The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem

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The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem includes a chapter III titled Some Early Eighteenth Century Pirates, 1670 to 1725. It says that as early as 1632 the New England coast was plagued by pirates, and that the merchant seamen of Salem and other ports sallied out to fight them. A caption shows the Panay, one of the last of the Salem fleet, bound from Boston to Manila twenty-five years ago.

In one passage the author writes that Salem sent its boys to fill the forecastles of vessels built in its own yards, and that seamen of Beverly and Marblehead turned their vessels into privateers. Another passage tells how a Beverly privateer took a merchant vessel carrying the library of the Irish scientist Dr. Richard Kirwan, and how books bought by gentlemen of Salem founded the Salem Atheneum. Illustrations include a Custom House document signed by Nathaniel Hawthorne as surveyor.