In 1919, Ralph D. Paine began a brief history of the old U.S. merchant marine with these words:
“The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its swift declension.”
Paine was talking mainly about the era of sailing ships, when U.S. whalers and traders often ventured to the opposite side of the world in pursuit of prizes.
But he might just as well have been talking about the state of U.S. shipbuilding and maritime trades today, which have virtually collapsed over the last generation.
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