by Rob Mundle
At 2pm on 23 August, when Eastern City was lumbering her way south-east in a half-gale and heavy seas, great alarm spread rapidly on deck when the shout came that smoke could be seen coming from the forehatch near the bow. Immediately the captain and some of the crew, assisted by able-bodied male passengers, removed the hatch in the hope that they would be able to spot the source of the fire and take appropriate action. But the smoke was so dense and suffocating that they were repelled.
A passenger – Mr J. Fowler – later provided to the Cape Argus, a Cape Town newspaper, an accurate account of how the drama unfolded:
The passengers and crew were ordered on deck, and we then believed they had all obeyed the order; but it was afterwards discovered that one of the steerage passengers, named Peter Maclean, belonging to the Isle of Skye, was missing.
Sadly, it was later revealed that Maclean had been ill in his bunk for many days and had probably suffocated.
Fowler then explained that crew members, aided by passengers, poured down the forehatch ‘vast quantities’ of water, being drawn from the sea using a steam pump. Meanwhile, Captain Johnstone had hauled up the majority of sails and turned the ship downwind. All her lifeboats were provisioned and readied so that they could be lowered over the side ‘at a moment’s notice’. Fowler continued:
The women and children, about 60 in number, were removed to the poop, where the captain had placed numbers of old sails, carpets, etc., and did everything he could to make them as comfortable as possible under those terrible circumstances.
All that long and dreadful night both passengers and crew continued to work without intermission, pouring tons of water down the hatches and forepart of the vessel; holes were also cut in the deck, and engine pumps and buckets went to work . . . the captain cheering us all the while, and never leaving the deck for a moment. I could not but admire his calm courage, surrounded as he was on the poop with so many weeping women and children, whom he never ceased to comfort by the assurance that they would all soon be safe in the boats.
The majority of passengers, however, were unaware of the full extent of the danger they faced. The captain and crew knew that with the sea so rough, there was no possible way that any of the ship’s boats, which inevitably would be grossly overloaded, would not capsize.
On the morning of 24 August, it was realised that the fire was working its way aft below deck and beginning to burn its way through the foredeck. At midday, the foremast fell to the deck in spectacular fashion, but fortunately no one was injured. Those passengers not directly involved in the efforts to fight the fire spent much of their time standing atop the aftermost cabin, scanning the horizon in the hope that they might sight the sails of another ship. But the odds of that were extremely remote: Eastern City was now well wide of the course that ships en route to Australia or Asia would normally take.
Yet fate was about to intervene in an extraordinary way, as Fowler recounted:
At about 2.30pm, when about to say goodbye in case of not meeting again before the final catastrophe, we were startled with the cry of ‘a sail’. I do not know how we all tumbled on deck but we were there in an instant. How I looked to windward and how faint and ill I felt when I at first failed to perceive anything but the ocean and a few black clouds just at the edge of the horizon; [then] how we all at last saw the sail just like a distant gull – she was coming down upon us.
Great joy immediately seized the hearts of passengers and crew; some thanked the Lord, while others laughed, hugged and cheered. As Fowler put it, ‘men who had probably never prayed before muttered sincere thanksgivings, and . . . those who had preserved the greatest indifference when death seemed so near, were now completely overcome’.
The vessel, the British ship Merchantman, was sailing from England to Calcutta with a full complement of troops on board. It was later revealed that, earlier in the day, someone on board that ship had sighted a pall of smoke on the horizon and alerted the captain, who had immediately changed course towards it.
It took only a matter of hours for boats from both ships to safely transfer all the passengers to Merchantman, which then changed course towards Cape Town, where they would be put ashore.
As Merchantman progressed in that direction, it soon became obvious to Fowler and the other survivors how pivotal a role fate, or some other power, had played in their rescue:
We were all truly thankful for our preservation from a terrible and inevitable death, and we all feel that the finger of Providence was in it, for, had Merchantman not been obliged to put into Rio de Janeiro in consequence of the illness of the medical officer then in charge of the troops, then [she] could not have been so far out of her course and in a position to rescue us.
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The 235-foot Yankee clipper Blue Jacket met a similar fate. Launched in Boston in 1854 and considered one of the fastest vessels of the day, she plied the Australian and New Zealand run out of England for the next fifteen years. On 13 February 1869, she departed Lyttelton in New Zealand for Liverpool with seventy-one people aboard and a cargo comprising mainly flax. Also locked safely away in a security compartment was more than £63,000 worth of Kiwi gold destined for English banks.
In late February, after riding the summer westerly weather systems across the southern seas without incident, Blue Jacket rounded Cape Horn and changed course towards the Falkland Islands, 330 nautical miles to the north-east.
On 1 March, the cargo of flax burst into flame, probably a spontaneous combustion. All efforts to control the fire over the following days failed, so on 9 March, the captain called for the ship to be abandoned. The passengers and crew took to the lifeboats, and one week later, the German barque Pyrmont rescued nine survivors from one of the boats. Fortuitously, they had with them the gold that had been aboard Blue Jacket.
The other sixty-two souls perished. However, there was an eerie reminder of the tragedy nearly three years later when Blue Jacket’s figurehead, a representation of an old sailor wearing a blue jacket with yellow buttons, was washed up on Rottnest Island, off Fremantle, Western Australia, after having drifted some 10,000 nautical miles. Despite being encrusted with barnacles and weed, it was still easily identifiable.
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One of the worst tragedies involving fire in the era of the clipper ships involved the emigrant ship Cospatrick, a 190-foot, 1200-ton Blackwall frigate. On 11 September 1874, she departed London with her longtime commander, Captain Elmslie, in charge. She was bound for Auckland with 429 migrant passengers aboard – 177 men, 125 women, fifty-eight boys, fifty-three girls and sixteen infants aged under twelve months. The crew comprised forty-three officers, able seamen and boys. Four other independent passengers making the voyage took the total number on board to 476.
At 12.30am on 18 November, when Cospatrick was 350 nautical miles south-west of the Cape of Good Hope and heading into the southern seas, the bosun’s locker in the forward section of the ship erupted in flames. It was later presumed that the cause of the fire was spontaneous combustion among stored paints, oils, rags and coal dust, although it was also speculated that a crew member might have dropped a lantern or candle in the locker while trying to break through the bulkhead and into a cargo hold with the intention of stealing rum, brandy or wine, which were stowed there along with flammable goods, including turpentine.
While passengers rushed to the deck in their night attire, the captain and crew made desperate efforts to turn the ship downwind so that the smoke and flames would be contained in the forward section of the ship. This manoeuvre was unsuccessful, so all on deck could only watch in horror as the inferno burst through the deck and started moving aft.
In less than an hour, it was obvious that Cospatrick was doomed, and with that realisation, passengers – mothers, fathers and children – began rushing to the ship’s boats, which were already suspended from their davits and hanging over the side. People leaped into them with no consideration for numbers or safety.
One boat, which was thought to have as many a
s eighty people crammed into it, was so overloaded that the davits buckled under the weight of the panicked passengers. The boat crashed into the boiling sea and capsized immediately, and all were drowned.
The flames spread so rapidly that lifeboats located towards the bow were either aflame or destroyed when the blazing foremast came down. This disaster immediately sealed the fate of those remaining on deck: there were no boats left to give them any chance of escape.
It appears that only two boats were successfully launched, with a total of just sixty-two people on board. Those fortunate few could only watch in a state of shock as the flames continued to spread throughout the ship, their horror turning to dread as they heard the panicked screams of terrified people facing certain death.
It is known that Captain Elmslie, his wife, their son and the ship’s medico, Dr Cadle, remained on board until the very end, which came within forty-eight hours. By then, Cospatrick was little more than a flaming hulk almost from stem to stern, with some sections of her topsides burned to near the waterline. All three masts, blackened and broken, were hanging over the sides.
When it was apparent that his ship would soon be consigned to the depths, Captain Elmslie was seen to throw his wife over the side and leap into the ocean after her, while Dr Cadle jumped overboard at the same time with the couple’s four year old son in his arms. In preference to being burned alive, they all drowned together.
Considering how far Cospatrick was from land, those aboard the two boats that managed to clear the ship were no doubt convinced they too would die. But they were determined not to give up hope, even though they had no food or water with them.
Despite their best efforts to stay together, a storm swept in a matter of days later and separated the two boats. One, containing thirty men and no women, had three experienced sailors on board: the second mate, Charles Macdonald, the quartermaster, Thomas Lewis, and ordinary seaman Edward Cotter, aged eighteen. If they had any good fortune, it was that there was one oar on the boat, and that a girl’s petticoat had somehow found its way on board. This enabled them to create a makeshift sail and steer in the general direction of land to the north-east.
It was possibly because of this ‘sail’ that the British ship Sceptre, which miraculously came over the horizon seven days later, spotted the small boat and rescued the survivors. By then, only five of the thirty were still alive, the rest having died from hunger, thirst and exposure. In their desperate last-ditch bid to survive, those five had resorted to cannibalism: they had drunk the blood of some of the deceased and eaten their livers for nourishment.
With those five men aboard, Sceptre then changed course towards Cape Town, but sadly, during this passage, two more of the survivors died. Of the 476 men, women and children who had sailed from England aboard Cospatrick, Macdonald, Lewis and Cotter were the only ones who lived to tell the story of the ill-fated voyage.
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By no means all of the conflagrations that destroyed the great clippers occurred at sea.
On 4 October 1853, the day when the fateful Tayleur was launched as ‘the largest merchantman ever built in Britain’, a similarly significant maritime event took place on the opposite side of the Atlantic. As many as 50,000 people took advantage of what was declared a public holiday and crowded around Donald McKay’s shipyard in Boston to view the launch of the largest wooden clipper ship ever constructed: Great Republic – a vessel that was expected to help meet the seemingly insatiable need for passages out of England to the Australian gold rush.
Great Republic’s dimensions were gargantuan: 335 feet in hull length – as long as a Boston city block – and a mighty beam of 53 feet. Because she was so large, her rig was unique for a clipper: instead of three, she had four masts, which between them could carry fifty sails. Her rig configuration was that of a barque, meaning that the three forward masts – the tallest of which speared nearly 250 feet skywards – were square-rigged, while the mizzenmast carried fore and aft sails.
McKay, not only had built her but was also responsible for her radical design, was taking a huge gamble with this project. Great Republic, with a Gross Registered Tonnage (GRT) of 4555 tons, had cost well in excess of $300,000 to build – some estimates go as high as $450,000 – and had taken a year to complete. Her construction costs reflected the enormous escalation in McKay’s ambitions over a period of just three years: Stag Hound, 1534 GRT, had cost $45,000 to build in 1850, Flying Cloud (1782 tons) $50,000 in 1851, and Sovereign of the Seas (2241 tons) $100,000 in 1852.
Not surprisingly, because of her incredible size, Great Republic’s construction consumed more timber than any other clipper: 1,500,000 feet of hard pine, more than 2000 tons of white oak, 336 tons of iron (for cross-bracing the hull structure) and 56 tons of copper (primarily fastenings). The crew, to comprise 100 men and thirty boys, were to have the benefit of steam-driven winches mounted on deck to assist with the raising of yards and sails, as well as the lifting of cargo and the anchor.
McKay had no buyer committed to Great Republic at the time of her launch. Yet he remained undaunted. Through this new ship, he was determined once again to confirm to the world that he stood at the forefront of clipper-ship design and construction.
There was an element of panic in the lead-up to the ship’s naming ceremony and launch when it was discovered that the Champagne that was to be smashed across the bow had apparently been consumed the night before, at an impromptu pre-launch party involving McKay’s eldest son and some of the shipyard’s leading hands. So, at midday, according to an observer, ‘amid the roar of artillery, the music of bands and cheers of the multitude’, backed by the peal of church bells, a bottle of pure water from nearby Lake Cochituate was smashed across the ship’s bow by the shipyard supervisor, Captain Alden Gifford. As the bottle exploded and the water ran down her topsides, Gifford declared her name would be Great Republic.
McKay’s inspiration for this name came from the poem ‘O Ship of State’, written by one of his great admirers, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Its words metaphorically related the construction of great ships to the powerful expansion of the United States of America on land and sea:
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,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Over the next six weeks Great Republic remained in Boston so her fit-out could be completed and her rig made ready. Her design featured four decks, the lower decks being for cargo and the remainder to cater for all classes of passengers, and the first-class accommodation included two large and superbly appointed cabins on the main deck. One of these was described by an observer as ‘beautifully wainscoted with mahogany’ and decorated with ‘recessed sofas on each side, ottomans, marble-covered tables, mirrors and elliptical panels ornamented with pictures’.
By the time Great Republic’s fit-out was finished, McKay had negotiated a charter deal for her in Liverpool with the Black Ball Line. She was not scheduled to sail from New York to Liverpool until later in the year, but already the Black Ball Line was promoting her as ‘the largest, finest and fastest vessel to sail to Melbourne’.
Yet disaster would soon interrupt that boast.
On the night of 26 December 1853, when Great Republic was docked in New York and being loaded with cargo destined for Liverpool, an intense fire broke out in a nearby bakery, sending embers high into the sky. Great Republic and four other ships – the clippers White Squall, Red Rover and Whirlwind and the packet ship Joseph Walker – were lying directly downwind of the fire, and in little time the embers set fire to sails, masts and rigging.
The firefighters did not have equipment that would allow them to spray water high enough into the rigs of the ships to douse the flames. Before long, blazing canvas sails and timber were crashing down onto the ships’ decks, setting their hulls on fire. Joseph Walker, White Squall and Whirlwind were burned to the water
line and Red Rover was badly damaged. Great Republic was declared a total loss by insurers after the fire was extinguished. Inspection of her smoking hulk confirmed that her entire top deck and rig had been destroyed.
Great Republic would never see Australia. The blackened hulk was sold and subsequently rebuilt minus the top deck, then later re-rigged with only three masts, all shorter than the originals. Even so, under this new configuration she made some impressively fast passages across the Atlantic to Liverpool, and from America to Japan.
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While raging tempests, fire and icebergs were the greatest threats to the safety of those aboard sailing ships as they crisscrossed the world’s oceans, disease also took a terrible toll on many occasions. The combination of poor hygiene, unsanitary conditions and claustrophobic confinement in damp, dingy and poorly ventilated accommodation – especially among steerage-class passengers – could fuel this problem faster than it could be contained.
One of the primary sources for the spread of disease and illness was the toilet facilities provided for the lower-class passengers. They generally consisted of an open bucket and a vinegar-soaked rag hanging on a peg behind a door; the already unhealthy environment became extremely odious when the contents of the bucket spilled over in rough weather.
Taking a bath was not permitted on the majority of ships, as it consumed too much precious fresh water. This meant that those with any desire for personal hygiene made do by occasionally using a damp cloth to wipe themselves over while lying under a blanket on their bunk. The limited access to fresh water also meant clothes could not be washed, so in many cases passengers were known to have worn the same attire for the entire voyage.
When, in 1851, the British Government voted to relax the rules regarding the number of children allowed to migrate to Australia, there was an immediate surge in applicants wanting to venture to the colonies. To meet this demand, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission undertook to partially, if not completely, fund the fares of poorer families and individuals wanting to start a new life. The commission also chartered a number of ships to carry them to their new homeland, and in 1852, one of the ships chosen for the task was the 169-foot New York clipper Ticonderoga. One of her more appealing aspects when being considered for charter was the fact that she had twin accommodation decks, which meant far more passengers than usual could be carried, effectively doubling the ship’s carrying capacity. However, this very feature was the reason why she soon became known as ‘the fever ship’.