His experience was almost as much commercial as nautical, and many of the shipping merchants who formed the aristocracy of old New York and Boston, mounted from the forecastle to the cabin, thence to the counting-room.
In a paper on the maritime trade of Salem, the Rev.George Bachelor tells of the conditions of this early seafaring, the sort of men engaged in it, and the stimulus it offered to all their faculties: "After a century of comparative quiet, the citizens of the little town were suddenly dispersed to every part of the Oriental world, and to every nook of barbarism which had a market and a shore.

The borders of the commercial world received sudden enlargement, and the boundaries of the intellectual world underwent similar expansion.

The reward of enterprise might be the discovery of an island in which wild pepper enough to load a ship might be had almost for the asking, or of forests where precious gems had no commercial value, or spice islands unvisited and unvexed by civilization.

Every ship-master and every mariner returning on a richly loaded ship was the custodian of valuable information.

In those days crews were made up of Salem boys, every one of whom expected to become an East Indian merchant.