Profits were heavy, and the men who earned them were afforded opportunities to share them.

Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle.

Often they became full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier, for boys went to sea at ages when the youngsters of equally prosperous families in these days would scarcely have passed from the care of a nurse to that of a tutor.

Thomas T.Forbes, for example, shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen; was commander of the "Levant" at twenty; and was lost in the Canton River before he was thirty.

He was of a family great in the history of New England shipping for a hundred years.