Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Yorkshire BY JAIMEE LEIGH JOROFF
In 1853, American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne crossed paths with the infamous clipper transport ship The Yorkshire. While the man and the ship led separate lives, each was entwined with the sea and their fates were destined to meet again years later in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s final hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. This is that story. Born July 4, 1804, and descended from “the hanging judge of the Salem witch trials,” Nathaniel Hawthorne came from a family steeped in the oceans’ peril. During the American Revolutionary War, his grandfather, Captain Daniel Hathorne, nicknamed “Bold Daniel,” was a privateer, patrolling the waters near New England and stalking the far-off treacherous coasts of Scotland and Portugal. The official American Navy had not yet been founded, and Hawthorne’s grandfather and other privateers were half protectors of America and half pirates, sanctioned by the American colonists to attack English ships and profit from their plunder. In a more respectable manner, Hawthorne’s father was a sea captain, 50
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traveling for trade to the West Indies, Africa, and South America. When Hawthorne was just four years old, his father became ill and died at sea. Hawthorne, his sister, and mother, moved in with his grandfather in Salem and there Hawthorne grew up surrounded by the seaside town’s history, stories from travelers, and his family’s dark role in the Salem witch trials. By the year 1817, Hawthorne was beginning to think about attending college. At the same time, to the south of Massachusetts in New York, a group of Quaker merchants was forming a line of clipper transport ships. The men included Jeremiah Thompson, father and son Issac and William Wright, Francis Thompson, and a non-Quaker, Benjamin Marshall. With an initial fleet of four, their ships became the first of their kind to carry mail, goods, and passengers, sailing between New York and Liverpool, England. Flying high atop the ships’ masts, a red flag adorned with a black ball streamed proudly in the wind, eventually inspiring the fleets’ name of The
Black Ball Line. While highly skilled seamen commanded the ships, most of the crews were desperate men plucked straight from prisons. And although many of the founders were peaceful Quakers and abolitionists, the Black Ball Line was notorious for vicious treatment of the lower seamen. In 1821, as the Black Ball Line began anchoring its seafaring reputation, Nathaniel Nathaniel Hawthorne
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