Barons of the Sea Read online

  While Third Mate Charlie Low was scrambling through the rigging on the homeward passage of the Houqua, his brother William Henry was locked in his cabin, listening to the waves thump against the sides of his family’s ship. He was sad, alone, and feeling rather like the family failure. William was returning from his third stint in China. He had fallen ill there, likely from overwork, exhaustion, and Canton’s hot and humid tropical climate. Yet something else was not right.

  A third brother, Edward Allen Low, who had joined William in China at Abbot’s behest, had written home worriedly some months before, shortly before the Christmas of 1844. William Henry, Edward noted, had not been able to carry out “some of the principal objects of his visit to Canton.” And both merchant brothers were in the dark about their futures at Russell & Company. New and lucrative partnership slots would be decided within the coming year. Warren Delano, who had consolidated his power in the firm, was now in his second term as Russell’s chief and had become its largest shareholder. In Edward’s view, Delano was not one to give jobs to the younger Low brothers just because they were Old Seth Low’s Sons.

  William Henry Low’s early departure hints that there was a succession problem and that Warren Delano was not eager to guarantee him a seat at the club table. “The partnership of R & Co. expires on 31st Decr. 1845, at which time a new one will be formed,” Edward wrote to eldest brother Abbot soon after Houqua departed on her return voyage. “Who will retire and who will be admitted to the new concern, I have as yet no means of knowing. If William [Henry] had remained, it was my intention to have spoken to Mr. Delano some time in the fall of ’45, and if I found there was no prospect of my being admitted for three years more, then I would join myself to William’s Establishment and see what we could do on our own account … any suggestions or advice you can give me will go far in deciding my movements.”2

  Once aboard ship, headed for home, William Henry’s spirits seemed to improve. He drank and laughed in the main saloon with Captain Nat and the other passengers, apparently ready to come home to his wife, Ann, and see his infant son for the first time. Yet behind the closed doors of his cabin, as Houqua bounded through the seas at close to twelve knots, William Henry seems to have lost all composure. Perhaps his visit to Canton without the calming influence of his wife was too much for him. The dissipation of his time in China—fueled by alcohol—may have gotten the better of him.

  As Houqua approached New York, William Henry Low stepped out of his cabin and walked to the bow of the vessel. It was night, and the stars formed a flickering blanket over his head. The sails and the rigging strummed above him. Aft, he heard commands barked to the helmsman by the mate on watch. The sea curled beneath the ship’s stem and figurehead—Houqua, his head crowned with a mandarin’s cap; his painted eyes looking steadily ahead, just like the portrait in his brother Abbot’s house.

  Those on the night watch heard a splash. They ran to the rail, looking for a man overboard in the blackness of the Atlantic. They saw nothing. The ship sailed on; it was probably not for a few hours that the crew realized a passenger was missing. By then, the corpse had been taken by the sea.

  William Henry Low was gone.3

  William was the second member of the Low clan to die away from home. The first was his uncle, the first William Henry Low, the family pioneer who had established the Lows in the China business thirty years before and had also died, albeit from tuberculosis while on a homeward-bound ship. Abbot Low did not dwell on his brother’s suicide, but correspondence reveals his shock and grief. “Poor William,” he wrote their brother Edward in China. “His end was sudden, indeed, and all unexpected.”4

  Suicide, as well as mental illness, was a forbidden topic in nineteenth-century America, especially in rich families that expected great success from their members. The Low family maintained their Yankee reticence when writing later about their loss. In a letter to his shipping firm’s representative in Canton, Abbot wrote, “It were more grateful to myself and kinder to you than devote these few lines to topics of a less painful nature.” Abbot then proceeded to inquire about the cargo Houqua was loading in New York.

  The ship’s speed gave reason for measured confidence. Houqua’s voyage to New York from Canton, her cargo holds full of tea, had taken only ninety days. “The result, though not brilliant, is satisfactory,” Abbot Low had written to Edward. “I think Houqua’s teas will yield a profit of 8% or 10% over and above commissions and charges.”5 He and Captain Nat set about building additional ships according to Houqua’s plan.

  Yet Houqua was not the only ship making good time. “The vessels from China have come along in remarkably short passages,” Abbot wrote Edward that April. “Such a course of winds has probably been never known before.”6 What alarmed Abbot the most: the old cotton packet ship Natchez, belonging to Howland & Aspinwall and under the command of Captain Robert Waterman, had made a “rapid passage” in “78 days!!!” Without this miraculous run in an old tub, he fumed, Houqua would have snagged the record by a margin of several days. “When would the world have heard the end of it?” Abbot wondered. “When?” The advent of all these fast, new ships, he reasoned, “must be regarded as having a bad effect upon our spring Tea market, and as 12 or 13 cargoes are yet to come along during the season and prior to June, I apprehend prices have not yet seen their lowest point by a good deal.”7

  What worried Abbot Low even more than older ships making quick passages was Howland & Aspinwall’s new ship, Rainbow. Although her keel was laid before Houqua’s, construction delays followed, due apparently to William Henry Aspinwall’s second thoughts about John Willis Griffiths’s experimental design. Could a ship this slim and with so lofty a rig stay afloat in rough weather? And was her cargo capacity too limited to make a profit for her owners? One concern that Aspinwall might have heard at his dinner table from his fellow merchants was that his extremely sharp, V-shaped ship did not have sufficient buoyancy at the bow and stern to maintain structural integrity in rough seas, which would render the vessel a structural loss. Captain Nat’s flat-floor design for Houqua, which gave his ship greater buoyancy, mitigated this problem somewhat, but in Griffiths’s mind, the flat floor came at the expense of almighty speed.

  Griffiths and Aspinwall wrangled about the final construction details until finally, in the words of clipper ship historian Captain Arthur Clark, “the ship was finished without the slightest alterations from the original plans.”8 (Although, according to one account, Aspinwall did call in foreign experts—most likely British ones—to examine the placement of the masts.)9 Contemporary observers mocked her “outside-in” look, but as Clark insisted a half century later, she was “designed and built with great care.”10

  It is hard to reconstruct a full picture of Aspinwall’s thinking, but one thing remains clear: he was not one to shirk away from radical innovation. Timing was everything—more so now than ever, with a half dozen ships arriving from China each month. If going “extreme” meant getting an advantage over the more conservative Low, for example, why not take a radical approach first and modify later? Aspinwall had already taken a gamble on the swift but small Ann McKim several years earlier. Speed had previously been a matter of prestige in the China trade. Now Aspinwall felt the time was right to make speed truly pay.

  On launch day, one newspaper announced that the ship “holds out a promise, we should judge by her model, of great speed.”11 Yet as beautiful as Rainbow was, she proved to be too extreme, too experimental. Only four days out of New York, as a howling Atlantic gale drove her ahead at full speed, Captain John Land heard a cracking sound, followed by the crash of tumbling spars and the shriek of ripping canvas. The ship careened out of control, as all three of her upper masts (topgallants) collapsed under the pressure. Land ordered all hands aloft to cut the wreckage free before the ship was driven under. Ironically, it had been Aspinwall’s more traditional sail plan, not Griffiths’s “inside-out hull,” which had failed.

  After battling more winter squa
lls, Rainbow limped into Hong Kong. Despite the troubles of the voyage, Warren Delano was still impressed with the ship’s performance, writing home to his brother Franklin: “The Rainbow arrives at Hong Kong yesterday, 103 days from New York, of which one day was lost at Bally [sic] when she stopped for water. This passage is a good one—ranking with ours in the Paul Jones.”12 The following September, Rainbow returned to New York after 105 days at sea. It seems that Griffiths’s extreme design needed a lot more tweaking, but Aspinwall didn’t give up on the eccentric naval architect.

  If Warren Delano inspected Rainbow as she lay anchored in Hong Kong harbor, he left no record of it—but given his inquisitive nature, he probably did. (Delano would eventually commission Griffiths to design a more refined sister ship.) He did, however, write home that market conditions demanded more of the fast ships, and urged his brother to get in on the clipper ship business so that he could ship more of Russell & Company’s goods home in a hurry. “We are beginning to feel the want of the vessel of the class named in my letters,” he wrote Franklin, “and I heard you will have acted promptly and that when this reaches you, a suitable ship may be on her way out to us.”

  But Franklin’s employer, Grinnell, Minturn & Company, was not yet interested in investing in the new type of vessel, preferring to stick with its old-fashioned packet model and focus on the transatlantic trade rather than the tea business.

  *

  In Boston, Delano’s old friend Robert Bennet Forbes had another idea for revolutionizing the China trade: Midas, a steam-powered ship built along clipper lines, which he hoped to use as a cargo ferry between Canton and Hong Kong. She made most of the trip between New York and China using her auxiliary sails, and proved leaky and unreliable. The vessel arrived with her machinery ruined by, as her mastermind remembered, “neglect and bad engineering, her reputation damned.”13

  Forbes later joked that Midas was “expected, like her prototype of old, to turn everything into gold.”14 Instead, she turned out to be a disastrous investment—although as a consolation, Forbes congratulated himself on being the first American to travel by steam east of the Cape of Good Hope. He tried the concept again the following year with the steam barque Edith, which he named after his daughter and hoped would be the first fast American steamer in the opium trade between Bombay and Canton. This ship, too, proved to be a mechanical nightmare. Delano, who greeted Edith when she arrived in Hong Kong, had nothing but harsh words for his brother Franklin back in New York:

  I must tell you confidentially that the clipper steam barque Edith is a failure. She has made two attempts to get up the East Coast against the monsoon and failed, while our Eagle performs triumphantly. She, the Edith, has not power enough to make head against wind and sea—and the immense weight of machinery and coals in the extremes of the vessel make her pitch and labor so heavily in a seaway that she goes ahead but slowly and then falls off to the leeward in a fearful way. If the new steam packet is built in the same way as the Edith—she must be a failure. All this weight could be amidships or the vessel cannot carry it. Upon the whole, the less we have to do with these experiments, the better.15

  Warren, in Hong Kong, found the separation from his wife and infant daughters hard to bear—especially after the younger, Susie, died in the spring of 1846. With the loss of her child, Catherine’s worst fears about the trip to China had been confirmed. She’d had only limited contact with Chinese culture during her three years there. Sequestered in a house in Macao while her husband conducted business in Hong Kong, surrounded by a coterie of other Western families, she lived as an alien fanqui, and it disturbed her. Far from home and her extended family, Catherine Delano sank into a deep depression, and Warren worried that she might actually commit suicide.

  By the end of that year, the Delano family—now including a new daughter, Louise, as well as a Chinese manservant and a wet nurse—finally returned to America, this time, it seemed, for good.16 Now possessing multiple competences, Warren finally had the means to purchase his dream house: one of the large mansions on Colonnade Row, next door to his brother Franklin and his wife, Laura. Franklin enjoyed reminding his crotchety neighbor and new grandfather-in-law John Jacob Astor that in England, having a doorplate reading “Mr. Astor” designated a physician’s office.17 Old Astor probably couldn’t have cared less—when he died in 1848, he was worth $20 million, making him by far the richest man in America.

  But a grand house in the city wasn’t enough. Warren Delano dreamed of creating a family retreat in the countryside. Even before leaving Canton, he had written Franklin about his intentions to build a home free from the worries and sadness of China, a haven on “2,000 or 3,000 acres of land … bought at a very low price.” There would be “good fishing and good shooting—and sufficiently easy … access to New York or Boston.” It would be impossible to put the hard years in Canton entirely out of mind; Louise would remain a sickly child, perhaps from exposure to tropical disease at an early age. But Warren’s struggle to shield his growing family from the nature of his business—and from any unpleasantness associated with it—would continue for the rest of his life.

  Warren kept his eyes open on properties for sale in the scenic Hudson Valley. Yet he was unable to find a place that suited his discerning taste. During the hot and steamy summer months, Catherine and the girls settled into a rented mansion in a section of Newburgh, New York, picturesquely called “the Danskammer” (from an old Dutch story about the “Devil’s Dance Chamber”). Warren divided his time between his office in New York and Newburgh, commuting by train on the newly constructed Hudson River Railroad that skirted the east bank of America’s Rhine.

  During his trips to and from Newburgh, Delano’s train roared past the writer Washington Irving’s once idyllic Sunnyside estate in Tarrytown. The chuffing, spark-spewing steam locomotives infuriated the aging creator of Rip Van Winkle. Delano, too, wished to escape the noise and dirt of the iron horses and turned his search toward suitable properties farther north, with unspoiled views of the valley. But although Warren continued to dream of designing the perfect house for his growing family, his first big project after his return to America would be to build a ship.

  *

  Despite Rainbow’s lackluster first voyage, William Henry Aspinwall surveyed the damage and decided to repair the V-shaped clipper and send her on another trip. This time she performed according to plan, taking ninety-two days to reach Canton and eighty-eight to come home.18 Thrilled with this success, Aspinwall commissioned John Willis Griffiths to design a larger and more refined version of the experimental craft. Her name would be Sea Witch, Griffiths’s technical masterpiece.

  To ensure greater stability than her predecessor, Sea Witch had a slightly less concave bow, as well as a diminished deadrise for a more flat-bottomed hull. She was still relatively small compared with transatlantic packet ships and narrow for her size, with a beam of only thirty-four feet. Sea Witch was the first ship of her type to do away with the old-fashioned beakhead bow and the latticework of braces underneath the bowsprit. Instead, her bow resembled that of an opium clipper schooner: angular, sharp, and free of ornamentation except for the dragon figurehead.I

  Even Griffiths’s employers, who had long considered him a mere draftsman, were impressed by the ship’s novel design. “We have no hesitation recommending [Griffiths] as a ‘Marine and Naval Architect’ of the first order,” wrote the partners of Smith & Dimon, “[a] gentleman who has reached an eminence in the line of his profession rarely attained, and whose skill in this branch of Mechanism we believe to be unsurpassed.”19

  Aspinwall selected as master of the Sea Witch the notorious “driver” Robert Waterman. In his midthirties, Waterman was charismatic, charming, and absolutely ruthless. He was the scion of an old Nantucket whaling family that had decided not to risk bombardment by the British during the War of 1812 and resettled in Hudson, New York—well up the Hudson River but with access to the Atlantic downriver. When Robert was just a toddler, his father w
as lost at sea, but despite his mother’s pleadings, the son followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the North Atlantic packet trade as a cabin boy. He quickly impressed the captains of the Black Ball Line with his daring. “[W]holly reckless of limb and life,” one observer said of him.20 The young Waterman greatly impressed Captain Charles H. Marshall of the packet Britannia, who was rarely impressed with anybody and who, according to one observer, “possessed an air of sternness about him that was somewhat repulsive to strangers.”21 Like many self-made men, Waterman had nothing but contempt for loafers and complainers. Going to sea was war, and he loved it.

  As a captain, Waterman reveled in his reputation as a driver, making great speeds and great profits for his ship’s owners. Though relatively short, he was lithe, brash, athletic, and something of a playboy while ashore. At the start of every trip, Waterman strutted aboard dressed in his finest-tailored clothes, which would include a topcoat with pearl buttons, a high beaver hat, tight gray pants, and a neatly tied cravat. He would then go below to his stateroom and emerge a few minutes later dressed in rough seafarers’ garb. Striding over to the rail, he would hold a bundle over the side and shout with a maniacal grin: “Well, they will be out of fashion when we return!” He would then drop his fancy clothes into the swirling East River.22

  New York’s social set found Waterman irresistibly handsome and charming; in the words of Captain Arthur Clark, “a young captain of an unusually attractive personality,” someone who was “regarded with pride and admiration” by his friends.23 He was a dandy, a hero, someone who set records and made shipowners like Howland & Aspinwall money. He also had supposedly never lost a spar or thread of important rigging, and according to Captain Clark, “never called on the underwriters for one dollar of loss or damage.”24

  Few of his friends on land knew his dark side. Those who did whispered that he went too far as a driver captain; that he put padlocks on the topsail sheets and rackings on the topsail halyardsII to make sure panicking sailors didn’t reduce sail without his permission.25 Waterman dismissed his critics as complainers and “sea lawyers.”