Barons of the Sea Read online

  “Yes,” came the reply.

  “What’s second?”

  “Nothing.”14

  The British were outraged.

  The American Navigation Society hoped to repeat this victory, only this time with big clipper ships sailing from England to China and back. Confident of their vessels’ superiority, the Delano-Perkins-Forbes syndicate gave the British clipper ship owners the option of having a fourteen-day head start. The Flying Cloud would be excluded from the competition, as she was six hundred tons over the limit, but the Low clippers could enter.

  There was no response from the British shipowners. To entice them, the syndicate then upped its stakes from £10,000 to £20,000.

  Eager for the keen public interest that such a race would generate, the London Daily News published an editorial urging the British to accept the challenge. Then in October, the British magazine Bell’s Life in London ran its own piece about the proposed race: “The limit of time is now expiring, and it is with no little disappointment that a letter received from the head of the eminent banking house of Baring & Co… . had to report no inquiry as to the proposition.” Clearly disappointed, the writer added, “The Americans want a match, and it reflects somewhat upon our chivalry not to accommodate them.”15 The race never occurred. No British ship came close to shattering Oriental’s ninety-seven-day run from Canton to London. According to Captain Arthur Clark, “No reason was ever given for the nonacceptance of the challenge, though the inference seems obvious.”16

  The Americans were left to compete with themselves. And they did so with a vengeance during the summer of 1852, with bigger and more heavily sparred vessels operated by a growing number of shipping firms. Out of all of them, A. A. Low & Brother remained preeminent in terms of its profitability and global reach. However, no amount of size or speed could convince Abbot Low or his partners to buy a ship built by Donald McKay. Revolutionaries in the China trade, they were conservative when it came to the California Gold Rush. A Low-owned China clipper was no longer the fastest to San Francisco, but they were generally faster on the tea route from China to New York. As a business proposition, men such as Low felt that a big McKay clipper like Flying Cloud, no matter how fast, was too expensive to sail and maintain in the long-term.

  Low and his friends had other uses for their hard-earned capital. They were ultimately proved right.

  *

  In the winter of 1852, Captain Creesy was cruising the Indian Ocean in Flying Cloud, heading home with a cargo full of China goods bound for the Grinnell, Minturn & Company warehouses. He and Eleanor spied another ship on the horizon and closed in. She turned out to be an outbound cargo vessel from Anjer in the Dutch East Indies, a port where fresh provisions were available. Creesy asked her captain for the latest newspapers in exchange for fresh vegetables, fruit, and fowl.

  As Flying Cloud sailed on, hens and capons cackling in her chicken coop, Creesy opened one of the New York papers, by now several months old, and read the following announcement:

  Captain Creesy of the ship Flying Cloud—it will be seen by the telegraph news in another column that the gallant sailor is no more. Two days after sailing from San Francisco, bound to China, he died, and the ship proceeded in charge of the mate. In every scene of a sailor’s life “with skill superior glowed his daring mind”—his dauntless soul “rose with the storm and all its dangers shared.” But now he rests from his toils, regardless of his triumphs. Peace to his manes.17

  Flying Cloud made it from Canton to New York in a very respectable ninety-four days. Many of those on the pier must have been startled to see Captain Creesy step off the ship and head toward the Astor House, looking quite the picture of health, his wife at his side.

  Josiah and Eleanor Creesy were showered with honors upon Flying Cloud’s arrival in New York, her first time in the city since setting the eighty-nine-day record to San Francisco six months before. An elated Moses Grinnell ordered copies of Captain Creesy’s log printed in gold letters on white silk and distributed them to his friends and associates. Curious New Yorkers visiting the Astor House got a chance to see a display of the Flying Cloud’s fids (the square wooden blocks used to support the ship’s topmast). They had been reduced to such relics because they had been so badly mashed by force of the Cape Horn winds—and Captain Creesy’s ruthless seamanship.18

  On May 23, 1852, Captain Charlie Low sailed N. B. Palmer out of New York on her second voyage around the world. This time he was determined to beat Flying Cloud, which had departed several days ahead of him on her second voyage to California. And now he, too, had company at sea: his new wife, Sarah Maria Tucker Low. Two hundred of Sarah’s friends and family had attended the couple’s wedding two weeks earlier. The marriage had almost encountered a legal hitch: “I was a little put out when my bride was about to go downstairs,” Low remembered, “for the minister then asked for the marriage license. I was never married before, and knew nothing about licenses, and no one had informed me that it was necessary to have one.” Charles tracked down the Salem town clerk, who, luckily, was at home and gave him the marriage license. Once that formality had been taken care of, Charlie found himself standing around for two hours, “shaking hands and receiving the good wishes and congratulations of the company.”

  Yet Charlie and Sarah Low were not off on a conventional honeymoon. It would be a working one, and his wife’s introduction to life at sea. “The next day,” Low wrote, “we left for Brooklyn to prepare for a wedding tour around the world.”

  Nineteen-year-old Sarah must have marveled at the luxurious quarters of N. B. Palmer, resplendent with gleaming exotic woods, tufted sofas, and shimmering crystal ware. As a young woman who had never been to sea, she, like Catherine Delano before her, would have been unnerved by the unfamiliar sounds: the shouts of the mate, the stomping of feet, the flapping of the sails, and the shrieking of ropes and blocks, as well as the odors wafting from the galley and the bilge. Yet by the time the deck started to sway under her feet, she demonstrated the same fearlessness on board the ship as she had when she got up to sing in front of her husband-to-be.

  Charlie Low admitted that taking a wife to sea was a “great lottery.”

  “A wife may be seasick all the voyage,” he wrote, “or she may be very timid and afraid of a squall or breeze of wind, which makes it very uncomfortable for the husband as well as her herself.” And then there was possibility of violence or death: illness, a sailor falling from aloft, a man overboard, a flogging, or even a mutiny.

  Sarah knew that a clipper was to be her home for the next year and made the best of it. She would have some company other than her husband: in addition to a regular crew of about fifty, N. B. Palmer sailed with twenty passengers bound for China. That first morning at sea, all the passengers remained in their bunks, seasick and miserable. Sarah and Charlie enjoyed their breakfast alone at the big, swaying table.

  The following day, N. B. Palmer hit rough weather. A group of frightened passengers showed up at the captain’s cabin. When asked if there was any danger, Sarah responded confidently, “I don’t know. My husband is on deck.”

  “There was no other comfort from her,” Charlie noted, “and it was a great comfort for me.”

  On July 1, as N. B. Palmer ran before the wind off the coast of South America, Captain Low climbed to the top of the mizzen, took out his spyglass, and spotted sails on the horizon. He figured it could only be Flying Cloud, the fastest clipper on the high seas—or at least around Cape Horn. Low had, in fact, beaten Creesy from China to New York by ten days the previous year, with N. B. Palmer taking eighty-four days and Flying Cloud taking ninety-four days.19, 20 Low ordered his ship onto the wind so he could catch up with his rival.

  The two ships drew up alongside each other. Captain Creesy hailed N. B. Palmer and asked how long she had been at sea.

  “Ten days after you!” Low bellowed over the sounds of flogging sail.

  “He was so mad, he would have nothing more to say,” Low recalled.

>   Yet as N. B. Palmer tried to pull ahead of Flying Cloud, the wind shifted. Low told the mate on watch to take in the studding sails. The ship slowed down drastically, and Flying Cloud raced ahead. Skies continued to darken, and the sea grew gray and unsettled. Then came eight days of gales, snow, and hail.

  The bad weather slowed the ship’s progress, but it proved to be the least of Captain Low’s problems as he approached Cape Horn. At midnight on June 10, as he was putting on his boots, preparing to go above for a last check on the watch, he heard a shot ring out above him, followed by a cry. Grabbing a musket—it wasn’t loaded, but to Low, “It did not matter”—and leaving his startled wife behind him, Charlie Low ran up the companionway,I accompanied by the carpenter and the sailmaker.21

  On deck, flickering oil lamps cast a shadowy, fitful light. Low saw two men down. First Mate Haines had been shot in the thigh, some ten inches above the knee. The second mate was clutching an injured, bleeding arm. Low saw no one else nearby; the crew on watch was hoisting the mizzen topsail.

  The night scene was confused and uncertain. Low shouted for the crew to finish setting the sail. The second mate was mobile, and hurried below to tend to his arm, as the captain called the men on watch to line up. Low needed the attacker to be identified swiftly if the ship’s authority and his control of the crew were to be maintained.

  The wounded first mate was still prostrate, with blood oozing through his trousers and onto the white pine of the clipper’s deck. Low asked him if any of these men had been the shooter. Groggy with pain, Haines pointed out “a big rascal” named Dublin Jack. It took no time for Low to have the accused sailor clapped in irons. The immediate crisis seemed to be over.

  It was at this moment that a different sailor stepped forward to say, “I fired the shot.”

  Low knew he had to make a spot decision. Uncertainty, injustice—or both—could shake the whole crew’s confidence in his leadership and risk spreading the violence. He raised his musket at the second sailor, known as Lemons, and asked where the gun was. Lemons responded that he had thrown the pistol overboard.

  Guns were, of course, forbidden the crew. Had he stolen it from the ship’s stores? Had he brought it on board in secret? To a poorly paid sailor, such a weapon would be expensive. Had he really discarded it?

  “Was it a revolver?” Low asked, as he thought through the implications. No, Lemons said; if it had been, neither the first mate nor Low would still be alive.

  “You are mighty cool about it,” Low responded. He ordered Lemons put in irons and taken below. Then he turned to the first suspect, Dublin Jack. The crew would need to see its falsely accused shipmate treated fairly. Low had Dublin Jack unbound and told him to go.

  Still, Low was on guard. The charge against Dublin Jack had been dropped, but he told the sailor that he would be keeping an eye on him. “All right, keep it on me,” Dublin Jack snapped back.

  Two English surgeons on board were tending to First Mate Haines below deck. They found the bullet still lodged in his thigh. Fortunately, it had not struck a bone—a critical, even fatal injury in this pre-antibiotic age—and there would be no need for an amputation. The second mate’s wound was also treatable; he emerged from below in a sling.

  It was now that Low had a chance to ask the second mate for his version of events. What he heard confounded him. This mate responded that he’d been struck with a handspike, not shot. His assailant, he said, was Dublin Jack.

  Captain Low was in a quandary and must have spoken with frustration: “I told him he should have let me know before I let Jack out of irons.”

  It was pitch black, and all of the men except the skeleton night crew had gone below. Low felt it best to administer punishment in the morning, in full view of the entire ship’s company. He knew he had a possible mutiny on his hands—a danger not only to him and other officers but also to the passengers and to his young bride. “I had a crew of thirty able seamen, six ordinary, and four boys,” he would later recall, “and placed as I was, with my mate laid up, my second and third mates incompetent, I felt that I must not show the least fear, “but must show that I was able to take care of my ship.”

  The next day, as Flying Cloud bounded through the ocean toward Cape Horn, Low determined the punishment for Lemons, the shooter: flogging at the mizzenmast.

  Low tied a rope across the quarterdeck to section off the area where the lashing would take place and hold back the crew. He told the watching men that anyone who crossed the line would be shot instantly.

  Dublin Jack put one foot across the rope, a deliberate action to test the measure of his captain, and Low responded—not with his pistol but with the physical force that his sailors would have respected. The captain jumped Dublin Jack, “caught him by the throat, carried him nearly fifty feet, and landed him on the quarterdeck, put him in irons quick as a flash, and lashed him to the mizzenmast.”

  One of the crew brought Lemons from below and lashed him to the mizzenmast as well. Captain Low ordered the second mate (probably still in his sling) to give each man four dozen lashes with a rope.

  The mate demurred. He had never done such a thing.

  “Neither had I,” Low recalled, “but it was no time to falter.” He grabbed the rope and thrashed the spread-eagled Lemons. “I was angry at him, and angry at the second mate for not supporting me.” Lemons was cut down, and Low gave Dublin Jack his forty-eight lashes as well.

  Captain Low would have known that flogging was increasingly unpopular with the public. Under intense pressure, Congress had recently outlawed flogging on American merchant ships and in the US Navy, but the bill signed into law by President Fillmore did not explicitly forbid other types of physical punishment.22 Low had certainly acted in anger, not the cool resolution appropriate for his position of authority. But he was no sadistic Waterman; he had never before flogged anyone. For Captain Low, the matter was clear-cut: violent punishment of two insubordinate sailors had been essential. The law of the sea and the law of the land were different. Keeping the peace on board, and keeping the ship properly manned and sailing, was a matter of life and death for all.

  Without his first mate to keep watch, Low remained on the quarterdeck for the next eighteen days, curling up in a corner to catch a few hours of sleep, his clothes drenched with spray.

  “I only went to my room to wind my chronometers and take the time,” Low wrote, “and yet my wife in all those troublous times never gave a sign of fear, but was braver than any man in the cabin.”

  When N. B. Palmer arrived in Valparaiso, Chile, to reprovision, Low immediately turned over Lemons and Dublin Jack to the American consul for a double trial on the charge of attempted murder on the high seas. The consul promptly locked the two men in jail. “I was glad to be rid of them,” Low said.

  No account of the event survives from the sailors of the N. B. Palmer. But it is suggestive that in Valparaiso, twenty men jumped ship. The flogging they had been forced to witness would have been an ugly, bloody memory. Low was left to scour the waterfront dives for more crewmen. Over the past few decades, the Chilean port had become a dumping ground for scoundrels and mutineers. “A fine set of men they were,” Low recalled. Still, only one was actually drunk when they came on board.

  N. B. Palmer arrived in San Francisco on September 30, after a rather disappointing passage of 125 days, 23 days behind the Creesys’ Flying Cloud.23

  Sarah Low, however, had been a success. While the ship was being loaded for the journey back across the Pacific, the ship’s carpenter went aft to ask if the “Old Man,” namely Captain Low, was on board. He wasn’t.

  “Is the Old Woman on board?” the carpenter asked the steward.

  Twenty-year-old Sarah Low overheard the remark. “She rather resented this,” her husband joked, “though I had a hearty laugh when I heard of it.”24

  N. B. Palmer then sailed for Manila and China, in hot pursuit of the season’s first tea pickings—and Flying Cloud.

  *

  N. B. Palme
r called at Manila after a passage of forty-five days to load a cargo of hemp. There Captain Low recalled, “we lived off the fat of the land and made easy acquaintances.” They continued on to Hong Kong, where the couple was put up in a suite of rooms at the Russell & Company headquarters, and Sarah Low got her first taste of life as a fanqui. She was now several months pregnant.

  With his ship’s holds loaded with hemp and tea—most likely all from Russell & Company’s account—and a baby on the way, Low raised anchor from Hong Kong on January 15, 1853, and set a course for the Cape of Good Hope, and, from there, New York and home. Within ten days, N. B. Palmer approached the Gaspar Strait, where Warren Delano’s clipper Memnon had run aground two years earlier. They approached the moonlit sandy beaches of North Watcher Island around midnight, and Low called his wife and other passengers out on deck to see the “splendid sight.” At four the next morning, the captain went up to order the watch to prepare to tack the ship. He was on deck when N. B. Palmer shuddered to a stop. She had run hard upon a coral ledge.

  Immediately, Low ordered the crew to lay back all the sails, the only way for a sailing ship to go in reverse. He then ordered a kedge anchorII dropped from the stern of the vessel, and all salted provisions stowed in the bow of the ship to be moved aft, reducing her forward draft. The sails filled, and, with a grinding sound, N. B. Palmer came off the reef. Low ordered his men to sound the shipIII and start pumping. She had lost part of her bow, and was making seven inches of water per hour. Low would have to make for the nearest port, or his ship would be lost on her second round-the-world voyage. The best bet was Batavia, the crown jewel of Holland’s East Indies spice-trading empire, which was ninety miles away.

  As his injured ship limped toward the anchorage, someone came up from below and said that Low had to come to his wife immediately. There, in the cabin, he found Sarah in labor. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom the couple named Charles Porter Low Jr.

  Soon enough, the ship was in safe harbor—although far from sound. “It was a hard time for me,” Low recalled, “my ship being in an almost sinking condition, but thanks to our splendid nurse, I was able to go on shore and secure coolies to come off and keep the pumps going all night, and also to arrange for the discharging of cargo.” The nurse was a Miss Hemenway, one of the passengers.