Tough customers

The Salem waterfront in the 1770s.

"Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees?”

-- From "Salem,'' by Robert Lowell

Salem in 1883, by which time it had become a major industrial town as well as port.

-- Mason, Boston Public Library