When they ceased to enjoy these qualities of superiority, they lost the trade and suffered for lack of protection to overcome the handicap.
The War of 1812 was the dividing line between two eras of salt water history.

On the farther side lay the turbulent centuries of hazard and bloodshed and piracy, of little ships and indomitable seamen who pursued their voyages in the reek of gunpowder and of legalized pillage by the stronger, and of merchant adventurers who explored new markets wherever there was water enough to float their keels.

They belonged to the rude and lusty youth of a world which lived by the sword and which gloried in action.

Even into the early years of the nineteenth century these mariners still sailed--Elizabethan in deed and spirit.
On the hither side of 1812 were seas unvexed by the privateer and the freebooter.

The lateen-rigged corsairs had been banished from their lairs in the harbors of Algiers, and ships needed to show no broadsides of cannon in the Atlantic trade.