Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  The carpenter plugged the hole in the fo’c’sle, the crew set to work pumping out the hold, and Flying Cloud resumed her normal course southward toward Cape Horn. Amazingly, despite storms and sabotage, the ship seemed to be making excellent time.

  *

  As Flying Cloud surged ever southward, Captain Waterman of the much bigger Challenge could barely keep his ship’s company together as she beat along the Brazilian coast, headed for Cape Horn. That he was running into the doldrums only added to his frustration.

  Challenge had left New York a month after the Flying Cloud, but both captains knew that Challenge did not have to catch up to win: the real race was which ship would make the trip to San Francisco in less time. Waterman’s bonus depended on a talented, hardworking crew—but that wasn’t what Waterman got.

  “They [the crew] would fight amongst themselves, cut, gouge, bite, and kept in a continual row,” Waterman recalled later.28 Even First Mate Douglass’s lash did little to keep these men in line. They refused to work. Worse still, about a dozen were still lying in the sick bay, the victims of venereal disease and other maladies. The crimps truly had given Waterman the worst possible crew.

  For the men who had little to no experience going aloft, the experience was terrifying. Climbing up the windward shrouds had to be done one foot or one hand at a time. Going out onto the yards to unfurl or take in sail required grace and balance, especially in rough seas, where the mast swung through a wide arc and the wind tore at the men’s faces and hands. One slip, and down a sailor would plunge into the heaving seas, never to be seen again, or worse, smack onto the white pine decks, a pile of broken, bloody limbs. There was little the ship’s captain—who usually doubled as ship’s surgeon—could do except bury the man at sea.

  When the wind did pick up, Waterman realized that his dream ship was not all she was cracked up to be. Not only was he cursed with a bad crew and a nasty first mate, but it was now apparent that he and the Griswolds had made Challenge too extreme for her own good. Their desire for sharpness and size had overridden Webb’s skill as a naval architect. Challenge’s waterline was too hollow, her bows too sharp. Whenever a good puff of wind came along, a huge wave rose from her bow, indicating too much water resistance. Worse still, she moved through the water with a snappy, rather jolty motion, not with the easy roll of more full-bodied vessels.29

  As Challenge made her way along the Brazilian coast, a sailor complained to First Mate Douglass that his belongings had been stolen. In a rage, the first mate ordered the entire ship’s company, including those in the sick bay, to line up on deck and open their duffel bags.

  It was not a captain’s duty to mete out discipline unless it was absolutely necessary. As Douglass conducted the search, Captain Waterman stood out on the quarterdeck, took out his sextant, and started to shoot the sun to get the ship’s position.

  He then heard a yell from forward.

  “Murder!”

  Several of the crew jumped Douglass and threw him to the deck. One grabbed his throat. Another man slashed at his leg.

  Waterman ran to Douglass’s aid, dropping his sextant on the quarterdeck and grabbing an iron belaying pin as he ran along the main deck. He smashed each of the men tackling his first mate on the head.30 Two of them dropped dead, their skulls split open. Several others scampered away, leaving Douglass bleeding on the deck.

  A big man, Douglass got up, felt the gash in his thigh, and smiled with sick pleasure. “God damn their souls,” he said. “I’m so damned glad the row occurred. I can lick them as much as I like, and they can’t do anything with me when I get to California.”31

  Waterman and Douglass tied to the rail those who didn’t get away. They would be dealt with later. One of the conspirators finally confessed to everything: the crew had planned to kill both Waterman and Douglass and sail the ship to Rio de Janeiro.

  His leg bandaged by the ship’s surgeon, Douglass grabbed a rope and flayed the backs of each of the seven men splayed out on the ship’s railing. Blood spattered all over the deck. A bucket of salt water was then thrown on their tattered backs, and they howled in agony. Confident that the mutiny was over, Douglass sent them to the sick bay. Locking them up in the brig was out of the question. Challenge was already shorthanded, and they would be needed later when the ship rounded Cape Horn.

  Douglass recovered from his wound. For the rest of the voyage, he kept a knife at his waist.32

  The mutiny’s ringleader, a sailor named Fred Birkenshaw, remained missing. Challenge was a big ship, but there were only so many places a man could hide, especially if he was deprived of food and water. Waterman was determined to find him.

  But the captain had more pressing concerns. His worst nightmare was to get driven backward in his attempt to round Cape Horn, away from the Pacific and toward the southern tip of Africa, by a driving gale. “Turned on her heel by a fierce West Wind,” Herman Melville wrote in White-Jacket, “many an outward-bound ship has been driven across the Southern Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope.”33

  Yet when Challenge tried to round Cape Horn, fierce weather struck hard. The clipper wallowed in a westerly gale for eighteen days. The footropes and sails became crusted in rough, skin-ripping ice. Three men tumbled from aloft and into the raging ocean. Chances of them surviving in such a gale were nil.

  Two sailors still refused to bend to Waterman’s will. One was the agile smart aleck George Lessing, whom Waterman nicknamed “the Dancing Master” for his ability to avoid blows from his first mate. When Lessing refused to go aloft, claiming illness, Douglass grabbed the man by the hair and dunked him into the frigid water that surged across Challenge’s deck.

  “I think we’ll baptize him,” Waterman supposedly told his first mate.34

  Gasping for breath, Lessing said he was drowning, which only steeled Douglass’s resolve to punish him more. Soaked and shivering, Lessing was carried to the sick bay, now crammed with almost twenty of the ship’s sixty-four-man crew. He died a few days later.

  Douglass’s next victim was an Italian known only as “Pawpaw,” who could barely speak English and didn’t own a pair of shoes. Several days on, still in the midst of the gale, he refused to go aloft, spluttering in Italian and pointing to his bleeding feet. Douglass beat him senseless and then added a fist to the ribcage for good measure. According to one witness, Waterman took a bit of pity on the Italian and served him water and a glass of wine. Yet wine or no wine, Pawpaw also died. His shipmates sewed up Pawpaw’s corpse in canvas and threw it over the side.

  Like the captain of the fictional Flying Dutchman, Waterman had sold his soul to Satan in exchange for extraordinary passages. Now, in the fury of a Cape Horn gale, it seemed the $10,000 bonus for getting his ship into San Francisco in fewer than ninety days was slipping from his grasp.

  *

  The angels smiled upon Flying Cloud as she made her way around the southern tip of South America.

  “I shall sleep better tonight than usual,” passenger Sarah Bowman wrote in her journal as the ship rounded Cape Horn in heavy seas and driving sleet, but without incident. “In the distance, the snowy mountains and frost covered rocks look like turreted castle forts and battlements, a soft blue haze descends and gives really a charm to the scene.”

  The much-feared westerly gale, powerful enough to drive the Flying Cloud backward or force her captain to steer toward Antarctica in search of favorable winds, did not materialize. The lack of terrifying weather seemed nothing short of a miracle.

  “The Capt. says we should have such luck once in five hundred times,” Sarah wrote.35

  Not that the rounding of the cape was completely idyllic. Captain Creesy noted in his journal on July 23: “hard Gale with much rain and sleet. Ship shipping much water bad sea running.” At eight in the evening, Creesy took out his spyglass and saw rocky Cape Horn itself rearing up out of a boiling sea. “The whole coast covered with snow,” he wrote, “wild ducks very numerous.”36

  On July 30, a week after passing C
ape Horn and heading to the North, the ship caught the southeastern trade winds. It was then that Flying Cloud finally got her first true burst of extreme speed. Captain Creesy ordered all sails set for the first time in days, including the winglike studden sails that projected out from the yards of all three masts. Pushed along her spread of lily-white canvas, the ship raced along.

  “Fresh breezes fine Wr.,” Creesy wrote in his log. “All sails set At 2 P.M. wind SE. At 6 squally in lower and Top Gallant studding sails 7 in Royals At 2 A.M. in the fore Top Mast Studding Sail Latter parts strong Gales & high seas running Ship very wet fore & aft … During the squalls 18 knots of line was not sufficient to measure her rate of speed Top Gallant sails set.”37

  Earlier clippers such as Sea Witch had achieved speeds of 15 knots in very short bursts. Now, only four years later, Flying Cloud was achieving that speed for days on end. Twenty-six days, in fact, averaging, according to Matthew Fontaine Maury’s later calculations, “the enormous rate of 15-7/12 knots, or eighteen statute miles per hour.”

  The ship complained, the rigging shrieking under the strain of more than ten thousand square yards of taut canvas. Everyone on board hoped the sprung mainmast and the rigging repaired at sea would hold. They did, against all odds. On one remarkable day, Flying Cloud shattered all records for deep-sea sailing ships—at least according to Creesy’s calculations—by sailing 374 nautical miles.

  Just as Flying Cloud approached the California coast, the winds died, leaving the graceful clipper rolling in the long Pacific swells. “Baffling and unsteady winds,” Captain Creesy wrote in his log. He was angry not just at the weather but also at his first mate, whom he’d suspended from duty a few weeks earlier for general incompetence and for “long neglect of duty.” The passengers on Flying Cloud fretted as their ship lay dead in the water, her once-taut sails slatting in the feeble gusts. Yet the wind picked up again on August 29, and Flying Cloud moved onward toward San Francisco. Two days later, guided by Eleanor Creesy’s calculations and Matthew Fontaine Maury’s charts, Flying Cloud reached the Farallon Islands, a series of jagged rock outcroppings that guarded the entrance to San Francisco Bay. The night was pitch-black, and to avoid running aground, Creesy noted in his log, “hove the ship to for Day light at 6 made South Farrlones [sic] bearing N E 1/2 E.”

  At seven o’clock, as dawn broke over the red-and-green-dappled coastline, a schooner drew up alongside Flying Cloud, carrying a pilot who would guide the ship through the Golden Gate and into San Francisco Harbor.

  For several weeks, as the ship sped along at full clip, the crew had been hard at work getting the Flying Cloud ready for her triumphant arrival. They painted her weather-beaten sides jet black, touched up the gold boot topping line that accented her hull, tarred her rigging, scrubbed the decks and polished the brass until it gleamed in the morning sun.

  Now her moment had come. Flying Cloud sailed past the former Spanish fortress known as the Presidio, and then past the Marin headlands, and up the bay to the docks. The crew then unbent and stowed all sails before a steam tug assisted her to her berth. It was September 1, 1851. Captain Creesy’s log entry for the day was as laconic as ever: “Anchored in San Francisco Harbor at 11h 30m A.M. after a passage of 89 days 21 hours.”38

  The operator of the semaphore tower atop Telegraph Hill cranked the two wooden arms to the signal for a “ship”: one plank pointed diagonally upward; the other pointed diagonally downward, oriented to the right. Hundreds of people swarmed out of the homes, offices, warehouses, and saloons of the city and clustered along North Beach to watch the swan-like clipper arrive at her anchorage. Aboard ship, Sarah Bowman was exuberant about their safe and speedy arrival. “Everyone here is talking about our passage,” she wrote, “the quickest ever known.” A cavalcade of clerks was already stampeding toward the waterfront, eager to get their hands on the ship’s cargo and sell it for high prices and great profit.

  From the ship’s mizzenmast flew a huge American flag marked with thirty stars. It was already out-of-date: Congress had adopted the thirty-one-star flag, welcoming Wisconsin into the union on July 4, which the passengers and crew of Flying Cloud had celebrated off the rainy coast of Brazil.

  Flying Cloud docked next to the slightly smaller but no less elegant N. B. Palmer, which had arrived in San Francisco ten days earlier, and was still in port preparing for her leg-to-China run. Low made no mention of the Cloud’s record in his recollections of the N. B. Palmer’s stay in San Francisco. Perhaps the young captain was steeling himself to beat Flying Cloud across the Pacific.

  Sarah, Whitney, and Ellen Lyon disembarked for a joyful reunion with their father, who had arrived via steamship and the Panama Isthmus a few weeks earlier. Sarah had wonderful news for her father: the dashing Laban Coffin had proposed to her on board the ship, and she had accepted.

  Also waiting for them was Reuben Boise, who had traveled down from Oregon Territory to meet his fiancée Ellen, Sarah’s sister. The sisters settled into their hotel rooms and then explored the burgeoning city. Wedding shopping proved daunting: $18 for a silk bonnet, $15 for a silk dress, $4 for garter boots. “Parisian elegance,” Sarah sighed at the inventory of the San Francisco clothing stores. “It is a fast country.”

  Among their shopping companions was Eleanor Creesy. Sarah wrote that she “has been very kind to us; indeed, she has taken as much interest in us as if we had been her own sisters, helped us sew, been shopping with us; in fact, done everything for us that our own mother could have done.”

  Captain Josiah Creesy officiated at the marriage of Reuben Boise and Ellen Lyon on September 17. It took place on deck, under Flying Cloud’s swaying yards and rigging. Eleanor Creesy was there, of course. “I love her dearly,” her sister Sarah wrote of Flying Cloud’s chief navigator, “and shall regret very much the day that calls us to part.”39 Laban Coffin and Sarah Lyon were also married aboard the ship, two weeks after Reuben and Ellen’s ceremony.

  Captain Creesy then approached Coffin with a strange request: given his extensive experience at sea, would he be willing to serve as his first mate for the rest of the voyage? Coffin accepted the offer from his old chess partner, and Sarah naturally decided to accompany him across the Pacific.

  That day came on October 20, when Eleanor and her husband sailed for Hong Kong to pick up a cargo of tea for sale in New York. This leg of the voyage earned Flying Cloud’s owners $45,555.75 in freight fees.40

  *

  The news of Flying Cloud’s record-breaking passage reached New York via the paddlewheel steamer, as the first transcontinental telegraph would not be up and running for another ten years. The ship’s owners were thrilled about the new record, a great selling point for Flying Cloud’s future voyages, but what they really wanted to know was the return on their investment. When Francis Hathaway, probably the principal advocate for adding clipper ships to the Grinnell, Minturn fleet, heard about Flying Cloud’s triumphant arrival, he anxiously wrote his agents in San Francisco about the condition of the cargo. Creesy had told his employers about the sabotage attempt and the partial flooding of the cargo hold. Incredibly, the only goods damaged by the sloshing seawater were a shipment of steel shovels, boxes of brandied peaches, and some spoiled casks of wine and brandy. The ship had even succeeded in bringing fresh butter, which was scarce in San Francisco. One newspaper raved about the spring butter produced by A. Vandyke of Roxbury, New York, calling it “sweet as a nut” and “from the hands of the milkmaid.”

  “You will feel the Flying Cloud has indeed ‘walked the waters like a thing of life,’ ” wrote the giddy reporter.41

  What shipbuilder Donald McKay thought about Flying Cloud’s incredible performance is unrecorded. But he did once explain his design philosophy thus: “I never yet built a vessel that came up to my own ideal. I saw something in each ship which I desired to improve upon.”42 For him, then, Flying Cloud was not the perfect ship. She was only the beginning.

  McKay was already hard at work constructing an extreme clip
per ship bigger even than the 1,800-ton Flying Cloud or the 2,000-ton Challenge: Flying Fish, which would be ready for delivery to Sampson & Tappan (owners of McKay’s first clipper, Stag Hound) by November. To make his ship stand out, McKay called for Flying Fish to be painted in green and gold rather than the customary black. Her skipper would be Bostonian Edward Nickels, who was famous for hosting lavish dinners when he was in port43 and who boasted that no ship he commanded had ever been “crawled up to or passed.”44

  McKay’s rival William Webb, who built the Challenge, was also busy with a new clipper: only half the size of Waterman’s huge dream ship but far more economical to operate. Her name was Swordfish, and her commander would be David S. Babcock, a Stonington, Connecticut, boy who was also none other than Captain Nathaniel Palmer’s brother-in-law.

  Both the captains of Flying Fish and Swordfish were hoping to beat Flying Cloud’s record.

  But where was the Challenge?

  *

  Nine days after Flying Cloud set sail across the Pacific in October 1851, a gigantic clipper ship passed through the Golden Gate, flying a distress flag. When the harbor pilot came aboard, he saw eight men chained together on deck. Found deep in the hold was crew ringleader Fred Birkenshaw, surviving on scraps that his fellow sailors had passed along.

  Perhaps the pilot’s men spread the news of this cruelty to their mates. By the time the Challenge approached the quay, an unruly mob was waiting for Douglass and Captain Waterman. As the ship tied up and stevedores began unloading her cargo, Douglass jumped into one of Challenge’s launches, rowed through the mass of abandoned hulks anchored in the bay, and disappeared into the hills.

  His flight failed. A local sheriff apprehended him within a few days. He was found drunk in a horse-drawn wagon bound for Monterey. “I whipped ’em and I’ll whip ’em again,” Douglass snarled. He also demanded that the sheriff’s men kill him rather than lock him in jail. “Well, gentlemen, if you want to hang me, here’s a pretty tree,” he supposedly said. “Do it like men.”45 He was charged with murder.