Elijah Cobb — A Reader’s Guide

stablished December 12, 1922, by a gift to Yale University in pursuance of a pledge announced on Alumni University Day in February, 1922, of a fund of $100,000 bequeathed to James Thayer McMillan and Alexis Caswell Angell as Trustees, by Mrs. Elizabeth Anderson McMillan, of Detroit, to be devoted by them to the establishment of a Memorial in honor of her husband.

He was born in Detroit, Michigan, December 28th, 1872, prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Andover, and was graduated from Yale in the Class of 1894. As an undergraduate he was a leader in many of the college activities of his day, and within a brief period of his graduation was called upon to assume heavy responsibilities in the management and direction of numerous business enterprises in Detroit; where he was also a Trustee of the Young Men’s Christian Association and of Grace Hospital. His untimely death, from heart disease, on October 4th, 1919, deprived his city of one of its leading citizens and his University of one of its most loyal sons.

Biographical Sketch 17

Elijah Cobb _Frontispiece_

Ship _Ten Brothers_ _facing page_ 56

Port Charges in 1811 88

Ivory, Coffee and Palm Oil: a Typical Bill of Lading 96

Such memoirs as were left to posterity by Captain Elijah Cobb are fragmentary, a few letters and a narrative of certain voyages, yet they serve to portray with singular fidelity the figure of a New England shipmaster of a century and more ago against the backgrounds of his time. Seafaring has long since ceased to be interwoven with the lives and interests of the American people as a whole. No fact is more difficult to realize than that we were once a maritime nation which, from father to son, earned its bread upon the face of the waters. The abandoned farm with the grassy cellar-hole and the lilac bush surviving by the stone doorstep is the accepted symbol of the Puritan and Pilgrim pioneers. Just as eloquent and significant are the sloping shores of a hundred bays and inlets where the little brigs, sloops, and ketches were built to trade with Virginia, with the West Indies, with the ports of Europe.

At the beginning of the Revolution, in fact, there were more sailors than farmers in the coastwise settlements of Maine and New Hampshire. Shipping was the chief industry of Boston. On Cape Cod, where Elijah Cobb was born and raised, the boys followed the sea instead of the plow, and the dry land was merely a roosting place until they were old enough to sign on in a forecastle. The proverbial Yankee traits of canny business dealings, handiness, and resourceful hardihood were bred in those clumsy, home-made vessels. The skipper was also a merchant who bought and sold and bartered the cargoes that filled his holds. His crew risked their own “adventures” in cash or merchandise, while his neighbors ashore owned shares in the vessel and her enterprises. And every voyage was a hazard that might make or break them.

Elijah Cobb is well worth bringing to light because he was so completely typical, from his piety and his eccentric spelling to his mastery of difficulties. The romance of the sea meant nothing to him, although he sailed in continual peril of pirate and privateer and of foundering in a gale of wind. Navigation was mostly by guesswork and to us it seems miraculous that he and his kind were able to fetch anywhere at all. What he called a good ship was not much larger than a canal boat, with a few men and boys to handle it. Such was the training school of the shipbuilders and seamen who, in succeeding generations, were to win for the Stars and Stripes on the high seas a commercial prestige that challenged the ancient supremacy of Great Britain and achieved its superb climax in the clipper ship era.

With unconscious art Elijah Cobb suggests to us the beginnings of his own career. It could not be better done by the practised hand of a novelist. His father, the master of a brig, dying at sea, left a young widow with six small children in poverty on a forlorn Cape Cod farm. The family could not be kept together. “Some of us, must leave the perternal dwelling & seek subsistance among strangers--my Bro^{r.}, being the elder, was tried first, but wou’d not stay, & came home crying--I was then, in my 6^{th} year, & altho” too young to earn my living, a place was offered me, & I left my dear Mother, for that subsistance among strangers which she could not procure for me.”