Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  As his straits grew more dire, Delano noted that Abiel Abbot Low was still prospering in the China trade—Americans still craved tea, and the Chinese still craved opium. His stake in the Baltimore & Ohio continued to pay off handsomely. He could see that the situation in China was admittedly volatile. A Second Opium War had broken out in 1856, the year before the panic. This time traditional enemies Great Britain and France joined forces to strong-arm the Chinese government into legalizing the opium trade completely, opening all remaining Chinese ports to Western trade, and establishing diplomatic legations in the Chinese capital. After four years of fierce fighting and broken treaties, British and French forces would reach Peking, burning large portions of the city to the ground, including the emperor’s summer palace.

  For the Chinese, the defeat would be total. The once-mighty Celestial Kingdom would now be at the mercy of the Western powers. During the next fifty years, England, France, and others would carve up China’s coast into “spheres of influence.” While China never became a colonial possession like India, and its imperial family nominally remained in power, it was powerless to stop the settlement of its port cities by the reviled fanqui or to stem the still-growing addiction of its people to the “foreign mud.”

  As in the past, American traders had stepped aside to let Britain and France do the dirty work. The American men of Russell & Company spent the years of fighting huddled within the tightly guarded British island fortress of Hong Kong. This time their homes did not go up in flames, and they were allowed to resume trading immediately after each phase of the conflict ended.

  America had, however, ventured into the imperialist arena—in Japan, in 1853, when it sent a fleet of steam-powered US Navy warships into Edo Harbor. Japan had coal, and the American government wanted a fueling station for its military vessels. Commodore Matthew Perry offered the Japanese government an ultimatum: open up to Western trade or face withering American cannonfire. The US shipping industry also had a special grudge against the closed, forbidden country: shipwrecked whalers who washed up on Japan’s shores had long been subjected to imprisonment and death.

  It was a strange echo of the British Royal Navy’s appearance in Canton in 1842 to avenge the twenty thousand seized chests of opium. The Japanese, who had banned all white Christians (save for the nonmissionary Dutch) from their shores since the early seventeenth century, decided that the best course of action would be to open up to Western trade while preserving their sovereignty.

  Matthew Perry returned to America triumphant, declaring in a speech that “Westward will the course of empire take its way … The people of America will, in some form or other, extend their dominion and their power until they shall have brought within their mighty embrace the islands of the great Pacific, and placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia.”6

  Perry’s speech proved darkly prescient, although Japan turned out to be a tougher nut to crack than China in opening itself to “spheres of influence,” not to mention the opium trade. To get the Japanese to agree to sign a Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1858, an American diplomat threatened to call upon the Royal Navy squadron stationed at Hong Kong to join in teaching the heathen Japanese a lesson. This time, however, there was no British navy involvement and no bloodshed. Within a few decades, the Japanese had modernized their military, especially their navy, to such an extent that any Western power would challenge them at its own peril, something the Russian czar would soon enough discover, when, at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, the Imperial Japanese Navy obliterated his fleet.

  En route to Japan, Perry’s fleet dropped anchor in Hong Kong Harbor. While there, the commodore took shore leave in luxurious lodgings at the Russell & Company headquarters. The firm was still making money hand over fist in the drug trade, with the newest scions of the Perkins and Forbes families securely at the helm.

  Abiel Abbot Low jumped at the new commercial opportunity in Japan, deploying some of his clippers, including the aging but still sprightly Houqua. Japanese tea and goods quickly became all the rage in America. “Being entirely free from dye,” Low noted, the tea “preserves remarkable purity and delicacy of flavor.” Not only was it delicious, but also his company had direct oversight of its production. “In Japan,” he continued, “the uncolored leaf is brought to the warehouses of the foreign merchant and, under his supervision, fired, put in boxes, matted, strapped, and marked, ready to go on board ship.”7 Unlike in China, where fraud was rampant, there was no danger of the tea crates being stuffed with sticks, stones, and other plants to make weight.

  *

  Five years old in 1859, Sara Delano was too young to comprehend why her father wandered around the house looking worried. Warren Delano’s fortunes had worsened since the panic two years before. With great regret, he had sold the family’s townhouse on Colonnade Row. Yet the sale of the New York mansion provided only a temporary solution. The bills kept mounting for the household expenses to which the Delanos had been accustomed for so long: the wages for a small army of servants and gardeners, a fleet of coaches, a stable full of horses, and the best produce from the Hudson Valley. Warren Delano could shutter Algonac and move his growing family back to Fairhaven and his father’s house. Or he could find a way to remake his fortune.

  That fall, as word of Chinese defeats filtered back to New York, and tensions between the slaveholding South and the free-labor North increased, cash-strapped Warren Delano announced that he would be going again to the eastern shores of Asia to rebuild his fortune. How he would do it, only his closest business confidants knew: he would rejoin Russell & Company as a partner and return to the opium trade, not only shipping the drug into mainland China but also importing it into the United States for medical use.

  Catherine, now pregnant with another child, was distraught at her husband’s impending departure. The China trade was the domain of ambitious young bachelors, not middle-aged family men. But she worked to hide her anxiety, busying herself in cutting expenses and caring for the family’s six children, with the help of her husband’s cousin Nancy Church, who served as governess and tutor.

  Warren could not have chosen a riskier time to leave the country. The political situation in the United States soured just as the economy had. Not only was the nation still mired in depression, with soaring unemployment, but tensions between North and South were reaching the breaking point. The South’s cotton shipments slumped, as did England’s demand for Northern goods. Many ships in the Yankee commercial fleet lay idle. Shipyards saw their orders dry up. According to Arthur Clark, the total tonnage of ships built in the United States plummeted from 583,450 in 1855 to 378,000 just two years later.8 Unable to fill their ships’ holds, operators began selling their vessels at fire-sale prices, often to European interests.

  Many of these once-proud vessels were pushed into the fertilizer trade, hauling bird manure from South America to ports around the world. Others were lost in accidents, sometimes with great losses of life. Sea Witch sank off Cuba in 1856, taking several hundred Chinese laborers with her. Flying Fish and Oriental were wrecked while leaving Chinese ports, their valuable tea cargoes disappearing too. Staffordshire’s end was especially violent: while on the return leg of a stormy transatlantic crossing, she ran aground and sank off the Canadian coast in December 1853, taking 170 of her 214 passengers and crew with her. Among the dead was Captain Josiah Richardson, former commander of Donald McKay’s first clipper ship, the Stag Hound.9 When news of the ship’s sinking reached Boston, the editors of the Boston Semi-Weekly Atlas paid the following tribute to her captain: “We knew him personally and can say that he was modest, kind to his sailors, bold and manly in the discharge of his duty, and uniformly successful in all his undertakings. Peace to his manes, for a better sailor or a truer man never trod a ship’s deck.”10 The financial and human cost of operating such big ships at high speeds, often without regular overhauls, was now a real concern.

  In addition to mass unemployment, the matter of slavery came to the po
litical fore. Despite the best efforts of those in Washington who sought to maintain the balance of power by admitting one slave state for every free state, Southern members of Congress, threatened by the power of the Northern transportation and industrial complex, cut off all subsidies for transatlantic steam travel, leaving the Collins Line to collapse into bankruptcy. Edward Knight Collins, once one of the most powerful and richest shipping magnates in America, never recovered from the blow.

  In October 1859 an unsuccessful businessman and abolitionist named John Brown led a failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Warren Delano took leave of Algonac around the same time as troops under the leadership of Colonel Robert E. Lee captured John Brown and quashed his attempt to incite and lead a slave insurrection.

  As Catherine Delano worried that her husband’s ship would sink in transit, the golden Hudson Valley autumn turned to silver winter, and a snowy calm settled down on Algonac. Huddled around the coal grate in the main parlor, the Delanos played games, wrote letters, and continued their school lessons as best they could. Several months after Warren left, Catherine gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Cassie. Sara, grieving with her siblings for their father now halfway around the world, called the baby the “posthumous child.”11 Warren had promised his children an absence of no more than two years.

  Outside the gates of Algonac, the country edged toward war. In 1860 an unknown former congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, running as the candidate of the upstart Republican Party, was elected president of the United States with only 40 percent of the popular vote. Lincoln called for slavery’s restriction “as with a chain of steel,” and told one friend privately: “This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”12, 13 After Lincoln’s election, the country splintered, as eleven southern states seceded from the union and chose former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as their president. The Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens declared, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”14

  To antislavery businessmen such as Warren Delano, such statements were contemptible and further soured his already low opinion of Southern Democrats. In his experience, he said, “not all Democrats were horse thieves, but all horse thieves were Democrats.”15 By April 15 of the following year, when rebel forces shelled the union stronghold at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America were at war. Almost as soon as hostilities broke out, the steam-and sail-powered ships of the Union navy blockaded the Confederacy’s deep-water ports. President Lincoln’s goal was to starve the rebels into submission.

  To retaliate, the Confederacy contracted in secret with shipyards in Great Britain to build several fast steam-powered commerce raiders that would wreak havoc on the Yankees’ fleet of clippers, transatlantic packets, and whalers. British politicians such as Prime Minister Palmerston turned a blind eye to this activity. What England couldn’t destroy through commercial competition, she would destroy using the rebel government as a front. Also, a divided and weakened America was good for Great Britain’s imperial ambitions. Better a subservient trading partner than a united economic competitor, on land and sea. Many British merchants were ardent supporters of the Confederacy, as they preferred an uninterrupted flow of Southern cotton to competing for Northern manufactured goods.

  Yet the members of the old Canton coterie in England made sure that Britain’s financial establishment did not declare economic war on the Northern economy. President Lincoln’s minister to the Court of St. James’s, Charles Francis Adams—son of President John Quincy Adams—worked fervently behind the scenes to make sure Great Britain stayed neutral in the conflict. At his side in London were John Murray Forbes and William Henry Aspinwall. Their mission was to try to purchase potential commerce raiders under construction in England that were “most likely to be used by the insurgents and to be dangerous in their hands.”16 The two shipping barons spent their time hobnobbing with British high society and defending the Union cause at dinner parties. They failed to purchase several ships that ultimately became notorious Confederate commerce raiders, yet they did successfully secure a $500,000 advance loan from Baring Brothers & Co. to the United States government on $4 million worth of bonds. Yet the deal came with a catch: if the United States government gave permission to American vessels to intercept British merchant vessels, the Treasury would have to return the advance. “The existing agitation of the public mind, both in and out of Parliament, rendered this condition a sine qua non,” Forbes and Aspinwall wrote Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, “and we may safely express our doubt if any other house would have undertaken to make the loan; certainly none on terms so liberal.”17 Russell Sturgis, Delano’s old boss and the American-born Baring’s partner, most likely smoothed the way for this deal to fund the Union war effort.

  Yet other Yankee merchants couldn’t resist colluding with the Confederacy, especially when it came to supplying the fledgling nation with slave labor. Using clippers for human trafficking was nothing new. Down-on-their-luck ocean greyhounds, most notably Sea Witch, had been used to transport Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba and Peru. Scarcely a week after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Union patrol vessel USS Saratoga intercepted the clipper ship Nightingale off the coast of Africa. She had sailed from Boston with a cargo of grain, supposedly en route to Liverpool. Something, though, was amiss. The ship had no business being off the coast of Africa. Saratoga’s crew found no evidence of slaves on board Nightingale, at least not at first. But they didn’t let her go. Rather, they waited until night and boarded again. There, in the ship’s cargo holds and once-lavish staterooms, the Yankee officers found to their horror 961 captured Africans in chains, prostrate and terrified. The ship echoed with the cries of hundreds of captive human beings destined for Southern plantations. Sailing across the Atlantic in a week with a cargo of slaves was obviously more lucrative than sailing from China in three or more months with a hold full of tea. And when done in a ship able to outrun almost any naval vessel afloat, the enterprise was almost worth the risk. Saratoga’s captain seized the clipper from her shady owners, released the slaves, and sent her back to America under navy command. Nightingale’s captain, Francis Bowen, known as the “Prince of Slavers,” jumped ship and escaped into the African wilderness.18 Saratoga’s commander, Lieutenant John Julius Guthrie, may have allowed Bowen to escape because he himself was a Southern sympathizer.19 Upon Saratoga’s return to Brooklyn, Guthrie resigned his commission and joined the fledgling Confederate navy.20

  *

  A strong supporter of the Union, Donald McKay quickly found his fortunes buoyed when the US Navy contracted with his yard to build new warships. To prepare for the real possibility that England would join forces with the Confederacy, the Canadian-born shipbuilder advocated that America’s wooden warships should be armored with five-inch-thick “shellproof” iron plates. He also argued that America’s underutilized fleet of extreme clippers, including Great Republic, could be armed, covered with iron armor, and converted into swift, steam-powered warships. This new, powerful fleet could then stand guard outside of Northern seaports, protecting them from the Royal Navy and from the Confederacy’s own ironclad, which was then being constructed from the wreck of the scuttled steam frigate Merrimac.

  “This fleet of about 2000 vessels of war … can be turned out in less time than four to six months, and it would be sufficient to protect our coast and meet the first storm,” McKay argued in a public letter published by the New York Times in December 1861. “The times are gone when Europe could be frightened by thundering newspaper articles and the hollow brag of ambitiou
s politicians; we have to show now that we know how to handle the engines of war, and to stand a hall [sic] of shells and balls. A powerful fleet is the best guarantee of peace for a great maritime nation.”21

  McKay proved prescient about the future of warships: in March 1862 the CSS Merrimac faced off against the Union ironclad USS Monitor off the coast of Virginia in a naval battle lasting several hours. The engagement, which ended in a draw, brought to a close the age of the wooden warship. Unfortunately, the Civil War—and ironclads—destroyed what was left of Donald McKay’s finances. He had won the contract to build four ships for the US Navy, including the ironclad USS Nausett, which was to be put into action bombarding Confederate coastal defenses. Yet the navy did not issue finalized plans for the Nausett class before construction started, and, as a result, the first built exhibited severe design flaws, not the least of which being that her deck was only three inches above the waterline. The resulting design revisions meant huge cost overruns for McKay and other shipbuilders, whom the navy refused to compensate for their extra labor and materials. Faced with an additional $300,000 in debts, the desperate McKay was now in danger of losing his shipyard and would spend the rest of his life trying to claw back his losses from the American navy.22