Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  On the Fourth of July, everyone dressed in his or her Sunday best for the festivities on deck: cravats and suits for men, hoopskirts and bonnets for women, and white duck trousers and black straw hats for the sailors. “Descend we to the richly furnished cabin,” Bowman wrote. “I must name the ‘goodies’ that crowd our table: roast turkey and chickens with oyster sauce, roast pig, boiled ham, all kinds of vegetables, English plum pudding, tarts, Blanc Mange, walnuts, filberts, almonds, raisins, oranges, apples, champaigne [sic], and Madeira in abundance.”10

  The crew had none of these treats, except perhaps for leftovers. Typical fare was rice, beans, potatoes, hardtack biscuits, and dried codfish (known among sailors as “Cape Cod turkey”).11 For them, the best they could generally hope for on a holiday was a “duff,” made by boiling a bag of flour with butter, eggs, molasses, and perhaps some figs or other dried fruit to add some sweetness. Holiday duff was a sailor’s sacred prerogative, for special occasions seldom brought rest for them. “This day was Christmas, but it brought us no holiday,” Richard Henry Dana had written of his experience going around Cape Horn a decade earlier. “The only change was that we had a ‘plum duff’ for dinner, and the crew quarreled with the steward because he did not give us our usual allowance of molasses to eat with it. He thought the plums would be a substitute for the molasses, but we were not to be cheated out of our rights in that way.”

  Incidents like these snowballed into simmering feuds and grudges among the crew. Overworked, underfed, and sexually repressed, clipper ship crews quickly grew sick of one another, fueling a cycle of paranoia and resentment: “Little wars and rumors,” wrote Dana, “reports of things said in the cabin, misunderstanding of words and looks, apparent abuses—brought us into a condition in which everything seemed to go wrong. Every encroachment upon time allowed for rest appeared unnecessary. Every shifting of the studden sails was only to ‘haze’ the crew.”12

  Aboard Flying Cloud, the chasm between the well-heeled passengers and the hardworking crew did not go unnoticed. Nor did Captain Creesy’s split personality. “The Capt. is an able seaman, no doubt,” observed Sarah Bowman, “but I will not wrong my conscience by calling him a gentleman. He is overbearing and jealous of every attention bestowed by the passenger upon the Mate.”13

  At least two crew members were sick of Captain Creesy as well. Sometime after the ship’s top-hamper fell into the sea, one of them got an auger—probably stealing it from the ship’s carpenter’s shop—went to the fo’c’sle, and drilled two neat holes through Flying Cloud’s thick oak planking, three feet above the waterline, on the port side. The other took a marlinspike and joined the two holes into one opening. With each plunge that Flying Cloud took into the heavy seas, a plume of water spurted into the crew’s quarters, and then trickled down into the hold below. It would only be a matter of time before damage was done to Creesy’s precious cargo. The two men then went back to their duties as if nothing happened.14

  As Creesy guided his ship toward Cape Horn, he and his Ellen wondered what sort of weather would greet them. The worst would be a westerly gale, preventing Flying Cloud from making headway past what sailors called “Cape Stiff.” Such a gale could be so strong that captains would have to furl most sails and heave to for days, even weeks at a time. In that circumstance, speed, of course, went by the board. The captain’s only responsibility was keeping his ship afloat, his cargo dry, and his passengers and crew alive.

  After almost a month on board, Sarah Bowman was starting to find the once amusing quirks of her fellow passengers rather annoying. One passenger, Francesco Wadsworth from New York, sat in the lounge reading racy books (“questionable French novels”)—although she noted that he wasn’t all bad; he sang Italian opera arias in a “rich, mellow voice.” Then there was J. D. Townsend, a fast-talking nineteen-year-old who claimed to have an income of $3,000 a year and “talks big of his fast horse, etc., drinks Claret, Champaigne [sic], and Cherry Bounce as if he loved it.”15Bowman found this boor’s company more off-putting than that potent concoction of cherries, whiskey, and sugar.

  Yet all of these petty disputes among the passengers and crew were mere distractions from the tremendous danger the entire ship’s company faced as they surged toward the southern tip of South America. During the California Gold Rush, many ships did not survive the journey around Cape Horn, swamped as they were by heavy seas, or capsized by a sudden squall, or dashed onto the rocks in blinding snowstorms. The Boston clipper John Gilpin sailed right into an iceberg and sank rapidly. Miraculously, the crew scrambled into the lifeboats, to be picked up by a passing vessel.16 The vast majority of those shipwrecked off Cape Horn were not so lucky. They froze to death or drowned in the furious sea, their ships vanishing without a trace. In his 1850 novel White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote of the feared maritime obstacle: “And now, through drizzling fogs and vapours, and under damp, double-reefed topsails, our wet-decked frigate drew nearer and nearer to the squally Cape. Was the descent of Orpheus, Ulysses, or Dante into Hell, one whit more hardy and sublime than the first navigator’s weathering of that terrible Cape?”17

  Those aboard Flying Cloud wondered whether their brand-new ship, already weakened from the dismasting accident, could survive the worst of Cape Stiff.

  *

  Far ahead of Flying Cloud was N. B. Palmer, which had left New York a month earlier, captained by Charles Low. The clipper had not had an easy passage either, battling rough weather and pushing forward against contrary winds. Passing a dismasted brig, Low decided not to stop. The disabled ship was “evidently abandoned for some time,” wrote Low, and “there was nothing to be gained” by N. B. Palmer slowing to investigate further.18 A boarding in mid-ocean would also cost valuable time.

  Low’s ship made a mediocre twenty-eight days to reach the equator. He blamed this not on Palmer’s design but on the bad conditions. “It was no fault of the ship but of the weather, that the passage was so much longer than my previous two voyages,” Low wrote. “[T]he ship was all I could wish for, and much faster than any other ship I had ever sailed in, and a splendid sea boat in heavy weather.”19

  On July 3 N. B. Palmer reached Argentina’s Isla de los Estados, located just to the east of Tierra del Fuego at the very southern tip of South America. The island, as Richard Henry Dana remembered it, was a barren pile of “girt with rocks and ice, with here and there, between rocks and broken hillocks, a little stunted vegetation of shrubs.”20 It was in these waters that as a young man, Nathaniel Palmer had hunted for seals in his small brig Hero, and eventually sailed south to be among the first people (if not the first) to sight the Antarctic continent. Now, three decades later, Palmer’s protégé Captain Low surged toward Cape Horn in his namesake clipper ship, one of the finest examples of American maritime technology on the high seas.

  Three days later, N. B. Palmer rounded Cape Horn. It had now been sixty-one days since her departure from New York. In his memoir, Low did not note any particularly bad weather on this passage around notorious Cape Stiff. But, like his mentor, he did not keep too much of a press of sail in risky conditions.

  Once in the warm waters of the Pacific, N. B. Palmer picked up speed and headed northward. Despite the ship’s wonderful performance on this second half of her voyage, Low must have felt a tinge of sadness when, somewhere off the coast of Central America, he sat down in the captain’s cabin and recorded the entry for day ninety-six of the voyage. They would not be breaking Surprise’s record time to the straits of the Golden Gate.

  *

  San Francisco in 1851 was still a rough-and-ready place, its wood frame buildings rising ever higher up the steep slopes of Telegraph Hill. Even though a catastrophic fire had ripped through the city that spring, new buildings sprouted up everywhere. Prospectors from as far away as France, England, Australia, and China descended on the city, hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields. Hot on their heels were prostitutes, loafers, and thieves. Gambling dens lined the waterfront, including the notorious Bell
a Union, sometimes thronged with as many as a thousand gamblers trying their hands at roulette and card games.21 Lavish to the point of gaudiness, its interior glowed bright as day from hundreds of flickering candles and whale oil lamps. At midnight, servers brought out four heaping breakfast spreads. Piles of gold dust sat on the gaming tables, next to knives and revolvers.

  The wharf district teemed with sailors just liberated from their duties and San Franciscans there to enjoy the activity and see the ships. The harbor was always full of steamers and small craft. But the arrival of the clipper ships in the late summer and early fall brought a special sense of excitement. The paddlewheel steamers of the Pacific Mail and US Mail generally arrived on schedule, traveling at the predictable speed of their coal-fueled engines. But the clipper ships out of New York and Boston were dependent on the winds and had no set time of arrival. When a clipper glided regally into San Francisco Harbor, crowds ran down to North Beach to see her come in.

  The rapid pace of shipbuilding evolution over the past few years had not been lost on San Francisco’s burgeoning community of journalists. “[T]he discovery of our golden sands has done more in four years toward improvement in the style of shipbuilding than would have occurred from other general causes in half a century,” boasted the Daily Alta California. The old ships had been “huge washing-tubs” which traveled “about as fast sideways as in any other direction.” The new ships were as “graceful in their motions as a swan on a summer lake, and fleet as the cloud which is blown by the gale.”22 As the gold continued to flow out of California’s fields and streams, the clippers kept coming from the eastern shipyards by the dozen, each more beautiful and beautifully named than the last: Herald of the Morning, Whirlwind, Sunny South, Coeur de Lion, Witch of the Wave. Under enormous pressure from their demanding clients, the shipbuilders experimented with a variety of forms not only to make their vessels faster but also to distinguish them from the growing pack of three-masted beauties. Most clippers had straight keels, although a few designers experimented with the drag keel, in which the stern had a deeper draft (depth) than the bow, a form popular with the old Baltimore clippers in their privateering and slaving days. To slice through the water at high speeds, some designers used a bow with a straight, nearly vertical stem, while others relied on a curved, or arched, forefoot that harkened back to the older packet ships.

  By the spring of 1851, San Franciscans had already been treated to a string of exciting new arrivals. Most thrilling of all had been Surprise, arriving that March after a record-breaking passage of 96 days. On May 17, another big clipper, the Sea Serpent, had arrived in San Francisco after 115 days at sea. It was not the result that owner Grinnell, Minturn & Co. had hoped for, but Sea Serpent’s passage had been marred by bad damage in storms off Cape Horn and, much to the kid-gloved Captain Howland’s fury, had been forced to put in to Valparaiso, Chile, for repairs.

  Now, in late summer, the San Francisco crowd gathered to watch yet another great clipper arrive. On August 21 the N. B. Palmer sailed through the Golden Gate, 107 days out of New York.

  Even if the passage had not been everything he’d wished, Captain Charlie Low was able to end this leg of the ship’s maiden voyage with a spectacular feat of seamanship. The trouble began when the harbor pilot who would guide the ship to the wharf refused to do the job until the next day. A frustrated Captain Low was rowed ashore to meet with A. A. Low & Brother’s agent, a Nantucketer named Frederick Coleman Sanford, who demanded why the ship was still lying at anchor, three miles off shore.

  “The pilot refused to bring her any closer,” Captain Low responded, no doubt gesticulating to the clipper bobbing in the distance.

  “The ship must come up to the wharf,” Sanford said.

  There was only one thing left to do. Low went back to the ship and ordered all sails set, “skysail and all.”

  A ship’s captain was never supposed to take the ship to her dock. That was the prerogative of the harbor pilot, with his deep knowledge of local tidal and underwater conditions. In addition to breaking all protocol, Captain Low was taking a big risk to the ship’s safety so that he could start unloading that day. Yet he was confident in his own abilities. “As soon as I got near enough, I backed the main yardI and went along the wharf so easily that there was hardly a jar,” Low recalled. It came so close to other ships that her flying jib boom struck the wheelhouse of the steamer Senator, wrenching two planks loose. The crowd assembled on the pier groaned but then cheered loudly when N. B. Palmer’s crew tossed the lines to the waiting stevedores to make her fast.

  “Well done!” Sanford shouted in disbelief.

  Low was quite pleased with himself. “The prettiest piece of seamanship ever done in San Francisco,” he joked. The harbor pilot was furious.

  The regular crewmen received their wages and promptly went ashore. It would be more than six weeks until N. B. Palmer went to sea again, continuing her maiden voyage on to China. She would be sailing across the Pacific with her holds almost empty, as aside from gold, California was not producing much of interest for the Chinese market. By October 7, the ship had been loaded with three hundred tons of ballast, and Low had hired enough crew at $25 per month to make the dash across the Pacific to Hong Kong, where he would fill his ship with a full load of tea. To earn some additional revenue, Low also took aboard seventy-five corpses—the mortal remains of Chinese migrants—in wooden caskets. Hearing about gold in “Californ,” thousands of Chinese men had flocked to San Francisco in search of a better life. But prospecting was a dangerous business. The dead bodies on board were going home for burial, their trip paid for by family or friends. Some shipowners couldn’t pass on the opportunity to make a handsome profit from this sad task. “At the time captains received an eighth of money paid for a passage,” Low wrote, “but dead bodies were considered freight. So one smart captain, to secure his passage money, loaded his cabin with corpses and called them passengers.”23

  Four years into the Gold Rush, there were already twenty thousand Chinese residents in San Francisco. A few merchants, such as Charlie’s brother Abbot, welcomed the arrival of the Chinese. “As gleaners in the gold fields which our own people had deserted,” he said, “as agriculturalists and horticulturalists … they were proving their value and importance to the development of the country.” New arrivals from China offered “an abundant supply of cheap manual labor” and “a boundless opportunity of that vigorous State to advance in the useful arts.”24

  Whites in San Francisco did not see the Chinese as an asset but rather as competition. A year before N. B. Palmer’s arrival in San Francisco, the California legislature passed the Foreign Miners Tax, which exacted a $20-per-month tax on all foreign miners and specifically targeted the Chinese.25 Newspapers caricatured Chinese immigrants as opium-smoking, pig-tailed, dirty, bucktoothed, dishonest rascals. Violence and discrimination against the West Coast’s growing Chinese population would eventually lead to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which ended all Chinese immigration to the United States for more than sixty years.

  Some Americans saw both slavery and anti-immigrant sentiments as antithetical to American democracy, especially in a place like California, which had been admitted to the union in 1850 as a “free state.” But the Know Nothing Party, a coalition of white Protestant nativists, was gaining support among working-class Americans who feared newcomers, the Irish and the Chinese among them. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal,’ ” an up-and-coming Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln wrote his friend Joshua Speed about the growing political crisis. “We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence [sic] of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”26


  Yet a clipper ship captain such as Charles Low did not have time to worry about the country’s future. What mattered to him were profit and speed. With her human and other cargo, N. B. Palmer cast off and set off across the Pacific for Hong Kong. It would be left to the other two clippers in the running, Flying Cloud and Challenge, to smash the ninety-six-day record Surprise had set in May in her passage from New York to San Francisco.

  *

  Proceeding to Cape Horn in a bad storm, Captain Creesy couldn’t understand why there was so much water in the hold. Flying Cloud was brand new, her seams newly caulked, yet she was heeling sickeningly while under full sail. When the ship’s carpenter went below on July 12, he found himself up to his waist in water that reeked of filth. Her pumps couldn’t handle this kind of inflow. Most of the ship’s precious cargo was safe, stowed above the water in the bilge, but if the source of the leak couldn’t be found, and quickly, all of it would be ruined, and the only hope of saving the vessel would be to come about and make straight for Rio de Janeiro.

  Eventually the carpenter found the source: a small hole, near the crew bunks in the fo’c’sle, clearly drilled with an auger. Creesy couldn’t believe it: the lives of seventy-eight people—not to mention cargo worth more than $50,000 and a ship valued at $90,000—had deliberately been put in jeopardy. But the last thing the captain needed was to cause a panic. He appears to have kept this sabotage secret from the passengers, as Sarah Bowman made no mention of the incident in her journal.

  Fortunately for Creesy, the two culprits had not been especially bright. One had been seen leaving the fo’c’sle with an auger—not exactly standard sailor equipment. A shipmate pointed out the offender, who had drilled the hole above his own bunk. Crewmates then ratted out his accomplice. Both were placed in irons and confined to the brig.27