Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  *

  The Lows could think of no better name for Captain Nat’s dream ship: Houqua. What better way to honor their old friend than a portrait in wood and canvas, with his likeness as its figurehead?

  The Lows trusted Captain Nat with more than a ship: he would be taking in their still-hyperactive, now-nineteen-year-old brother Charles, transforming him from apprentice sailor to ship’s officer. For so many Yankees, business and family were one and the same. If a captain or merchant did not have a son to train in the ways of commerce, he would informally “adopt” the nephew or son of a close business associate as his apprentice. Captain Nat and his wife, Eliza, had no children of their own, and the Lows might as well have been family.

  Abbot Low hoped to eventually sell Houqua to the Chinese government as a warship. The presence of a modern warship in the Chinese navy, as a counterweight to the Royal Navy, would make conditions safer for Americans trying to conduct business. China was still smarting from the humiliation of the recent conflict, and there was a strong chance that another conflict would erupt with the bellicose Great Britain.

  The US government was also intent on looking after American interests in China. On the heels of the British Treaty of Nanking, American diplomat Caleb Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, which would give American businessmen many of the protections and privileges they so desperately desired. Ratified by Congress and signed by President John Tyler, the 1844 treaty reaffirmed Americans access to the five ports now opened to foreigners, and specified:

  [T]he vessels of the United States being admitted to trade freely to and from the five ports of China open to foreign commerce, it is further agreed that in case at any time hereafter, China should be at war with any foreign nation whatever, and for that cause should exclude such nation from entering her ports, still the vessels of the United States shall not the less continue to pursue their commerce in freedom and security, and to transport goods to and from the ports of the belligerent parties, full respect being paid to the neutrality of the flag of the United States.

  The treaty also provided protections against the kind of violence merchants had experienced in 1841. If rioters burned or looted American buildings, the US consul was authorized to “immediately dispatch a military force to disperse the rioters, and will apprehend the guilty individuals and punish them with the utmost rigor of the law.” The treaty also stipulated that only the US Consulate, not the Chinese courts, could administer punishment to Americans for crimes committed in the Celestial Kingdom; this extra-territoriality was much hated by the Chinese. There was one exception to this rule: any American “who shall trade in opium or any other contraband article of merchandize, shall be subject to be dealt with by the Chinese Government, without being entitled to any countenance or protection from that of the United States.”27

  Yet these provisions were almost entirely symbolic, a nod to the fact that opium trading still remained technically illegal in China. The American vice consul in Canton in 1844 was none other than Warren Delano II, partner of opium-dealing Russell & Company, so there was no real means of enforcing this opium ban. Delano himself dispatched a letter to the secretary of the navy urging America to send a fleet of ships that would give the Chinese “a sense of respect for the United States.” Delano knew that a disruption of the opium trade by the Chinese would cause another war with England, one that the humbled Celestial Kingdom could not win.

  So the “foreign mud” known as opium continued to flow into China.

  *

  I. A first-time sailor.

  II. Studding sails, whose booms slide outward from the yardarms of square-rigged vessels, are meant to increase a ship’s sail area, and hence speed, in light winds.

  III. Larboard is synonymous with the port side, or the left side of the ship, when facing forward; starboard with the right side of the ship.

  IV. “Before the mast” meant working as a sailor rather than as an officer, as sailors lived in the front of the ship (forecastle) while officers slept in the rear of the ship (in the afterhouse).

  V. Before the chronometer, it had been done almost entirely by guesswork, otherwise known as “dead reckoning.” British navigators and, later, American seamen used the longitudinal meridian running through the naval observatory at Greenwich, England, as the so-called Prime Meridian, at 0 degrees. An hour’s difference from GMT equals 15 degrees in longitude, with each degree the equivalent of sixty nautical miles at the equator, a distance that decreased as the ship sailed northward or southward. But to know this required knowing the time.

  CHAPTER 6

  CAPTAIN NAT

  Probably no one ever brought up so many young men who afterward became successful shipmasters, while his character and example were an inspiration to many who never sailed with him.1

  —CAPTAIN ARTHUR HAMILTON CLARK, on Captain Nathaniel Brown Palmer

  The man who in a fit of frustration carved the model of the ship that would become Houqua was Abbot Low’s secret weapon. Captain Nathaniel Palmer was designer, master mariner, and adventurer, all packaged with a bearish yet calm exterior. Bearded and brawny, and standing six feet tall, forty-four-year-old “Captain Nat,” as his friends called him, did not thrash his men or curse the bad weather. Rather, in a fit of pique, he threw his white beaver hat to the deck, stamped on it, and then retreated to his cabin to cool off. According to one fellow mariner, Captain Nat was “a man of great physical strength and endurance,” and his “roughness was all on the outside; his heart was filled with kindness and sympathy for the joys and sorrows of others.”2 He was also a very gifted designer of ships, who had gained his knowledge through years of seafaring rather than by theoretical study or apprenticeship.

  He was born in 1799, making him about a decade older than most of the recent Russell partners. A Yankee from the small Connecticut coastal town of Stonington, he grew up around his father’s shipyard, which built fast, trim privateers of French-inspired design that were the scourge of the British during the War of 1812. According to one biographer, what distinguished ships built in and around the Connecticut River Valley was the native white oak, which “stood higher in the estimation of shipowners than any except the live oak of Hatteras Island and the coast of Florida.”3

  As he wandered the shipyard at his father’s side, the young Palmer learned of the various types of American woods used in shipbuilding. Each one had a specific purpose. White oak, the gold standard of shipbuilding woods, was coarse grained and could be shaped into virtually any structural component: ribs that sprouted out from the keel; hull planking that covered the ribs; and hanging knees, triangular pieces bolted to ribs that supported the decks above. Its pores were infused with tyloses—occlusions of the tree’s xylem cells—making it nearly waterproof. Other woods could be used based on price and availability. Some could be cut locally. Rock maple, a dense, tough wood that still was easy to utilize with iron tools, was often used for the keel, the backbone of the ship, and was rot resistant when immersed constantly in seawater. White pine, soft and also resistant to rot, was used for deck planking. Hackmatack, a species of larch found in eastern North America, was excellent for rough construction such as hanging knees. Other woods were harder to come by and had to be shipped to the yard from a distance, among them finely grained, imported satinwood and rosewood. These were used most often inside passengers’ quarters and the captain’s stateroom.4

  The most prized wood for structural work was southern live oak, long reserved for American naval vessels, where price and transport were no object. Its most famous use was in the frigate USS Constitution, completed in 1797 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and known as “Old Ironsides” because British cannonballs seemed to bounce off her hull during the War of 1812. Virtually impervious to rot, live oak provided bracing components for parts of the ship that were subjected to extreme stress. With a specific gravity of 0.88 out of 1.00 (an object with a specific gravity of 1.00 will be neutral in water; anything heavier than 1.00 will sink), it has
the highest density of any American hardwood. In its “living” form, live oak trees, usually draped in languid Spanish moss, grew in bogs and bayous, and shaded the approaches to stately plantation houses such as Oak Alley in Louisiana.

  Any shipyard apprentice who wanted to become a master shipbuilder had to become expert not only in the use of tools such as the adze and the saw, but also in the characteristics of all of the woods used in his craft. Unlike later ships built out of iron and steel, wooden ships were made out of living materials. The wood breathed, flexed, expanded, contracted, and, if not cared for, rotted away. Yet when seasoned and maintained properly, a high-quality wooden vessel could last just as long as a metal ship. Most importantly, wood was plentiful in the United States, unlike in Europe, which by the nineteenth century had decimated its stands of old growth timber. As a result, American shipbuilders continued to perfect the art of wood shipbuilding, while Europeans experimented with iron, first for use in the frames and then eventually for the entire hull.

  As much as he loved prowling around his father’s shipyard, Palmer did not stay in Stonington long. The channel leading out to Long Island Sound was only twelve feet deep, which severely limited the size of vessels that could be built there.5 Nathaniel shipped out to sea at fourteen, just in time to miss the Royal Navy’s 1814 bombardment of Stonington—one of the British assaults that seared itself into the memory of Warren Delano, then just five years old. While still in his teens, Palmer became captain of the small seal-hunting ship Hero. Sailing to South American sealing grounds, he became arguably the first Westerner to see the mysterious continent of Antarctica. Palmer’s claim would be disputed in the years to come, but an Antarctic peninsula bears his name to this day. He later conducted his own Antarctic expedition, financed by wealthy Stonington businessmen.

  Sealing ships were smaller versions of New Bedford whalers, filled with rough men who slaughtered mammals for their oil and skin, and Palmer soon decided to leave these “butcher ships adrift.”6, 7 Yet, along with learning how to sail small but nimble craft in the open sea, the Antarctic voyages gave him a key advantage over other captains: an intimate understanding of the winds and currents around Cape Horn, that treacherous southern tip of South America that would one day prove to be the most feared obstacle on the sea route to the future boom town of San Francisco.

  Leaving the bloody decks of the Stonington sealers behind, Nathaniel Palmer made a quick voyage to the West Indies to supply the Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolívar, then fighting for much of South America’s independence from Spain. In a letter written to Abbot Low many years later, Palmer boasted that he’d crammed 175 sheep on the top deck.8

  By the 1830s, Palmer was commanding flat-bottomed packets that carried bales of Deep South “King Cotton” between New Orleans and the cotton brokerages of New York. His boss was Edward Knight Collins, a colorful New York shipping entrepreneur who also ran a line of transatlantic packets. Although an excellent captain, Palmer knew when not to push his luck with the weather. According to one historian, “Palmer felt his way carefully to the extreme edge of safety and stayed there.” The captain also demonstrated himself to be “something of a shrewd businessman besides, and something more than an average good ship designer.”9 He was especially impressed with the ship’s flat floors, and thanks to his design suggestions, Collins’s next packets proved to be extremely fast.

  Soon Palmer was working for Collins’s Dramatic Line’s transatlantic packets. He set a new speed record from Liverpool to New York that October: an astonishing fifteen days, against the prevailing winds, when a more typical passage could last between six and eight weeks.10 But he decided eventually that a year on the North Atlantic was more than enough. He might not have had the nastiness in his soul needed to keep his “packet rat” crews in line, especially on so punishing a schedule. “Packet rats they were called, and that was an insult to the rats!” snarled one North Atlantic packet captain. “Brawlers, sea lawyers, pimps, drunkards, no-goods all.”11 Unlike the navy, there was no court-martial system to enforce discipline on board. Punishment, just like the business itself, was at the mercy of the free market. Many masters and mates had to put down mutinies by resorting to fisticuffs and even pointed guns. This gnawing, constant fear of insurrection severely affected the personalities of many officers. Palmer’s younger brother, Theodore, also a captain, was seen by one fellow mariner as a “harder man to get along with,” as he had “been in Liverpool packets most of his life.”12

  So in 1840 Captain Nat bowed out of the transatlantic trade and signed on as a captain with A. A. Low & Brother. The timing was perfect. China packet crews were generally regarded as less stressful to command than their North Atlantic counterparts, for they tended to be less violent, desperate lots than the “packet rats.” And the China passage, although still dangerous and much longer, could be relatively placid compared with the harsh North Atlantic.

  As Captain Nat sailed the A. A. Low & Brother packets between New York and Canton, he thought back to his experience on the flat-floor cotton boats. Could he use that concept on a new generation of tea ships? He decided that he would want to be an owner—as well as the captain—of any ships he designed. He made his case known to A. A. Low & Brother, and the company accepted his conditions.13 A $19,500 contract with Brown & Bell to build Houqua was signed on November 1, 1843.

  *

  All along New York’s East River, wooden hulls were rising in the yards of Brown & Bell and competitors such as Smith & Dimon, and W. H. Webb. Since the Treaties of Nanking and Wanghia, other firms that previously did not do much business in China were challenging Russell’s supremacy, a situation that greatly worried Abbot Low. “The China trade is passing into numerous hands,” he wrote darkly in a letter to his brother Edward, “and will in all probability be attended with but little profit.”14 The word was out, and competition was growing stiff, as new companies shelled out for swift ships modeled on clipper designs.

  The ship that attracted the most interest was being built for William Henry Aspinwall, who had once been one of Russell & Company’s most valued commission clients but now competed against it in the China shipping business. Her designer was John Willis Griffiths, an eccentric, lowly draftsmen at Smith & Dimon who had somehow managed to sell Aspinwall on his own design.

  Unlike Palmer, who was renowned for his seafaring exploits and expertise, Griffiths had a hazy past and appears never to have ventured on a blue-water voyage. In later life, he became something of a shameless self-promoter who claimed to have been the principal “inventor” of the American clipper ship. As one historian summed up, “John Willis Griffiths was considered a genius as a naval architect, although perhaps somewhat eccentric in his zeal to improve American naval architecture.”15 Griffith’s aggressive salesmanship might have stemmed from an inferiority complex common to tradesmen at the time, who felt that their status in the increasingly mercantile nation was under threat. Shipbuilders were looked on as mechanics—highly skilled, perhaps, but people who worked with their hands, not their heads.

  Griffiths, born in New York City, had trained as a shipwright under the watchful eye of one Isaac Webb at the Eckford yard. It appears that bad luck plagued the apprentice Griffiths at the yard. At seventeen, he cut himself in a shipyard accident, and Isaac Webb released him from his indenture. Despite his love of ships, Griffiths’s head, one would surmise, was not in the right place.

  Griffiths bounced around after his apprenticeship. He married and got a job at the United States Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Here he absorbed military naval design practices, in which speed was paramount over cargo capacity, especially for frigates and other patrol craft. The US Navy recognized his talent; as a young man, Griffiths designed the hull of the fast frigate USS Macedonian, rebuilt from the keel of a British frigate captured during the War of 1812.16 It was during this time that Griffiths grew more interested in shipbuilding theory and less in mere construction.

  Finally, Griffiths landed a m
odest job at the Smith & Dimon yard back in New York. As a draftsman, he supervised the construction of half models for clients: wooden layer-cake-like miniatures that could be taken apart so that the shipwright could measure dimensions (sheer,I body, and half breadth), figures that would be expanded proportionally into full-size templates in wood three-quarters of an inch thick. Then they would go to the shipyard’s wood stocks to see which types of wood were available for assembling the full-sized ship.17

  How the Smith & Dimon draftsman Griffiths got the ear of someone as lofty as William Henry Aspinwall remains a mystery. Later in life, Griffiths claimed to have given a lecture at the American Institute of the City of New York—a civic association founded in 1829 that served as a forum for inventors seeking to promote their creations to capitalists—outlining his concept of a new China packet. Unlike Palmer, who advocated for sharp ends and a flat bottom, Griffiths believed that a V-shaped bottom (high deadrise) created a faster ship. Basically, the result would be an enlarged opium clipper. Griffiths maintained that the entire audience laughed at his presentation. Everyone except for William Henry Aspinwall, who was intrigued by the design and asked the young draftsman to prepare more elaborate plans. However, no record of Griffiths’s lecture survives in the archives of the American Institute, and most of Aspinwall’s papers have been destroyed.

  A more likely story is that Aspinwall could not engage the new A. A. Low man, the respected Nat Palmer, and so he took a gamble by choosing Griffiths. The young draftsman may have been a radical, but his employer Smith & Dimon was one of New York’s most respected shipyards, with a long track record of success. Aspinwall’s aim was a larger version of a ship with which he was already intimately familiar: his own Ann McKim, built in 1833. Although it was the fastest ship in the China trade, it was too small and slim hulled to be profitable. He signed a contract with Smith & Dimon at almost exactly the same time that Palmer convinced A. A. Low & Brother to build his ship.