Three sailors chat on deck, their vessel pitching and heaving on early evening swells.

By the dim light of a lantern, they study a compass, keeping the route due north, ignoring their exhaustion and insistent pangs of hunger, the cold

and the wet beating at their bones, they tend to the sail on this long 1200 mile journey

out of Argentina. Somewhere beyond the horizon is a shipwrecked crew and their passengers

they are determined to locate. Rations are thin. Biscuit for breakfast, fried salt pork on occasion. They skip lunch.

Dinner is cabbage soup in rotations with the other men down below in the claustrophobic quarters.

So engrossed are these three concentrating on the crossing, the headings in the wind direction.

They're startled by the sudden outcry of the American seamen, a man named Ford as he rests the helm from his

crew mate, bringing the boat hard to port to avoid a pot of whales dead ahead.

It's 1812. The Falkland Islands have once before claimed their ship and nearly

their lives. Yet again, here they are sailing straight to them. Here on the unbounded waters, wondering what fate still has in store. Hello, glad to be with you. It's American History Hit and I'm Don Wildman.

Today we go down to the wharves and straight out to sea.

We are in the great age of sail in the earliest decades of the 19th century.

The reckoning is soon to come with the advent of steen, but for now

the ships are still wooden and driven by the wind. with the 30 years out from its founding is finding its new sea legs in the world.

Challenged by issues of trade and problematic relations with Great Britain,

American shippers are developing new international markets for their goods,

and this has American vessels venturing

farther and faster than ever to exotic ports of call in the far east and elsewhere.

It is a new and burgeoning world full of industrial promise and

ocean-going commerce is the means to keep pace.

But shipping is still a trade rife with unpredictability and mortal danger.

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