by H. W. Brands
Between the low pay and the grim conditions, it was no wonder owners had trouble filling out their crews, and hardly less wonder they relied on “crimps”: human scavengers of the waterfront who cajoled, coerced, or drugged and dragged unsuspecting and unwilling victims aboard just in time for sailing. When the victims awoke, they were at sea, beyond the reach of any law but the captain’s. Adding financial insult to physical injury, the crimps charged the owners per sailor delivered; the owners transferred the cost to the sailors, who had to work it off before receiving any pay of their own.
The crimps made good money filling the forecastle of the Challenge. When the ship cast off from its East River berth, its crew comprised fifty- six men, of whom half had never been to sea before; and of these, a substantial number had never wanted to go to sea. If not for the crimps they would have been home with their mothers or sleeping off their drunks in an East Side alley, a Bowery brothel, or the city jail.
Robert Waterman was accustomed to making sailors out of landsmen, but even he was shocked at the composition of this crew. A captain—especially a famous captain like Waterman—could wait until his ship had cast off before boarding; Waterman joined the Challenge below the Battery. He examined the crew and summarily fired the first mate, the man responsible for finding suitable hands. He might have put back into port had not a boat from an arriving ship brought aboard James Douglass, a first mate Waterman knew. Douglass said he was looking for work. This surprised Waterman; most seamen valued their shore time, and Douglass’s vessel hadn’t even tied up yet. But Douglass explained that the crossing from Liverpool had been rough, and he had been obliged to treat his men vigorously. On shipboard he was safe, but he feared reprisal on shore. Could Captain Waterman use a first mate?
Waterman certainly could, especially one with a reputation as a driver like himself. “Black Douglass” was what sailors called him; the name suited the man, and the man suited Waterman.
During the first weeks of the voyage, the men got a taste of the Douglass discipline. A clipper could be a daunting introduction to the nautical arts. To push reluctant landlubbers to the top of masts that soared and swayed two hundred feet above the deck, and to the ends of yards that swooped and dipped far out across the sea, often required the kind of encouragement Black Douglass delighted in. Fortunately for the sailors, the weather was settled and breezes light. First trips up the rigging could hardly have come under less threatening circumstances.
Yet this crew was more reluctant than most. Several pleaded seasickness despite the favorable conditions; after a couple of days Douglass suspected malingering. He applied his own cures: a heaver (a stout stick of wood used to twist and thereby tighten ropes), a belaying pin (a short post inserted in the rail, to which ropes were fastened), a thick end of rope, or simply his fists. The more pliable found relief aloft; others nursed their injuries and plotted revenge.
The mood darkened as the Challenge entered the tropics east of the Bahamas and encountered the doldrums; day after day the vessel drifted, sails slack, the swells hardly more than the ripples of a pond. The sun baked the deck, steamed the men in their berths, and simmered the water in the drinking tank. One man died of a mysterious illness; his funeral cast an ominous pall over the vessel.
Crossing the equator off the multiple mouths of the Amazon, Robert Waterman cursed his luck. A record run required at least the acquiescence of the weather; this weather was damnably recalcitrant. And the crew compounded the weather problem. A clipper could make the most of the lightest breezes, but only if its crew looked lively when summoned and if they efficiently followed the captain’s commands. This crew was neither lively nor efficient. “I think it was the worst crew I’ve ever seen,” Waterman recalled later. Staring south, he cursed again.
THE EQUATORIAL DOLDRUMS that delayed the Challenge also captured the Courrier de Cherbourg, albeit farther south. And though Per- lot and his companions in La Fortune had no such precise deadline as Robert Waterman’s ninety days, they were plenty eager to reach California. Every day lost to the absence of wind was a day deducted from gold- digging, a day on which those who beat them to California would claim a larger portion of the wealth. For twenty-two days the calm held the ship fast—“twenty-two days which seemed to us as long as twenty-two years, and twenty-two years of purgatory.” The savants among the crew said it was precisely these calms that led the ancients to conclude that the tropics were impassable; Perlot started to think the ancients were right.
Finally a skein of clouds crossed the horizon. It drew closer, and as it did, the faintest whisper of wind ruffled the sails. The sea surface wrinkled; slowly the ship began to move—at first south, then southwest. Perlot and the others savored their release from prison. “A steady and pleasant wind rocked us softly and led us to our heart’s desire.”
But the soft rocking gave way, before long, to motion more violent. As the ship crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, the weather turned foul. The north wind jumped to the south, bringing rain, which in turn was followed by a west wind and thick clouds. For eight days the weather was a torment—“never two hours of the same wind, and never a good wind.” Eventually, however, by tacking west, then south, then west again, the captain was able to escape this turbulent region.
A northeast wind blew them to the latitude of the Rio de la Plata, which they sensed—by the color of the water, the sudden presence of seaweed, and the land-based birds—rather than saw. Several days later they did sight land: Patagonia. From the distance of six to eight leagues the coast seemed scarcely to rise out of the water, and the whole countryside had the appearance of a vast forest. Far in the interior, two volcanoes erupted. “The smoke of one of these volcanoes made a half-luminous trail in the evening, almost four leagues long; the other belched flames only at intervals.”
The passengers enjoyed the fireworks for three days before a sudden west wind drove them out to sea. The wind grew to tempest strength, compelling the captain to heave to and causing the ship to drift steadily, helplessly east.
When the storm abated they once again headed southwest. Three more days brought them within sight of the Falkland Islands, although at first even the captain wasn’t sure of the identity of those barren and windswept outposts of Britannia. Having seen neither sun nor stars for ten days, and with no accurate way to judge their drift during the storm, he didn’t know where they were.
The wind continuing from the west, the Courrier beat painfully toward Tierra del Fuego, which seemed to Perlot “rather the land of snow than that of fire, with its cliffs as high as mountains.” The coast now trended southeast, and the ship followed its curve to the strait of Le Maire, which separates the main island of Tierra del Fuego from a neighbor island called Staten. Before a cold but steady west-northwest wind, they cleared the strait and proceeded swiftly toward Cape Horn—which, Perlot and the other novices learned, was a rocky island rather than a true cape.
Joy reigned on board; we were going to have the unexpected luck of doubling, unimpeded, the terrible Cape! And while still casting a last look on Staten Island, which was fleeing far behind us, each one got ready for a passing salute to the island, or rather the rock which bears this name, the terror of navigators, whom it reminds of so many wrecks: Cape of Storms! That evening we went to bed gay and happy, promising ourselves to get up early in order to enjoy the view of the redoubtable cape.
But the Cape of Storms had its honor to defend, and it refused to let the argonauts pass without a contest. Hardly had Perlot and the others retired for the night than they heard the mate shout for the sailors to scramble aloft; almost at the same time they felt the ship shudder before a frightful blast from the west. The blast brought waves such as they had never seen. “The billows rolled over the waist of the ship; almost every wave passed over the vessel.”
The pounding continued all night; Perlot awoke to see the topsail, the only one that had been left set, in tatters—“as if someone had tried, with a machine made expressly, to make it into a c
anvas sieve.” The captain abandoned all hope of holding the Cape. Putting the wind astern, he steered away from that perilous place. “I would leave you to guess if we made good time, pursued by a wind of unheard violence.”
Yet retreat offered no respite.
The ship literally leaped from one wave to another, so rapid was the headway and so short was the interval from the crest to the trough of the wave. Besides, what waves! Truly, only Cape Horn can raise waves to equal them. Each one, in descending, seemed certain to precipitate us into a gulf ready to swallow us—and nevertheless we always found ourselves, more or less soaked, it’s true, on the top of the following wave. Each surge passed over the ship and left us a foot or two of water on deck.
For two days they flew before the storm. By the time the wind dropped enough to let them feel at least comparatively safe, they had lost 160 leagues to the guardians of the Cape. The captain repaired his rigging and attempted to regain some of the lost distance. Three days of tacking yielded modest progress. But the closer they approached to the Cape, the harder the wind roared. The captain hove to again. For twelve days they drifted backward, bow into the wind.
Once more they began tacking. The weather was clear, but very cold, and the wind persisted from the west. They gradually regained their westering, but only by circling far to the south.
Eventually the wind dropped; as it did, clouds set in. An icy fog enveloped the ship. “All the ropes were covered with a layer of grime an inch thick; it was impossible for us to put about that day and the next; it was not till the third day, toward noon, that, breaking the ice which encased the ropes, we succeeded in putting about and going back toward the northwest.”
At this point they were at latitude 61 south, almost within sight of Antarctica. Though they didn’t spy the mysterious southern continent, they did see and feel the effects of summer—summer! this tempestuous season was—at high latitudes.
It was the 18th of December. That day we had twenty-one hours of sunlight followed immediately by three hours of aurora clear enough to permit us to read and play on deck as in full daylight. The sun turned almost horizontally round us, but, although nothing stopped its rays, for no cloud altered the azure of the sky, we froze on deck, where we liked to stay in order not to miss the opportunity, if it was presented, of seeing a floating iceberg.
To the passengers’ disappointment but the crew’s relief, no icebergs were encountered. The disappointment was mingled with disorientation. “Our existence on board had become the strangest in the world,” Perlot said. “The night was suppressed, or virtually so. Daily habits were found to be completely upset. Thus, the cook would have to stay permanently at his stove, if he had wanted to satisfy everybody. This one, who had just got up, claimed his breakfast, while that one, up for a long time, demanded supper in order to go to bed. One claimed that the sun had just risen; the other affirmed that it was going to set. Both were wrong, for it was noon.”
Progress continued northwest. For nine days they held the same tack. Each day the sun rose a little higher above the horizon; each night the darkness lasted longer and the aurora diminished in brilliance. The cold gradually eased. On the tenth day they sighted one of the many islands off the west coast of Chile, which brought the immensely welcome realization that they had passed Cape Horn. “So we had been floating for several days in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which seemed to want to justify its name, for we were sailing as peacefully as possible, though nonetheless with speed.”
THE FRENCH CAPTAIN of the Courrier de Cherbourg probably didn’t carry copies of Matthew Maury’s Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions. If he had, he would have learned what he ended up discovering on his own: that the longest way around Cape Horn was sometimes the shortest. In his days at sea, before his injury, Maury conjectured that the prevailing winds between the Cape and Antarctica flowed in a circular, clockwise direction. His subsequent research confirmed this. In other words, whereas a ship coming from the Atlantic might meet ferocious headwinds near the Cape itself, by swinging south it could pick up winds blowing in the opposite direction.
Robert Waterman appreciated Maury’s insight, but the captain of the Challenge had too much riding on a record passage to San Francisco to waste time swinging south. And he was behind schedule already. The weather was partly to blame, but so also the crew—or perhaps it was the officers. First mate Douglass cudgeled crewmen for minor infractions and on general principle; some submitted silently, but others struck back. One seaman named Fred Birkenshaw, after receiving one of Douglass’s blows, took the opportunity of a diversion of the mate’s attention and grabbed him from behind. Several other crew members rushed Douglass, snatching away his heaver and pummeling him with their fists. One man produced a knife; aiming for Douglass’s throat or breast, he slashed but badly missed, merely stabbing Douglass in the leg.
Douglass screamed bloody murder, alerting Waterman for the first time to the mutiny. The captain may have realized that his life was in jeopardy too, or he may simply have responded from righteous wrath. In either case, he hurled himself from the quarterdeck into the midst of the melee. With his sextant he smashed one mutineer, a man named George Smith, who had Douglass’s neck in a death grip. With fists, feet, and rope, Waterman attacked several others. He helped free Douglass, who, with his blood spurting across the planks, went into a frenzy of retribution. Seizing a heaver again, the mate laid about like a demon. The mutineers, losing their nerve, fled for their lives.
The mutiny lasted no more than a few minutes; Waterman took longer weighing his response. Some of the central participants were readily identifiable. George Smith bore the imprint on his scalp and skull of Waterman’s sextant; the captain ordered him placed in irons. Fred Birkenshaw was identified as the leader of the insurrection, but was missing. A crew member said he had seen him dive over the side, apparently preferring death by drowning to a noose at the end of a yard.
Waterman interrogated Smith, who at first contended the violence was extemporaneous. But threats that his punishment would increase from continued lying brought forth an explanation that several of the crew had indeed been plotting for some time to murder Douglass and Waterman and take the ship to Rio de Janeiro, where they would melt into the swirling population of that busy port. Smith hastened to add that he had not been party to the plotting; he had simply overheard it.
Waterman thereupon seized several of the alleged conspirators. Under questioning they too admitted overhearing the mutiny plans; like Smith, all but one said they took no part.
Waterman disbelieved the denials of participation. He pronounced eight men guilty and ordered them flogged. Douglass carried out the sentences, with obvious relish. By the time the convicted were cut loose, they were nearly unconscious (they revived slightly when stinging salt water was thrown on their wounds), and the deck was covered with their blood and gore.
Needless to say, all this hardly endeared Waterman to his crew. Nor did he expect it to. The operative question was whether it terrified them sufficiently to do his bidding against their own will. The answer, as it emerged, was yes and no.
Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Cape, the Challenge encountered generally favorable winds. The vessel skated across the waves as its designer intended, lifting Waterman’s hopes of recouping the lost time and capturing the record. For several days the good luck held, and the ship cruised smartly through the Strait of Le Maire and clear to the Cape.
But then, as if it had been lying in ambush behind the Cape, a huge storm slammed the vessel. Giant rollers—“Cape Horn snorters”—bearing the momentum of five thousand miles of open water and towering to sixty feet, raised the great clipper high, then dashed it down. The keel and braces groaned under the repeated pounding; the masts bent and shuddered and swayed before the gale like the trees they once were. Foam from the wave tops mixed with sleet and snow to turn the air a spuming white. The water roared, the wind shrieked, and the guardians of the Cape, become demons from hell, ho
wled derision at these mortals trespassing where mortals didn’t belong.
Waterman had trespassed before and knew how to defeat the demons. But he couldn’t do it alone. He needed men to climb the rigging, to furl or reef the sails that survived the blast, to cut away those the storm shredded. With sail the ship would survive; without sail it would perish—capsized or crashed on the rocks. At this latitude all could expect to go down with the vessel, frozen blue within minutes of hitting the water.
But to many of the men, death seemed more likely aloft. The lurching of the ship was bad enough on deck; two hundred feet of mast magnified the motion to appalling proportions. The wind, also, was more violent aloft, able to snatch a man from the footropes and cast him to the waves. Nor was the wind or the pitching the worst of the danger. The snow and spume encrusted the ropes in ice, cheating the sailors of purchase for hands and feet. The sailors too were quickly encrusted, their faces frostbitten, their fingers immobilized, the blood that oozed from cracks in the skin freezing before it coagulated. A man didn’t have to be a coward to quail at the prospect of ascending in conditions like these.
Even the kindest captain, under duress of the common danger, might have felt obliged to counter these fears with other fears—of the first mate’s wrath, for instance. Waterman was hardly the kindest captain, and he turned Douglass loose on the reluctant. The mate employed his heaver to drive the men from the forecastle to the deck, where they quickly discovered they risked being swept overboard by the waves that crashed across the bow. Between the blows of the mate and those of the ocean, most decided they were safer aloft. Up they went, as slowly and carefully as they dared. Douglass hastened their ascent by vowing to follow them up and beat them there.
