Barons of the Sea Page 24

  Waterman felt he had no need to apologize for anything. He would face justice head-on. Tired and weather beaten, but still bright-eyed and defiant, he strode off the ship, down the gangway, and into the mob, which parted before him, surely taken aback by this little mariner’s audacity. Waterman made his way to the Alsop Building, headquarters of the Griswold firm’s agent. There he debriefed the representative on the terrible voyage. Although Challenge did not make it to San Francisco in less than ninety days, that Waterman had completed the trip in about the same time as Captain Low had done in N. B. Palmer a few months earlier—with a much more fractious, inexperienced, and sick crew—was a remarkable feat. Waterman did not shy away from telling the press that he was “not satisfied with the ship’s record on this maiden voyage,” and that this “noble sea boat … had no chance during the entire voyage to try her speed.”46

  The journalists who came aboard Challenge were horrified at the sight of so many sick and injured men. As soon as the crew members opened their mouths to tell stories of Waterman’s brutality, the reporters also knew that this was fantastic copy. “The ship Challenge has arrived, and Capt. Waterman, her commander, has also. But where are nine of his crew?” asked the California Courier. “And where is he and his guilty mate? The accounts given of Captain Waterman toward his men, if true, make him one of the most inhumane monsters of this age.”

  Despite the undoubted protestations of the remaining officers, the reporters went into the ship’s fo’c’sle and sick bay. There they found the most lurid, ghastly scenes of human suffering: “The scene at this time on board of the ship beggars all description,” the Courier continued. “Five of them are mangled and bruised in the most shocking manner. One poor fellow died today, and five others, it is expected, will soon be in the embrace of death. One of the men now lying on his deathbed has been severely injured in his genitals, by a kick from this brute in human form. Had these poor men been put in a den with bears and panthers, they could not have been much more inhumanely and shockingly maimed.”47

  By the next day, when the papers hit the streets of San Francisco, what had happened aboard America’s newest and biggest clipper ship had become the talk of the town. Within a month, thanks to William Henry Aspinwall’s rapid mail steamship service between California and New York, the star-crossed voyage of the Challenge was national news. Not since the publication of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast twelve years earlier had the shipping business faced so much public scrutiny.

  The concerned citizens needed a scapegoat. On November 1 two thousand angry men marched to the Griswold offices and demanded that Waterman come out from hiding. When the captain refused, the seething mob broke down the front door with crowbars and pickaxes. Waterman fled the office by climbing to the top floor and jumping to the roof of an adjoining building. The vigilante leaders promptly seized Captain John Land, Challenge’s new captain, who had commanded the revolutionary Rainbow on her maiden voyage six years before and hadn’t even yet set foot aboard his next command.48 Then, according to Captain Arthur Clark’s version of events, they debated whether to “shoot, drown, or hang him in place of Captain Waterman.”49

  Next, the mayor of San Francisco, a tough-talking former Kentucky boatman named Charles Brenham, showed up with members of the Committee on Vigilance, the city’s de facto police force. With dozens of armed men backing him up, Brenham ordered the mob to disperse. Otherwise, he supposedly yelled, “I will put every damned one of you in jail!”50 The mob murmured angrily but then scattered. Still cornered, Robert Waterman turned himself over to the authorities for protective custody. He demanded a public trial to prove his innocence.

  On December 1 the Griswold brothers saw their proud family name splashed across the pages of the New York Times. The paper reported that one month before, there had been a “serious disturbance which occurred at San Francisco immediately after the arrival of the Challenge, growing out of the severity and cruelty charged to have been exercised by the captain and mate towards the seamen.” The paper then reprinted a section of the Alta California’s coverage of the Challenge’s arrival, noting that ten of the clipper’s crew had been killed during the voyage and that “there were many rumors afloat respecting the above mentioned affair.”51

  The captains who met at New York’s Astor House bar also discussed the possible fallout from Captain Waterman’s trial. So did shipowners such as Moses Grinnell and Warren Delano, who surely spoke about it over brandy and cigars in their townhouses.

  No one knows what the Griswold brothers thought.

  Captain Creesy was happily oblivious to all of this, as his ship raced across the Pacific.

  *

  I. The lowermost yard on the main mast (second mast back from the bow), supporting the main sail.

  CHAPTER 13

  FRIGHTFUL TO LOOK ALOFT: SOVEREIGN OF THE SEAS

  No more beautiful sight can be imagined than a morning at sea, with these magnificent vessels racing in mid-ocean, perhaps two or three of them in sight at once; the sun rising amidst golden clouds; the dark blue sea flecked with glistening white caps; long, low black hulls cleaving a pathway of sparkling foam; towering masts, and yards covered with snowy canvas which bellies to the crisp morning breeze as if sculptured in marble; the officers alert and keen for the contest.1

  —CAPTAIN ARTHUR HAMILTON CLARK

  The trial of Robert Waterman and James Douglass took place at the US District Courthouse in San Francisco, and lasted four months. It was a media circus, with reporters and curious observers cramming the balconies of the rickety structure. The witnesses gave contradictory, tangled testimony about the entire voyage: the attempted mutiny, the knife assault on Douglass, and the alleged beatings and deaths of Pawpaw, Lessing “the Dancing Master,” and other crew members at the hands of the captain and first mate.

  Amidst the storm and fury of the press, Waterman remained unrepentant. (Although he did send $500 to the widow of one of the men who fell from aloft, along with a sympathy note.2) The whole affair, he insisted, had been whipped up out of nothing when Challenge’s crew spread “slanderous falsehoods and outlandish stories to the newspapers” as part of their scheme to cover up their own guilt in the mutiny. For him, as for all clipper captains, the primary job was to ensure the arrival of his employer’s ship and cargo as quickly and safely as possible. In his mind, he had been dealt a lousy hand by the crimps, and had hired Douglass because such a bully was the only kind of officer able to whip a diseased, inexperienced, and surly group of men into shape. What bothered Waterman the most was that due to bad seamanship and uncooperative weather, Challenge never had a chance to show her true top speed. Although a rich man, the loss of the $10,000 bonus still stung.

  In February 1852 Judge Ogden Hoffman Jr., a Columbia-educated jurist appointed by President Millard Fillmore to bring some semblance of judicial order to San Francisco, admonished the jury to “weigh carefully the portion of the testimony touching on the state of discipline and behavior of the crew at the time the offense is alleged to have been committed and whether under a consideration of all circumstances, as detailed by witnesses, a reasonable man would have cause to fear personal danger or be deprived of the command of the ship and whether this state of affairs warned the committal of an assault like the one charged in the indictment.”3

  The jury came back hopelessly deadlocked, and so Waterman emerged from the ordeal triumphant. He was effectively exonerated on all charges, save for the cruel treatment of one crew member, for which he was fined $400—a paltry sum for a man who was busy plowing his considerable personal wealth into California real estate. (Like Creesy, Waterman probably owned 3/32 of his ship.) As for Douglass, he was out $250 for the murder of Pawpaw and $50 for assaulting the ship’s carpenter. The mutineers were set free.4

  Waterman never went to sea again. He and his wife, Cordelia, settled permanently on a ranch in northern California’s Suisun Valley, where they cultivated eucalyptus trees from seeds imported from Austra
lia. The hope was that wood from the drought-resistant tree could be used for shipbuilding. “For a person who has some capital and is willing to wait for returns,” touted one newspaper, “there is a pretty chance to make a fortune in the growing of gum trees.”5 Unfortunately for Waterman and other cultivators, the Australian wood proved too gnarly for any practical use and no match for the stands of white oak on the East Coast.

  Although permanently “on the beach,” Bully Bob Waterman still took pride in the fact that while he may have lost men, he had never lost a sail or a spar. And the record he set while in command of Sea Witch several years earlier—seventy-four days from Hong Kong to London—remained as yet unsurpassed.

  *

  There would be other major races between clippers in the next few years. In the fall of 1851, as news of Flying Cloud’s new eighty-nine-day, twenty-one-hour record trickled back east, Donald McKay and his New York rival William H. Webb unveiled their newest contenders for the dash to the Golden Gate.

  If the contest among N. B. Palmer, Flying Cloud, and Challenge had been informal, the one between McKay’s Flying Fish and Webb’s Swordfish was a true race on the high seas: six days after Flying Fish sailed from Boston, Swordfish departed from New York in hot pursuit. By latitude 50 degrees south, just past the stormy tip of South America, Swordfish had romped past her Yankee rival, and on February 10, 1852, she reached San Francisco first. Yet to her captain’s consternation, he had fallen short of Flying Cloud’s record, by a mere twenty-four hours. Ten days later, Flying Fish sailed through the Golden Gate.

  In late 1852 Flying Fish raced again from New York to San Francisco, this time against the clippers Wild Pigeon and Trade Wind. To create as fair a race as possible, each master was provided with a copy of Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts. Donald McKay’s Flying Fish, again under the command of Edward M. Nickels, emerged victorious with a fantastic run of ninety-two days and four hours—but still fell three days short of Flying Cloud’s best run. If her captain had not disregarded Maury’s advice to sail as close to Brazil’s Cape St. Roque as possible to avoid the doldrums, he might have broken the old record.

  From the safety of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, Maury rejoiced in these new feats of navigation. He estimated that his charts alone saved ships an average of thirty-five days in the journey from New York to California.6

  Yet what American clipper ship owners were really hoping for was an international derby that pitted the Stars and Stripes against the Union Jack. Scarcely two years after the London Times declared, “We want fast vessels for the long voyages which otherwise will fall into American hands,” the British were prepared to challenge their “gigantic, unshackled rival” with clipper ships of their own.7

  *

  In August 1851 Captain Joseph Gordon of Delano’s Memnon knew his would be a special passage out of Hong Kong. Also departing Hong Kong for Liverpool that summer was one of Abbot Low’s ships, the Surprise. Both clippers were aiming to beat the ninety-seven-day record set by Low’s Oriental the previous year. They were sailing against the monsoon from China to London’s West India Docks, to bring the season’s first crop of tea to the British markets and sell it for the highest possible price.

  Alongside the trim American clippers were their bulkier British cousins, still modeled on the full-bodied warships of the Royal Navy. Yet right in the American Memnon’s wake would sail a new creation completed by the Liverpool firm Taylor & Potter that same year. Her name was Chrysolite.

  Word of the new American flyers had rattled British merchants even before Oriental’s first arrival at London’s West India Docks in December 1850, after her record-breaking ninety-seven-day voyage from Canton. “British sea captains must have seen the American clipper ships in the ports of China,” observed Captain Arthur Clark, “or perhaps an Indiaman in the lone southern ocean may have been lying almost becalmed on the long heaving swell, lurching and slatting the wind out of her baggy hemp sails, while her officers and crew watched an American clipper as she swept past, under a cloud of canvas, curling the foam along her keen, slender bow. But when these mariners returned home and related what they had seen, their yarns were doubtless greeted with a jolly, good-humored smile of British incredulity.”8

  British merchants could meet such tales with incredulity no more, and pride went hand-in-hand with profit. For her first trip to London, Oriental’s holds were packed with what A. A. Low & Brother loaded at a rate of six pounds sterling per ton, while the bulkier British ships that had ridden at anchor at Whampoa beside her got in later to London and were forced to settle for three pounds ten per ton.9

  After taking off the Oriental’s lines while she was in dry dock, the British quickly built their own response. Compared with the big American clippers, Chrysolite was a small ship: 150 feet long, 26 feet wide, and only of 570 tons.10 By August 1851, she had made her way to Hong Kong and was ready to sail for home. Her passage would make this seasonal run the first international tea race, a maritime contest between England and her “unshackled rival.”

  With a full cargo of tea, Delano’s thoroughbred hurried through the South China Sea, as Captain Gordon did his best to outrun Memnon’s British foe. On either September 14 or 16 (accounts vary), Memnon passed through the Gaspar Strait, a two-mile stretch of water between the Dutch East Indies islands of Belitung and Bangka. Bounded by shoals on both sides, its five-knot current shifted with the monsoon, making it even more treacherous. Pirates lurked off shore in small boats, lying in wait for a wreck.

  As she wended her way through the strait, Memnon’s crew could hear chattering birds and screeching monkeys coming from the jungles that were only a stone’s throw away from their ship. According to one account, the first mate told Captain Gordon that his ship was getting perilously close to shore. Gordon snapped back that he knew what he was doing. Ten minutes later, Memnon’s coppered bottom crunched onto the rocks. The pirates pounced, rowing toward the listing clipper at full speed, bellowing in triumph as they drew near. As they clambered up one side of the ship, the crew—including Captain Gordon and his wife—escaped in the lifeboats on the other side, hoisted sail, and set a course for Singapore, three hundred miles away.11

  Warren Delano’s Memnon—the first clipper to sail around Cape Horn to California, and a brainchild of the great John Willis Griffiths—was stripped of her valuable cargo and fittings within hours. The broken hulk was left to disintegrate on the shores of the Dutch East Indies.

  Gordon and his crew made it back safely to America, but Memnon was out of the race. Warren Delano would have to wait to see whether his friend Abbot Low could preserve America’s pride. Luckily for him, Memnon was almost certainly insured.

  It wasn’t until January that the results were in. On January 3, 1852, the London Illustrated News crowed gleefully that the Chrysolite had reached Liverpool with a sailing time of 104 days.12 Oriental’s ninety-seven-day Hong Kong-to-London record set two years before still remained untouched, but the British were catching up.

  *

  Delano must have smarted from the loss of his prized vessel, but he remained confident of the American clipper ship’s superiority on the China route. It appears that he retained stakes in some of Low’s clippers, for that same January, a group calling itself the American Navigation Club challenged all British clipper ship owners—including their old Canton colleagues at Jardine, Matheson & Company—to a formal race from London or Liverpool to China and back. The American syndicate was top-heavy with the old “Canton bachelors” who’d made their fortunes in China, including Delano, John Murray Forbes, and the Russell & Company patriarch Thomas Handasyd Perkins, now in his mideighties.

  The challenge was publicly announced in the London Illustrated News, with the following conditions:

  One ship to be entered by each of the party [sic], and to be named within a week of the start. These ships to be modelled [sic], commanded, and officered entirely by cit
izens of the United States and Great Britain, respectively … The challenged party may name the size of the ships, not under 800 nor over 1,200 American registered tons; the weight and measurements which shall be carried each way; the allowance for short weight or oversize.13

  As an imprimatur of the Navigation Society’s credentials, the challenge ended with: “reference may be made to Messrs. Baring Bros. & Co. for further particulars.” The timing of this announcement was probably more than coincidence. By then, the august bank had taken on its first American partner: none other than Russell Sturgis, Warren Delano’s first boss in China, who had settled in London rather than return to Hong Kong.

  The proposed blue-water derby, the first of its kind in history, would be regulated in the same manner as the races of the Royal Yacht Squadron—the prestigious British yacht club at Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight—where the cream of the British aristocracy competed with one another in private, custom-built racing boats. The previous year, the schooner yacht America, built along clipper lines and owned by a syndicate of New York merchants, had arrived uninvited at Cowes. John Cox Stevens, one of America’s co-owners, challenged the gentlemen of the Royal Yacht Squadron to a £10,000 winner-take-all ($50,000) wager to any yacht that could beat his ship. After much hemming and hawing, Royal Yacht Squadron allowed America to race in the final competition of the season: a fifty-three-mile sprint around the Isle of Wight.

  America swept past the finish line nearly twenty minutes ahead of Aurora, her closest competitor.

  In disbelief, the British sailors in hot pursuit hollered, “Is the America first?”