For those of you who count yourselves amongst the descendants of Capt. Job Chase (William,John, William,William 1601/02 England) born 1736 in Yarmouth, Barnstable County, Massachusetts.... I send along this tidbit from 'Shipmasters of Cape Cod' by Henry C. Kittredge, Houghton Mifflin, 1935 as it appeared in the Cape Cod Genealogical Society's Winter 1996 Bulletin Vol. XXII, Number 1, Issue #76... ....'Disastrous though it was, the War of 1812 did not last long enough to ruin vessels so completely as the Revolution had done; and after it was over, business everywhere picked up with extraordinary speed. The fortunes of Job Chase, Jr. of West Harwich, illustrate the matter clearly. From 1800 until about 1840, he was one of the largest owners of coasting vessels on the Cape- a merchant whose name was known from Saco to South America. Business was steady with him from 1805 up to 1812; even in spite of the war, he had a vessel or two at work in 1813 and again in 1815. In the course of the next two years, his fleet began to grow and he began to proper. Furthermore, by dealing in everything from sheep's wool from Nantucket to mahogany logs from San Domingo, Chase contributed as much as any man in his generation to the prosperity of the mid-Cape. Coasting skippers from Orleans on the one hand and Yarmouth on the other applied to him for commands, while Baltimore firms wrote to ask the privilege to act as his agents, and Boston politicians urged him to swing Harwich into supporting Samuel Lothrop for Governor. By 1830 a whole fleet of Chase's vessels were sailing coastwise, almost all of them ringing the changes on the name Hope. There were the Hope's Lady, Hope and Phoebe, and New Hope, all schooners, and all at work between 1806 and 1821. Others of the same period were the Hope, the Hope for Peace, Old Hope, and Hope and Polly. Later, in the twenties and thirties, came the schooners Hope and Susan, Hope for Success, Hope's Delight, Delight in Hope, Hope Mary Ann, Hope and Hannah, Superb Hope, Lovely Hope, Mount Hope, and the brig Lady Hope. But, as if to show that, whatever faith he may have pinned to the name Hope and its varieties, he scorned superstition, Job Chase Jr. carved other names on the quarter boards of three of his vessels- the Leonidas, the Rosebud, and the Amazon. The Chase family founded something very like a maritime dynasty. Old Job Chase, Sr. had started the ball rolling during the last years of the eighteenth century; his son, having carried the business on and greatly expanded it, admitted the third generation into partnership by making his sons captains and joint owners of his best schooners. Two of the boys, Job 3d and Sears Chase were sailing between the West Indies and New York in 1822 and 1823, Sears bringing mahogany from San Domingo in the Lovely Hope. A third son, Jonathan, made regular trips with passengers and freight between Darien, Georgia, and New York in the brig Amelia Strong, in which both he and his father owned shares. A fourth son, Ozias, died on a voyage to the Carolinas; a son-in-law, Isaiah Baker, was a distinguished mackerel-catcher and inventor of the purse seine on the one hand, and a South American trader on the other, always in Chase vessels. Still another of Chase's captains was a nephew, James Chase. Now and then Chase took a flyer in foreign trade. In 1809, Captain Nathan Nickerson took one of the fleet, the schooner Folly, from Baltimore to Lisbon to the tune of $2211 freight money; and some twenty years later, Captain Isaac Kelly went to St. Petersburg, and back by way of Bremen and Tampico, taking on board at Cronstadt 'sixteen measures of Vodky' against the rigors of a North Atlantic crossing. But for the most part Chase depended not on any single long voyage with large profits, but on a multitude of short trips, each yielding a small return. Chase's fleet was, in truth, a fleet of tramps par excellence. Any port where there were cargoes or rumors of cargoes was a magnet for his skippers. Of necessity Chase gave his captains complete discretionary powers in deciding where to go and what to do. Captain Jonathan Small, for example, discouraged at finding freights from Baltimore to Boston only five cents a barrel, dropped down to Wilmington, North Carolina, and picked up a load of lumber for the Barbados. Job Chase, 3d, carried staves and shingles, geese and turkeys, from the Carolinas to Martinique and Guadeloupe and sold molasses in Baltimore on the return trip. Nehemiah Harding was carrying coal and flour from Richmond to Newburyport. Nehemiah Kelley, turning his schooner Leonidas into a passenger carrier for the trip, took a group of young ladies from Havana to New Orleans. Nathan Nickerson, in the meantime, was trying to sell a cargo of salt fish in Boston, and James Oliver was in the Carolinas, loading shingles for St. Thomas with an idea of picking up salt for New York somewhere in the Salt Keys. The beginning of the end of Job Chase's business came when his son Jonathan wrote from New York in 1836, 'I think it is about time to quit owning as you now own...I don't like the management altogether, and there appears to be some jealousy.' The Chase fleet gradually diminished during the following years, and with its passing a lively business faded from Harwich. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>