Barons of the Sea Read online

  As an unemployed Moses wandered the New Bedford wharves, lined with barrels of whale oil, he ran into his father’s business partner (and cousin): the cadaverous Preserved Fish. Fish had left the Quaker faith and become an Episcopalian, perhaps to align himself with New York’s elite.

  “You are out of work are you not, Moses?” Fish inquired.

  “Yes sir,” Moses responded dejectedly.

  “You know the business,” Fish said. “Will you take it over as a partner?”

  Moses had a rich father, but he himself had no money. “But sir, I have no capital!” he protested.

  “Nonsense!” barked Fish in his curt captain’s voice. “You have all the capital I want: brains, youth, and ambition. Come now, no buts. Yes or no?”11

  Moses packed up his belongings, moved to New York, and set up shop at Fish & Grinnell on South Street. His wife, Susan, must have been grateful to leave behind the ruckus about her conduct at the New Bedford Meeting.

  Over the next few years, Fish & Grinnell would expand from whaling into an even more lucrative business: the transatlantic packet trade. This wing of its business became known as the Swallowtail Line, after the double-pointed red-and-white pennants that flew famously from its ships’ mainmasts.

  Another young man also joined Moses at the firm’s New York countinghouse table: the sharp-faced, bewhiskered Robert Bowne Minturn. He, too, had family roots at sea—his grandfather had been a wealthy Rhode Island shipping magnate—but as a young man, he had hoped to go to Columbia College and become a physician. However, when Minturn was still a boy, his father died, leaving the family in poverty. To support his mother, Robert was forced to become an apprentice clerk at age fifteen. The work was so crushing that the despondent, fatherless boy contemplated suicide by jumping into the East River at the end of a long day at the countinghouse.

  Only the thought of his mother’s plight seems to have kept him going. “He felt deeply the restricted circumstances of his mother after she became a widow,” a biographer wrote, “and this, no doubt nerved his arm for the battle of life upon which he so early entered.” In 1831 Minturn became a partner of the firm following the retirement of Preserved Fish and Moses’s father, Cornelius. Fish & Grinnell became Grinnell, Minturn & Company. At least one visitor was struck at how such a prominent firm was run by two men in their early thirties. According to one story, when a representative from London’s Barings’ Bank visited the firm, he asked if he could meet with Mr. Minturn.

  “I am he,” said Minturn.

  “Not you—not you!” sputtered the Englishman. “But the old man.”12

  Four years after making partner, Minturn married Anna Mary Wendell, the daughter of a prominent attorney from Albany, New York. By then, he could more than provide for a family. Perhaps in deference to Anna, he left his family’s Quaker persuasion and joined the Episcopal Church. A decade later, Robert Minturn was worth $200,000, thanks to his firm’s booming transatlantic business.

  His business partner’s wealth was easily just as vast. As he grew richer, Moses Grinnell hankered for political office, perhaps as much to protect his shipping interests (under attack from Jacksonian populists) as by any desire to serve the public. Moses served one term in Congress as a Whig from 1839 to 1841. This was the party of the elite, which put Grinnell in opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, which was increasingly the party of working men—like the shipyard workers who built Grinnell’s ships and the sailors who crewed them. After serving two years in Washington, Moses returned to the Grinnell, Minturn & Company countinghouse—to the satisfaction of many of his peers, who felt that politics was no place for a gentleman. “A ‘popular candidate for office,’ ” opined one such person, “is equivalent to ‘a vagabond who has no business of his own’; ‘popularity’ means ‘the approbation of the mob.’ ”13

  By the 1840s, the Grinnell, Minturn Swallowtail Line would receive a financial windfall, thanks to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the nineteenth century: Ireland’s Great Famine. Although Britain had abolished slavery by 1839, absentee aristocratic British estate holders kept millions of Irish peasants in a state of virtual serfdom as tenant farmers from whom they extracted a yearly quota of grain as rent. Often, Irish tenant farmers had little left to eat except potatoes. The famine began in 1845, when a fungus wiped out Ireland’s entire potato crop. During the next few years, an estimated one million people starved to death, out of a total population of eight million. Another million and a half scraped together the money to immigrate to America, mostly aboard westbound packet ships to the New World. The passage could last anywhere from two weeks to three months.

  After Irish emigrants had sold everything they owned except perhaps for a few treasured possessions, family and friends would gather for an “Emigrant Wake” that mimicked the wakes held for the departed. After an evening of dancing and drink, the sad reality sank in: they would never see those departing again. By crossing the North Atlantic, they might as well be crossing the River Styx. Leaving family, friends, and the graves of their loved ones behind, emigrants departed their decimated villages in Mayo, Donegal, and Cork Counties, and headed to the coast by foot and horse cart, and then by ferry across the Irish Sea to Liverpool.

  The “famine Irish” enriched Grinnell, Minturn & Company of New York and the White Diamond Line of Boston. As a result, the Irish population of both cities swelled during the 1850s, with the vast majority condemned to live in conditions of abysmal poverty. In a typical packet, more than a hundred passengers were shoved into the tween decks of the ship, spaces equipped with crude bunks and tables. Unlike cabin-class passengers, whose food was included in the fare, steerage passengers often had to bring their own provisions and bedding. Any food the company provided was little better than the lot of the crew: hardtack biscuits, salt pork and beef, and hash. Untold thousands died of sickness and accidents in so-called “coffin ships.” Yet for these famine Irish, the terrifying journey was worth the risk. If they stayed behind, they would most likely starve.

  As they raked in huge profits from the humanitarian disaster, packet shipowners took on a charitable face. The New York newspapers of the day repeatedly praised Grinnell and Minturn’s altruism. Journalist and politician Thurlow Weed gushed that Grinnell “was so large-hearted that he desired to make everybody happy; he was generous to the last degree. Unlike many men situated in life as he was, he did not contribute to hospital or asylum funds at stated intervals only, but gave in charity every day. In fact, he was always giving either money or assistance of other kinds to the needy.” He wrote similarly about Grinnell’s business partner: “Indeed, no better man ever lived in New York than Robert B. Minturn.”14

  Not everyone appears to have shared this view. Fellow shipping man Abbot Low thought the Grinnell firm’s profiteering from the famine distasteful. In a letter to a sibling, he wrote sarcastically: “Our friends, Grinnell, Minturn are heartbroken about the famine. They have a house dinner to celebrate the fortune it is bringing them, and dine on terrapin, salmon, peas, asparagus, strawberries—all out of season, of course—then Mr. Grinnell gives the famine fund $360, which he had lost on a bet with Mr. Wetmore [William S. Wetmore, founder of rival China trade firm Wetmore & Company]. That, my dear brother, does not remind me of the way Houqua used to do things.”15I If this letter is authentic, Low conveniently forgot about the lavish spreads of Chinese delicacies at Houqua’s Canton villa. To him, those who were involved in the immigrant packet trade were profiteers in human misery, while, as his old Canton partner Robert Bennet Forbes liked to say, those merchants involved in the opium-fueled China trade were “exponents of all that was honorable in trade.”16

  Ironically, Forbes joined the Irish humanitarian effort in 1847, commanding the naval vessel USS Jamestown on a transatlantic voyage to Ireland, her holds carrying eight thousand barrels of food. The local Protestant gentry feted Forbes and his forty-nine-man crew with a splendid feast, and the Liverpool Herald crowed that this America
n gesture came from “genuine concern for the plight of a starving nation. Also, the notion of an American ship of war going on an errand of mercy, at the height of the unpopular Mexican War, seems to have resonated with the American public.”

  Forbes was smart enough to see through the pomp and the publicity. Accompanied by a local priest, he saw enough in five minutes in the back alleys of Cork to horrify him: “hovels crowded with the sick and dying, without floors, without furniture, and with patches of dirty straw covered with still dirtier shreds and patches of humanity.”17 During his many years in China, Forbes might have seen similar scenes of despair had he walked the forbidden streets of Canton and peered into the numerous opium dens. He would boast later that “many of the children born about the time of our advent [in Ireland] were named ‘Forbes,’ ‘Boston,’ or ‘James’ [after the USS Jamestown].” Soon after his return to America, Forbes received from the city fathers of Cork “a splendid silver salver and other tokens of their regard—which my family hold in trust, hoping that the Treasury of the United States will, sooner or later, return the seventy-five dollars’ duty exacted at the Boston Custom House, with compound interest, and a full apology for the grab!”18

  *

  The clannish Warren Delano probably respected Moses Grinnell—they were New Bedford boys, and he had a friendship with Grinnell partner Francis Hathaway that went back to their days in Canton. Besides, the Grinnell firm had helped make his brother Franklin rich. Yet it appears that Delano did not think much of Robert Bowne Minturn. “I note all that you say of RBM—in connection with your arrangements with GM&Co,” Warren wrote Franklin about Minturn. “I am a bit surprised at his duplicity.”19 The feud seemed to stem from Minturn’s wanting to bring someone into the firm as a partner who, in Warren’s assessment, was “without expenses other than eating, sleeping, whittling, and smoking, and RBM might take a fancy to let him in, in your place.”20

  In the shipping business, good manners in no way affected tough competition or hard bargaining. Grinnell and Minturn were very different creatures from the Russell men, who had spent their formative years in China, raised on long-haul, long-term gambles, with big payoffs at the end—quite literally, when one’s “ship came in.” The availability of products to buy and markets for selling them dictated routes, cargoes, and seasons.

  Grinnell, however, wanted to run his firm’s vessels on a schedule. He was a man of the countinghouse who prided himself on providing regular service across the North Atlantic. His transatlantic packets made money several times a year, not once a year as on the China route. And, in fact, over the long haul, the transatlantic packet operators made more money with their ships than the China traders did. As one historian noted, “The packets traveled a bit more slowly, but they carried considerably more. Their shrewd operators resisted the ‘bigger and better’ temptations until the traffic was ready to support bigger and better ships.”21

  Moses Grinnell took a risk only when he could truly afford to lose what was at stake. Buying a California clipper ship was a huge gamble; he preferred to invest in ships and men with proven records. There was a Quaker conservatism about his firm’s operations. According to one historian, “[T]hey achieved their success without the mean sharpness which marred the great house of Howland.”22 Such “mean sharpness” included Howland partner William Henry Aspinwall’s ruthless pursuit of speed with Sea Witch under the controversial Captain “Bully Bob” Waterman.23

  Compared with A. A. Low’s concern, Grinnell, Minturn’s stake in the China trade was relatively minor, and managed from the New Bedford offices of his business partner Francis Hathaway, whose specialty was importing tea, silk, and hemp from Canton and Manila.24 The firm had interests in two older vessels plying the tea route: Horatio, in which the young Charles Low had gotten his start under Moses’s cousin Captain William Howland, and Oneida, an aging former North Atlantic packet ship. Grinnell preferred to invest in the packet ship type, the sort of vessel with which he was most familiar, even if the Lows described his stubby old Horatio as a “pile driver.” Oneida had made respectable if not spectacular runs from Canton to New York in the recent past but could not compete with the clippers.

  It was probably Francis Hathaway who finally pressured Moses Grinnell to jump into the clipper business. He had spent time in China as the Grinnells’ agent, and he knew Warren Delano and John Murray Forbes from their days in the Factories. A lifelong bachelor, he was a cousin of John Murray Forbes’s wife, Sarah Hathaway, and of Warren Delano’s wife, Catherine Lyman. He would have been well aware of the promise of his kinsmen’s new, swift ships.

  Or perhaps Moses Grinnell was simply tired of being bested on the high seas by the men of the Canton coterie. Whatever his motivation for belatedly joining his rivals in the clipper game, in 1850 Francis Hathaway wrote to Warren Delano’s brother Franklin about a new sort of ship under construction for the firm. Hathaway did not hold back his opinions on the ship’s design, writing, “I want nothing but a fast, the fastest large clipper.”25

  This clipper became Sea Serpent and was given over to Grinnell’s cousin Captain William Howland, long master of the aging Horatio. But she proved not to be as fast as Hathaway had hoped, and so he may well have pushed Moses to go after another one for Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy of the antiquated Oneida. In 1851 the time finally seemed to Grinnell to be right. And he had a naval architect in mind: Donald McKay.

  Grinnell was familiar with McKay’s work. In between commissions for Enoch Train, McKay had designed Grinnell’s most recent purchase: the transatlantic packet ship Cornelius Grinnell, named after the owner’s seafaring father. Cornelius Grinnell had been built for strength rather than speed. Her bow was bluff and her stern square. The papers heralded her as “by all odds” the strongest ship of her size ever built in America. Nonetheless, she boasted an incredibly high rig, as lofty as any clipper ship’s. Cornelius Grinnell broke no records in the transatlantic run but established a reputation for relatively regular arrival times in New York and Liverpool.

  Yet the enormous clippers that McKay was now working on for Train were larger than anything in Grinnell’s fleet. The larger of the two, Staffordshire, was a strange hybrid: a “clipper packet,” designed for a regularly scheduled run rather than itinerant cargo service. Named after the famed pottery works in England, she was intended for the transatlantic trade, where, Train hoped, her great speed would allow the White Diamond Line to compete head-on with the Cunard steamships. A witch figurehead leered down from Staffordshire’s prow.

  The other clipper on the stocks was slightly smaller than Staffordshire, registering at 1,782 tons and stretching 225 feet long, with a beam of 40 feet. She had a relatively flat bottom, inspired by Captain Nat’s designs, which had proved their worth over the past several years. Duncan McLean wrote of her in the Boston Daily Atlas: “If great length, sharpness of ends, with proportionate breadth and depth, conduce to speed, the Flying Cloud must be uncommonly swift, for in all these she is great.” She was to be Train’s entry into the California trade, meant to compete with Sampson & Tappan’s new (but yet unproven) Stag Hound and the crack vessels of Abbot Low’s fleet.

  This was the clipper on which Grinnell set his sights. The question was how much cash it would take for Train to part with Flying Cloud.

  How Moses Grinnell was able to talk Enoch Train out of his Flying Cloud remains a mystery. But somehow the two men struck a deal: Train would keep Staffordshire for transatlantic service but sell Flying Cloud to Grinnell for use in the California trade. What part McKay had in this transaction, if any, is unknown. Most likely, the Nova Scotian was happy to see two of his most prominent clients, one from Boston and one from New York, get in a bidding war over one of his clipper ships.

  George Francis Train, Enoch’s unreliable, eccentric cousin who did a stint as partner at the White Diamond Line, would later not only claim responsibility for building Flying Cloud, but also for selling her to Moses Grinnell. “The proudest moment of my life,” h
e wrote in his rather fantastical memoir My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, “up to that time, was when I received a check from Moses H. Grinnell, the New York head of the house, for $90,000.”26 George, who traveled the world to promote the Union Pacific Railroad after his time in the shipping business, would one day be imprisoned and nearly committed to an insane asylum after “publishing an obscene paper,” the subject of which remains a mystery.27 Whether he truly masterminded the sale of Flying Cloud is likewise unknown.

  For his part, his much saner kinsman Enoch Train lamented later that selling Flying Cloud to Moses Grinnell for $90,000 was one of the great business mistakes of his career.28

  Still, Grinnell, who hated taking risks, did not take on the entire risk of the clipper he bought from Train. Rather, he split up the ownership (and risk) of Flying Cloud into 32 shares and distributed them to partners. As lead partners, Grinnell and Minturn each held a 9/32 stake in the new vessel. Francis Hathaway, Henry Grinnell (brother of Moses), and a captain from Mystic, Connecticut, named John E. Williams each took a 4/32 stake. As an incentive for swift sailing and careful management of his Flying Cloud’s cargo and passengers, Captain Josiah Creesy received a 2/32 share.29

  There was little question of Donald McKay taking a share: Boston builders mostly avoided investing in their own ships, which may well have contributed to their artistic success. As historian Henry Hall wrote: “Leaving to others the management of the ships … it is probable that the superior excellence of Boston vessels sprung from the particular fact that builders gave their whole attention to the art.”30 Why agonize over the ship you’d built piece by piece once it was out of your hands?