The merchant Wu Ping-Chien, known by his American friends as Houqua. With an estimated worth of $26 million, Houqua was one of the richest men in the world and served as a mentor to many American traders in Canton. Portraits of Houqua adorned the homes of his American “sons.” This portrait by Lam Qua once hung at the Delano family’s Algonac estate. By permission of Frederic Delano Grant, Jr.
Abiel Abbot Low, close friend and colleague of Warren Delano II and founder of the shipping firm A. A. Low & Brother. By the 1850s, Low operated the largest and most successful fleet of clipper ships in the China and California trades. Meticulous and shrewd, Low vastly expanded his fortune by investing in railroads and the transatlantic cable. He also used his influence to send his other brothers to China to earn their competences. Courtesy of Nadeau’s Auction Gallery
Portrait of Captain Nathaniel Brown Palmer: Antarctic explorer, master mariner, and clipper ship designer. Palmer served as head design consultant for A. A. Low & Brother, supervising the construction of many of the company’s clippers. Although a proponent of sharp lines, he favored the flat-bottomed hull-type used in New Orleans cotton packets, giving his vessels extra capacity and stability without sacrificing speed. The Stonington Historical Society
The early clipper ship Houqua. Designed by Captain Nathaniel Palmer, she boasted a sharp bow and a flat floor. Upon her completion in 1844, a newspaper reporter described her as the “prettiest and most rakish looking packet ever built in the civilized world … as sharp as a cutter—as symmetrical as a yacht—as rakish in her rig as a pirate—and as neat in her deck and cabin arrangements as a lady’s boudoir.” Her figurehead was a bust of the great Chinese merchant, mentor to her owner Abiel Abbot Low. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum
A sketch of Algonac, the forty-room Italianate mansion designed by Andrew Jackson Downing for Warren and Catherine Delano at Newburgh, New York; the house was filled with mementos of the Delanos’ years in China. This drawing is in the hand of either the architect or Warren Delano II, who appears to have been a talented amateur sketch artist. For generations of Delanos, “Algonac” was a code word for good news. Algonac burned down in 1916. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Warren Delano II with his children Sara (“Sallie”) and Warren III, in a daguerreotype taken in 1856. Three years later, the patriarch would leave the idyllic life he had created for his family at Algonac to rebuild his fortune trading opium and tea in China. Sara Delano Perkins Collection
Catherine Lyman Delano, wife of Warren Delano II, was noted for her beauty, intelligence, and calm demeanor. During the course of her marriage, she traveled to China three times and kept a detailed journal of the family’s adventures with their eight surviving children. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
William Henry Aspinwall, owner of the early clipper ships Rainbow and Sea Witch and mastermind of the Panama Pacific Railroad. He had the foresight to take a gamble on John Willis Griffiths’ revolutionary clipper ship designs, and put his trust in the aggressive sailing tactics of Captain Robert Waterman. Not part of the “Canton Coterie,” Aspinwall had business interests as far afield as China, South America, and the Mediterranean. Despite running an aggressive shop, he was also known as someone who had “rare faith in the honesty of his fellow man.” Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
John Willis Griffiths, the groundbreaking shipbuilder who designed the Rainbow and Sea Witch for William Henry Aspinwall and the Memnon for Warren Delano II. His revolutionary clipper ship hull designs called for a sharp bow entry and a V-shaped bottom. An eccentric self-promoter in his later years, Griffiths would claim that he presented his radical designs to a snickering audience at the American Institute of the City of New York before being hired by Aspinwall and vindicated. There is no proof this actually occurred. Courtesy of Deborah Pearson
Captain Robert “Bully Bob” Waterman, one of the most charismatic and feared captains under the American flag. He commanded Howland & Aspinwall’s Sea Witch on her record-breaking seventy-four-day run from Hong Kong to New York in 1849, a record that still stands to this day. Despite his reputation for brutality and hard driving, no ship under Waterman’s command ever lost a spar. Alamy Images
The clipper ship Sea Witch, John Willis Griffith’s masterpiece for William Henry Aspinwall, with her figurehead of a snarling Chinese dragon. Captain Robert Waterman was the guiding force behind her spectacular performance at sea. Courtesy of the Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles
A photograph of San Francisco taken in 1850, showing the harbor full of ships riding at anchor, many of them left to rot by crews who had jumped ship looking for gold. During the heady years of the Gold Rush, eggs sold for $1 a piece, a pair of boots for $50, and a barrel of flour for $60. To cash in on the unprecedented demand for passengers and freight, East Coast shipping operators sent almost anything that floated on the treacherous voyage around Cape Horn. Library of Congress
Moses Grinnell, partner in the successful shipping firm of Grinnell, Minturn & Company. In 1851, the packet ship operator paid Enoch Train $90,000 for his unfinished clipper ship Flying Cloud, then under construction at Donald McKay’s East Boston shipyard. Train later lamented that selling Flying Cloud to Grinnell was the worst business decision he had ever made. The Union Club of the City of New York
Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy, commander of the clipper ship Flying Cloud during her two record-breaking voyages from New York to California. Flying Cloud was his first clipper ship command, and he pushed the ship to her absolute limit. His wife Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, an expert navigator, always went to sea with her husband, whom she fondly referred to as “Perk.” This photograph of Josiah Creesy dates from his Civil War naval service as master of the clipper Ino. Sadly, no image Eleanor Creesy survives. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum
Captain Charles Porter Low, who defied his older brother Abbot’s wishes and went to sea. The family troublemaker proved his worth, going on to command the clippers Houqua, Samuel Russell, N. B. Palmer, and Jacob Bell. Public domain
The clipper ship Flying Cloud, as depicted in a popular Currier and Ives engraving. Upon her return to New York after her record-breaking voyage from New York to San Francisco, Moses Grinnell ordered copies of Captain Creesy’s log printed in gold letters on white silk and distributed them to his friends and associates. Composer Charles D’Albert even penned a “Flying Cloud Schottische” dance in the ship’s honor. Image courtesy of the Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles
A painting of the elegant N. B. Palmer, anchored off Staten Island. This clipper, the final masterpiece of designer Captain Nathaniel Brown Palmer, was Captain Charles Porter Low’s favorite and longest command. Low’s wife Sarah gave birth to their son Charles Jr. aboard N. B. Palmer in 1852. Courtesy of the Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles
A formal portrait of the Nova Scotia–born shipbuilder Donald McKay. Possessing immense technical gifts and a strong immigrant’s drive, McKay declared, “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.” As arguably America’s most famous clipper ship builder, McKay was lionized by poets, journalists, and politicians in his adopted hometown of Boston. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The clipper ship Great Republic, the masterpiece of Donald McKay. When completed in 1853, she was the largest merchant vessel in the world—until she was almost completely destroyed by a disastrous fire on the eve of her maiden voyage. This painting by James Edward Buttersworth shows Great Republic as she would have looked under sail had she not burned. Courtesy of the Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt building a model of a clipper ship in his study at his Hudson River estate at Hyde Park, c.1935. As a politician, Franklin was fond of quoting his maternal grandfather’s business dictum: never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sources on the clipper ship era are scattered, and careful detective work is required to separate fact from myth. The scores of mid-nineteenth-century American clipper ships that once sailed the seas are all gone—long since sunk, broken up, or burned for their metal parts. Yet their story is there to be told, in letters, diaries, published reminiscences, business contracts and receipts—not to mention in its enduring impact on American culture and history.
I have relied heavily on Captain Arthur Hamilton Clark’s The Clipper Ship Era, published in 1910 and written by one of the great American experts on the sailing ship construction and handling. Clark knew many of the men who sailed the clippers of the 1850s, and he was also a friend of the great naval architect Donald McKay, who built more record-breaking clipper ships than any other shipbuilder of his time. Other invaluable secondary sources include the excellent work of Basil Lubbock, Carl C. Cutler, William C. Crothers, and Howard Irving Chapelle. And then there is Jacques Downs, who over the course of decades, studied the life and culture of the foreigners’ community in Canton. The fruit of his lifetime obsession is the meticulously researched, colorfully written book The Golden Ghetto.
I am also indebted to the Recollections of Charles Porter Low, member of the historic Low family, who captained several of the great clippers whose stories are here told. Not written until 1906, fifty years after his glory years in the California and China trade, Low’s recollections remain vivid, colorful, and full of self-deprecating humor. Like any memoir, especially a sailor’s tale, the Recollections should be taken with a few grains of salt, but his specifics on dates and log entries indicate that although writing late in life, Low was working from actual references at his disposal.
The voices of the era’s often-illiterate sailors survive in countless sea chanteys. To bring other lost voices to life, I have included descriptions of sailors and their craft from Richard Henry Dana’s 1840 Two Years Before the Mast, the classic memoir of a Harvard-student-turned-sailor that remains arguably the most accurate and vivid account of life at sea aboard an American vessel during the golden age of sail.
Putting together the biographies of the men who designed and built the clipper ships involved a fair amount of educated guesswork. The naval architect most celebrated in legend, Donald McKay, also remains the greatest mystery. According to his descendant Richard Hamilton, most of his papers were destroyed in a flood many years ago, and many of the secondary sources on him are unreliable, including an account written by one of his grandsons in the 1920s. In this light, I’ve evaluated and cross-referenced stories carefully, and I’m grateful for Richard Hamilton’s own recent research.
McKay’s rival William Henry Webb was the subject of an in-depth commemorative 1987 biography by Edwin L. Dunbaugh and William duBarry Thomas, published by the Webb Institute. John Willis Griffiths, the builder of the early clippers Rainbow and Sea Witch, was not as fortunate. His life, too, remains shrouded in myth, and his own inflated accounts are not to be trusted. The most reliable character study comes from Dr. Larrie Ferreiro’s biography published in the Nautical Research Journal.
Captain Nathaniel Palmer, designer of Houqua and other clippers for the Low family firm, is lovingly portrayed in Charles Low’s Recollections, as well as in a few early-twentieth-century biographical sketches. The Palmer-Loper papers in the Library of Congress, however, do not reveal much in the way of personal thoughts.
The merchants who form the core of this story have left fascinating but widely scattered records. The Forbes brothers—John Murray and Robert Bennet—were prolific letter writers and diarists during their trading years in China and as shipowners and entrepreneurs in Boston. Their papers can be found in the Massachusetts Historical Society and in published memoirs. Robert Forbes, like his friend Charles Low, was a great yarn spinner and shameless self-promoter, yet he was a keen, colorful observer of the events of his time. John Murray Forbes, the soberer and steadier of the two brothers, was the bridge between the Chinese merchant elite and the Boston “Brahmin” aristocracy, both in matters of business and culture.
Warren Delano, progenitor of the presidential branch of his Yankee clan and a man whose life was full of adventure, was an inveterate letter writer, but many of his records were destroyed when the family mansion burned in 1916. My reconstruction of his life and personality comes from surviving correspondence at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum at Hyde Park, New York, as well as from memoirs by his children and Geoffrey Ward’s meticulously researched Before the Trumpet: The Young Franklin Roosevelt. Descendants Catherine (Nina) and Lyman Delano have been extremely helpful with family knowledge and lore, as has Sara Delano Perkins for allowing me use of some of her never-before-published collection of family photographs, and Frederic Delano Grant Jr. for solving the mystery of the portrait of Houqua that once hung at Algonac. It has been a real pleasure to get to know the Delanos over the past few years, and I deeply appreciate their enthusiasm and support.
William Henry Aspinwall was the most elusive personality of the shipowners, and I relied on the biography The Aspinwall Empire written by his descendant Colonel Duncan Somerville to shine some light on the man, his ships, and his character sketches of contemporaries. I faced a similar challenge with Moses Grinnell, part owner of the legendary Flying Cloud, whose stature loomed large in the New York merchant community but whose inner thoughts are lost to time. Finally, aside from one long letter written by Sarah Bowman on the Flying Cloud’s maiden voyage, as well as that vessel’s log, there do not appear to be any deeply revelatory primary sources on Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy and his remarkable wife, Eleanor; I have had to base much of my knowledge of them on the detective work of the late A. B. C. Whipple.
James Grinnell of the New Bedford Whaling Museum has been extremely generous with his treasure trove of research documents and material. Thanks to his help, I have a much better grasp of the entire remarkable clan of Yankee capitalists and inventors. Many other wonderful institutions have shared their rich collections of primary and secondary sources, allowing me to stitch together the disparate strands of the story. These include the Mystic Seaport Museum and Library, Peabody Essex Museum, the NewYork Historical Society, the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the San Francisco Maritime Museum. Thanks also to Mary and Ian Lewis for being such generous hosts during my research stay in the Mystic area.
For me, the greatest living link between the clipper ship era and the present day is Llewellyn Howland III, a fellow Harvard alumnus and a book editor of the old school. Introduced to me by mutual friend Ed Kane, Louie is related to many of the old Yankee clipper ship families, including the Forbeses, and has a wealth of knowledge about the men who built, sailed, and owned the great and wondrous ships. It was he who urged me to write a book about New England family capitalism on the high seas and then devoted many precious hours of his time to help me do just that. I especially enjoyed his sailing stories. He’s the real reason why it’s wise to go sailing with someone who knows what he’s doing. Thank you, Louie, for your encouragement, advice, and salty Yankee humor during our times in Gloucester.
Also much gratitude to William H. Bunting, one of the deans of American maritime history and author of Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships, for his input.
I would not have been able to complete this book without the assistance of many others, who have graciously given me their time and shared their resources so that I could complete the project.
Let me warmly thank Thomas LeBien, Brit Hvide, and Megan Hogan (who, it turns out, has a family connection to the Delanos), my editors at Simon & Schuster, for their extensive guidance and faith in the clipper ship project. With their extraordinary attention to detail and storytelling narrative, Simon & Schuster still publishes books the old-fashioned way. Jonathan Karp, publisher at S&S, has been a wonderful source of encouragement since 2007, and I’m grateful to him for giving me a chance at writing a second b
ook under his aegis. Kudos to my agent Becky Sweren at Aevitas Creative for her tireless support and patience, as well as Vivien Ravdin for her expert narrative and editorial advice, which she had also provided in spades for my last book, A Man and His Ship.
In the fall of 2013, I spent seven weeks at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. There amidst the autumnal splendor of New England, I wrote the initial draft of Barons of the Sea. Many revisions and rewrites followed, but I shall forever be grateful to my fellow artists at MacDowell, as well as its dedicated staff. Special thanks to Brent Watanabe, Alma Leiva, Riccardo Lorenz, Sutton Beres Culler, Anne Hayashi, and Blake Tewksbury for their friendship, and to the entire kitchen for their superlative culinary skill.
As with my previous book, I spent my summers writing at a special place on the South Shore of Massachusetts, where the sea is a constant source of inspiration, wonder, and reassurance. I’d like to thank the residents of this seaside colony, and recognize especially our long-time family friend Ramelle Adams, and her late brother, Peter Boylston Adams. It was through this community that I also met Richard Cadwalader, a graduate of Maine Maritime Academy and seasoned mariner who gave many great suggestions for the manuscript.
In the late summer of 2015, I was invited by my friend Stephanie Speakman to sail around Martha’s Vineyard aboard the clipper schooner Shenandoah. Aboard this reproduction of an 1850s sailing ship, the brainchild of the legendary Captain Bob Douglas, I was able to experience life at sea in a really vivid way. Although we passengers were not permitted to go aloft, we sang along with chanteyman Bill Schustik as we raised the sails and pumped the windlass to raise and lower the anchor. One of my favorite memories is of a night on the Shenandoah as she was anchored off Naushon Island (still the family retreat of the Forbes family), and I lay on deck, gazing at the Milky Way with Bill’s bass rendition of “Lorena” wafting up from below.
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