Besides, Donald McKay had no need to be in on his ships’ future profits. Train’s quick sale would soon prove to be his best business transaction.
*
I. This undated letter from Abbot Low to an unnamed sibling is cited by historian Helen Augur in her 1951 book Tall Ships to Cathay, a history of the Low family’s involvement in the China trade and recommended as a source by Charles Low descendant E. Holland Low. There are no footnotes or citations in this book, but considering Augur’s stature as a journalist in the 1950s, it is unlikely she made up this letter out of whole cloth.
CHAPTER 11
AT THE STARTING LINE
My sail-ships and steamships threading the archipelagoes,
My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind,
Commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work, races
reborn, refresh’d,
Lives, works resumed—the object I know not—but the old, the
Asiatic renew’d as it must be,
Commencing from this day surrounded by the world.
—WALT WHITMAN, “A Broadway Pageant” (1860)
New York was all about clippers in early 1851.
Winter gave way to spring, and the melting ice drifted down the Hudson River and out into the salt-laced waters of the Upper Bay. Cargo sloops from Albany, their big white mainsails stretched taut in the breeze, passed passenger steamers heading upriver. In genteel Washington Square, well-dressed couples strolled along the winding footpaths under arching, freshly green trees. The Merchants’ Exchange, a granite, Greek Revival fortress at 55 Wall Street, hummed with voices as the city’s men of affairs met each morning to set prices for wheat, copper, and coal flooding into the city from the nation’s heartland and for bales of cotton coming up from New Orleans. Among frequent attendees were clipper ship owners Warren Delano, Moses Grinnell, Abiel Abbot Low, and William Henry Aspinwall—who may have been professional rivals but behaved in public with complete civility. Mercantile, upper-class New York was a small, insular world, and members of this club had to act like gentlemen, above all else. Many of them were related to one another, in any case.
After a visit to the Exchange, the merchants would then go to their offices on South Street, where they would meet with shipbuilders to go over models for proposed clippers and with their clerks to review ledger books. They were eagerly awaiting the first shipments of tea from China and cash receipts from sales of dry goods in California. After winding down affairs at their offices around four o’clock, they would stroll home to dinner at their townhouses.
Yet the southern tip of Manhattan didn’t sleep when the rich men left. As dusk fell on South Street, sailors, shopkeepers, and other denizens of working-class New York streamed out of their places of work. They headed to the saloons and downed ale and whiskey, although many had been drinking already throughout the workday. Garishly made-up streetwalkers flounced down the sidewalks, and members of the nativist “Bowery Boys” and Irish Catholic “Dead Rabbits” gangs wolf whistled as these women passed by. In the tenements, German and Irish immigrant families huddled around cast-iron stoves, cooking dinners of cabbage and porridge.
And with the coming of spring, the clippers from China and California were sailing home. The merchants were ready to count their bounty, the shipbuilders eager to learn of the latest records; the professional sailors were waiting to sign up, while thugs readied themselves to ensnare those unlucky enough to be at the wrong saloon at the wrong time.
New clippers, too, were rising in the shipyards on the banks of the East River, their skeletal hulls looming over the city streets. Refinements of earlier designs, they had longer hulls, sharper bows, and higher masts than the likes of Houqua or Rainbow, not even eight years old and already outclassed. For these new clippers, there was no time for sea trials or dry runs. Once completed, they would be sent on their way around Cape Horn to California. Time was too precious, and profits too great.
*
When Charlie Low arrived back in New York aboard Samuel Russell that spring of 1851, he had every reason to be happy. That is, until he heard, most likely at the bar of the Astor House Hotel, that the Low clipper Surprise—under the command of former opium runner Captain Philip Dumaresq—had bested his 109-day run from New York to San Francisco. Talk was that the latest Low clipper, N. B. Palmer, could lower the record once again on her upcoming maiden voyage. But the House of Low also awaited the challenge of the House of Grinnell, which had a new ship, Flying Cloud, looking to race around the Horn that spring. The fact was, the clipper field was getting crowded. More were nearing completion in Boston and New York, as well as in other yards in Maine, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
The first thing Charlie did on dry land was meet with his brother Edward to tour the Westervelt shipyard and inspect the partially completed N. B. Palmer. Edward asked Charles what he thought of the ship.
“The most beautiful vessel I have ever seen,” his brother responded. “If I could have command of such a vessel, it would be the height of my ambition.”
Edward must have smiled as he told Charles the good news: he should report to the shipyard the next morning and supervise her completion. After that, he would be her master on her maiden trip to California.
Content though Charles would have been to spend all his days supervising the construction of his latest dream ship, his brother Seth Haskell Low seems to have wanted his kid brother to get to work on finding a wife—preferably a New Englander—in his brief time ashore. At Haskell’s urging, Charles took an overnight boat to Fall River, Massachusetts. After a quick visit to New Hampshire, he paused in Danvers, Massachusetts, just south of the old China trade port of Salem and recently connected to Boston by railroad.
Like others with deep ancestral ties to New England, the Lows looked for prospective mates among their fellow Yankees. Warren Delano had made a similar trip five years earlier and married Forbes cousin Catherine Lyman, who promptly sailed with him on his next trip to China. The reasons went deeper than simply marrying into families they already knew. After two centuries of making their livings from the sea, Yankee families were accustomed to long and dangerous separations. Rooftop balconies atop gabled waterfront houses—known as widow’s walks—allowed the women of the house to watch for telltale masts and sails on the horizon. They knew that many of the captains and merchants who ventured to China or the Pacific whaling grounds never came home.
Perhaps the Lows also wanted Charles to avoid meeting the type of well-born New York girl who, in the scathing words of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, “are taught to sing, dance, flirt, laugh, and act French vaudevilles, but never learn one useful thing that will enable them to perform the part of a good wife and mother.” The “finishing” of young women in such a continental manner, the editors concluded, would lead only to the finishing of a husband, and the practice was working “its way silently but surely to the complete revulsion in morals, manners, religion, philosophy, and finance of the whole community.”1
Haskell Low had a woman in mind for Charlie, a “Miss D,” but the sea captain was unimpressed when he finally met her, despite her beauty. “Night after night, I was invited to parties,” Charles Low recalled of his time in Danvers, “but I was not carried away by any of the young ladies.” Unlike the dandyish Captain Waterman, Charles was not a flirt. He wanted a companion who would travel with him rather than a socialite wife who would wait ashore for months on end.
Finally, at one party, the host asked the several young ladies there to sing. None stepped forward at first. “Each and every one had a cold—or something else was the matter—and wished to be excused,” Low recalled. As one Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine writer smirked, a typical “young girl who sings” of the era had a “voice like that of a tin kettle if it could speak, and takes more pride in reaching a high D sharp than if she had reached the top of the pyramid of Cheops.”2 Nobody wanted to be judged so harshly, especially in front of potential suitors such as Charles,
whose years at sea had left him with a round, sun-creased face, flashing blue eyes, and hardened hands.
Then a dark-haired, black-eyed girl stepped forward without a word, sat down at the piano, and started to play and sing. The song may have been one of the sentimental ballads of the era, which usually had to do with love and death. Went one popular song of the time:
Thou have learned to love another,
Thou hast broken every vow,
We have parted from each other,
And my heart is lonely now;
I have taught my looks to shun thee
When coldly we have met,
For another’s smile hath won thee,
And thy voice I must forget.3
If she were highly skilled, she might have tried an aria such as those popularized by “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, who had made a sensational American concert tour the previous year. Lind’s figure graced the prow of the clipper Nightingale, then under construction in Maine.
That night, Charles Low heard Sarah Tucker’s voice soar above the pearly notes of the piano and thought to himself, “This is the girl for me.” Unlike other women of her set, who sang “scientifically,” Sarah must have sung with confidence and poise. What a contrast from the rough-hewn, lusty voices of men singing chanteys, like that about a captain named “Kickin’ Jack Williams,” or being paid a measly “dollar and a half a day.” But even such singing meant something to Charles, for he boasted that he wouldn’t hire a sailor if he couldn’t sing.
Charles and Sarah sat and talked all night. Sarah was only eighteen and had recently lost her father. At the end of the evening, the couple cracked open a peanut, ate the two kernels, and promised each other a gift at their next meeting—a dating game known as a “philopena.”
When the two of them met again, Charles gallantly drove a rented carriage up to the Tucker house.
“Philopena!” she exclaimed after she opened the front door.
A few days later, Charles and Sarah were engaged. Charles then hurried back to Manhattan to oversee the final fitting out of N. B. Palmer.
*
N. B. Palmer would be ready for her maiden voyage to California by May 1851, just in time for a race against Moses Grinnell’s new Flying Cloud. There were more than just profits riding on this trip: the ship’s reputation was being watched from England. That spring, an exquisite, fully rigged model of the N. B. Palmer had gone on display at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 (the first true world’s fair), attracting much interest amidst the clanking steam-powered machinery and other curiosities on display in the vaulted cast-iron-and-glass halls of the Crystal Palace.4 The model reminded visitors that a Yankee Low clipper still held the record on the prestigious tea route between Hong Kong and London.
Flying Cloud and N. B. Palmer were not the only ships that spring with a shot at setting a record on the San Francisco run. There was also a gigantic new vessel under construction on the East River, commissioned by Nathaniel and George Griswold. Perhaps acting on intelligence gleaned from the McKay yard, the Griswolds had charged shipbuilder William H. Webb to build the biggest clipper in the world, larger than Flying Cloud and Staffordshire. Named Challenge, she would tip the scales at over two thousand tons displacement and would be propelled by more than twelve thousand square yards of canvas. The mastermind of Challenge’s bold sail plan was none other than Captain Robert Waterman, whom the Griswolds had coaxed out of his sunny California retirement to serve as a design consultant—as well as to be the ship’s master on her maiden voyage. The incentive: a $10,000 bonus if Waterman brought her through the Golden Gate in ninety days or less, handily breaking Surprise’s record run the previous year.
The prudent, conservative Webb—an old friend of McKay’s and perhaps his foremost New York competitor—balked at the scope of the commission. Challenge was more than twice the size of his two previous clippers, the trim and elegant Mandarin and Celestial. He already had his hands full, building oceangoing steamships for the California trade, but he obliged—perhaps because the Griswolds forked over $150,000, almost twice the already high price Grinnell had paid for Flying Cloud.
Webb and Waterman bickered constantly during the design process, so much so that the Griswold firm had to mediate. Webb did not like Waterman’s plan for more canvas. The designer was worried that such a huge spread of material pushed the practical limits of seamanship, making the ship too unstable and dangerous to operate. Ultimately, Challenge’s sail plan was somewhat reduced, which gave Webb some comfort. Yet her topmost yard still towered two hundred feet above the main deck.
A ship as large as Challenge was a severe test of wooden shipbuilding technology at the time: only the warship USS Pennsylvania was larger. Challenge would be the first clipper with three full decks rather than two. To ensure that the huge vessel did not come apart in bad weather, Webb added iron strapping that was bolted diagonally into the outer surface of the frames. This gave her greater longitudinal rigidity and, hence, resistance to hogging. She also had a sharp, V-shaped hull like earlier China clippers Rainbow and Memnon. But ultimately, the issues facing the giant Challenge’s quest for the record run to California were not structural, but human.
*
N. B. Palmer was the first of the big new clippers to sail from New York during the 1851 spring sailing season. As Captain Charles Low supervised the finishing touches to the sparkling new clipper, he was determined that his ship would break Surprise’s ninety-six-day record from the previous year, as well as fend off the rival clippers scheduled to sail for San Francisco: Flying Cloud, Challenge, and Gazelle. His older brother Abbot Low wanted the record to remain in Low family hands at all costs. Low’s business now depended on quick voyages around the world: New York to California, California to China, and, finally, China to New York. In the public eye, the ocean voyage to San Francisco had outclassed the China run in glamor not only because it was so physically dangerous and financially risky, but also because it was a new and novel embodiment of America’s Manifest Destiny and of quickly won riches.
For a shipowner, owning the fastest ship in the China trade was still a big feather in the cap, but by 1851, it was nothing compared with the profits that came with the fastest voyage to San Francisco.
Despite the lighthearted tone with which he relates this period in his memoir, the pressure on Charles must have been immense. The prospect of nearly a year apart from his bride-to-be, Sarah Tucker, bothered him enough to make him lose focus on supervising the fitting out of his brother’s flagship.
Shortly before the May 6 sailing day, Captain Nat Palmer and Abbot Low noticed that the now-veteran clipper captain was looking sad and distracted. They pulled him aside.
“Charlie,” Abbot said sharply, “you would like to go to South Danvers, would you not?”
Charles responded that yes, he would.
“Why should he not go?” Palmer asked gruffly.
Abbot relented. “You have time to catch the boat at five o’clock, but not much time to spare,” he said. The usually businesslike merchant might have been sympathetic to his brother’s emotional distress because of recent changes in his own personal life. His wife, Ellen, had died the previous January after giving birth to their fourth child: a son, Seth, who himself barely survived. Abbot had already taken in his brother William Henry’s widow, Ann, and her young son following William Henry’s suicide. After Ellen’s death, Ann became a mother figure to Abbot’s motherless young children, two girls and two boys.
Charles left the N. B. Palmer, packed his suitcases, and ran to catch the steamer Bay State up to Boston. “I only had a few days to spend with my betrothed,” Low recalled, “and then back to the ship I went.”5
On the sixth of May, as scheduled, N. B. Palmer left New York for San Francisco “with light winds from the southwest.”6 The crowds who gathered at the Battery to watch the departure heard a cacophony of sounds coming across the water: the clank of the windlass,I the creaking of yards as they were hoisted up the ma
sts, the roaring commands of the first mate, and the bellowing of one of Captain Low’s prized chanteymen as he sang out work songs to keep the men in rhythm as they hauled on the lines. The words, as one observer noted, sprung from “undeveloped intelligence,” and the melodies had a “wild, inspiring ring” that took on a “pungent, briny odor and surging roar and rhythm of the ocean, and howling gales at sea.”7
The chanteyman’s lyrics about leaving ladies behind must have been especially poignant for Captain Low. As N. B. Palmer set her sails and headed out into the North Atlantic, he looked forward to a time when Sarah would be his wife and be able to accompany him on ship.
*
That same May, Josiah Creesy, master of the Flying Cloud, was loading up his ship on South Street. The veteran captain of the Oneida had finally received his dream commission, and, unlike Captain Charlie Low, he would not be sailing alone: his wife, Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, was a veteran of life at sea and a vital member of his crew. An accomplished mathematician, Eleanor (called Ellen by her husband) was so skilled in practical navigation that tough-hided Josiah trusted her with keeping his ship on course. Her finesse with a brass sextant and charts was unmatched, and Creesy encouraged his wife’s talents. Ellen, for her part, moderated her husband’s intense, competitive character.
Creesy, already grizzled at thirty-seven years old, was a native of Marblehead, Massachusetts, a fishing port north of Boston, where he had grown up racing small sailing boats. As a teenager, his idea of a good time was sailing all the way to Salem in a fishing dory to stare at the big China trade vessels, and, while still in his teens, Creesy shipped off to sea. By age twenty-three, he had become a captain.8 Before long, Josiah would marry a woman from home, Eleanor Horton Prentiss.
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