by H. W. Brands
THREE DAYS OUT OF Maderia the Courrier sighted Tenerife, the summit of the Canaries, and then skirted southwest toward the Cape Verde Islands. Crew members told Perlot that the African coast was just over the eastern horizon; perhaps in the backlight of dawn he would see Cap Vert. But strain though he did, he failed.
Another week brought the social highlight of the voyage—in fact, the social highlight of nearly every voyage that passed from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, and one encountered by thousands of argonauts. As the ship approached the equator, those who had already been initiated into the service of King Neptune prepared to repeat the procedure on those who had not, in this case including the entire membership of La Fortune. The ritual, like all rituals, assumed a certain timeless quality, not least in Perlot’s retelling.
The day before the crossing, toward evening, the mate, armed with his telescope, attentively scrutinizes the horizon, then after several false alarms, cries to the man at the helm: “Hold the wind, the line is in sight.” He says these words in a way that attracts attention, then takes a few more sights through the glass as if to be sure he is not mistaken. The news spreads, and everyone rushes to the deck, trying to perceive the line; they look, they squint their eyes, they rub them, they look again; in vain! They see nothing. Then the mate advances, glass in his hand, and obligingly offers to show you the famous line. You approach, you look; ah! this time you see very clearly a line which extends all the length of the horizon.
The complaisant officer is careful, it’s understood, to direct the instrument only toward the Equator; otherwise one would notice that, whatever part of the horizon is observed, one sees the line, and one would soon guess that this line is nothing but a hair placed between the two large glasses of his telescope. No one thinks, however, of making this experiment; everyone has proved de visu that he is coming to the line.
The next day at dawn all awake to the rattle of hail on the deck. This is odd, as hail rarely falls in the tropics. Reveille sounds; there is no time to dress. “The men wear only shirt and trousers, and the ladies—I don’t know exactly, but not much.”
The captain appears, growling to discover the meaning of this importunate end to his slumbers.
A voice rumbles down from the heavens: “Who are you, audacious mortals, who do not fear to adventure upon my waters? Know that I am the Equator, and that I permit no one to cross me.”
The brave captain answers, “We have been told, in our distant lands, that previously voyagers had encountered his Lordship the Equator and had been able, under certain conditions, to cross beyond without being destroyed by the fires with which he defends his realms.”
“That’s true,” replies Equator from on high. “But those travelers had submitted to my conditions. Submit in your turn, and you will pass.”
“What are your conditions?”
“I wish each person who passes here to change his name and be baptized in my waters. I wish him after the baptism to bear no name other than shellback.”
The captain accepts the condition. He orders that all be baptized, and henceforth answer only to 11/10/2008shellback.
As preparations are made for the ceremony, a few sharp-eyed passengers note a sailor descending from the top of the mainmast—interestingly, from near where the voice of Equator had seemed to emanate. He carries an empty sack—which looks as though it might once have held the dried beans that litter the deck.
The baptisms begin. Each neophyte is made to sit on a plank suspended by ropes over a tub of water. The godfather and godmother—veterans of the crossing—speak the sacramental words. At “Amen,” a pail of water is emptied upon the neophyte’s head, and the ropes are released, dumping him into the tub. The shellback clambers out, and the ceremony is repeated.
All are amused, and all goes smoothly till one neophyte, an independent passenger, decides that the assistants to the godparents have handled his wife more familiarly than necessary. Cross words are exchanged, then blows.
The captain intervenes, halting the ceremony. Those awaiting their turns are left to risk Equator’s wrath unbaptized.
This breaks the spell of the ritual—and requires Perlot to return to the past tense, which he employs to relate the denouement.
Before the end of the day, peace was made, and at four o’clock in the afternoon the baptismal banquet took place. A great table was set on the poop; we all seated ourselves there, officers, sailors, and passengers, and the dinner was splendid: food, beer, all kinds of wine were served to us with profusion, and the guests did honor to all; each one helped himself to his heart’s content, knowing that he would not again find himself at such a feast during the rest of the crossing.
By banquet’s end the sour feelings had sweetened. Everything indicated a happy conclusion to the day. But such was not to be. “The demon of discord, who had succeeded that morning in disturbing the baptismal ceremony, had promised himself to disturb the feast too.” His agent in the disruption was the putative nephew of the duke of Baden, Magraff, who “had eaten well and drunk superlatively.” Magraff asked for silence. The guests complied, expecting a toast. Not at all: he began complaining about the management of the company’s business. This annoyed several of his fellows, who had drunk nearly as well as Magraff; fisticuffs commenced. The pugilists, however, were distracted by the republican Badinier, who seized the floor to declaim in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity, and California. His remarks excited approbation from the many and thoughts of mischief in a few. These latter snatched a spar from the deck and compelled Badinier to sit astride it, though he protested that he didn’t merit the honor. They paraded him about the ship before depositing him in the privy.
“This folly ended the festival,” Perlot wrote. “In sum total, it was a joyful day.” He added, “The next day we were able to economize on breakfast and to a great extent on dinner. Nobody was hungry, but everyone was a little thirsty. Each one complained of pain at the roots of the hair.”
IF HEAVY USE COULD have worn ruts in the ocean, the track the Courrier de Cherbourg followed thus far in its voyage would have been deep and smooth. The French vessel was one among hundreds that made the voyage to California in the few years after James Marshall’s discovery. Scores of the ships shared the European origins of the Courrier; a larger number hailed from ports of the eastern United States. Yet whichever side of the Atlantic the argonauts’ vessels started out on, their journeys converged near the equator off Brazil. And at that point they entered waters that, while not exactly unknown, were hardly as familiar to seamen as many other parts of the world’s oceans.
From the fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth, the heaviest traffic in the South Atlantic had been bound east for the Indies, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. By comparison, the traffic around South America, for the Pacific, was far lighter. Magellan discovered the southwest passage to the Pacific in the early sixteenth century, but for another 250 years the length of the voyage and the relative absence of attractive destinations in the Pacific discouraged commerce via the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn. As late as the 1770s, British explorer James Cook could cruise for many months in Pacific waters no European had ever visited.
The American Revolution didn’t exactly revolutionize navigation of the South Atlantic and the Pacific, but it did change it. As long as the American colonies had been under British rule, American commerce with the Far East was hostage to the monopoly held by the British East India Company, whose vessels traveled via the Cape of Good Hope. American independence broke the monopoly and allowed American merchants and captains to chart their own course to China. An active trade soon devel oped around Cape Horn, with merchantmen from New York and Boston doubling South America on their way to Oregon (where they purchased furs), to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii, where they wintered and acquired sandalwood), and on to Canton (where they traded the furs and sandalwood for tea).
In time the trade grew fiercely competitive. During any given sailing season, the f
irst ship back to New York with its cargo of tea won premium profits, which might be so high as to buy a new ship outright. The pressure for speed drove shipbuilders to experiment with new designs; ships grew taller, leaner, longer. The culmination of the trend was the clipper ship, of which the state of the art in the late 1840s was the Sea Witch, with a recorded top speed of sixteen knots.
The demand for speed had a second effect, institutional rather than technological. For centuries sailing had been more art than science, as skippers consulted soothsayers, entrails, rheumatic elbows, and intuition to find fair winds and favorable currents. Such general features of atmospheric motion as the trade winds and the equatorial doldrums, and such gross oceanic motions as the Gulf Stream, were common knowledge; but the specific and detailed information that could give one ship a few days’ edge over its rivals was either undiscovered or jealously—because profitably— held by its discoverer.
In the 1840s, however, the U.S. Navy began sponsoring systematic investigations of wind and current patterns. Spearheading the research was a young officer confined to land by injuries incurred in a stagecoach wreck; during his (ultimately incomplete) recuperation, Matthew Maury directed a team that sifted through tens of thousands of pages of ships’ logs, collating by position the recordings of wind and current and producing a remarkably ambitious set of charts of the movements of air and water over and in the world’s oceans. First published in 1847, Maury’s Wind and Current Charts (with a companion volume: Sailing Directions) yielded immediate benefits to users.
Conventional wisdom ante Maury held that vessels from the East Coast of the United States bound for Cape Horn should swing far out into the Atlantic above the bulge of Brazil, that to get caught under Cape São Roque risked endless days battling the trades that blew up from the cape to the northwest. What Maury discovered was that very close to the coast the wind and current changed. Breezes blew from the continent out to sea, and the current ran down to the cape—both contrary to conventional wisdom. One of the first captains who tested Maury’s findings cut a third off the usual transit time from the Virginia capes to Rio de Janeiro. When this captain returned to Baltimore a whole month ahead of schedule, Maury became famous and his charts sold out.
As it happened, the ascending trajectory of intelligence regarding wind and wave intersected the similarly rising curve of shipbuilding technology at precisely the moment when both became immensely more valuable than before: that is, at the moment the discovery of gold in California burst upon the Atlantic world. Until 1848 the race in which the clippers and their nautical kin competed was essentially unidirectional: from China home to the Atlantic. They carried nothing out to the Pacific that depreciated with time; consequently their speed was wasted during half their round trip. The news from California changed the situation overnight. As everyone from Valparaiso and Sydney to New York and Paris appreciated, those who reached California first would claim the best gold mines and the largest markets for all the supplies the miners required. Speed immediately doubled in value, as did whatever delivered speed.
The gold discovery conferred a windfall on the owners of existing clippers and touched off a mad boom in the construction of new ones—“a perfect mania,” said the New York Herald, which reported regularly on the merchant marine. Keels were thrown down by the dozen; more than 150 clippers were built in the half decade after 1848. Ship architects stretched the clipper principle ever farther: the craft grew longer, taller, slimmer, faster.
The gold discovery also conferred celebrity on the men who commanded the great ships. The clipper captains were icons of their day. Newspapers reported their comings and goings; small boys trailed them in the streets; gentlemen tipped hats to them in the finest hotels and restaurants.
Among the celebrated clan, none drew more attention than Robert Waterman. “A strutting dude of sail,” was how a contemporary described the captain of the Sea Witch, the man who shattered all records to China and back. In his early forties, Waterman was of average height, perhaps five feet eight inches, and barrel-chested yet otherwise trim. Most captains wore beards; Waterman’s face was bare, the better to show off his splendid jawline. The odd black ringlet trespassed upon his high forehead; his Roman nose seemed the prow of his visage. Tailored in wool or Chinese silk, top-hatted in beaver, Waterman turned the heads of men and women as he rolled—whether by carriage or, with that seagoing gait, by foot—up Fifth Avenue.
More than his appearance excited whispers. He had a reputation for fearsome discipline. “Bully Waterman” was the name he bore among the veterans of his cruises, and among those to whom they passed their tales. Even his defenders conceded that he was a “driver”; his critics called him a killer. Passersby wondered if the tales were true. He seemed so self- controlled, so refined. Was there a furnace behind that fashionable cravat, a volcano beneath the pearl buttons of his waistcoat?
Cordelia Waterman heard the whispers, though she affected not to. Anyway, she hoped the question of his captainly character was in the past. After his record runs in the Sea Witch—the best of which carried him from New York to Valparaiso in sixty-nine days, from Callao to China in 50 days, and from China to New York, via the Sunda Strait and the Cape of Good Hope, in an astonishing 75 days—Cordelia convinced her husband to retire. He was very young, by most standards of retirement, but between his regular pay as captain, the bonuses the Sea Witch’s owners paid for his records, the profits he earned from the cargo he carried on his own account, and some shrewd investments in real estate, he and Cordelia had more than enough to live quite comfortably. Early retirement had been implicit in the marriage agreement; four years after the wedding, Cordelia hoped—and expected—that her husband’s sailing days were done.
But the brothers Griswold had different ideas. South Street merchants with a whole fleet flying their flag, Nathaniel and George Griswold were inspired by the gold discovery to commission the building of the arch- clipper of the clipper age: the Challenge. The builder they chose was William Webb, whose East River yard was the epicenter of clipper con struction. Amid the California boom, Webb already had more work than he could handle, but two things about the Griswolds’ proposal enticed him: their ship must be the fastest afloat, and money was no constraint. He whittled on a model, reckoned costs and profits, and agreed.
The maritime world immediately began to buzz about the Challenge. At a time when $60,000 was a handsome price for a ship, the Griswolds were spending $150,000. Their goal was to capture the record for the California run. Then, it was rumored (and not denied by the subjects of the rumor), the Griswolds would send their ship to England, where she would challenge (hence her name) any British vessel to a match race, the winner to receive the loser as prize.
The Challenge was a ship like no other. She was the longest in the world, at more than 250 feet. Her masts towered to 230 feet; her main yard was nearly 90 feet long. Her keel was of white oak, bolted with copper; her decks were of white pine, clear and straight-grained. Copper covered the keel; iron plates, painted yellow, sheathed her lower flanks. From the top of the plates to the rail was painted pitch black. Her form caused reporters nearly to swoon. “Her bow rises nobly,” said one, “and although its lines are concave below, yet as they ascend they become gently modified, still preserving their regular form; and, on the rail, blend in perfect harmony with her general outline…. The bow is plain to nudity, compared with other ships, but beautiful beyond the power of words to describe.”
To captain their prize vessel, the brothers lured Robert Waterman out of retirement. One last voyage, they explained to him—and to Cordelia— was all they asked. For his trouble—and hers—Captain Waterman would receive his regular fee, a share of the profits from the sale in California of the ship’s cargo, and, if the Challenge broke the Cape Horn record by reaching San Francisco in ninety days or less, a bonus of $10,000.
THE GOLD FLEET FOR California comprised two distinct categories of vessels. In one category were those ships like the Courrier d
e Cherbourg, hired to haul argonauts like Jean-Nicolas Perlot and his fellows in La Fortune to the mines. The Courrier’s owners and its captain were happy to get the argonauts to California as quickly as was reasonable, but having little direct interest in the mining, they had no desire to risk life or vessel to trim a few days or even weeks from the voyage. In the second category were the clippers, for whom speed was all. The clipper captains were prepared to risk everything—ship, cargo, and crew—to make the fastest time possible around Cape Horn. And if the possible weren’t fast enough, men like Robert Waterman were willing to attempt the impossible.
Waterman’s crew would join him in the attempt, even if unwillingly. The crew was typically the weakest element of any clipper, for although the law of supply and demand worked well enough on the quarterdeck, with captains like Waterman selling their services to the highest bidder, it failed in the forecastle. Despite an acute shortage of ordinary seamen, shipowners refused to raise their pay above about ten dollars per month for the Cape Horn run. To some extent this was a matter of circular reasoning: observing the crews they obtained at this wage, they couldn’t imagine paying such incompetents more. To some extent it was an acknowledgment of the strange effects California gold was having on the supply of sailors: with crews abandoning ship for the mines upon anchoring at San Francisco, owners often felt their crews ought to be paying them—for passage to California.
Nor was the problem simply low wages. Food was a chronic complaint: blandly monotonous at best, often wormy and rotten. Fresh water ran short. Rats ruled below deck. “They ate holes over-night through the hardwood cabin partitions, stole socks out of our shoes while we slept, also balls of twine and beeswax used in sail-making, and dragged them into their nests between the partitions where they seemed to produce a fresh family over-night,” wrote one seaman. Worst of all was the arbitrary discipline doled out by the captains and mates. Service aboard a clipper (as aboard other ships) was a form of indentured servitude; but where servants on land could appeal to neighbors and the sheriff in cases of mistreatment, crewmen at sea had no recourse. Their rights were only such as their captain deigned to recognize; he was judge, jury, and executioner for infractions of his code of conduct.
