Active and eager to learn, Charlie Low was unsure about this stern-faced, “aristocratic captain” who never went outside without slipping on a pair of kid gloves. A fine navigator but “not much of a sailor,” Charlie thought of his new lord and master. Howland had achieved his rank by starting off “on the quarterdeck” instead of “before the mast”—meaning that he had started his career as an officer rather than moving up the ranks as a common sailor—and therefore had not received the practical experience that other captains of his generation had. Family connections and book knowledge almost certainly eased his way into the captain’s cabin. Yet somehow he proved himself on the North Atlantic run, commanding a series of packet ships and gaining a reputation among his peers as being an “A-1 navigator and a gentleman.”15 Howland’s wife accompanied him on his trips. When she gave birth to a daughter during one of their voyages, she named the baby after the ship: Horatia.
A captain’s great power came with great responsibility. “The captain, in the first place, is lord paramount,” wrote Richard Dana. “He stands no watch, comes and goes when he pleases, is accountable to no one, and must be obeyed in everything, without a question even from his chief officer.” Such a man refrained from emotional intimacy, even with his chief mate, and when there were no family or passengers on board, “has no companion but his own dignity, and few pleasures, unless he differs from most of his kind, beyond the consciousness of possessing supreme power, and occasionally, the exercise of it.” He had to be unknowable, feared rather than loved, to maintain power over her crew.16
On ship, Charlie would surely have matched Dana’s description of a sailor of the day. Dana, the scion of a wealthy Boston family, shipped out himself after his freshman year at Harvard, in his father’s hope that it would cure his frequent spells of ill health. In an 1840 memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, Dana wrote of the devil-may-care swagger that came with belonging to this fraternity of sorts. “A sailor has a peculiar cut about him,” he observed, and went on to describe it: trousers, “tight around the hips, and thence hanging long and loose round the feet;” baggy checked shirt; and a “low-crowned, well-varnished black hat, worn on the back of the head, with half a fathom of black ribbon hanging over the left eye.” These, “with sundry other minutiae” were in Dana’s eyes the signs of a true sailor, “the want of which betrays the beginner at once.”17
Dressed in his duck trousers and checked shirt, Charlie Low came aboard Horatio on November 5, 1842. His destination: Canton. News had reached America of the end to Anglo-Chinese hostilities with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. It was time, Abbot and the other Yankee merchants felt, to act.
His official title on Horatio was ship’s boy, which put him at the bottom of the onboard totem pole. As an apprentice, he was expected to learn from the other sailors. With luck, he would rise to become an able seaman and then mate. He got no wages, but did receive $30 in spending money from his father. He also got something more precious to him: “my freedom; that is, I was not to depend on him any further, but to make my own way in the world.”
Yet big brother Abbot did not let Charlie set sail without family along: he also booked William Henry and Ann Low on the same trip. This was to be William Henry’s second trip to Canton. He had returned to New York the previous year, safe but shaken by the Opium War—and with only partially filled pockets. Now that trade relations had resumed, he had little choice but to go back to China and try his luck again.
The steam tug pulled the sturdy wooden vessel out into the Upper Bay, and the guests on board Horatio debarked. The crew scrambled aloft, the sails came tumbling down, and off the ship sailed for China. “It being a fair wind, we did not stop work till all the studden-sails [sic, studding sailsII] were set and we were nearly out of sight of land,” Charlie recalled.18 Then the first and second mate summoned all hands on deck and chose their watches, alternating until the crew was divided evenly into the two work crews that kept the ship fully operational twenty-four hours a day. The first mate was, in Dana’s words, “the prime minister, the official organ, and the active superintending officer.” Aboard Horatio, he supervised the larboard watch. Meanwhile, the other work crew, commanded by the second mate (“neither officer nor man … obliged to go aloft to reef and furl the topsails, and to put his hands in the tar and lush, with the rest”) would take the starboard watch.
The two watches worked on an alternating daily schedule, also known as “larboard” and “starboard.”III The larboard schedule went as follows: sail the ship from midnight to four in the morning (the dreary so-called middle watch); sleep from four to eight (with a short interlude for breakfast); sail the ship from eight until noon, lunch (known as “dinner”) and leisure between noon and four; a two-hour “first dog watch” between four and six in the late afternoon; and then two hours of cleaning, training, and repair from six to eight o’clock. Then they would go back on duty until midnight.
The starboard watch schedule went as follows: sleep between midnight and four in the morning. They would then sail the ship between four and eight o’clock, possibly overlapping for breakfast with the other watch about to go on duty. Eight until noon was their leisure time and dinner. They would go back to sailing the ship from noon to four, and then take off two hours for cleaning, training, and ship repair, as well as a quick supper. Then they would sail the ship between six and eight in the evening, or the “second dog watch,” after which they could sleep from eight to midnight, and then go back on duty.
It was the use of two-hour “dog watches” that made the two schedules alternate each day.
The pace was grueling, and the schedule was not carved in stone. A skeleton crew had to run the ship during mealtimes, and in the case of bad weather ahead, the mate on watch would summon all hands on deck to take in sail and prepare the ship for the onslaught. A good mate knew that a group of idle sailors was a recipe for discontent. Repairing the rigging and polishing brightwork was done throughout the trip. Scrubbing the decks with large rectangular stones known as holystones because of their resemblance to Bibles was a tedious, much-hated task assigned toward the end of the voyage. The less time they had to talk among themselves, the better. “In no state prison are the convicts more regularly set to work, and more closely watched,” Dana wrote of one particularly harsh master. “No conversation is allowed among the crew at their duty, and though they frequently do talk when aloft, or when near one another, yet they stop when an officer is nigh.” The so-called Philadelphia Catechism was a common refrain among disgruntled sailors:
Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able
And on the seventh—holystone the deck and scrape the cable.19
As the Horatio’s voyage wore on, Charlie got his sea legs, absorbed the strict hierarchy, and steadily learned more seamanship: “slushing the masts and spars” (with galley grease), and “tarring the standing rigging,” just as other men did who sailed “before the mast” had done.IV He also learned the art of navigation, establishing the ship’s position and plotting its course so it could make the fastest possible speed and avoid treacherous shoals, coastlines, and other hazards. Navigation in the nineteenth century required proficiency in basic arithmetic, a firm understanding of trigonometry, and the judgment that comes of experience. When clouds blotted out all of the celestial bodies in foul weather, the ship’s position had to be determined by guessing the distance traveled since the last known fix. A good navigator meant the difference between life and death for all on board.
The first task was to calculate the ship’s latitude, or position north or south of the equator. To accomplish this, Charlie had to look at the sun at noon through an instrument known as the sextant—invented in the 1750s—and then calculate its angle above the horizon. Such a procedure was known as “shooting the sun.” To ensure that his reading found the sun at its highest altitude, or zenith, he would have to take several shots. The sextant altitude, as it was called, would then be corrected using published tables to create
a “true altitude.” This was subtracted from 90 degrees to reveal, finally, the vessel’s latitude. This noon sight would be plotted on a chart map as a parallel horizontal line, giving a reasonable indication of the ship’s latitude.
At night, Charlie would use the sextant again, this time to calculate lunar distances: discovering position lines from a combination of stars or planets, chosen for their brightness, in both hemispheres. Star and planet shots were more difficult and time-consuming than shooting the sun. Clear twilight skies and a sharp horizon were a celestial navigator’s best friends. Plotting stars and planets also required the precise time, taken from the ship’s chronometer, as well as tables of exacting spherical trigonometry. After a good session, Charlie would have three or more stars tightly intersecting on his chart to form an exact position that provided both latitude and longitude.20
Calculating longitude—the ship’s east-west location—had until relatively recently been a mix of guesswork by most mariners and complicated calculations by only the most skilled. The invention of the marine chronometer in the eighteenth century by the self-taught British carpenter and clock maker John Harrison resulted in a supremely reliable clock unaffected by changes in humidity and the ship’s motion. Harrison’s marine chronometer, which found its way onto most large merchant vessels, was set constantly at Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Each day, when the celestial latitude was calculated by shooting the sun, the navigator would compare the ship’s local time (the local hour angle) with the Greenwich time (the Greenwich hour angle), and, using published tables, be able to calculate the distance in degrees east or west from the Prime Meridian.V
Soon after the American Revolution, the United States made its own contribution to navigation, one, arguably, as important as Harrison’s chronometer. This was The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802 by twenty-nine-year-old Nathaniel Bowditch, a self-taught mathematician from Salem. The grammar school dropout had taken only one trip to Manila, serving as a supercargo. But with typical Yankee dash and impudence, he noted every inconsistency in the calculations of the then-bible of navigation, John Hamilton Moore’s The Practical Navigator. The result, an entirely new guide, became a massive best seller, was adopted by merchant captains and the US Navy as the gold standard for navigation, and has never gone out of print.
By the end of his first voyage, Charlie Low had shed his landlubber persona, as well as much of his childish impetuousness. He now had the air of one of the old hands that Dana memorialized; he walked with “a wide step, and a rolling gait,” and swung “his bronzed and toughened hands athwart-ships, half-opened, as though just ready to grasp a rope.”21 Arriving safely in Canton in early 1843, Charles was summoned to dine with Houqua. The aging merchant was worn out from the difficulties of the past few years. Low noted that the merchant showed the Americans around his beautiful gardens and then offered them an “elaborate lunch;” Charlie thought the strange food was “very good indeed, though some did not please my fancy.”22
The Chinese, caving to British demands when they signed the Treaty of Nanking, had effectively abolished the old Cohong system, rendering Houqua nearly irrelevant. Opium ships could now anchor and discharge their cargo free from Chinese interference—although, in truth, American opium traders had already been carrying illicit goods to closed ports. Britain allowed US merchants to set up shop on the island of Hong Kong, which had been ceded to the Crown, allowing them (and their families) to bypass the residential restrictions that had previously confined them to the Factories or to Macao. The ports of Xiamen, Shanghai, Fuzhou, and Ningbo were also opened to Western trade.
American merchants continued to shuttle between America and China, yet one in particular seemed dogged by bad luck. After only a few months in China, William Henry Low and his pregnant wife, Ann, sailed home on Paul Jones. Ann almost certainly wanted to deliver their child in her native Brooklyn, away from the disease and heat of Hong Kong. Also, William Henry appeared to be floundering professionally again. For the second time, he had failed to make partner at Russell & Company. Paul Jones, the same ship that would carry Warren and Catherine from New York to China later that year, got the Lows home in 118 days—not a bad voyage, considering that 140 days was considered an average passage, but still not as swift as owner Robert Forbes had hoped.
It also seemed maddeningly slow to the ship’s captain, Nathaniel Palmer, who must have been especially anxious to have his boss’s brother and sister-in-law aboard.23 The problem, to Palmer, seemed to be the shape of the ship. Although equipped with considerable “deadrise”—a sharp upward angle in the submerged sections of her hull—she still featured the bluff, apple-cheeked bow typical of older ships. The captain found himself tacking his fully loaded vessel awkwardly back and forth against the prevailing winds.
It was sometime during this voyage that Palmer went below to his cabin and picked up a stray block of wood. Using his practical experience with ships of all kinds, he whittled it into the shape of a vessel that he thought would be better suited for the tea trade.
Palmer showed his little whittled shape to William Henry Low, most likely at dinner in the main saloon of the Paul Jones. There, under the flickering oil lamps, feasting on the vegetables, meats, and fruits that the recently invented canning process had made possible on long voyages at sea, Low peered down at a uniquely different model ship. It had a sharp-ended hull—just like the little opium clippers that sped so efficiently, cutting through the waves rather than riding over them. Yet Palmer’s model also had the flatter bottom sections of the cotton packets that sailed between New Orleans and New York, big cargo carriers that had proven to be surprisingly swift sailers.
Captain Nat knew that the small opium clippers had achieved some truly startling speeds. Now that the China market had been cracked open, why couldn’t bigger, oceanic ships do the same? With luck, his refined clipper-type ship could approach the fourteen knots that the little opium runners had achieved. Palmer estimated that his new ship could bring fresh tea from China to New York in fewer than a hundred days, a faster voyage than the Paul Jones and other ships in her class.
The relatively flat-bottom contours of Palmer’s prototype created the interior volume needed for greater carrying capacity. His new model would be ideal for hauling the maximum number of tea chests with the minimum amount of wasted space. And there was another factor at work. Some sailors on the China run had noticed how their ships sailed differently with a cargo of tea versus bulk goods. “A ship with a tea cargo is very buoyant and is not deep in the water and sails very well,” the young sailor Charlie Low observed.24 This enabled tea ships to make nine or ten knots sailing large in a quartering wind—compared with six or seven knots for merchant ships loaded with heavier cargo.25 Imagine how fast a better-designed ship could be.
Such was the ship that Captain Nathaniel Palmer envisioned while slogging homeward on John Murray Forbes’s brand-new Paul Jones. With luck, Palmer reasoned, a sharp-bowed ship could average twelve or thirteen knots in a fresh breeze—possibly even faster—when loaded with a full cargo of tea. The question was whether a ship with such sharp ends would lose crucial buoyancy and become unstable or structurally deficient in bad weather, especially when fully loaded with cargo.
Late in 1843, a newly disembarked William Henry Low turned up at the South Street offices of A. A. Low & Brother, sadly without the competence he had sought in China, but bearing Captain Nat’s model ship. His brother Abbot controlled the family purse strings, and after careful examination and consultation with the East River shipbuilders Brown & Bell, he gave his approval for building this experimental craft. Captain Nat would design the new vessel and supervise her construction at the shipyard.
In the new economic landscape, with four new ports opened to American trade, Abbot knew there was no fortune to be made in being an ordinary commission house, simply taking a cut of every cargo of tea, opium, or Chinese luxury goods. To gain a competitive edge against both British and American rivals, a
shipping firm had to offer a service that would command the highest freight rates: getting first to market. Working with Russell & Company, Low intended to dispatch China freight at maximum speed. In an age before electronic communication, swift ships also allowed crucial business correspondence and bills of exchange to travel faster between China and New York. Low wanted this business, too. But he knew his firm would have tough rivals: the Griswold brothers were already at work planning a fast ship, of course named Panama, to be built along the lines of an enlarged Baltimore clipper.
The Russell partners in China, including newly returned managing partner Warren Delano, were also aware of the need for speed. Although not trained as a mariner like his father, Delano knew what such ships would mean to the business. “[A] large ship can carry goods at cheaper rates of freights, particularly on long voyages, than small ones can do,” he observed, “and in China, the port charges are about the same as small as on large vessels if they bring up rice.” An ideal ship, he calculated, would be of 550 tons, be able to stow 1,300 to 1,400 tons of tea, and cost $35,000 to build and outfit. And the best captains, he advised, were ones “who will keep the vessel in good order—make short passages and spend but little money.”26 As Warren Delano kept track of opium chests coming in and tea chests going out in the company ledger book in Hong Kong, where the Russell & Company offices had moved, he scanned the Pearl River for the new class of ships that his friend Abiel Abbot Low had started building—ships that would make faster passages than the one he and his wife had endured.
Barons of the Sea Page 10
