Now the Muse will take a look at the Embargo from the male point of view, in this case the mariner. Our real life hero, Elijah Cobb, had busily opened a route to Hamburg that had proved very lucrative until the British blockaded the Elbe. He got around it by using a canal starting in Lubec that ran to Hamburg, but he doesn't record using it more than once. Instead, he was sent to Malaga, Spain, but upon arriving there, found that the British Orders in Council forbade him from taking on a return cargo. (All these blockades were the result of the Napoleonic Wars, in case the reader is wondering).

Well, he bribed his way out of that one. He attempted to run through the Straits of Gibralter at night, when, with luck, he wouldn't be seen. But the wind dropped, and so he ended up being boarded by the commander of an English Frigate who seems to have been totally asleep at the switch. The clerks at the clearance office were easily bribed, and Cobb sailed away under protection of a convoy, arriving home in time to take out a ship then at anchor in Alexandria, Virginia. It was full of stone ballast (since ships couldn't leave Europe with a cargo) which Cobb unloaded, loaded back up with flour, and made arrangements to leave on the next tide, despite having learned that the Embargo had passed and would be in effect at 10:00 the next day. The tide would allow for an 8:00 departure. He was able to get away by the skin of his teeth and took one of the last shipments of flour to Cadiz, in Spain, along with news about the Embargo.

No more is heard from Captain Cobb until some adventures relative to the War of 1812, but not so Captain Merrick, hero of This is the House. We learn that he went home to help organize the militia, in case New England seceeded and would need to be defended. We learn that he was part of a group of mariners who built a clipper-rigged ship in Plymouth, and sailed it out past the watchful eyes of the government, staying out until the whole thing was called off the following spring. We learn that salt-making took on new life, during the Embargo, by way of a cash crop, and that the men returned to the land in order to feed themselves and their families. When the Embargo was lifted in March of 1809, everyone took off for Europe in a hurry, trying to earn as much as they could before England and America went to war. Everyone knew it would happen. They just didn't know when.

The home folks weren't able to pick up their pleasant life-styles, because the South Shore folks who had been willing to help weren't willing any more, and because money had to be saved, so that even if the South Siders had been available, no one was going to rehire them.

That part is all fiction, the Muse hastens to announce. But a clipper rigged ship did sail -- salt-making was taken up and remained robust for many years, and New England was, indeed, interested in secession. The Muse will muse about that in the next post.