Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  As Waterman was making his record-breaking voyages to China—this was the man who had made the journey in Howland & Aspinwall’s old cotton packet Natchez in an astonishing seventy-eight days—the German composer Richard Wagner premiered an opera based on the myth of the captain who made a deal with Satan. In exchange for impossibly fast trips and huge profits, the blasphemous captain and his ship would be condemned to wander the oceans forever. The spell would be lifted only if the captain could find a loving wife; every seven years, he would be thrown up on shore and given a chance.

  Wagner based his darkly scored opera on a satirical novel by the poet Heinrich Heine, but the legend may have originated from a true story. Two hundred years before Wagner wrote Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), Captain Bernard Fokke of the Dutch East India Company amazed his countrymen with his exceptionally fast trips from Amsterdam to Batavia—present-day Jakarta, Indonesia. At a time when a typical trip took six months, Fokke drove his ship to her destination in a mere three. He was such a hard driver that many whispered that the captain must have indeed made a deal with the devil.

  If Waterman’s journeys were less impossibly fast, he provoked no less awe in his contemporaries. In 1846, when Aspinwall hired him as captain and design consultant for his second experimental clipper, Sea Witch, Waterman was arguably more famous than Captain Nat Palmer. His contribution to the ship’s design was a gigantic sail plan: five tiers of sails on each of her three masts. Taller than any other American merchant vessel on the high seas, her skysail yard would tower almost 150 feet above the main deck, only 50 feet less than her 192-foot overall length.26 The daring sail plan, coupled with Griffiths’s lithe, V-bottom hull, created a ship that was as skittish as a thoroughbred racehorse. The white oak hull rose rapidly on the stocks at Smith & Dimon, and she was scheduled for launching in December of that year.

  Perhaps the curse of the Flying Dutchman had been broken, for come December, Waterman had a new bride at his side: the former Cordelia Sterling of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Like many captains’ wives, Cordelia was forced to decide whether to stay at home on her own or accompany her new husband around the world. She decided to make the maiden voyage of Sea Witch.

  The newlyweds arrived in the big city just as the Christmas social season was getting under way. By the 1840s, American Protestants had warmed to the idea of Christmas as a family holiday. Before that, Christmas was associated with Catholic—even pagan—revelry, in which the lower classes would ape and mock the mannerisms of the gentry. Following the example set by the German-born Albert, Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, a growing number of prosperous Americans—especially in the industrializing, congested cities—placed Christmas trees in their parlors and enthusiastically embraced the nostalgia evoked in New Yorker Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

  Several years after the Panic of 1837, New York was more prosperous than ever. Shoppers thronged the chilly streets, peering into display cases at A. T. Stewart’s white marble department store, which were stacked full of bonnets, hoopskirts, garters, vests, and beaver hats. As dusk fell, gas lamps flickered on in the windows of some homes, powered by the new mains that were starting to crisscross the city. New brownstone houses were replacing ones of brick.

  On launch day, December 8, 1846, hundreds gathered at the Smith & Dimon yards to see Cordelia Waterman christen the ship. A reporter from the New York Herald was on hand for the ceremony, and his coverage must have caused both Waterman’s and Griffiths’s hearts to swell with pride. “The Sea Witch is, for a vessel of her size, the prettiest vessel we have seen,” he wrote. “She is built of the best material, and, although presenting such a light appearance, is most strongly constructed.” Observers could only imagine how Sea Witch’s white pyramid of canvas, once unfurled, would dwarf her skimpy, sleek black hull.

  Just above Cordelia and the launch platform loomed a startling figurehead: a snarling, black Chinese dragon—“the symbol of the Chinese empire.”27 The imagery may have been in response to the rival Houqua’s figurehead, a battle between commerce and conquest.

  Cordelia Waterman slammed the bottle of champagne against Sea Witch’s bow, the hull groaned, and the clipper slid into the East River.

  Two weeks later, on December 23, Sea Witch sailed from New York. Like most ships of her era, she had no sea trials. Once finished, she was quickly loaded with cargo and dispatched for China. It was to be Cordelia’s first and last voyage on one of her husband’s vessels. She likely was seasick, a miserable affliction most new passengers and crew members battled the first few days out until they got their sea legs. Whenever she left the privacy of her stateroom, she found herself surrounded by men covered in tattoos, missing fingers and teeth, and speaking in a sailor’s dialect no well-brought-up woman from Bridgeport could understand. Perhaps she saw personality traits in her husband that she never imagined while he was on shore.

  Waterman piled on the canvas and drove Sea Witch southward through the bleak, wintry Atlantic toward Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she arrived after a twenty-five-day trip. After loading cargo and additional provisions at Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Sea Witch ran her easting down in the “Roaring Forties” (so-named because of the strong westerly winds between 40 degrees and 50 degrees south latitude) before heading northward into the tropical climes and light breezes of the Indian Ocean. Seventy-nine days after leaving South America, Waterman dropped anchor in the British port of Hong Kong.

  Unlike her finicky predecessor Rainbow, Sea Witch behaved magnificently under Waterman’s confident care. After picking up the usual cargo of tea, porcelain, and silks for Howland & Aspinwall, the captain tried to break his old seventy-eight-day record back home to New York. He missed by four days, arriving in port on July 25, 1847, but he surpassed other previous marks thought to be impossible to exceed. Sea Witch averaged 264 miles a day for ten days straight against the howling monsoon wind and rain; on her best sailing day, she traveled 302 nautical miles.28 “Remarkably quick sailing!” the Herald declared breathlessly when Waterman departed for China again, this time leaving Cordelia behind.29

  Waterman ultimately broke his old Canton-to-New York record in March 1849, when Sea Witch made the trip in an astonishing seventy-four days, with a best ten-day average of 11.10 knots.30 Pleased with his creation, and no doubt feeling redeemed after Rainbow’s mixed performance, Griffiths would one day write proudly of his ship: “It will be entirely proper to add, that the model of the Sea Witch had more influence upon the subsequent configuration of fast vessels, than any other ship ever built in the United States.”31

  His boss probably agreed, but William Aspinwall had other irons in the fire. In addition to his clipper ships Rainbow and Sea Witch, he would order two steamers for his new Pacific Mail Steamship Company—the SS California and the SS Panama—to make the coastal run between the Isthmus of Panama and ports in the Alta California and Oregon territories. Exciting reports were filtering into East Coast cities about the discovery of gold.

  Aspinwall had lobbied hard for a congressional subsidy to carry the mail to the West Coast, and it was this contract that made the steamship run a financially viable proposition. This venture would ultimately pay off in spades.32

  *

  I. According to drawings on page 282 of Howard L. Chapelle’s The History of American Sailing Ships (published by W. W. Norton, 1935), Rainbow had a traditional packet ship beakhead bow, with the accompanying latticework under the bowsprit. Contemporary paintings of Sea Witch eliminate this feature, showing instead a stem shaped in a concave arch above the waterline.

  II. Ropes used to hoist flags, yards, and sails.

  CHAPTER 8

  MEMNON: DELANO’S CALIFORNIA BET

  My ship is sound, and wind and tempest proof.

  Storm and adverse wind, in league,

  Keep me away from the shore;

  How long? How should I know it still,

  When count I keep not any more?

&n
bsp; I cannot tell the scenes I saw,

  Nor name the ports I sought to reach;

  The only scene I long to see,

  I cannot find—my native beach!

  And now, my friend, come take me home,

  Give me shelter and give me rest.

  My ship is freighted with treasures rare,

  Choose thou the rarest, take the best—

  Thy humble roof, oh, let me share!

  —RICHARD WAGNER, The Flying Dutchman, act 1, scene 3 (1843)1

  For the rich, speed was becoming an addictive spectacle. When not seated at their desks or at home with their families, a growing number of New York’s wealthiest men could be found speeding up and down city avenues in two-wheeled carts known as sulkies, pulled by a pair of fast-strutting horses. In the whitewashed taverns that lined Bloomingdale Road (later an extension of Broadway), the city’s bankers, merchants, shipowners, and newspaper barons would challenge one another and place bets over jugs of pale brandy. “It would seem as if all New York had suddenly become owners of fast horses and were all out on Broadway on a grand trotting spree,” noted the New York Herald of one such racing day.

  Those with the time and money to maintain a stable and race in the afternoon would happily pay upward of $30,000 for a pair of winning horses. And few sulky drivers cut a more imposing figure than Cornelius Vanderbilt—the self-made steamship millionaire who drove his cart with a big cigar clenched between his teeth.

  Crowds would gather along the course and cheer as he and other moguls sailed past at close to thirty miles per hour, their cravats whipping in the breeze, wire wheels whirling, horse hoofs pounding on the brown dirt. At the end of a race, they may have sung a catchy new minstrel tune by Stephen Foster:

  Camptown ladies sing this song,

  Doo-da, Doo-da

  The Camptown racetrack’s five miles long

  Oh, doo-da day

  Goin’ to run all night

  Goin’ to run all day

  I bet my money on a bob-tailed nag

  Somebody bet on the bay.

  Money changed hands, toasts were drunk, and plans were made for rematches. At the end of an afternoon of racing, the horse owners would go back to their staid townhouses and dress for dinner with their families, “thoroughly ventilated and in good condition for a comfortable supper and a sound sleep.”2

  But the China trade men were giving New Yorkers something else to bet on: a race of wood and canvas spurred on not by pockets full of tin but pockets full of gold.

  *

  Abbot Low, not to be outdone by Aspinwall’s 1846 Sea Witch, started construction in 1847 of a new masterpiece, an improved sister ship for Houqua, named after one of the American godfathers of the opium trade: Samuel Russell. Warren Delano was probably the man who suggested the name. In an undated letter, he wrote to Low: “If you built a ship, or buy her on the stocks, you may call her either the Cushing or the Samuel Russell, the latter jingles best to my ear.”3 Like Houqua, Samuel Russell was the product of Captain Nat’s hand, boasting a similarly flat bottom and sharp ends—only this time she was somewhat larger than Low’s graceful first clipper. For the comfort of her captain and passengers, as well as a bit of uncharacteristic whimsy, Palmer added a set of square gallery windows on her stern, a feature borrowed from the old British East India ships, although without their gilded decoration.

  No doubt egged on by his old Canton friend, Warren Delano finally commissioned his own clipper ship the following year. Named Memnon, she would be the last clipper ship designed by the eccentric John Willis Griffiths. Perhaps Delano wanted to capture a whiff of the Sea Witch’s glory by trying an extreme design on the North Atlantic run, putting him in direct competition with Grinnell, Minturn & Company and other transatlantic packet lines. As it turned out, Memnon was a herald of things to come. Although built for the China trade, she would be the first ship to set a record in a new speed competition, one far more dangerous than the run to China. At 170 feet long, 36 feet wide, and 1,000 tons, Memnon was substantially larger than her predecessors, including Abbot Low’s Samuel Russell. Griffiths appeared to have ignored the mounting evidence that Palmer’s flat-floor concept produced a steady yet fast design—Memnon was a slightly larger version of Sea Witch, except that her sails were rigged as a barque with a fore-and-aft sail on the aftermost (rearmost) mast and square sails on the others. Delano named Memnon after the mythical ancient warrior king of Ethiopia who journeyed from afar to defend the city of Troy, and to whom the god Zeus granted immortality after Achilles stabbed him through the heart. Why Delano named his ship after a mythic African hero is a mystery, but according to one source, a figurehead depicting the monarch adorned the ship’s sharp bow.4

  On July 30, 1848, Memnon set sail from New York bound for Liverpool. The captain, Oliver Eldridge, a native of Cape Cod who “came from a hardy race of mariners,” immediately expressed his distaste for the new ship: she was no Sea Witch.5 On her first week out, the ship averaged a pitiful seventy-seven miles a day eastbound. Finally, after two weeks, she picked up speed. Captain Eldridge wrote: “I am now convinced this ship can sail.” Still, compared with the new Cunard paddlewheel steamers that could cross the Atlantic in fourteen days, she made a mediocre first run—taking twenty-one days for the eastern crossing, and twenty-three days and seventeen hours to come home, “with much bad weather and much reefing.”6

  There is no record of what Griffiths thought about Memnon’s performance on the transatlantic run. In any case, the naval architect was already distracted by a new dream. Fueled perhaps by his newfound celebrity, he had decided he could make a living as a naval writer and theorist, giving lectures and publishing his shipbuilding magnum opus, The ShipBuilder’s Manual and Nautical Referee. He also launched a serial publication entitled the Monthly Nautical Magazine and Quarterly Review. Its official mission was “cultivating marine architecture in the United States.” Its unofficial one was to burnish Griffiths’s reputation as the nation’s foremost marine designer; the man who “invented” the clipper ship type and sold it to a disbelieving public.7

  Ultimately, Memnon proved that the clipper type was not suited to the conditions of the North Atlantic passage. (Only one other, the 1851 Staffordshire, would be built specifically for the transatlantic run.) The vessels’ slim lines and light construction made them ideal for ghosting along in light winds, and they sailed very well when loaded with crates of tea. But they simply did not have the cargo capacity to do battle economically with the more heavily built packet ships, nor could they guarantee the winds would keep them to a fixed schedule. With the recent advent of steamships, well-heeled passengers were now demanding to arrive as well as depart on time.

  What Delano thought about Memnon’s initial performance is unknown, but he took a gamble by putting her on a new run. She might not have been able to compete with the big packets for freight or with the Cunard steamers for passengers, but perhaps she was strong enough to beat the gales of Cape Horn, bound for the Golden Gate.

  *

  Shortly before Delano’s Memnon set sail for California in 1849, Captain Charles Low brought Houqua into New York after a ninety-seven-day passage from China. It was the twenty-four-year-old’s first command. After proving himself as ship’s boy and third officer, Low was told by Captain Nat that “I was just as capable of being master as I should be two years hence.”8 The young man was promptly promoted.

  As Houqua came into view to the spectators on the Battery’s shoreline promenade, it was clear to everyone watching that something was amiss with the ship. Her longboats were the wrong size, and the masts looked jury-rigged. Low must have trembled as he watched the bearish figure of Captain Palmer stride along the wharf to inspect the ship. The young captain had a report to make to his mentor about his ship’s close brush with catastrophe some months before.

  Sometime after passing the Cape of Good Hope, on January 15, 1848, Houqua was running along at night, all sails set, the light of a full moon shimmering down
on the inky Indian Ocean. At twelve midnight, Captain Low felt a sudden chill in the air and went down below to look at the barometer. It was dropping rapidly. Returning to the quarterdeck, he ordered the watch to strike all the port studden sails,I as well as the jibs and spanker.II The ship continued along at full speed, the wind whistling through the remaining sails. Within a few hours, Low found he had no choice but to order his men aloft to take in all of the sails except for the main topsail and foresail; these he reefed, or drew in partially.

  The ship kept moving as the waves grew higher, crashing over the bulwarksIII and swirling around the deck. The wind blew out the remaining sails, yanked the furled ones from their gaskets, and carried them out into the sea. The barometer had plummeted to 27.50, indicating the onset of full storm conditions. “The sky was covered with dense masses of black, smoky clouds filled with thunder and lightning,” Low recalled, “and all the mast-heads and yardarms had composants, or balls of electricity, resting upon them, as low down as the lower yards.” Low ordered the helmsman to turn the ship into the wind, heaving her to and bringing her to a near stop.

  There was a brief lull in the ocean’s fury, and the crew cut away the damaged rigging. But then something ominous appeared on the horizon: a solid wall of water, perhaps thirty feet high, bearing down on the clipper ship like an avalanche. Those on deck ducked under the bulwarks and held on to anything they could. At twenty-three, Captain Low was younger than most of the crew, yet he couldn’t show his fear. “It is impossible to describe the roaring, howling, and shrieking of the wind,” he said later. “Never did I imagine it. The stoutest and firmest man in the ship could not stand before any one of the ports, the spoondrift [spray] being driven through them with a force of a shot from a cannon.”9