floated down the Mississippi River to New Orleans for international export. The rise of the steamboat made it easier to transport finished products and passengers to towns up the river. By 1850, New Orleans was the second busiest port in the US and the fourth busiest port in the world.
Thanks to its location on the Ohio River, Cincinnati grew quickly in the 1800s. It became a manufacturing hub, specializing in flour, pork, whiskey and other manufactured goods that it sold to plantations that were downriver. In the 1850s, Cincinnati was four-times as big as Chicago.
In the early 1800s, America began to expand its commerce by building new waterways. The Erie Canal was the most successful. It was built between 1817 and 1825, linking Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes between the US and Canada, with New York City. The canal was initially 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide. It was dug mostly by hand, though the laborers were aided by animals, explosives and tree stump pulling machines. They started with 3,000 construction workers and by 1821 were up to 9,000. Between 1825 and 1882, the canal generated $121 million in tolls, four times what it cost to operate. It carried so much traffic that by 1918, it had been enlarged three times.