Barons of the Sea Read online

  The rogue wave struck hard, as did successive ones, ramming the helpless vessel until finally Houqua lay over onto her side, and seawater began roaring into every door and hatch. Losing his grip, Low plummeted from the quarterdeck and into the ocean. Another wave crashed over the ship, and down he spun into the depths. “I never expected to see the ship again,” he recalled. “I said my last prayer … Everything that I had done from my youth up came to my mind, and I wondered how long my relatives would look for me and never hear from me.” Charles may have thought of his dead brother, who had jumped to his death from the very same ship. He was about to become the third member of his family to die at sea.

  Then he shot to the surface. He pulled himself onto the weather rail, huddled alongside several other men. Somehow they got ahold of some axes and began cutting away the rigging that held two of the three half-submerged masts to the ship. Each one pulled away with a terrific groan, and slowly the ship righted herself. Yet more broke loose as the ship slowly pulled herself onto an even keel: away went the carpenter’s shop and the galley (and its still-burning coal stove), all of the ship’s boats, and the pen that was the home to all of the hens, cows, and pigs. The roar of the waves drowned out the cries of the animals as they plunged over the side.

  With utmost care, Captain Low ventured below. Inside the ship, chaos reigned. Men were trapped as water continued to pour through the hatches. In an effort to escape, the Filipino cabin boy tried to smash his way through a skylight. He sliced his arms open, spilling blood everywhere. Low and others bandaged him up, along with a few other injured men. It was still blowing a full gale.

  The holds were half full of seawater. The only way now to save the ship was to man the pumps. Working a manual pump—which operated like a railroad handcar—was backbreaking work even in fair weather. All wooden ships leaked; when driven hard, they might require an hour’s pumping in each watch, work that “completely disheartened some of our best men,” one observer wrote.10 But on Houqua that night, Low and his men were in a race against time. The captain ordered both of the heavy iron pumps rigged, and set all hands to work. Did they sing to keep rhythm or stave off thoughts of death? When a shift of men tired, they lay down on the deck for rest, and another group took their place.

  One exhausted man asked why the second mate wasn’t helping out. Low waded into the main cabin and threw open a stateroom door. There, he saw the second mate on his knees, praying fervently, a “badly scared man.” Low looked at him and said, “Hustle out of that quick and go to the pumps! God helps those who help themselves!”11

  After hours of work, the water in the holds was holding steady. Houqua was no longer sinking. By the morning of January 17, some thirty-six hours after the storm had hit, the clouds faded away, and the sun shone down on the Indian Ocean. Two of Houqua’s three masts were gone, and her deck was covered in a tangled mass of ropes and wood, but her graceful hull was intact. Low breathed a sigh of relief.

  Now was the time to use whatever spare spars were left to create a temporary rig on the remaining mast. “We had fine weather,” the captain recalled, “and I sent the fore-yard and fore-topsail yard on deck to be refitted, which was a tedious job.” Because the galley was gone, the men cut a coal cask in half, placed one end on deck, surrounded it with sand, and used it for boiling salt beef and pork. With a few tattered sails hanging from the foremast stump, Houqua sprung back to life, even if she looked like a badly wounded bird. Low made no mention of any lives lost in his later account of the near-disaster.

  Houqua dropped anchor in Hong Kong on March 14, 131 days out of New York, 60 of them under the “jury rig.” The cargo of cotton goods was almost completely ruined from water damage. Low abandoned the cargo to the insurance underwriters, who organized an auction of the cotton bales on the Hong Kong docks. Still eager to make a dollar, Low insisted on acting as the insurance company’s agent for the sale. It was a smart move, at least as he remembered it: “Chinamen gathered in crowds and bid against one another, and the whole cargo was sold for cash for more than it would have brought in Shanghai if delivered in good order.”12

  Low then fired the second mate “for incompetency and drunkenness.”

  There was no dry dock in Hong Kong, so before rerigging the ship, Captain Low had to have Houqua careened onto her side so that workers could repair the hull. What he saw shocked him: the fallen masts had nearly punctured the ship’s planking. If he and his men had not cut away the tangled mass, the ship definitely would have foundered with all hands lost.

  After a series of repairs, which included mismatched longboats, Houqua sailed to Shanghai, now open to trade, with European and American “concessions” (foreign colonies) outside the city walls. After loading up with tea, Houqua returned to Hong Kong to take on additional cargo—which was when another typhoon struck the Houqua and all of the other ships riding at anchor at Hong Kong. Several other vessels, including one large English opium clipper, were either driven aground or sank in Hong Kong’s harbor. “We rode out the typhoon in safety,” Low recalled. “This was my third experience of hurricanes inside of a year, and I wanted no more, though as it would be the typhoon season for two months yet, I knew I might be favored with some more.”

  Houqua rode at anchor until November 1848, as her captain waited for more fresh tea pickings to arrive. News of the ship’s near wreck had already reached home. Shortly before Houqua weighed anchor to set sail back to New York, Charlie received a letter from his father, Seth. Years before, Seth and Abbot Low had done everything possible, including offering Charles a desk job, to keep him from going to sea. Now the old man wrote: “The circumstance of your escaping from a watery grave is very striking … as I view the Providence of God, the fact that you were inspired by presence of mind, courage, resolution, fortitude, prudence, as well as blessed with health and strength to endure and meet the emergency of the occasion, were equally the gift of God, and should be cherished by you as continual causes of thanksgiving to Him.”13

  Charlie Low put the letter in his desk and kept it for the rest of his life. Presence of mind, courage, resolution, fortitude, prudence—the prodigal son had made good.

  *

  After Captain Low finished reporting on the harrowing voyage, Palmer looked at his battered creation. The old salt was notoriously cheap when it came to renewing his ship’s rigging and other equipment. But he turned to the nervous Low and said, “Don’t worry, you saved my ship and saved the insurance companies a lot of money, and they have got to make everything good, and I shall see to it that they do.”

  A few weeks later, Captain Palmer and Abbot Low presented Charlie with a wonderful gift: an eight-day ship’s chronometer costing $800 from Negus & Company. It came with an engraved silver plate:

  Presented by the Atlantic, Sun, Mercantile and Union Mutual Insurance Companies of New York and the Insurance Company of North America of Philadelphia to Captain Charles Porter Low, late master of Ship Houqua, as a testimonial of their approbation of his good conduct in saving said ship and cargo, after having been thrown on her beam ends in the Indian Ocean on the 15th of January 1848 in a violent Typhoon, and nearly filled with water, but by the extraordinary exertions of the Master and crew was righted and subsequently taken by them to her port of destination which was 3,500 miles distant.14

  There was a second surprise: the voyage home had made an accidental profit. Abbot took his battered brother aside and told him that if the voyage had gone as scheduled, the ship would have lost money; but since she had been delayed in Hong Kong, she had brought home the first of the year’s tea, beating all other ships and clearing a profit of over $60,000.15

  Soon Captain Low was pacing Houqua’s quarterdeck again, the ship back to her original glory, with the chronometer gleaming in her captain’s quarters below.

  *

  Back when he had arrived in Hong Kong in March 1848, Charlie Low heard talk of gold having been discovered in the newly conquered territory of California. It was incredible ne
ws, and an opportunity not lost on the young captain. Now, in New York nearly a year later, Abbot confirmed that the gold was a reality, not a dream, and gave his brother new orders. Charles would leave Houqua for a new command: the brand-new Samuel Russell. He was to load up the Russell with manufactured goods and sail her around Cape Horn to California—right on the heels of Delano’s Memnon.

  President James K. Polk had officially announced the discovery of an “abundance of gold” in the California territory in his State of the Union address to Congress the previous December. “It was known that mines of the precious metals existed to a considerable extent in California at the time of its acquisition,” Polk told the assembled legislators. “Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated.” After comparing the conquest of California with the purchase of Louisiana forty years earlier, the president predicted that “a great emporium will doubtless speedily arise on the Californian coast which may be destined to rival in importance New Orleans itself.”16

  In the months following President Polk’s address, 120,000 Americans dropped everything and headed for California. The vast majority were men. It was the largest migration yet in US history—much of it would be by sea.

  In New York’s saloons and boardinghouses, weary carpenters, shipwrights, and other tradesmen talked incessantly of the stories they heard about their comrades striking it rich three thousand miles away. A typical farmhand in New York State could expect to earn $11.50 a month, and even though tens of thousands of Americans were setting up new farmsteads in Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana, wages in the fertile prairie states were scarcely higher than those on the East Coast. In contrast, the wage of a typical farmhand in California was $60 per month.17 Even if you didn’t have the luck to strike gold, you could at least earn a decent living out West.

  Some tried to get to the promised land by crossing the continent with horse-drawn wagons, traveling over the well-trod Oregon Trail, a treacherous trip over mountains and through desert that could take six months. So did the typical voyage by ship. That spring, it seemed that half the population of the Eastern Seaboard was heading to California on anything that floated. Old whaling ships, their holds still reeking of oil, were being hastily outfitted with makeshift bunks for would-be prospectors. So were countless coastal brigs, cotton packets, and fishing schooners. In 1849 about 750 vessels departed the East Coast for California, up from only 2 or 3 just a few years earlier. Many would never make it, lost in storms, often with all hands. And many of the battered ships that did make it to San Francisco Harbor never left, abandoned by their crews and left to sink into the mud of the bay.

  Warren Delano’s clipper ship Memnon was different from these old tubs: designed by the mastermind of Sea Witch and Rainbow, she was a lithe and elegant craft, painted to gleaming perfection, a black swan amidst the motley, broken-down fleet being readied in New York for the trip around the Horn. Delano had built her to compete on the transatlantic run to England but after one voyage decided to redeploy her on the new route.

  What attracted the attention of Delano and other New York merchants were not the reports of California gold but the reports of California prices: a pair of boots selling for $50 (about $1,400 today); barrels of pork, flour, and beef for up to $60 ($1,600); whiskey for about the same; a drop of opium-based laudanum, $1 ($28).18

  The best way to make money amidst the pandemonium, those in the China trade realized quickly, was not to dig for gold but to outfit and supply the hundreds of thousands of people who’d dropped everything and headed for the hills. Supposedly, a miner could earn up to $1,000 a day—money he would likely spend as well as save. Indeed, many would end up saving nothing at all.19

  And despite the treacherous travel conditions, there were more new consumers than ever: San Francisco’s population had jumped from less than a thousand to more than twenty thousand. The city was awash with money and lawlessness—gambling, prostitution, and gun violence were rampant. Joining the parade of Argonauts were thousands of Chinese, who found their way to America in hopes of work and to escape the once-proud Celestial Kingdom that Western opium had helped devastate.

  As a result of California’s growth, freight rates soared to heights that shattered even the records set for the freshest China tea. And in California, US merchants faced no foreign import duty.IV It was all good, especially for the merchants who could make the trip the fastest. As the journalist Horace Greeley observed, “Experience has amply proved that all such products take the quickest rather than the cheapest route.” He went on to theorize that if a transcontinental railroad connected New York and San Francisco, “twenty million dollars of costly or perishable merchandise would annually seek California overland … and that this amount would steadily and rapidly increase.”20 But such an overland route remained decades ahead; for now, goods would take to the seas.

  Steam may have conquered the Atlantic, but the 3,100-mile voyage from New York to Liverpool pushed the absolute limits of Cunard’s coal-driven ships. San Francisco via Cape Horn was still out of reach because the ships of the day could not carry enough fuel to make the voyage without frequent stops. And so, in a betting country gone mad about money and speed, the California clippers became an obsession. Americans of the time would bet on anything: cards, horses, trains, stocks, bonds. And Warren Delano was ready to gamble his earnings once again.

  *

  As he cast off from the East River pier in April 1849, Memnon’s master Joseph R. Gordon knew his would be a tough passage. Old Cape Horn had inspired fear among generations of mariners. The southernmost point of Chile, it marks the border of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Navigators had feared this passage since the time of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the sixteenth century because of its huge waves, icebergs, poor visibility, and strong currents. Ships attempting to make a westbound passage around Cape Horn frequently battled contrary winds that would leave them stranded and battered for days or weeks on end. Many a well-built ship had met her end in the waters of “Dead Man’s Road.” Yet Gordon also had a secret weapon on this historic trip: a new navigational manual, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Winds and Currents Chart, published around the same time that reports of gold started to trickle back to the East Coast.21

  The timing was perfect. Forty-three years old in 1849, Matthew Fontaine Maury had been collecting data on the ocean’s winds and currents for the past decade. This strenuous labor was born out of frustration. Ten years earlier, the promising young naval officer from Virginia had badly injured his leg in a carriage accident, ending his career at sea. To support himself and his family, he lobbied for a job as superintendent of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. There he found stacks of old ship’s logs from American naval vessels, piled helter-skelter in the archives. Among them were the records from the illfated US Exploratory Expedition, known by insiders as the “Ex Ex.” During Ex Ex’s circumnavigation of the globe, from 1838 to 1842, the small fleet had sailed around Cape Horn to explore the mouth of the Columbia River, as well as the sparsely populated bay that would one day be home to San Francisco. The ships then sailed south to Antarctica and island-hopped across the Pacific to Manila and Singapore.

  Yet the expedition was plagued by mutiny against the expedition’s volatile leader, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, who used brutal methods such as “flogging around the fleet” to keep his men under control. It seemed, too, that wherever they landed, the Americans fought with the natives. By the time Wilkes arrived back in America, two of his six ships had been lost. Wilkes survived a court-martial, but his reputation was ruined.

  Yet Ex Ex would leave behind 87,000 miles’ worth of logs, as well as 180 charts of distant coastlines and islands.22 No one seemed willing to comb through them except Maury, who had all the time in the world at his new desk job. And Maury was not content simply to organize the logs. Rather, he and a small group of assistants scanned thousands of dusty pages looking for patterns of the oc
ean’s winds and currents. He published his findings in 1847: careful compilations of observations in the form of charts, providing recommendations to captains on the routes to follow to find ideal winds, avoid headwinds, and locate passages through the doldrums.

  Maury himself called the Cape Horn passage from New York to California “the longest in the world … both as to time and distance.”23 Memnon would be the first clipper ship not only to travel this route, but also the first to use this crucial guide. The ship carried all the cargo that eager consignees could cram aboard: wheels of cheese, plate glass, tables, chairs, bolts of cloth, eggs, crockery, and brandy and other spirits. Memnon’s crew of about fifty men was also eager for its ship to get to California faster than anyone else—most of them planned to jump ship as soon as she tied up in San Francisco and head right for the gold fields.

  These greenhorns were likely a mix of races and nationalities—Yankees, African Americans, Portuguese, Germans, and French—all of them in for a rude awakening about what they thought was a free passage. A clipper ship did not sail herself; her men did. What Charles Porter Low and other young apprentices had learned gradually over the course of years, the would-be prospectors would have to learn in a hurry, beginning as the steam tug guided the clipper through the New York Narrows and into the open Atlantic.

  On deck, a sailor’s only safeguard was the rope lifeline strung along the length of the ship, and “holding fast” to it so as not to be washed overboard if a freak wave struck. If they fell overboard, there was little to no chance of being saved; it was nearly impossible to stop a fast-moving clipper ship with all sails set, and most sailors could not swim. Small wonder that so many sailors had the letters spelling “Hold Fast” tattooed across their knuckles.

  There was little room for sentiment following the death of a crewmate. According to one account, when a particular ship’s African American cook died of disease, “no one was near him when he died. As soon as it was found out, he was sewn up in his blankets and hove overboard. No one thought anything of it. The men simply took off their hats. The captain didn’t even come up on deck.”24 An auction might be held for the dead man’s possessions, with the lucky bidders stowing away clothes they bought until their next time at sea.25