Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  The devil-may-care swagger that sailors adopted was a survival mechanism, like laughing in the face of death. No one knew who might be next.

  *

  For Delano and other Russell men, California gold was a godsend. With little gold specie of her own, the United States relied heavily on the credit-backed bills of exchange provided by European institutions such as Baring Brothers and Rothschild’s. After the collapse of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836, banknotes issued by state and local banks, usually backed by federal and state bonds, were dubious currency at best, backed more by a wing and a prayer than by specie.

  The men of Russell & Company had an advantage: valuable access to the solid capital of London’s Barings Brothers. British opium traders such as William Jardine and James Mattheson were more than happy to put in a good word for their American friends from Canton. The time spent in the Factories—rowing in the Canton Regatta, playing whist at the Union Club, working long hours at the countinghouse table, surviving Commissioner Lin’s siege—was intense. Even Anglo-American rivalries could not tear these bonds. No outsider, no matter how talented or rich, could truly understand what bound these men together.

  Still, the era’s paper money was playing with fire. Many, such as Robert Forbes, had been burned in the past by currency subject to sudden devaluation, and knew others who had been ruined. Of course, a well-connected but suddenly impecunious former China trader like Forbes could simply go back to Canton and bring home another competence (assuming he made it there and back). But for men such as Forbes and Delano, the California trade offered another kind of opportunity: East Coast merchants could sell manufactured goods to western gold diggers for hard currency rather than for dubious paper notes. Soon shipments of gold bars and coins back east would skyrocket: from $4.9 million in 1849, to $27.7 million in 1850, and to $42.6 million in 1851.26

  During a time in American history marked by extreme financial instability, the sudden infusion of California gold into the US economy promised two things. First, that Americans would be liberated from European banks, finally having their own source of stable, gold-backed currency. The second was that all Americans, regardless of their birth or circumstances, could go to California and earn a “competence” of their own. They did not have to be a Perkins, a Russell, or a Forbes to go to San Francisco and strike it rich. Nor did one need access to a haughty European bank to obtain a letter of credit. All one needed, theoretically, was a bag of gold dust. It was the classic risk-and-reward proposition, and Americans happily followed the prospect of money, even if it meant risking life and limb to make it to California to pan for gold, open a shop, or scrounge around in the dirt for golden flecks.

  *

  On July 28, 1849, the inhabitants of the sprawling shantytown of San Francisco saw a spectacular white-winged angel sail through the Golden Gate strait: it was Warren Delano’s clipper ship Memnon, under Captain Gordon, completing her record-breaking 15,000-mile trip around Cape Horn in 123 sailing days. By dint of her sharp design and Captain Gordon’s hard driving, Memnon had slashed the typical voyage around the tip of South America by almost 80 days and soundly beaten the six-month average it took a covered wagon train to trundle overland from Independence, Missouri to California. Her captain had followed Maury’s advice by sailing eastward, almost entirely across the Atlantic, before turning back toward Brazil’s Cape St. Roque—thus avoiding the calms of the Caribbean that he would have encountered had he followed a more southerly route.

  When she tied up at her wharf, Memnon was undoubtedly the most beautiful structure in this boisterous, dirty city. Her gleaming woodwork and jet-black hull contrasted sharply with the rest of the city’s buildings, a hastily thrown together mass of boardinghouses, saloons, and casinos. Captain Gordon also had to pick his way through a maze of creaking, barnacle-ridden hulks that sat abandoned in the harbor; ghost ships left to rot when their crews had abandoned the sea for the gold fields. Memnon would not meet that fate: she was too new and valuable to be left behind.

  Yet the voyage could have been much quicker. Soon after sailing south of the equator, Memnon’s greenhorn crew had had enough of Captain Gordon. His hard driving was terrifying. Memnon reeled off the miles, but only by keeping an excess of sail in gale force winds. To those who had never been to sea before, the prospect of climbing to the top of Memnon’s swaying masts to send down the royalsV in an Atlantic gale was too much for them to handle. Gordon and his officers stopped the mutiny with fists and belaying pins,VI and put into Montevideo, Uruguay, for a few days to rid the ship of the troublemakers and resupply the stores.

  It would be another several months before a rickety wooden tower would be erected atop San Francisco’s Loma Alta hill. The two semaphore wings atop this tower would signal to the citizenry what type of ship was coming into port: frigate, ship, sloop-of-war, barque, or side-wheel steamer. After seeing the signal, the merchants would send their representatives scrambling to the pier to find out what ship had arrived and what cargo she was carrying.27 Eventually Loma Alta would have a new name: Telegraph Hill.

  Delano’s clipper ship Memnon was a sight to behold—and impressively swift—but she arrived in San Francisco on the heels of another intriguing new ship: the steamship SS California. In building her, William Henry Aspinwall, the owner of Sea Witch, had proved prescient again. Using a congressional mail subsidy of $200,000 for regular passenger and mail service between New York, Oregon, and the newly conquered California territory, he formed a steamship subsidiary of Howland & Aspinwall called the Panama Mail Steamship Company. The arrival of these two revolutionary vessels in San Francisco set a paradigm for the next decade. Subsidized steamships such as California were ideal for transporting passengers and mail to and from California on a regular schedule, while unsubsidized clipper ships like Memnon were perfectly suited for carrying bulk cargo at high speed around Cape Horn without having to either refuel or stop in port to unload and reload at the isthmus. Both types of vessels would earn their owners vast amounts of money in the years to come. Yet the steamers had one more advantage: with their ironclad strong rooms, they would carry California’s gold bars back to New York and other financial centers: often as much as $1 million per trip. At 5 percent freight commission, this meant big profits.

  SS California would soon be joined by sister ships SS Oregon and SS Panama. Operating with Congress’s generous support, Aspinwall’s Pacific Mail Line became the most reliable means of transport for passengers who could afford $300 for the comforts of cabin class—which included fresh horsehair mattresses and a well-stocked dining saloon—or $50 for the dreariness of salted pork and rude bunks in steerage. Whatever they paid, Aspinwall’s steamship passengers still had to cross the Panama Isthmus to get to the next port of departure. The punishing trip through the mosquito-infested jungles by horse or mule proved fatal for many, with yellow fever killing the most. A canal would not be built across the isthmus for another six decades.

  Other steamship operators were quick to invest in lower-risk alternatives. Cornelius Vanderbilt, flush with cash from his East Coast steamships, started a line that transported passengers and freight across Central America by floating them down the Chagres River. And Aspinwall himself began planning the first transcontinental railroad in the Americas: a fifty-five-mile-long line spanning the Panama Isthmus that would allow his steamships to make regularly scheduled arrivals and departures. The Panama Railroad would be the crown jewel of his transportation empire.

  In the meantime, Warren Delano’s clipper business continued to succeed, despite competition from steam. Warren Delano Sr., the old sea captain, who had survived smuggling adventures and capture by the British, could not have been prouder of his son’s achievements. “My Dear Son,” began a letter sent from his Fairhaven home, “the beautiful Memnon has established her reputation.”28

  The Delanos were now global, riding the clipper ships all the way around the world. The exact profit Delano made from Memnon’s voyage has been los
t to history, but it was certainly great enough to encourage others, including his own old business partner Abbot Low, to redeploy their clippers into the California trade. Within months, the lessons learned with these early China clippers would lead to the construction of a new type of vessel: the majestic “California” clipper. Bigger, faster, and stronger than their predecessors, they could circumnavigate the world in record time, able to earn more than $100,000 in a single successful voyage. For a brief period, the California clipper would be the envy of the seagoing world.

  The benefits of Delano’s successful investments were now there for all to see in New York. Warren and Catherine shed their Yankee reticence and threw themselves into New York’s social whirl, hosting elegant parties at their Lafayette Place townhouse, its columned front room ablaze with flickering gaslight as couples danced to the strains of a small orchestra. To their young children, they were the picture of aristocratic grace and composure when they went out on one chilly evening, with Catherine wearing a silk dress under a flounced coat as she held Warren’s arm.29

  And a year after Memnon’s San Francisco voyage, Delano chose the site of his Hudson River country retreat.

  *

  Abbot Low may have been caught a bit off guard by his friend Delano’s Memnon. But while he sent his brother Charlie off to California as captain of the Samuel Russell in Memnon’s wake, Low also started building a new clipper ship that could earn spectacular profits in a route that, until recently, had been legally impossible.

  The year 1849 marked not only the start of the high-stakes California race but also the moment when America brought England to her knees in the China trade. Under pressure from British merchants demanding faster freight service, Parliament finally repealed the ancient Navigation Acts, which since the days of Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century Puritan Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of Great Britain, had prevented foreign vessels carrying goods from Asia from trading in British ports. Originally meant to weaken the maritime supremacy of the Dutch, who controlled the spice and pepper markets of Indonesia, the old law had also hampered American traders eager to compete against the British East India Company monopoly. The East India Company’s privileged position in the China trade had already collapsed in the 1830s, but the ships belonging to the British merchants who moved in to fill the massive hole were still slow compared with American vessels. Now the barrier to American competition was down.

  Abbot Low jumped at the chance to beat every British ship to market and make a killing by selling the freshest cargoes of tea. A. A. Low & Brother’s next clipper would not be named after a merchant but rather the trade that she was intended to dominate: Oriental. On September 14, 1849, Oriental set sail on her maiden voyage to Hong Kong under Captain Nat’s command, arriving in a leisurely 109 days. But on her return run, with a full load of tea, Palmer pushed the ship’s speed to the limit, arriving in New York only 81 days after departure, coming within just 7 days of beating the Faustian Captain Waterman’s record in Sea Witch. After repairs and refitting, Palmer turned over command of his ship to his younger brother, Theodore Palmer, and booked passage in one of the ship’s staterooms as a passenger. Although tired and happy to retire, the fifty-year-old master mariner could not bear to miss her next, history-making voyage: Oriental would be the first American clipper to deliver a cargo of tea from China to England.

  The two brothers fought throughout the voyage. Compared with the cool, contained Nat—who believed that a happy, well-fed crew made for a happy, well-run ship—Ted Palmer was an irascible master. He had spent years in the rough North Atlantic packet service, where crews had a reputation for being drunks, loafers, and criminals, though many were probably men who simply had not had a fair shot at making their way in the world. That didn’t matter: hard-to-handle or lazy sailors, Ted Palmer thought, should be lashed to the rigging and flogged. No excuses.

  Bickering aside, the combination of Nat’s design and Ted’s driving led to a stunning outcome. Oriental sailed from Hong Kong to London in just 97 days, a new record, and months ahead of all British ships that had left at the same time.

  On April 20, 1850, Captain Theodore Palmer nosed Oriental into London’s historic West India Docks. When Delano’s Memnon had sailed from New York to Liverpool the previous year, the British people had not paid her transatlantic passage much notice. Now, with government protections over the glamorous China trade lifted, Oriental’s arrival from Hong Kong represented foreign competition for all to see. For maximum effect, Ted Palmer had bedecked her with fluttering signal flags, and had her brightwork and brass polished to a radiant glow. On her mizzenmastVII flew a giant American flag, as well as the red-and-yellow Low house flag embossed with a large O.

  The ship’s early arrival meant her cargo of tea was the first of the season. It sold for $48,000, a sum equal to two-thirds of the cost of building the ship.30 Stevedores unloaded the sweet-smelling cargo, bound for the silver services of London’s wealthiest households, while crowds of the curious swarmed around the vessel. Compared with the stout, swell-sided British merchant ships on either side, there was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on the Oriental—she was lithe and sleek from stem to stern, and her raked white masts soared high above the quay. Rather than a ponderous figurehead, Oriental’s bow was adorned only with her name and a scrolled billethead, picked out in gold leaf.31 For Captain Nat and other American ship designers, lavish nautical ornaments not only added unnecessary weight to the ship but also were contrary to republican simplicity. And her stern had no square gallery windows—they were superfluous to the ship’s form and purpose, whatever palace-like comfort they provided officers and passengers. The purpose of the rounded counter stern was to provide extra lift in turbulent weather and compensate for her fine underwater lines.

  Officials from the British Admiralty, the government branch responsible for the Royal Navy, boarded the ship, chatting with both Palmer brothers as they stood proudly on her pine decks, scrubbed to an ivory hue by the crew. The public might have been amazed, but the editors of the London Times were indignant: “We must run a race with our gigantic and unshackled rival,” they wrote. “We must set our long-practiced skill, our steady industry, and our dogged determination against his youth, industry, and ardor.”32

  Oriental seemed a success. She was a success. Now Abbot Low needed to build a clipper strong enough to handle the fierce Cape Horn route from New York to California. It was becoming clear that the California trade was no passing fad, and he needed to make a few additions to his fleet to fully take advantage of this opportunity. Low had sent Houqua around Cape Horn once, with mediocre results; built to speed along in the light winds of the Indian Ocean, she was simply too small and finely built to handle the tumult of Dead Man’s Road. A new ship was needed.

  Unfortunately, Low could not look to Nat Palmer to build it. The New York–based captain, retired from the sea after his last Oriental captaincy, did hope to design one more ship. But New York shipyards were currently booked solid with a backlog of vessels being built for the Cape Horn passage. So, in 1850, Abbot took a chance and asked the yard of Samuel Hall in East Boston to design his new clipper. Low knew Hall’s yard well: a decade earlier, he had launched a quartet of its loftily sparred, fleet-footed little opium clippers. The designer was a young man named Samuel Hartt Pook. Now he set out to design Low’s new vessel: the Surprise. She would be the first of a great fleet of Boston-built clippers.

  The port of Boston was still smarting from the meteoric rise of New York. It had been decades since the extended Perkins family of Boston Brahmins first made its wealth in the China trade; many of the leading merchants had since ended up in New York, and the city’s East River shipyards had thrived. But the midcentury demand for clipper-type vessels gave Boston designers a new opportunity to show New York that they could compete in the lucrative trade.

  Pook admired Palmer’s flat-floor concept and adapted it to his design for Surprise, only this time giving her an even sharper bo
w than previous clippers. The result was the perfect California clipper: one that surpassed the ships that Griffiths had designed for Aspinwall and Delano in carrying capacity and also equaled—or perhaps even surpassed—them in speed. Surprise would be the biggest clipper in the Low fleet: 183 feet long, 38 feet wide, and of 1,262 tons.

  At the new ship’s launching on October 5, 1850, builder Samuel Hall had a surprise of his own for the thousands of people who had flocked to South Boston to watch. Up till then, sailing vessels were usually launched only partially rigged, without their topmasts and yards. Hall’s Surprise was launched ready to sail. Watching from a festive tent pitched on the waterfront, feasting on a lavish spread that included raw oysters and German hock wine, Hall’s special guests saw a ship that Boston could be proud of. Her skysail yards soared well over 150 feet above the deck. All the running rigging was in place. The ornamental carving on her bow glinted in the sun: an eagle’s head, symbolizing America. On her stern were the arms of Low’s New York City: a Dutch colonist and a Lenape Indian flanking a windmill, surmounted by yet another eagle.33 The unusual launch went off without a hitch, and Surprise glided into Boston Harbor, where she was towed to an outfitting pier for final preparations.

  The builder may have wanted to prove a point, but he had a practical reason as well. Low needed his ship as soon as possible, and rigging the ship before launch saved valuable time. Appreciating the quality of her construction, Abbot Low sent Hall a $2,500 bonus.34

  Since Captain Nat Palmer had retired from the sea, Abbot Low decided he needed a similarly special man to command Surprise: opium-clipper veteran Philip Dumaresq, who had also worked with Pook on the design. Surprise left New York in December, flying the red-and-yellow A. A. Low & Brother ensign and carrying nearly $200,000 worth of cargo. Ninety-six days and fifteen hours later, she bounded into San Francisco Bay. Captain Dumaresq had taken Lieutenant Maury’s advice and followed the Winds and Currents charts, avoiding the doldrums of the Tropic of Cancer by making a sharp “elbow turn” off the coast of Africa, back toward Brazil.35 The San Francisco record now belonged to the House of Low.