Barons of the Sea Read online

  Other New York firms were also cashing in on the California bonanza. Grinnell, Minturn & Company, which had specialized mostly in the transatlantic trade, commissioned its first clipper ship in 1850 when Moses Grinnell hired Charles Raynes of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to build Sea Serpent. Unlike Low’s yacht-like China clippers, Sea Serpent was a big, heavily constructed ship. At 212 feet long, 39 feet wide, and of 1,300 tons, she was beefier than any of A. A. Low’s ships to date, able to take the battering of the westward passage around Cape Horn.36 “To use a nautical phrase, ‘Her model fills the eye like a full moon,’ and her strength and workmanship are of the highest order,” gushed the Boston Atlas on her launch day that November.37 Under Captain William Howland, who also helped oversee her construction, Sea Serpent proved to be a reliable if not particularly fast clipper, taking 125 days to reach San Francisco from New York on her maiden voyage. For the rest of her career, she earned steady revenue for the company and would outlast almost all others of her type, sailing for another three decades before sinking in a North Atlantic storm in 1891.

  But Robert Bowne Minturn, Grinnell’s partner, did not share Grinnell’s enthusiasm for the clipper ship type. He preferred investing his firm’s capital in the transatlantic packet service—transporting Irish immigrants to America was a steadier source of income. The China trade was a side business and San Francisco too unsteady. One clipper was enough for him.

  Overriding Minturn’s objections, Moses Grinnell cast his gaze on a partially completed vessel in the Boston yard of the now-thriving Nova Scotian immigrant Donald McKay. Her name was Flying Cloud, her owner the merchant Enoch Train, McKay’s principal client. Train operated a fleet of transatlantic packets plying between Boston and Liverpool and, like Grinnell’s firm, made most of his money ferrying Irish emigrants to the New World.

  Moses Grinnell apparently made Train an offer he could not refuse: $90,000 for the unfinished hull on the building ways. The arrival of Flying Cloud in New York in the spring of 1851 under the Grinnell, Minturn banner signaled a challenge to the supremacy of Low, Aspinwall, and Delano in the race to California. The year also marked the ascendancy of a new designer who had been carefully studying the work of Griffiths and Palmer for years and was ready to unleash his own clippers onto the oceans of the world.

  *

  I. A sail attached to the side of another square sail, used to increase speed in light winds.

  II. The gaff-rigged fore-and-aft sail on the aftermost mast of a square-rigged ship.

  III. An extension of the ship’s sides above the level of the deck, meant to protect the crew from heavy seas.

  IV. The following year, to the fury of southern politicians who dreamed of a plantation system that expanded westward into the territorial spoils won in the Mexican War, California was admitted to the union as a free state.

  V. A sail flown immediately above the topgallant sail on square-rigged ships.

  VI. A wooden, pin-shaped device used to secure lines of running rigging.

  VII. The third mast from forward in a vessel having three or more masts.

  CHAPTER 9

  ENTER DONALD MCKAY

  Yes, sir, and if there were any letter coming before A, or any figure standing higher than 1, the vessels of Donald McKay would be indicated by that letter and that figure.

  —EDWARD EVERETT, former secretary of state, US senator, and fifteenth governor of Massachusetts, “Launch of the Defender” (1855)1

  Donald McKay’s shipyard in the spring of 1851 was a popular sightseeing destination for Bostonians. On a typical day, East Boston boys would play hide-and-go-seek amidst the piles of seasoning lumber. The shipbuilder saw no need to keep them out, as long as they weren’t stealing. He knew or employed many of their fathers, anyway. The neighborhood of East Boston, located across the harbor from Beacon Hill, had only five thousand residents.2 It was a workingman’s town full of carpenters, rope makers, blacksmiths, coopers, and wagon drivers. Among them was a cooper named Patrick Kennedy—the progenitor of the Massachusetts political dynasty—who arrived from Ireland as an immigrant on the McKay-designed packet ship Washington Irving.3

  Only a decade earlier, East Boston was known as Noddle’s Island, little more than a tree-covered hill and smelly mudflats. Now it was one of the great shipbuilding centers of the world, having built nearly thirty thousand tons of shipping during the past decade.4 That tonnage came from wood, a resource that mid-nineteenth-century American shipbuilders saw as virtually inexhaustible. The ships they built were nothing less than cathedrals of wood, both in their size and their structural complexity. Each ship required thousands of pieces of timber, each chosen according to its place and function in the vessel. According to historian William Crothers, “The most desirable product was a tree whose growth corresponded with the required configurations of the proposed finished piece. Laying out the piece so that its shape followed the natural sweep of the grain gave the component its greatest possible strength, which, in turn, guaranteed the greatest success of safety that could be built into a vessel. Such consideration was paramount, because at sea, small failures could become overwhelming disasters.”5

  Master woodworker Donald McKay was a tall man with calloused hands, rough fingernails, and wild, curly hair. Forty-one years old in 1851, he had a hands-on approach to operating his yard, which was very much a McKay family affair. His father, along with several of his brothers, worked for him at one time or another, including younger brothers Hugh and Lauchlan. His wife, Mary, managed the books.

  As shipyard owner, Donald McKay was the charismatic leader of his workmen. His sympathies always lay with the mechanic rather than the business side of ship construction. According to one descendant, McKay was quick to lead by example, picking up a mallet and thudding treenails into planks to show his workers just how things should be done. Through force of personality, he transformed himself from a humble craftsman into the toast of his adopted hometown of Boston.

  McKay had had to fight his way into the American shipbuilding world, and his manic drive reflected his outsider status. His was an immigrant success story, part of an exodus of Canadians who left the Maritime Provinces looking for work in the young, increasingly prosperous United States.

  Born in Jordan Falls on the south shore of Nova Scotia in 1810, Donald was the eldest of eleven children. His father owned a sawmill and also built small wooden ships on the side. His paternal grandfather, also named Donald McKay, had been a Scottish sergeant in the British army regiment that had occupied New York during the Revolution. After the war, Sergeant McKay sailed for Nova Scotia, to claim the parcel of land promised to him by the Crown for his service. He ended up owning a swampy, hardscrabble farm by the sea, where the family eked out a living.

  After learning rudimentary boatbuilding skills, his teenaged grandson and namesake left Nova Scotia for New York in 1825—the year before the opening of the Erie Canal—where he apprenticed himself to the shipbuilder Isaac Webb. There he worked alongside two other apprentices who would become famous clipper ship builders: Webb’s own son William, and John Willis Griffiths. The three remained close for the rest of their lives, through changing times and fortunes.

  Like Griffiths, Donald cut his apprenticeship short, though not because of injury. He was fed up with being an indentured servant. (It was he who described the apprenticeship system as slavocratic). Besides, he already had a job offer from Webb’s rival firm, New York’s Brown & Bell.

  McKay also had another source of support: a young lady named Albenia Boole, the daughter of a successful New York shipbuilder, who, like himself was an immigrant from Nova Scotia. Unlike the impoverished McKays, the Booles had means, and Albenia’s father had made sure that she was well educated, especially in mathematics. Albenia, in turn, must have sensed her beloved’s insecurities about his lack of formal education, and spent countless hours tutoring him in the more theoretical aspects of ship design, such as physics and geometry.

  In 1841 McKay finally got the
chance he had longed for: run his own shipyard. He had married Albenia, and together they moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, a coastal city long known for shipbuilding. There McKay built small ships and dreamed of doing something greater. Newburyport was in decline, as was nearby Salem, once the hub of the Yankee China trade. The trend affected shipyards in other New England towns that had once built packet ships but now were relegated to constructing coastal schooners and brigs.6 Capital and access to it were moving away.

  But Newburyport proved to be the stepping-stone McKay needed. When shipowner Enoch Train ordered a packet ship and McKay delivered the Joshua Bates, Train was so impressed with what he saw that he “grasped Donald McKay by the hand and said to him, ‘Come to Boston; I want you!’ ”7

  Train was the patron McKay needed. The Boston merchant was an old hand in the transatlantic packet ship business. Owner of the White Diamond Line, which ran between Boston and Liverpool, he had spent much of his career trying to divert New York’s immigrant traffic to his own city. Train had lots of money to invest. More important, Train, like McKay, had ambition. He wanted to show the world, in the words of the Boston Atlas, “that a Boston line of packets equal, if not superior, to any belonging to New York, could be built here.” Such a task, of course, required “much discretion in selecting a suitable mechanic to carry out his views.”8

  Donald McKay, although no mere mechanic, was Train’s man—and he delivered. His new shipyard on Border Street in East Boston was renowned for building tough, durable vessels for the North Atlantic trade. Between 1845 and 1850, McKay built Train five North Atlantic packets: Washington Irving, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American, Daniel Webster, and Ocean Monarch. They were built for strength and cargo capacity, and to be operated by hard-driving, often tyrannical captains who pushed them and their “packet rat” crews to the limit.

  Yet McKay’s designs also provided plush accommodations, considerably more luxurious than those of the rather grim Cunard steamships, Train’s rivals in the Liverpool-to-Boston route. The rich woods, tufted sofas, cut-glass oil lamps, and marble tables of the Train Line packets were meant to make passengers feel as if they were aboard a fine hotel on shore, at least during calm conditions. (One Cunard partner snapped to a whining passenger, “Going to sea is a hardship. The company did not undertake to make anything else out of it.”)9 McKay and other American shipbuilders were unashamed to indulge their countrymen’s taste for grandeur while at sea, even if it provided a mere momentary diversion from their discomfort. First-class passage on a crack packet ship was not cheap: $140 for a trip that could last anywhere from sixteen days to two months, depending on the season and the prevailing winds. Steerage was a different matter: an immigrant could purchase a berth in the airless, noxious hold of an Enoch Train packet for a mere $15.10 However, Boston still remained a secondary destination, and there were signs that Cunard might change its mind about the location of its western terminus.

  Word of McKay’s shipbuilding prowess by this time was reaching New York. Before becoming third mate aboard Houqua in 1844, Charles Low had a stint as a sailor aboard the small coffee carrier Courier, which McKay had rigged with skysails and royal studding sails, unusual for a ship so small. On board, Charles Low noticed what a fine vessel she was: “The Courier was a small ship of about three hundred and fifty tons, very fast, and a beautiful seaboat.” The voyage from New York to Rio and back, he recalled, was “one of the most pleasant I have ever made.”11

  McKay was raising the building of fast, clipper-type vessels from a commercial science to an American high art. The wellspring of rival Captain Nat’s design inspiration came from his long career as a captain in the China trade; because tea was a light cargo, Palmer’s clippers were relatively small and lightly built. Rival Griffiths was a theoretician who valued speed above all else, often at the expense of profitability. In contrast, although a supremely talented designer, McKay was more of a careful synthesizer than an innovator, his craftsmanship forged in the crucible of years of study and observation. Unlike up-and-coming New York builders, who were beginning to experiment with steam power and iron construction, he continued to place his faith in the power of wood and canvas. His packet ships were fast not just because they were sharp-hulled or heavily sparred, but also because they were built with the finest attention to detail in every possible way.

  His shipyard was prospering, but tragedy struck the McKay family in December 1848, when Albenia died in childbirth. Stricken with grief, McKay buried his wife and stillborn daughter in Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport, where they had lived during the early part of their married life. By the time of Albenia’s death, the couple had six rambunctious children, and in the fall of the following year, Donald married Mary Cressy Litchfield, the eighteen-year-old daughter of one of his shipyard’s carpenters, who, like many another nineteenth-century second wife, would throw herself into caring for the family.12

  Mary proved to be just as able as Albenia in helping her husband’s career. Not only did she run the household, but also she served as his business manager. According to one descendant, she was a strong personality, “the type of person who stood up for what she believed in.” In later life, she constantly lobbied local officials to ban the sale of alcohol at a local inn because there were so many young children in proximity.13 Having been surrounded by rowdy shipyard workers her whole life, she knew the evils of demon rum all too well. Mary was also credited with giving her husband’s clipper ships their melodious names.

  McKay had no desire to conquer Beacon Hill society, and so East Boston made sense as a place to settle down with his growing family. As one of Boston’s leading shipbuilders, he now made a good income, living in his Greek Revival mansion at the crest of the White Street hill. Out of pride for his adopted country, he added a veranda with thirteen columns, signifying each of the original colonies. As his grandson remembered, as much as the craftsman enjoying talking shop, “the charming qualities of his talented wife and his own interesting and attractive personality” made him a popular guest at parties.14 On cold Boston winter nights, the windows of Eagle Hill would be aglow with the light of dozens of whale oil lamps, friends and family sending the sounds of stamping feet, laughter, and Scottish reels into the evening air. McKay loved playing the violin at these gatherings.15 The famed Massachusetts politician Edward Everett declared of his friend Donald McKay’s large family, “I wish to know, my friends, if you do not call that being a good citizen?”16

  Built with his own hands and to his own design, McKay’s house was only a short walk away from his shipyard on Border Street. There, on a typical day, Donald McKay worked alongside his men in the shipyard: hammering trunnels into frames, planing hull planks, and joining keel scarphs with iron pins.17 Night watchmen swore that McKay would sometimes get up in the middle of the night, walk down to the yard, and caress the hulls of his vessels as they sat on the stocks.18

  “My speech is rude and uncultivated, but my feelings, I trust, are warm and true,” Donald McKay once said.19 Yet while seemingly unambitious for social status, he remained hungry for professional recognition. His gift for self-promotion set him apart from equally skilled and capable designers. As his reputation grew, McKay cultivated a circle of journalists and politicians, letting them roam around the shipyard, especially at launchings. Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts was an admirer, as was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, bard of the Brahmin establishment and author of “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Song of Hiawatha.” Longfellow was so impressed with what he saw at McKay’s shipyard that when he returned home to Cambridge, he composed “The Building of a Ship,” published in 1849. In it, he praised the shipbuilder Donald McKay as the “worthy Master.” To Longfellow, a great sailing ship was analogous to the union, and the shipbuilder analogous to the Lord Almighty:

  Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

  Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

  Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hopes of future years,
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  Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

  We know what Master laid thy keel,

  What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,

  Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,

  What anvils rang, what hammers beat,

  In what a forge and what a heat

  Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!20

  Arguably no other American shipbuilder had such a powerful cultural advocate, something that mattered in the city that prided itself as being the “Athens of America.”

  McKay was also determined to sell a clipper ship to a big New York firm and prove his worth to the growing metropolis he had left twenty years earlier. His business arrangement with Train allowed him to build ships for other operators if he had the time. Above all, McKay was dying for the chance to build not just fast ships but also big ones—bigger and faster than any of the New York clippers that had been built for the tea trade but were now being pressed into service for the long haul to California.

  Attract attention he did with his first ship of the clipper type: Stag Hound, in 1850. Her owners were George R. Sampson and Lewis W. Tappan, a formidable Boston team whose bread and butter was importing hemp from Manila. With their substantial backing, McKay could finally think big with the clipper type. He had built sharp ships before, small compared with the New York clippers, less than five hundred tons each. Stag Hound, on the other hand, was a monster, the biggest merchant ship in the world, and purpose-built for the San Francisco trade. McKay’s genius was to take Nat Palmer’s flat-floored China clipper model and enlarge it so that it could comfortably haul large amounts of heavy bulk cargo rather than light chests of tea. Stag Hound measured more than 1,500 tons, a third larger than Low’s brand-new Surprise, and almost twice as large as the pioneering tea clippers Houqua and Rainbow of only five years earlier.