After laborers removed the ship’s hundreds of tons of tea, hemp, and rock ballast, N. B. Palmer was towed to the Dutch navy yard. With no dry dock, she had to be “heaved down”—turned onto her side against a bank, exposing her underwater hull. There Low saw a two-foot-wide chunk of hard coral sticking out of the ship’s copper-plated bottom. “If this had come out at sea,” he wrote, “the ship would have gone down in less than an hour.”
Luck had saved not just his ship but almost certainly his crew, his wife, and his newborn child.
As for his son, several Dutch colonists suggested to Captain Low that the boy be registered as a Dutch citizen, as he would “have great privileges when he grew up.” Low refused. “He was born under the American flag,” he responded, “and was and always would be an American citizen.”
Six months later, on July 25, 1853, N. B. Palmer picked up her pilot outside of New York Harbor. She had been gone fourteen months. It must have been a tearful reunion for Captain Low and his family, who rejoiced in the new addition to the clan. Soon after unloading the cargo, Charlie and Sarah Low took the boat to Boston and, from there, the train to the ancestral family seat in Salem. As Low recalled, they were “joyfully received by my wife’s mother and her other relationships and friends.”
Charlie Low then had to ask his wife a very important question: Would she come with him again on his next voyage around the world? She said yes. But there would be a catch: her mother would be coming as well. Baby Charles Jr. would remain in Salem.25
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The around-the-world voyages of Captain Creesy and others were reaping immense returns for shipowners. Most financial records for many of these firms have been lost, so exact figures are difficult to determine, but merchants, captains, and historians alike attest to the profits they earned: Captain Clark described Surprise, for example, as a “mine of wealth” for A. A. Low & Brother.26 A typical clipper cost between $50,000 and $120,000 to construct, depending on the size of the vessel and the quality of materials used. If a ship arrived in San Francisco at the right time, its cargo of dry goods and supplies could be worth up to $100,000; that first voyage alone could easily pay off most if not all of the cost of building the ship.
Yet the economics of the business as a whole were increasingly in trouble. Fewer young American men were willing to put up with the terrible conditions and low wages ($25 a month on average, and often quite less) for a career at sea. Between 1849 and 1860, more than one million people traveled to California in search of a better life, ending up as shopkeepers, craftsmen, and farmers in a new and prosperous land. In previous generations, many of the single men who made the trek would have gone to sea. There was also the lure of the fertile prairies of the American Midwest, especially in Kansas Territory, where free-soil Northern farmers hoping to till their own land fought pitched battles against proslavery Southern settlers determined to extend the plantation system farther west.
By the 1850s, there was a labor mismatch: the big clipper ships required big crews, and there were simply not enough qualified sailors to man them properly. Rather than raise wages, the owners were forced to use crimps and other dubious tactics to crew up their vessels and keep down costs.
Despite the fine craftsmanship that went into the many dozens of extreme clipper ships launched between 1845 and 1853, there was without question a good amount of haste and sloppiness as well. The financial pressures to get the ships finished and loaded up for California no doubt contributed to the problem. Haphazard maintenance didn’t help, either. Charles Low noted how reluctant Captain Nat was to replace worn out rigging on Houqua after three voyages.
The China trade was still strong, especially for Russell & Company and, by extension, the shipping companies associated with it, most notably A. A. Low & Brother. As Robert Bennet Forbes wrote, “The period from 1851 to 1858 was probably the culminating point of the firm as purely a commission house. Its reputation had been built up and well established by a long succession of laborious, shrewd, but conservative partners, who nearly always left the house greater than they found it, and certainly with undiminished reputation.” The secret to its success was access to capital. As each new Chinese port was opened to Western trade, Russell & Company established itself as the “exchange bankers of the place, by virtue of the currency of its sterling bills in India,” and thus was able to ship superior teas to England and America.27 Because of its special relationship with Baring Brothers, Russell & Company had easy access to specie-backed British currency, and British opium dealers in India appreciated this American house’s ability to complete transactions in pounds sterling.
As the 1850s wore on, there were strong signs that the boom times in California were coming to an end. San Francisco was developing its own manufacturing and agricultural infrastructure, pushing down commodity prices. Declining freight rates for East Coast imports cut into the ability of shipping companies to pay crews of up to sixty men to operate an extreme clipper ship.
The reaction of New York’s and Boston’s shipping communities was to cut back on orders for clippers of the “extreme type,” in which speed trumped all other design considerations. Captain Nat’s time-tested design principles still ruled the day for the China tea business, which showed no signs of slowing down. As he listened to his younger brother Charles’s account of racing against Flying Cloud, Abbot Low must have beamed. He then commissioned another extreme clipper to round out their San Francisco–China operations. With the addition of this ship, A. A. Low & Brother had one of the largest and most profitable fleet of deep-water tall ships under the US flag. None of these ships was above 1,500 tons. With N. B. Palmer, Low felt that he had achieved the ideal balance of size and speed.
In the years to come, the quest to build new ships to beat Flying Cloud’s record became the domain of less-established ship operators. It proved to be a futile enterprise. More seasoned shippers opted to build ships that were less expensive to operate and could carry more freight than the extreme clippers. These ships, called medium clippers, would still have relatively sharp lines but would carry much less sail, to balance reasonable speed with economy.
The first of this type was completed in Boston in 1851. She was named Antelope, and the Boston Daily Atlas noted that the deep-keeled, flat-floored vessel was “expected to hold as good a wind as most of the sharp-bottomed clippers of the same register. The design of her model was to combine large stowage capacity with good sailing qualities.”28 Antelope proved to be a lousy sailor compared with her sharper, more heavily sparred competitors, taking a leisurely 149 days to sail from Boston to San Francisco. But more medium clippers would follow her, ships that were able to make the Cape Horn trip in 110 to 120 days, carrying more freight and requiring less crew than their extreme cousins.
Brilliant a designer as he was, Donald McKay was not immune from changing times. Yet his reaction to the glut of clipper ships sliding down the ways was not to build slower and fuller but rather even bigger and even faster than ever before. And McKay did not have much interest in building deep-ocean steamships. Clippers were the ships he could build and wanted to build. And why should he not do as he pleased? Unlike his main rival—the more modest William H. Webb, who eagerly built steamships—McKay had become a bona fide national celebrity, courted by the press and toasted by Boston’s high society. He was the mechanic and craftsman as American hero, one who could stand as the social equal of his august clients. Or so he thought.
Even if success had gotten to his head, McKay had every reason to feel that he could vanquish all competing shipbuilders with a grand gesture. By building bigger and more extreme clipper ships than his rivals, he figured, he would create his own market rather than conform to the current one, and prove the naysayers wrong. What’s more, he had also grown quite prosperous in his own right, unlike the perpetually struggling John Willis Griffiths, who, by the 1850s, was having a very hard time making a living as a traveling lecturer and engineering consultant.
In 1852, following
Flying Fish’s loss to Webb’s Swordfish in an eagerly anticipated race to California, McKay had started construction of a new extreme clipper ship, the biggest in the world by far. He was at the peak of his creative powers. In May of that year, the Boston Daily Atlas announced that Donald McKay was naming his giantess Enoch Train, in honor of his first major patron.29 Records are scanty, but it can be surmised that McKay was building her on commission from Train as a replacement for the Flying Cloud.
Yet it appears that Enoch Train walked away from the new clipper. If so, McKay was not going to let himself be embarrassed by dismantling the partially completed masterpiece at his yard. As the launching date approached and the timbers kept rising on the shores of East Boston, the papers announced that the ship’s name was now Sovereign of the Seas—and that McKay was building the ship not on a shipping firm’s commission but on his own account.
Even his most dedicated supporters must have shaken their heads at such hubris. McKay had taken on the financial risks of a massive project. And he had unapologetically given his ship the same name as a 1637 British warship that had boasted so many cannons and gilded decorations that England’s enemies nicknamed her the “Golden Devil.”
But unlike the ponderous flagship of King Charles I’s navy, McKay’s American Sovereign of the Seas would be trim and elegant in profile, even though she measured more than 2,400 tons and stretched 252 feet in length. She dwarfed every clipper that came before her, including Flying Cloud. Her figurehead was not a king on horseback but rather a half-man, half-fish figure blowing a conch shell. Boston reporter Duncan McLean was at no loss for words when comparing the American ship with her British predecessor. How strange that “uncouth hulk” would look against her namesake, he wrote: “Behold the modern Sovereign of the Seas, the longest, sharpest, the most beautiful merchant ship in the world, designed to sail at least twenty miles an hour with a wholesail breeze. See her in the beauty of her strength, the simplicity and neatness of her rig, flying before the gale, and laughing at the rising sea; and then imagine her cumbrous ancestor, wallowing from side to side, tearing up the ocean into whitened foam, and drifting perhaps seven miles an hour; yet she was the finest ship of her day.”
McLean summed up: “Imagine all this, and even a landsman can comprehend the wonderful progress of naval architecture.” The hero of the story, of course, was Donald McKay, who “alone is responsible for her success as a seaboat.”30
The journalist might have swooned, and the public may have gawked as the ship neared completion. But at least a few visitors to the East Boston yard must have wondered if McKay had gone mad. One observer noted that he “had invested all he was worth [financially] in the ship” and that “he had built her in opposition to the advice of his best friends.”31 Valued clients had no interest in buying the ship. Not George Upton, owner of McKay’s latest California clipper, Romance of the Seas; or Sampson & Tappan, owner of Stag Hound; or Moses Grinnell, proud owner of Flying Cloud. Two vessels of the extreme clipper type (Grinnell had commissioned Sea Serpent, too) were enough for the Swallowtail Line. Grinnell knew that the real money for his firm remained in the transatlantic packet business, a run for which clippers were wholly unsuited, especially when pitted against a new generation of paddlewheel steamers that could plow through the waves at more than thirteen knots, irrespective of winds and currents.
Other shipowners, still wedded to the more traditional clipper ships, kept their distance from Sovereign of the Seas. Abbot Low had yet to be won over by McKay’s work. For the old China hands, it was a matter of wait and see.
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By summer, salvation for Donald McKay had appeared in the form of New York shipowner Andrew F. Meinke, partner in the German firm Funch, Meinke & Wendt. Meinke’s origins remain obscure, and he purchased Sovereign of the Seas for $150,000. Then, it appears, Moses Grinnell stepped in and offered Meinke his company’s services as ship’s agent—supervising the procurement and loading of $84,000 worth of cargo bound for San Francisco. The best part of the deal, it may have seemed to McKay’s family, was that Donald’s brother and trusted right-hand man Lauchlan became her first master.32 Trained as a shipbuilder like his brother, Lauchlan had moved to the quarterdeck in the mid-1840s, captaining the barque Jenny Lind on several fast transatlantic voyages.33 “No swearing, no bustle, nor even imperious language,” one person remembered of Captain McKay’s style on board ship.
Sovereign’s designer would later claim to regret this act of nepotism.
On August 4 all of New York watched with awe as Sovereign of the Seas spread her twelve thousand yards of canvas and bounded out into the North Atlantic, headed for San Francisco. “With a good chance, we expect he will make the shortest passage on record,” the Boston Daily Atlas said of the captain’s prospects.34 On board was the largest crew ever assembled on an American merchant vessel: 105 men and boys. Tucked away safely in Captain McKay’s cabin was a set of newly drawn and updated Winds and Currents charts that Lieutenant Maury had donated to him personally. Maury wrote Captain McKay that if he followed his course, Sovereign of the Seas would reach her destination in 103 days. Her designer certainly hoped that the Boston Atlas would be proved right and Maury proved wrong, and that this new ship would beat Flying Cloud’s eighty-nine-day record.
Donald McKay’s design instincts (and daring) proved right: bigger still meant faster for a clipper ship. Sovereign flew before the wind as no other ship had before her. “The noble ship,” a crew member known only as Faulkner wrote of her departure from New York Harbor, “clawed off shore like a pilot boat, carrying whole topsails, courses, jib, and spanker. Next morning, the wind favored us a little, and we were soon under all sail, close hauled, walking to the eastward at the rate of 15 miles an hour, and long before sunset were out of sight of land.”35 She passed the equator in twenty-five days and continued forward at full clip.
As the seas worsened toward Cape Horn, Captain McKay made sure that his crew was comfortable and well fed, something lost on many other masters (with the exception of old Captain Nat). “He had stoves in their quarters, and continually had one or more of the boys to attend the fires, and at the same time dry the sailors’ clothes,” Faulkner wrote home, “had warm coffee, and tea, and provisions served out during the night as well as the day, and never exposed the men more than was absolutely necessary.”36
Yet kindness to the sailors did not mean that Lauchlan McKay was easy on his brother’s dream ship. Rather, he hoisted full sail and pushed her to the absolute limit. “He carried on sail so as to make it truly frightful to look aloft,” Faulkner wrote.37 Sovereign of the Seas rounded the cape without incident and then beat up the Chilean coast, battling gales and headwinds all the way.
Then, on the night of October 12, disaster struck. While carrying a full press of canvas, the backstays holding up the mainmast slackened under the strain of wind and rain. The main-topmast came crashing down, taking with it the top portion of the foremast. The entire foretopmast was hanging over the side in a tangled mess, making the situation far worse than on Stag Hound or Flying Cloud. Huge plumes of seawater shot up from the tangled wreckage, and the once-graceful ship came to a halt. The mast was acting like a gigantic anchor, pulling the ship down to one side.
She was the third of Donald McKay’s clippers to be dismasted on her first voyage. Captain McKay ordered, “Nothing must be cut!”
“Impossible, sir,” the mate protested. “We must cut the wreck adrift.”
McKay refused to give in. “Nothing shall be cut,” he repeated, even as the wreckage threatened to cause mortal damage to the vessel’s hull and rig. He then supposedly tossed in a quote from the revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, who had recently fled to the United States after his unsuccessful attempt to win Hungary’s independence from Austria: “Boys, remember Kossuth’s motto: nothing is impossible to him that wills! I will that everything shall be saved; now go to work like Trojans.”38
Miraculously, the sea and wind abated, giving the men time to do
emergency repairs. Over the next several days, the crew used blocks and tackles to pull much of the wreckage out of the water and secured to the deck. Captain McKay barely slept: “now setting a sailmaker’s gang to work repairing sails, next a carpenter’s gang to making and fitting masts and yards, and the sailors generally to clearing the rigging, getting down the stumps of the topmasts.” In twelve days, Faulkner noted, the ship was once again “a-tanto, as complete aloft as if nothing had happened.”39 Aside from saving the ship’s reputation, there was another good reason why Captain McKay refused to put in to Valparaiso or another nearby port for repairs: it would have cost about $25,000 to rerig the ship. Since the 2,950 tons of cargo on board were worth an estimated $85,000, this would have deeply cut into the ship’s profit margin.40
Repaired and freshly painted, Sovereign of the Seas arrived in San Francisco in November after a passage of 103 days from New York. If she hadn’t been dismasted off Chile, she probably would have finished her voyage at least 10 days earlier—tantalizingly close to Flying Cloud’s eighty-nine-day record passage the previous year.
For Lauchlan McKay’s bravery off the coast of Chile, the New York Board of Marine Underwriters would eventually present him with a silver dinner service. Sovereign of the Seas then sailed in ballast (devoid of cargo) to Honolulu, where she was loaded with 8,000 barrels of whale oil. Rather than continue on to China, Captain McKay sailed her directly to New York, where she arrived 82 days later. During this run, Sovereign of the Seas showed her true speed, clocking 421 miles in a single day, or an astonishing average speed of 17.5 knots.41
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Barons of the Sea Page 26
