For perhaps 40,000 years prior to the events considered in this book, humans had been building seaworthy watercraft out of wood, setting up masts in them, and hanging sails from those masts to catch the wind and drive those craft across the water. Eighteenth-century Atlantic mariners drew on that cumulative experience to contrive variations on that technology so sophisticated and intricate that their use took years to master. They used that technology to expand the maritime empires founded by their immediate predecessors, effecting transatlantic migration, the transfer of goods and pathogens, and the expropriation of an enslaved labor force of at least twelve million people from Africa to the Americas, all of whom were shipped across the Atlantic in ships made from trees and powered by the wind.

In the nineteenth century, a westward-looking preoccupation with conti¬nental expansion reinforced the pressure of nationalism to reconfigure North Americans’ appreciation of their own history. They no longer thought of themselves as denizens of the western coastal provinces of an Atlantic empire, but as owners of landmasses surrounded by water. More and more of them had only an indirect connection to maritime commerce, and would live out their lives never having witnessed it in person.

That process was only just beginning in the late eighteenth century. Then, most North Americans of European or African origin lived near water and used it for transportation, in everything from a canoe to a three-masted, 300-ton ocean-going ship. Daniel Baugh has written that ‘the superior weight-carrying efficiency afforded by water transport in respect to trade was the central techno¬logical-economic factor of the Early Modern era.’ Roads were few and usually bad, especially when it rained or snowed. Almost everything we now load onto trucks and trains, they loaded into skiffs, periaugers, flatboats, sloops, and schooners. People and goods making ocean passages, whether up or down the Eastern Seaboard, across the Atlantic, to or from the Caribbean, would do so on sloops, schooners, brigs, snows, and ships. The news, official documents, letters, government and military orders traveled the same way, and connected Boston to Charleston, Philadelphia to London, Tidewater Virginia to Glasgow, New York to Barbados.