Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  By building longer ships than the competition, McKay acted on a scientific principle that shipbuilders had known for more than a century: extending a ship’s waterline length increases its maximum top speed. By 1850, soaring California freight rates had made the construction of such large, costly ships financially possible, and McKay decided to build wooden merchant ships longer—and stronger—than had ever been constructed before, even for the tea trade.21 He also made a few adjustments to basic clipper ship design.

  The first tweak was to a section of the bow known as the forefoot, or the place where the stem meets the keel. Rather than the typical curved forefoot found on clippers, McKay gave his ships a more pronounced rounded (or “arched”) one, reducing water resistance against the already sleek hull shape. The second tweak was to give the prowI an even greater forward rake than earlier ships, further diminishing the impact of the sea against the hull at high speed. The third was giving the sternpost—upon which the rudder was hung—a slight rake aft, giving the stern more buoyancy as the ship surged ahead while under a full press of sail.22 The more pronounced rake also reduced the wetted surface area of the vessel, cutting down on drag.

  The launching of Stag Hound on December 7, 1850, was a major celebration for the people of Boston, just as the launching of Surprise had been a few months earlier. Only this time McKay proved to be an even greater master of publicity than his neighbor Samuel Hall. The handsome, charismatic McKay reveled in the attention as he showed the reporters around the 226-foot-long Stag Hound resting on the stocks. The newsmen looked up in awe at the three masts, which when rigged with a full set of sails would carry 9,500 square yards of canvas—enough, it was hoped, to give her massive bulk sufficient headway in light winds and unbelievable power in a breeze.23

  The morning of the launch, McKay’s workers carefully greased the gently tilted waysII with tallow, so that the huge hull would slide smoothly into Boston Harbor. Snow drifted against the clapboard houses of East Boston, clumps of pack ice pushed onto the shoreline, and howling winds thrummed the standing rigging on Stag Hound’s partially erected masts. Even so, anywhere from ten thousand to fifteen thousand bundled-up spectators gathered around the ship, waiting eagerly for the signal to launch.

  By noon, the tallow along the launching ways was starting to freeze, and McKay ordered a gang of workers to pour boiling whale oil onto the tracks. When the last of the supports were knocked away, Stag Hound suddenly groaned and raced stern first toward the water.

  The startled foreman in charge of the christening shouted, “Stag Hound, you’re [sic] name’s Stag Hound!” He leaned over the platform railing and smashed a bottle of Medford rum just beneath the panting-dog figurehead as his hat tumbled onto the frozen mudflats below.24

  McKay’s wooing of the press had worked. Duncan McLean, a reporter from the Boston Atlas, was taken not only with the ship (“an original, and to our eye … perfection in her proportions”) but also with the personality of her charming designer. “Mr. D. McKay, of East Boston,” he rhapsodized, “designed, modeled, draughted, and built her; he also draughted her spars, and every other scientific detail about her. She is, therefore, his own production—as much as any ship can be the production of any single mind—and upon him alone, as before remarked, rests the responsibility of her success—always assuming that she will be properly managed at sea.”25

  Not everyone was so confident about Stag Hound’s prospects, however. A prominent Boston marine underwriter, looking at the extremely rakish vessel, told her captain, Josiah Richardson, “I should think you would be somewhat nervous in going so long a voyage in so sharp a ship, so heavily sparred.”

  “No, Mr. Jones,” Captain Richardson snapped back. “I would not go in the ship at all if I thought for a moment she would be my coffin.”26

  Some Boston shipowners questioned McKay’s “bigger is better” mentality. Speed and power were one thing, but what about operational costs? The bigger the ship and the greater the rig, the more expensive she was to crew up and operate. William Fletcher Weld, perhaps Boston’s richest and most powerful shipping man, ordered several clippers of his own for his Black Horse Line, but they were of a more conservative cut than McKay’s. Weld dismissed extreme California clippers as a flash in the pan, and a bad investment in the long run.27

  After a short delivery tow to New York, Stag Hound sailed for San Francisco on February 1, 1851, with a hold full of over $70,000 of goods. Six days out, as the oversparred clipper surged through the Atlantic at nearly seventeen knots, Captain Richardson and those of the forty-six crew on watch heard a groaning sound aloft, followed by the sound of splintering timber. The main topmast—the highest third of the main mast—snapped off and careened into the ocean with a thunderous splash. As it fell, it also carried away the tops of the other two masts, fore and mizzen. Richardson barked for the men to climb aloft and hack away the loose rigging. Yet they could not heave to.III A gale struck, and the crippled ship continued to fly before the wind. Like Charles Low on Houqua a few years earlier, Richardson supervised rudimentary repairs to the ship using the spare spars. After fighting around Cape Horn, Stag Hound limped into Valparaiso, Chile.

  Despite the accident, Richardson wrote to Sampson & Tappan from Valparaiso, “Your ship, Stag Hound, is at anchor in this harbor after a passage of 66 days, which, I believe, is the shortest but one ever made, and had it not been for the accident of losing some of our spars, I do not doubt it would have been the shortest … We lost at least 800 miles by the accident.” He then added emphatically, “The ship has yet to be built to beat the Stag Hound.”28

  Donald McKay had ushered in the era of the so-called extreme clippers, enormous vessels with sharp lines and massive spreads of canvas. The age of the small, trim tea clipper was over.

  *

  By the early 1850s, rapid technological innovation had begun to affect the shipping business. Many of those who had made their fortunes in the China trade were taking themselves away from the world of adventure on the seas and turning toward the new world of railroads, mining, and communication. Even as he was building more clipper ships, Abbot Low was in talks with financier Cyrus Field about laying the first transatlantic cable, which would allow near-instant messaging of news and capital between the Old and New Worlds. Warren Delano’s disgruntled brother Franklin was no longer involved with the Grinnell, Minturn & Company’s partnership, satisfied to live off his wife’s immense Astor fortune after her grandfather John Jacob’s death. The Astor patriarch had died in 1848, leaving $20 million to his descendants.

  His brother Warren Delano had also begun to retreat from the rigors of the shipping business. Although there is no surviving record of official day-to-day involvement, Delano was still heavily invested in the Low brothers’ shipping company. Yet he deployed most of his hard-won fortune in new enterprises, specifically coal mines, copper mines, and railroads. Rather than accumulating new wealth in secretive adventures abroad, Warren now sought to invest his capital at home, using what he earned to maintain his family as comfortably and worry free as possible.

  Indeed, the international oceanic commerce that created so much wealth since 1800 was now a waning sector of the American economy. A few years after McKay opened his shipyard, President Polk’s secretary of the Treasury, R. J. Walker, noticed an ominous trend for deep-sea shipping: out of the country’s estimated $3 billion gross domestic product, only $150 million (a mere 5 percent) was being shipped abroad, and that number was declining. In the analysis of maritime historians Alex Roland, W. Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar: “Beginning in 1820, America traded with itself more than it traded with the rest of the world. In 1830 world trade again exceeded domestic, but thereafter, with the two exceptions of the world wars of the twentieth century, the United States traded with itself more than others.”29 The California boom only accelerated this trend.

  New York’s and Boston’s merchant elite sensed this transformation as well. Tea and spices were all well and good, but the growing
agricultural and natural resources of the newly won western territories of Texas, California, and Oregon were even more appetizing. The California boom had provided a life-saving boost to Boston builders; with freight rates reaching $40 a ton, local merchants with long experience in the coastal, Caribbean, and South American trades threw their hats into the ring. The competition grew intense. John Murray Forbes’s daughter Sarah remembered her father’s battles with “box fever,” after which he was laid up for days at his Naushon Island retreat with leeches on his head. “My mind was running on small boxes to fill up the chinks under the ship’s decks,” Forbes wrote later.30

  The roster of clipper-type ships departing for California in 1850 was impressive. Boston-built ships included the Forbes brothers’ little barque-rigged Race Horse, Low’s Surprise, and Sampson & Tappan’s Stag Hound. New York–built ships included Aspinwall’s Sea Witch, Low’s Samuel Russell and Houqua, Smith & Dimon’s Mandarin, Bucklin & Crane’s Celestial, and Delano’s Memnon. According to Captain Arthur Clark, Boston’s shipping community gathered in clubs, taverns, and hotels and wagered “large sums of money on the result, the four older ships, especially the Sea Witch, having established high reputations for speed.”31

  Aspinwall’s Sea Witch handily beat both the Forbes brothers’ Race Horse and the Lows’ Samuel Russell by 12 days. But the Bostonians were redeemed early in 1851 when Surprise smashed Sea Witch’s record by arriving in San Francisco in a mere 96 days. Along with winning the record passage, Surprise sold her 1,800 tons of cargo for $200,000 on the San Francisco market.32

  One by one, the slower ships came through the Golden Gate, freshly painted and polished by their crews so that they would look sharp for their grand entrances: Memnon in 123 days, Celestial in 104 days, Race Horse in 109 days, and then, finally Mandarin at 126 days.33

  Following Surprise’s triumphant, record-breaking 96-day romp around Cape Horn, orders poured into Boston shipyards—both Samuel Hall’s and Donald McKay’s, only a stone’s throw away from each other.34 Even if Warren Delano might have lost money wagering on Memnon’s second voyage around the Horn, he could take comfort in the fact that he had been the first merchant to see the potential of the clipper ship in the California trade.

  Only two years earlier, a passage of 180 days from New York to California via Cape Horn was considered respectable. By 1851, 100 days was the new standard for a fast run to San Francisco.

  *

  I. The above-water portion of a ship’s bow.

  II. The ramp upon which a ship is built.

  III. Coming to a stop by turning into the wind and leaving the headsail backed.

  CHAPTER 10

  GRINNELL GRABS THE FLYING CLOUD

  Build me straight, O worthy Master!

  Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,

  That shall laugh at all disaster,

  And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!

  The merchant’s word

  Delighted the Master heard;

  For his heart was in his work, and the heart

  Giveth grace unto every Art.

  —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “The Building of the Ship,” 18491

  When New York shipping magnate Moses Grinnell put a $90,000 offer on Donald McKay’s second clipper ship in 1851, he was not making a blind bet. He was very familiar with McKay’s work and trusted that the Boston builder could build him a ship that could beat his rival Abbot Low. Grinnell was forty-eight years old in 1851 and one of New York’s most successful shipping merchants. The South Street house of Grinnell, Minturn & Company operated a fleet of fourteen ships and among packet owners long enjoyed a reputation as the outstanding firm.2 Quipped one observer, “Everything that gets into their nets is fish.”3

  Like so many leaders of New York’s shipping community, Grinnell was a New England transplant, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and heir to one of the nation’s greatest whaling fortunes. It was a fortune won by hard Yankee toil. Moses’s father, Cornelius, had begun life as a hatter’s apprentice in New Bedford. He went to sea in 1791 as the first mate aboard the Rebecca, the first American whaling vessel to round treacherous Cape Horn and hunt for prey in the Pacific Ocean. In 1815 old Cornelius quit the sea and started a shipping venture in New York with his friend, a fellow former whaling captain with the appropriately salty name of Preserved Fish. (Preserved was a relatively common New England name at the time, signifying being “preserved from sin.”) Preserved ran the New York branch of Fish & Grinnell at 87 South Street, while Cornelius minded the New Bedford whaling operation. The firm flourished.4

  If son Moses learned from his father’s business savvy, he also learned from his mother’s family ethos. A few years after the end of the Revolutionary War, Cornelius had married Sylvia, the sister of Cornelius Howland, a close friend and privateering partner.5 Sylvia brought Cornelius wealth—and something more. The Howlands, from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, were staunch members of the Society of Friends. (They were also kin of Sea Witch owner William Henry Aspinwall.) The Quakers were a community that had drawn together in adversity, having been persecuted violently by the Puritan establishment in New England and, before that, the authorities in England. Their sin? Refusing to join the established church or recognize the supremacy of clergy—both acts seen as dangerously destabilizing to John Winthrop, founder of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the theocratic “City upon a Hill.”

  Through Sylvia Howland, the Grinnell family would enter the world of New England Quakers. Although Cornelius never became a full member of the Society of Friends, he nonetheless occupied a “rising seat” in his wife’s meeting, and his nine children—Moses included—would become part of New England’s tightknit Quaker network. The antiwar Christian sect’s wealth was buoyed by a rising tide of whale oil and its ties were cemented by kinship. Cornelius never left the Unitarian Church, but perhaps to appease his wife’s family, he dressed like a wealthy “plain” Quaker, wearing finely made but dull-hued broadcloth, knee breeches, and highly polished black shoes—a “quaint but tasteful costume.”6 (In due course, such Quaker frugality would find its most extreme manifestation in Cornelius’s grandniece Hetty Green, a millionaire Wall Street speculator and legendary miser called the “Witch of Wall Street.”)

  Yet despite its stolid, prosperous façade, the New Bedford Quaker community was becoming a victim of its own financial success. As families like the Howlands grew wealthier, they became increasingly tempted by the worldly goods that their affluence afforded them but their religion forbade on principle: dancing lessons, luxurious carriages, square pianos, and brightly colored clothing. For a society that expelled members for owning keyboard instruments, keeping the flock on the straight and narrow path proved to be a real challenge. When the Grinnells and others moved to the booming, cosmopolitan city of New York, Gotham’s all-too-worldly pleasures presented further temptations.

  Cornelius’s son Moses would grow up to be a New York Unitarian, yet he kept a lifelong spirit of Quaker community and responsibility. Wrote one admiring contemporary, “His liberality and enthusiasm in all good works, in all generous enterprises, and in all patriotic movements, inspired the sympathy and cooperation of others. There was irresistible magnetism in his voice and manner.”7

  Born in 1803, Moses Grinnell had not had to start off life the hard way by going to sea to slaughter and render whales in the Pacific Ocean. Following graduation from the Friends Academy in New Bedford, young Moses began his business career not in his father’s firm in New York but in the countinghouse of his father’s business associate William Rotch, one of the richest whaling magnates in town. His annual salary was a meager $100. During his teenage apprenticeship, Moses formed a close friendship with a young man named Joseph Anthony, who worked with him in the Rotch firm. At the same time, he became engaged to Susan Russell, the headstrong heiress to another New Bedford whaling fortune and the sister of Anthony’s wife.

  Like Delano, Moses soon left home as a shipowner’s representative, but not to China. R
ather, he sailed from New Bedford to Rio de Janeiro and then to Trieste, Italy, where he sold his cargo of coffee at a handsome profit. His friend Joseph Anthony apparently took his absence hard: “For the first time in my life,” he wrote, “a tear moistened my eye on parting with a friend. For nearly five years, he has been my companion in the counting room and endeared himself to me so much that I can truly say that I felt for him all a brother’s love.”8 Such grief was understandable, for there was certainly a chance Moses would not come home.

  For the next year, Anthony kept a diary addressed to Moses, which apprised him of the business and social goings-on in New Bedford. At a time when letter delivery to friends and family abroad was sporadic at best and took months or even years, keeping a diary to be presented to the traveler upon his or her return home was a genuine gift. Even the most trivial news was treasured. “A cold day—very slippery—spent the evening at Cora’s. Had some oysters and then took a sleigh ride around town,” he wrote on January 6, 1823. Anthony also kept Moses informed about business: “Sunday—a pleasant day. The Persia commenced discharging her cargo, which made some stir being the first day of the week. Many considered it wicked.”9

  He also kept Moses in the loop about a scandal entangling his fiancée at Meeting. Apparently, Susan and her sister Mary were refusing to live the simple life. “The overseers of the meeting,” Anthony wrote, “entered a regular complaint in the preparative meeting this day against Mary and Susan for not conforming to the Discipline in the all-important points of Dress, Address [possibly this refers to the polite use of “thee” and “thou”], attending disorderly marriages (viz. the marriage of Jere’h Winslow and mine), and frequenting places of public amusement. The girls have got their feelings a good deal excited, and will probably resign their membership.”10 Despite the complaint against her, Moses married Susan upon his return to New Bedford in 1824. Clearly, Joseph Anthony would not have cared—his own wedding was one of the “disorderly” ones that Susan attended. Yet Moses soon found himself out of a job at Rotch’s. Was it because his wife would not conform to the Society of Friends’s standards?