Clipper Ships and the Golden Age of Sail

by Sam Jefferson

  The Pagoda anchorage, Foochow, in 1866. The tea clippers are lined up awaiting their cargo. Pictured left to right: the Black Prince, the Fiery Cross, the Taitsing, the Taeping and the Flying Spur.

  Another view of the Pagoda anchorage, as it looked in 1866.

  A tea plantation in the Chinese interior.

  When it came to the China tea race, even loading up your boat was a competition against your rivals. The shippers had favoured the lovely Ariel, which was fair enough, but it looked set to be a dead heat between the next three vessels: the Serica, Taeping and Fiery Cross. By rights, they should all have left on the same tide. Yet at midday, while the other two skippers were rowed ashore to clear customs, a tug had sidled up alongside the Fiery Cross and towed her down the Min River to the sea. Customs hadn’t been cleared and bills of lading were left unsigned, but the Fiery Cross was gone, leaving George Innes on the verge of babbling insanity.

  Innes had a special reason to be aggrieved. The previous year he had raced Robinson back from Foochow, the clippers leaving on the same tide. Some 16,000 miles later, they had arrived in the English Channel with only a few miles separating them, but it had been the Serica leading. Somehow, Robinson on the Fiery Cross had sniffed out a tug that had towed her up to London ahead of her rival. Much bitterness had ensued, as the tea shippers paid out an extra ten shillings per ton of tea to the winner of the race. This added up to a great deal of money. In addition to this, the crews of both boats had bet an entire month’s wages against each other on the outcome, and the unsatisfactory finish meant emotions were running high.

  Out to sea

  Customs cleared, the tide now dictated that the Serica and Taeping wouldn’t be able to leave until early the following morning. While Innes stewed, the Fiery Cross was making progress down the Min River. The Pagoda anchorage was about 15 miles from the open sea and this first part of the journey was very beautiful. Steep, lush hills dropped right down to the water’s edge, their peaks often shrouded in soft mists. The lower slopes were terraced to a dizzying height with the tea crop. Now and again a small village or a temple, clinging to the hillside, would punctuate the natural beauty of the place.

  It was a breathtaking departure point. Yet Richard Robinson paid little attention to the scenery. He was on his mettle on this treacherous river. A couple of miles downstream, he approached the Mingan Pass and the river narrowed to a gorge. The tide would race through at seven knots on the flood. If you grounded here, your ship was at the mercy of the tide and the Chinese wreckers, who could strip a stricken vessel in a matter of hours.

  The Serica drying her sails prior to departure. She had been launched from the same yard as the Taeping in the same year, but was always slightly slower.

  Monsoon season in SE Asia can bring dramatic and violent storms, as this painting illustrates.

  A modern day view of the Min River at the Pagoda anchorage.

  The Min River was a very picturesque departure point for the tea clippers.

  With three victories in the tea race in her first five seasons afloat, Fiery Cross had dominated the tea trade for the previous five seasons, but by 1866, the newer vessels were threatening to steal her crown and only her hard driving captain was keeping her competitive.

  As the Fiery Cross approached the wreck of the clipper Childers, which had met this precise fate, the crew focused on another ship ahead, sheering about in the current, evidently anchored. ‘Why, it’s the Ariel!’ Robinson’s mate exclaimed, and so it was. The Ariel had suffered some problem with her tug, had been forced to anchor hastily and had missed the tide over the bar. Captain Robinson chuckled; he knew that the Fiery Cross was two feet shallower than the Ariel and would get across the bar with no trouble.

  On the deck of the Ariel, Captain John Keay eyed the approaching ship with dismay. After a trying few hours, things were getting worse. As the Fiery Cross came alongside, Captain Robinson doffed his hat to Keay in a mocking farewell. Across the water, three derisive cheers for the Ariel resounded lustily from the crew of the Fiery Cross. Keay and his crew were left fuming as their rival swept by.

  The following morning the Ariel finally towed out to sea, but now she had company. Both the Serica and Taeping had caught her up. In the morning haze, the trio traded tacks in the fluky breeze, trying to gain an advantage. It was 16,000 miles to London, but even at this stage, every yard counted. About 24 hours later, the Taitsing, under Captain Nutsford, finished loading and was towed downriver in pursuit. The rest of the fleet was not far behind, but the race was to be between these five.

  The captains and their ships

  The leading ships were well matched. The Ariel was probably the favourite as she was brand-new, freshly launched from the Clyde yard of Robert Steele in Greenock. Many a discerning sailor had eyed her with admiration as she lay at the Pagoda anchorage awaiting her cargo. She was slightly larger than her rivals and incredibly elegant. Her low black hull gleamed in the sunlight, her graceful sheer accentuated by a gilt riband which ran along her deck line. Her counter stern was far daintier and more cut away than any other clipper.

  In fact, when hard-pressed on the passage out, she had utterly terrified her crew by scooping up water over this beautiful counter and threatening to wash her helmsman away. Captain Keay kept very quiet about that, but he nursed doubts about her safety in a big following sea.

  A painting of an unknown tea clipper slashing through the China Sea. Close inspection of her deck layout and sail plan suggests the only likely candidate is the beautiful Ariel.

  In contrast to the newcomer, the Taeping and Serica were both tried and tested, being three years old and, like Ariel built by Robert Steele. The Serica had won the 1864 tea race and lost out by the narrowest of margins in 1865. The Taeping was very fast, but a serious dismasting had kept her out of the first flight for two seasons. She had run home from Hong Kong with a favourable monsoon in the astonishing time of 88 days the year before. Now was her chance.

  The Taitsing, meanwhile, was a new ship and an unknown quantity, but the Fiery Cross… well, everyone knew about the Fiery Cross. She was six years old and had won the China race in four of the past five seasons. She was old now, but still the boat to beat.

  The fastest ship on earth was nothing without a good skipper and, despite several of them being rather out of temper on departure, these were men at the peak of their game. Captain Robinson’s antics had succeeded in enraging everyone, and this was partly because all knew they could not afford to let him get away from them. He was too sharp for that; a man of incredible energy, Robinson wrung every last ounce of speed out of his ship. A passenger who travelled aboard the Fiery Cross with Robinson in command voiced his utter amazement at the chaos of ropes and sails that strewed the decks as Robinson charged around like a man on springs, trimming the yards frantically to get that extra tenth of a knot out of his ship.

  Captain Keay of the Ariel was a very different man. A quiet, taciturn Scot, he raced his ship in a very scientific manner and had a special weighted box on wheels which he would use to adjust the trim of the Ariel to suit the conditions. Unlike Robinson, he was a meticulous man who enjoyed order aboard. He wasn’t afraid to take a risk to get ahead and, with the twitchy Ariel under his command, he was going to need nerves of steel. He enjoyed a strong rivalry with his fellow Scot MacKinnon, a native of the small island of Tiree and a man of similar temperament and drive. Back in the 1850s and early 1860s these two had commanded the rivals Ellen Rodger and Falcon, the dominant vessels in the trade until the Fiery Cross had turned up. Now they commanded newer, faster vessels and were determined to assert their superiority.

  The Ariel and Taeping were both built by Robert Steele in Greenock and were probably the favourites in the 1866 race.

  Captain John Keay of the Ariel (above) and Captain Donald MacKinnon of the Taeping (above right) had a rivalry dating back to the 1850s.

  The Ariel under a very heavy press of sail, including many of her ‘flying kites’, gives an exce
llent impression of speed as she slashes through the water.

  A contemporary advert for China tea. The advert stresses that this is for the sought-after ‘first crop’ Pekoe and Congou teas from Foochow.

  Fiery Captain Innes of the Serica was a daredevil and a drinker. He’d been in the China trade for many years and knew every trick in the book. A short cut in the China Seas held no fear for him. So much so that he had rammed his previous command, the Lady Grant, onto a reef and lost her. Captain Nutsford of the Taitsing knew Innes very well as Nutsford had been mate on the Serica on her previous voyage.

  Both were capable of pushing their ships to the limit as illustrated by this anecdote from Nutsford: One night the Serica was tearing along before a gale under a tremendous press of sail, the ship’s very fabric groaning under the strain. With the wind increasing, Nutsford went below to ask Innes if it might be wise to reduce sail a little. Innes, who was taking a nap, answered sleepily: ‘Can ye still see the lee cathead?’ (The cathead is on the bow – if you can’t see it, the ship is half submerged.) Nutsford answered in the affirmative, upon which Innes sank back into slumber, murmuring: ‘She’s a’right then.’

  All five of these skippers firmly believed they could win the race. The long voyage would be about constant vigilance. Generally, in the first leg down the China Sea, the skipper would lash a cane chair to the break of the poop and take the occasional cat nap. Even after that, there would be no real rest until London. Keay, for one, had his entire cabin jammed full of tea chests as he sought to get some extra weight aft.

  The challenges of sailing China clippers

  Handling a China clipper was a challenge in itself. The captain was in charge of a 200 ft racing machine, setting around 30,000 square feet of canvas on anything up to 40 different sails. In addition to the regular sails, a clipper carried innumerable ‘flying kites’, or stunsails, on light spars. These sails were forever being taken in and reset, so there was no let-up for captain or crew.

  China clippers were not like normal ships in the way they handled squalls either. The standard approach on any tall ship was to bear away and run before a squall until its ferocity was spent. Woe betide the clipper captain who took this method. The ships were so fine-lined that if you turned away from the wind during a squall, the vessel would generally lay over with her rudder half out the water until the sea started pouring over the gunwales.

  A story told in fo’c’sles of the time was how the hugely dignified and vastly experienced Captain Robert Deas had been given command of the very sharp clipper Titania. Although very competent, Deas was not used to handling flighty clippers. Faced with his first serious blow some days after departure, Deas promptly ordered the helm to be put down so she could run before the squall. The clipper proceeded to lay her gunwale under the water and tear along out of control at an undignified angle. All this time, her stately captain clung to the rail, pipe clenched between his teeth, as he tried to maintain his regal demeanour. Shortly afterwards, the Titania was dismasted.

  On deck aboard a clipper ship in heavy weather. Many of the tea clippers had very low bulwarks, leaving crew exposed in heavy seas.

  The Salamis sits bolt upright in dry dock awaiting a fresh coat of anti foul. This beautiful clipper ship was built in 1875. She was the iron sister to the attractive Thermopylae and was almost as fast. Although built for the tea trade, the Salamis never carried a cargo of tea, but was diverted into the Australian trade where she made a reputation for herself as the fastest iron clipper in the wool fleet. She was wrecked in the South Seas in 1905.

  The China trader Thomas Blyth entering Hong Kong. Smaller clippers such as this were no match for flyers such as Ariel and Fiery Cross.

  Sail handling aboard a racing clipper was an endless and demanding job, with the yards requiring constant adjustment. Falling from aloft was a continous risk and many sailors perished in this manner.

  A dramatic depiction of the kind of Chinese war junk that operated in the China Sea during the time of the clipper ships.

  The monsoon weather could be very unpredictable with extremely severe squalls often sweeping in almost out of nowhere. Yet it was the typhoon that was feared by all sailors traversing the China Sea. There is no difference between a typhoon and a hurricane except its location, as typhoon derives from the Japanese term for a severe revolving storm. In this picture a vessel scuds, helplessly before the typhoon. The masses of reefs and islands in the China Sea made running before the typhoon even more fraught with risk.

  Men aloft changing sails in preparation for the doldrums. Tall ships carried a separate suit of older, worn sails for the light airs of the tropics as there was so much chafe as the sails flogged. This meant that many hours were spent aloft switching sails around.

  A clipper ship running well in the trades. Trade wind sailing was often a truly joyous period of a voyage while the hard driving of the ships made for exhilarating sailing.

  The trick was to luff up and ‘shake the wind out of her’. This is all very well in theory, but anyone who has luffed a yacht or dinghy will appreciate the nerve it takes to fire a 1,000-ton boat into the wind and let the sails flog for an indeterminate amount of time. Imagine the thundering of canvas! The utmost care also had to be taken to prevent the boat getting caught aback; otherwise she might lose her spars or worse.

  Navigation was also a nightmare. The azure waters of the China Sea are dotted with low islands fringed with palm trees and powdery white sand. In places it is breathtakingly beautiful, but beneath the water the beauty turns treacherous. The shallow waters are studded with reefs that you have to thread your way through. At the time, many of them were unmarked or in the wrong place on the chart. Shoals were often named after the ship that left her bones there and were a constant reminder of the ever-present dangers of these waters. In 1866 the Lammermuir Bank was still marked with the sun-bleached stump of its namesake’s mast. These were gravestones that marked the route down to the Sunda Strait.

  Local knowledge was everything and a daring skipper could con his way through a shoal with a man looking out from the topmast, saving himself several days in the process. It took nerves of steel. If you got it wrong in the narrow reef-studded passages, the outcome was often fatal as Chinese pirates gave no quarter to a stricken crew. The previous year the clipper Childers was attacked after grounding on her way to Foochow. All crew were murdered with the exception of the carpenter who jumped overboard and clung to the rudder. After looting, the pirates burnt the ship. The glare attracted a gunboat, which rescued the carpenter.

  If all that wasn’t bad enough, the racers left in June when the south-west monsoon started to take charge. This meant a tough beat down the China Seas. With monsoon season came fearsome squalls and torrents of rain. Donald MacKinnon knew about the power of the monsoon. Two years previously he had been sailing the Taeping up the China Sea when he had been badly battered by the monsoon and forced to limp into Hong Kong dismasted. He wanted no such disasters this time around and progress was good as he nursed his ship down the coast of Cochin China (modern-day Vietnam), working the land and sea breezes to his advantage. The trick here was to time your tacks so that you stood into the coast just as the land breeze kicked in, which was often quite late in the day. It took great finesse to get it absolutely right.

  Manoeuvring for position

  On 7 June the Taeping was in touch with the Ariel and the following day her crew were deeply gratified to cross tacks with the Fiery Cross off the low-lying Paracel Islands. From here, the racers crossed to the Borneo coast and threaded the treacherous Gaspar Strait between Borneo and Sumatra. After being caught by the Taeping, the Fiery Cross had regained her lead as she passed through the Sunda Strait – the entry to the Indian Ocean. The Ariel and Taeping were next through, two days behind, and they were followed by the Serica and Taitsing, four and eight days respectively behind the leader.

  Out in the Indian Ocean, life became easier for the clippers and their crews. The skipper might even
permit himself to go below and sleep. Under the benign influence of the south-east trades the clippers could spread their wings, skimming across the seas, logging 300 nautical miles and more a day as they sped home. Aboard the Fiery Cross, Robinson was pushing on like a lunatic. He was actually three days ahead of the chasing pack as he passed Mauritius. The Serica and Taitsing seemed to be out of the running by now, dropping several hundred miles behind the leaders. However, as the Fiery Cross closed with the Cape of Good Hope, Robinson took a gamble that didn’t pay off. He opted to stand in close to the coast to make use of the Agulhas current. The tactic backfired and the wind died. Further offshore, the Ariel and Taeping enjoyed more wind and closed in on the veteran racer.

  The Taeping running before a freshening wind. She was always noted for her unusual speed in very light airs and managed to give the Fiery Cross the slip in the doldrums.

  The Taitsing made the quickest running of the whole fleet as she raced past the Azores.

  A pilot gig approaching the pilot cutter. This illustrates the tricky job a pilot boat crew had in rough conditions.