Barons of the Sea Read online

  Hers was a seafaring family: her father, a sea captain, died when Eleanor was only three; a few years later, her mother married his brother, a US Navy lieutenant. Unlike other well-brought-up girls of the day, Eleanor Creesy had no interest in the cult of domesticity that dictated a woman should stay out of the hurly-burly, male-dominated arena of commerce. Instead, she followed in the footsteps of staunch New England women such as Abigail Adams—the influential wife of America’s second president, John Adams, and the mother of future chief executive John Quincy Adams—who defied the notion that women’s education should be geared primarily to attract a husband, run a home, and charm people at parties. Eleanor had no desire to pace the widow’s walk atop her Marblehead home, worrying like countless captains’ wives before her whether her husband would return.

  Although it was not uncommon for captains to bring their wives on long ocean voyages, Eleanor’s role as a mariner set her apart from her peers. “It was the rare bride who knew how to ‘work time’ to calculate the ship’s position,” writes historian Joan Druett.9 Not everyone was kind about wives on board; superstitious sailors derisively called such ships “hen frigates.” But it seems Eleanor had a way with people as well as technology. According to one passenger, she was “social and gentle … such glorious eyes I never saw, large, liquid, and hazel, soft as a gazelle’s and always beaming with kindness on somebody.”10

  Creesy did have a terrible temper and had no qualms about engaging in “belaying-pin and knuckle-duster” tactics with his crew.11 His runs on the China trade were good but not spectacular, and he was also a “pencil sharpener”—suspected of fudging daily records for the sake of pleasing his bosses. The ambitious captain had long been hoping to get command of a faster vessel of the clipper type. With Flying Cloud, he had his chance.

  While waiting to set sail, the Creesys stayed at the Astor House, New York’s largest and most modern hotel and the crown jewel of the Astor family’s real estate portfolio. The hotel boasted such modern amenities as running water, room service, and a bell system to summon servants to a guest’s room. Gaslight, rather than whale oil or tallow candles, flickered in the crystal chandeliers and gilt sconces.12 In the central courtyard, adorned with trees and splashing fountains, was a dark wood bar around which shipowners and captains loved to congregate, place bets, and spin yarns. Captain Creesy must have relished being the center of attention at the Astor House bar. He now commanded the largest merchant vessel in the world—and possibly the fastest, too.

  In the weeks before Flying Cloud’s sailing, Moses Grinnell and Robert Bowne Minturn hosted a series of onboard receptions to market her to prospective passengers and to merchants looking to ship goods to California. The promotional effort worked wonders. After a tour, one New York reporter wrote, “Hundreds of people have visited this beautiful and unique ship … The Flying Cloud is just the kind of vehicle, whatever else it may be called, that a sensible man would choose for a ninety-day voyage.”13

  On June 2, 1851, flying the red-and-white swallowtail banner of Grinnell, Minturn & Company, Flying Cloud departed New York’s South Street on her maiden voyage. Her holds contained about $50,000 worth of goods: 500 kegs of white lead, 100 cases of imperial black paint, lamp black, 100 cans of turpentine, 190 dozen brandied peaches, 100 dozen tomato and pepper sauces, 68 boxes of candles, and many casks of wine and spirits.14 She was also carrying something even more precious: Moses Grinnell’s ambition to break the monopoly of the old China hands on the speed record to California. He hoped, too, that his McKay-designed ship would be a worthy adversary to the Low ships on the race from China to New York.

  There were twelve passengers on this maiden voyage: six men, five women (including an Irish maid), and one male child.15 None of them appeared to be gold prospectors: the ticket price for passage on a clipper ship was way too high. Unlike passengers on the steamers, who were divided into two classes, there was only one class: the equivalent of modern-day first. Among the several passengers who boarded Flying Cloud with valises in tow were three Boston siblings: Whitney, Sarah, and Ellen Lyon. Ellen was en route to San Francisco to marry Reuben Patrick Boise, a distinguished Oregon jurist. Her father had taken a Panama steamer and was scheduled to arrive ahead of his children. Why the three siblings decided to take Flying Cloud and not the more regularly scheduled steamship line is a mystery.16 Sarah Lyon would not regret her choice.

  But with the departure of N. B. Palmer just four weeks earlier, Captain Creesy was presented with a predicament: manpower. By the early 1850s, recruiting enough sailors—no matter how inexperienced—to sail a big clipper to California was becoming a problem. In the first few years after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, captains had no problem signing on men to work on a sailing ship rounding Cape Horn to California. Gone now were those heady first months, when hordes of prospectors would happily board anything floating bound for San Francisco. The steamships of Pacific Mail and other lines had made the trip to California via the Panama Isthmus almost routine. Tickets were expensive, but most prospective travelers preferred to fork over the money rather than endure hellish conditions on a clipper as part of the crew. Yet despite the labor shortage, freight rates to California remained sky high. Flying Cloud’s maiden voyage cargo was worth the modern-day equivalent of many millions in California—and worthless if the ship didn’t sail or sank en route.

  By the last days of May, Creesy, like other captains, had to resort to shady, often brutal tactics to get the fifty or so men needed to crew up a ship like Flying Cloud. He hired “crimps,” crew recruiters who were little more than thugs. The crimps made deals with the operators of New York’s waterfront dive bars and brothels, who would drug unwitting patrons into a stupor with a few drops of opium. The crimps would then dump the unconscious men onto the deck of the waiting ship. When they awoke, the newly conscripted members of the crew not only found their pockets were empty but also that they were now contracted to sail the duration of the voyage. Worse still, three months’ worth of their wages had been paid out to the crimps.17

  Some of these men were experienced sailors who had been out on a spree the night before. For them, especially the packet rats, climbing aloft in a blinding gale to shorten sail was all in a day’s work. Such brashness when faced with danger or uncertainty was all part of a sailor’s lot. Others were unfortunates caught in the crimp’s clutches: famine Irish, African American freedmen, and fugitive slaves, Portuguese, Italians, Finns, and many others in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even captains and officers could be targets. According to a New Orleans clergyman writing in an 1851 issue of the Sailor’s magazine, “In one case, the captain of a ship who had unfortunately taken too much liquor was shipped as a common sailor and went down the river in that capacity, leaving his own ship on the levee.”18

  The year 1851 was a terrible one for deaths on board American merchant ships. According to one source, 103 men died from disease and shipboard injuries while on the job. The average age was only twenty-eight.19 Few other records survive, but it is safe to say that the year’s death toll on ships and in foreign ports was probably in the thousands. It came down to lack of training, insufficient manpower, profit-driven owners hell-bent on speed, and the dangers inherent to life at sea.

  *

  A month after Grinnell’s Flying Cloud departed New York, a third and even bigger clipper, Challenge, set sail in pursuit. Not only was she the biggest merchant ship in the world, but also she was likely the most expensive, costing the Griswold brothers well over $150,000 to construct. Yet Captain Waterman had a problem: his rivals Creesy and Low had taken the best men from the New York waterfront. In charge of a much bigger ship with significantly larger sails than her rivals, Waterman needed at least sixty men to cast off for San Francisco. The crimps he hired delivered too few men; what’s more, they were the absolute dregs of the waterfront. Seventeen were unfit for duty and lay moaning in the ship’s sick bay. Only six of them had ever steered a ship before.

  W
aterman was so upset that he considered canceling the voyage. But with so much cargo in his hold, a giant clipper built to his specifications—and that $10,000 bonus from the Griswolds if he made the trip to California in less than ninety days—the captain decided to set sail.20 First, though, he made a quick change in personnel. While riding at anchor off the Battery, he fired his first mate and replaced him with James Douglass, who had arrived in New York Harbor aboard the Black Star Line’s transatlantic packet Guy Mannering. Waterman knew his reputation and felt Douglass was the only person who could whip his slovenly crew into shape. Douglass was the archetypal bucko mate: six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, he was rough-hewn, belligerent, and had an almost maniacal love of beating his men. The word on the docks was that the new first mate “would rather have a knockdown fight with a lot of sailors than eat a good dinner.”21

  Waterman probably had another, more immediate reason to hire a big man like “Black Douglas”: he was the ideal bouncer to have guarding the space between the fo’c’sle and the captain’s cabin. Waterman was slight of build, with almost feminine features—and he was detested. On this trip, he needed not just a first mate but also a bodyguard.22

  Before delivering his lecture to the crew, Waterman splashed his face with seawater, a ritual baptism he did before every voyage. A skilled sailor, he had supposedly never lost a spar and was not about to lose one on this voyage, either. He and Douglass went through the sailors’ chests, collecting all pistols, personal knives, brass knuckles, and other weapons, and then threw them overboard. The only sharp objects the men could keep were their sailor’s knives and marlinspikes, which were needed for unjamming halyards, cutting through damaged rope, and performing other essential tasks while aloft.23 As one more precaution against violence, it wasn’t uncommon for the first mate to break the sharp ends off these knives before returning them to their owners.

  The stage was set for one of the most infamous voyages of the clipper ship era, one that would expose to the nation the human cost of speed and profit at any cost.

  *

  I. A device used for raising the anchor, consisting of a barrel turned by a crank or lever.

  CHAPTER 12

  AROUND THE WORLD

  To protect the cigars, I had a tin chest made & hope it will fetch a profit above cost … I hope you will not part with the shipment of butter without a full consideration, none can be better than per F. Cloud which was new as you were informed.

  —FRANCIS S. HATHAWAY to the Grinnell, Minturn & Company office in San Francisco, May 30, 18511

  Leaving New York Harbor that June day in 1851, Captain Creesy guided Flying Cloud on a southeast course across the Atlantic. He was aiming to avoid the doldrums: the windless belt of equatorial air that could trap sailing ships for days. To do so, Creesy first headed the ship toward Africa. Then, not far from the coast, he turned and tacked back southwest toward Brazil. Wife Eleanor was, as always, his careful navigator as they plotted their way using the new charts that Matthew Fontaine Maury had published only two years before.

  Creesy’s earlier command had been Oneida, a vessel half the size of Flying Cloud, so getting a feel for a ship this large and skittish was a tall order. Yet he would not let his crew see his anxiety about his valuable command. Swapping yarns at the Astor House while awaiting Flying Cloud’s launch, Josiah Creesy almost certainly heard how McKay’s earlier Stag Hound lost her top-hamper under a heavy press of sail in gale conditions on her maiden voyage the year before. The accident had ruined Captain Josiah Richardson’s chance of grabbing the record. Creesy hoped that his ship, only the second clipper built by McKay, did not have the same design flaw.

  Three days out of New York, the wind freshened, but Creesy kept his speed and did not reduce canvas. The wind blew harder and harder. The shrouds creaked, and the ocean broke over the bow as Flying Cloud bounded through the waves. Ships such as Flying Cloud were pushing the absolute limits of wooden ship technology, especially when it came to the terrific forces exerted upon the masts by wind and the tremendous pounding of heavy seas on the hull. “They carry enormous cargoes, and the speed of these Leviathans, when sporting with the winds and the waves, is almost terrific,” wrote a San Francisco journalist. “It is in fact so great, that could power enough be brought to bear on the hull of an old-fashioned ship, as to force her through the water at the same rate, it would crush her to pieces.”2

  Down below, most of Creesy’s passengers were laid up in their staterooms, suffering from seasickness. Compounding their nausea was a pungent mix of odors: coal smoke from the galley, animal excrement, vomit from commodes and chamber pots. The ship’s luxurious passenger quarters became a mockery as Flying Cloud heaved and lurched through the ocean. And then there was the strange cacophony of noises from up above: the creaking of yards and shrieking of ropes in their blocks, as well as the hoarse shouts of the first mate to the men on watch, followed by the pounding of bare feet on pine decks. Passenger Sarah Bowman was all too aware of the “immense amount of livestock on board.” As she sat in her chair, staring out at the vast ocean, she felt it odd to hear “roosters crowing, hens cackling, turkeys gobbling, pigs grunting, and lambs bleating.”3

  When the passengers got their sea legs, the next challenge was finding ways to fill the days in the middle of the vast ocean, far away from all that was familiar. “Oh, how I should like the daily papers,” Sarah yearned. “I want to know what is going on in Boston, and vicinity. I want to see all the folks at W., the Whitmans, the Silsbys, and hosts of others I shall always remember so pleasantly—shall I ever see their faces again? Yes,—I will believe so.”4

  By June 6, four days out, those passengers who had gotten over their nausea were eating their first full dinner when they heard a cracking and splintering from up above. The main and mizzen topgallant masts came crashing down, along with the main topsail yard. The broken masts and spars swung in the air from a mass of tangled rigging, as Flying Cloud flailed before the wind like a wounded beast. Down below, passengers noticed the ship break her forward motion. Her previously steady roll became uneven, as she leaned drunkenly to one side.

  The easy thing for Creesy to have done was to order the crew to cut down the broken masts and spars, turn around, and proceed back to New York under reduced sail. Yet the old master refused. Ordering the crew to heave to, he held the ship in position and waited for the wind to die down. He was lucky. The weather turned.

  The following day, the captain sent his crew aloft. Rather than cut away the damaged rigging, Creesy wanted the ship brought back to her original rig. There in the middle of the ocean, that’s what the sailors did. Using the stock of extra spars stowed on deck, the crew repaired and replaced the damaged masts. Broken pieces from the originals were refashioned into smaller spars. Skilled hands led by example and repaired the rigging. The restoration of the ship at sea was altogether a heroic feat, one made possible by the remarkable stability Flying Cloud enjoyed—partly because of her relatively flat bottom, and partly because Creesy had probably made sure that cargo had been loaded carefully to preserve her center of gravity.5

  Onward, Flying Cloud sailed for San Francisco, the crew watching the repaired masts for any danger signs. Passengers must have breathed a sigh of relief. Most were young—none was past his or her midthirties—and were generally affluent and well educated. Sarah Bowman amused herself by reading poetry to Eleanor Creesy. She also took a strong interest in one of her fellow passengers, Laban Coffin from Baltimore, who was, she thought, a “finished, traveled gentleman, well bred—well read—posted up on every subject—fine looking to boot.” Sarah was especially taken with Laban’s travel stories: he claimed to have been around Cape Horn thirteen times and that this was his third trip to San Francisco. He may have been exaggerating to put Sarah and the other ocean novices at ease, but he did have plenty of sea experience. A scion of an old Nantucket whaling family, Laban was tall and well built (“rather inclined to be on the fleshy side,” Sarah wrote). He h
ad shipped to sea at fifteen and survived being crushed between a bobbing whale and the side of the ship as he tried to remove a harpoon from the dead beast’s flank. After recovering from this near-fatal experience, he spent many years sailing between Baltimore and South America, trading hides for machinery.6

  Captain Creesy liked the tough but gentlemanly Laban enough to play chess with him during his precious free time.7

  Laban was also a lot of time with the Lyon siblings, and fellow passengers couldn’t help but notice that he was especially attentive to Sarah Lyon.

  But there was still trouble ahead for Flying Cloud. The ship’s carpenter reported that her mainmast was badly sprung at the base and could crack if put under too much pressure. Word spread, and the passengers fretted. “It is a pity, of course, it would not do to crowd on sail, and we cannot make the voyage as soon as we otherwise should,” wrote one passenger. “Besides, the Capt. Fears we may lose the mast in passing that dreaded ‘world’s corner,’ Cape Horn.” Creesy weighed his choices and decided to keep the ship under a full press of sail, all the while keeping a careful eye on the mast. His best hope was to trust that Lieutenant Maury’s course would save them valuable time and that Cape Horn would not hit them with a western gale that would topple the mainmast.8

  Within twenty-one days, Flying Cloud swept past the equator. “[P]assengers have been on deck watching the lovely sunset,” Sarah Bowman wrote in her journal. “[L]ong before the rich colours have faded from the clouds, the stars were out and our gaze was turned [to] the southern cross—Ah! How strange it seems—We are now going at the rate of eleven knots an hour … great speed for this latitude.”9

  Flying Cloud continued sailing along Maury’s recommended route for finding the most favorable winds and currents. The sprung mainmast held, as did the repaired rigging. Then the gentle, sunny balm of the tropics soon gave way to gray seas and lowering skies. The passengers, still worrying whether the mainmast would hold, distracted themselves by playing games and reading in the warmth of the main saloon.