Warren Delano had once written that he did not trust the partners to manage the firm in his absence; clearly, he was still concerned.34 The power struggle must have been especially awkward for a man who had just married into the Forbes clan. (It is unclear if Delano told Catherine and his prospective in-laws about his plans before the engagement.) Still, he had little choice: he would have to go to Canton for his family’s future security. But Warren was not about to leave behind his young bride.
Catherine Delano must have been overwhelmed as they waited in New York for their ship, the year-old Paul Jones, to sail on December 4, 1843. At 628 tons, Paul Jones was a large ship for her day, built in Medford, Massachusetts, as the pride of the Russell & Company fleet. She was also equipped with something new: insulated storage space so that she could carry American ice to Asia. Ever the tinkerer, Robert Bennet Forbes had worked closely with Boston’s “ice king” Frederic Tudor to pack blocks of ice in sawdust in her hold. The ship’s ice cargo, claimed Forbes, would allow a previously unheard-of comfort for passengers on this trip: canvasback ducks and mutton, acquired off the Cape of Good Hope.35 Warren Delano would not have wanted his young bride to suffer weeks of hardtack and salted pork on her first sea voyage.
Catherine was terrified of going to a strange country with a man she had known only for several months, but wealthy women of the time, no matter how well educated, were expected to be submissive to their husbands. And Catherine was—at least in public. “I feel that it is my duty to go,” she wrote despairingly to a cousin, “but I do feel sad to think of the long separation from all my kind friends. When I think of my poor experience, it seems almost dangerous to undertake such a thing and I feel unhappy, and then if I stay home I should not be happy. I have determined to go and look on the bright side.”36 The prospect of a stormy winter passage must have made things look even bleaker for Catherine.
When the couple landed in China in the spring of 1844 after a 104-day passage, Ned Delano was there to greet them. In addition to the joy he felt at being reunited with his beloved older brother, Ned could not help but marvel at the culinary delights that came out of the ship’s hold. “We had ice from the [Paul Jones],” wrote Ned. “Sent out for mint, and for the first time in China … mint juleps were concocted and drunk.” There was enough ice left over to make “ice creams, things before unheard of in China.”37 Warren noticed his brother was lonely and growing quite fat.
Warren and Catherine settled into a mansion in Macao. They called it Arrowdale, and Warren sketched it for a scrapbook, most likely for the children that he and Catherine planned to have. In the same year, his brother Franklin scored a matrimonial coup of his own: marrying Laura Astor, John Jacob Astor’s favorite granddaughter. Although still employed by Grinnell, Minturn & Company, the thirty-one-year-old no longer had to sweat and strive like his brothers. Franklin’s new grandfather-in-law gave the couple a house fit for American royalty: one of the Colonnade Row townhouses on Lafayette Place.
The Delanos on both sides of the world had arrived.
CHAPTER 5
MAZEPPA AND THE PROBLEM CHILD
The European navigator is prudent when venturing out to sea … The American, neglecting such precautions, braves these dangers; he sets sail when the storm is still rumbling by night as well as by day; he spreads full sails to the wind; he repairs storm damage as he goes; and when at last he draws near the end of his voyage, he flies toward the coast as if he could already see the port.1
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, 1835
Lord Byron wrote his poem “Mazeppa” in 1819, its main character a dashing Ukrainian Cossack who is quite the ladies’ man. As punishment for his affair with a beautiful young Polish countess, her cuckolded husband orders Mazeppa strapped to the back of a wild horse and set loose on a ride through the Polish countryside. Somehow, Mazeppa survives his tortuous, galloping ordeal, and a beautiful Cossack maid nurses him back to health.
For shipowner Abiel Abbot Low, thinking about it in the early 1840s, Mazeppa was a fitting name for a lithe, fast ship carrying illicit cargo. His lightly built Mazeppa was only 150 tons, yet it was also heavily armed with five brass 18-pounder guns and an Armstrong 68-pounder. The guns gleamed brilliantly in the sunlight upon the ship’s departure from New York in 1842, the orange-and-red Low house flag fluttering proudly from her mainmast. The goal of this fast ship and her new kind was simple: control the opium trade with China, using vessels that would best the British opium clippers in speed and maneuverability.2
Robert Forbes of Russell & Company—A. A. Low & Brother’s habitual business partner—almost certainly masterminded this initiative, along with his brother John Murray. They knew the opium trade, both its perils and its promise. Robert, who arrived back in New York from Canton in late 1840, had survived the siege of the Westerners’ Factories earlier that year, when China tried to force an end to the opium trade. He had listened when the chief of the Chinese trade guild, Houqua, pleaded with his American protégés to get out of the opium business, and he had agreed. But, unlike some rivals, the Russell partners appear to have had few scruples about engaging in what they saw as a “fair and honorable” trade. And the Forbes brothers, as well as Abbot Low, had been following the ongoing news out of China: Britain’s retaliatory naval blockade, its assaults on Canton and cities beyond, and its demand that China open to Western trade. The British would prevail—the Western world was confident of that. And the opium trade would boom again. Even at the risk of losing Houqua’s patronage, Forbes and his partners appeared ready to break their gentleman’s agreement in the name of making money.
Abbot Low, the former principal partner of Russell & Company, and, like Robert Forbes, also recently returned from the tumult of Canton, agreed. He had brought home a competence in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, just as his father, Seth, had hoped. He was rich, if not John Jacob Astor rich, but with money both to invest and to spend on a grand lifestyle. Shortly after his return in late 1841, the thirty-year-old bachelor had purchased a beautiful house in Brooklyn Heights, with a superb view of the Upper Bay.
Yet despite his newfound comfort, Abbot Low was restless. He did not want the Low family to coast on its past success, especially his own. Abbot set up offices for his new shipping company on Fletcher Street in Lower Manhattan, in the same building as his father’s drug-import business. Above his desk, he hung a portrait of his adoptive Chinese father, Houqua, a daily reminder of what set him apart from all other American merchants. A relationship with Houqua was one that money alone could not buy.
Just as Colonel Thomas Perkins of Boston had done a generation earlier, Abbot resolved to send his relatives to Canton. He had several younger brothers coming of age who had a golden opportunity to follow in his footsteps and solidify the family’s economic standing. Reading the incoming correspondence from China, Abbot saw two unknowns. The first: How long would Houqua live? The more Lows who got to know the Chinese merchant and benefit from his tutelage, the better. Houqua’s relationship with Perkins and the Forbes cousins had proved fruitful indeed for the Boston Concern. The second unknown was when the Opium War would end. Until the British signed a treaty with the Chinese that ended hostilities, the risk to men and ships outweighed the profits.
Meanwhile, Abbot Low was working actively on his opium clipper project with Russell partner John Murray Forbes. Money was marrying money in the Canton alumni club. Forbes had wed Sarah Hathaway, a cousin of his old friend Francis Hathaway, one of the first New Bedford merchants to break into the China trade. Unlike his flashier New York friends, who were completely absorbed with making money and keeping up appearances, John Forbes loved intellectual pursuits such as reading poetry in the silence of his study. His wife’s Quaker influence pervaded the Forbes family ethos: “cheerfulness, buoyancy, and simple mode of life,” his daughter Sarah recalled.3 Looking for peace and simplicity, Forbes decided to create a world of his own; a retreat from the congestion of Boston. In 1842 he purchased the i
sland of Naushon from his wife’s uncle. Located south of Cape Cod, Naushon was only seven square miles in size, and a wilderness of beech woods, sandy beaches, and marshes. Over the next decade, Forbes drained swamps, cleared trails, and built the first of a series of family houses on the north side of the island. He spent many days on horseback, trotting along sandy trails and gazing at his flocks of sheep. Forbes also raced small sailing yachts, making him one of the first of his set in Boston to engage in competitive racing for pleasure rather than profit. It was one of many diversions he and his friends had perfected in Canton.
“In smaller matters, his inability to enjoy the pleasant things in life without sharing them with others was a marked trait,” his daughter Sarah wrote. “No sail in the yacht was perfect unless a party could be gathered to enjoy it, too. And the island friends, farmers, sailors, servants, and all, had one afternoon in the course of the summer, with supper served to them on the yacht.”4 Yet Forbes was not one to sit on his laurels. It was at the same time he purchased Naushon that Forbes began investing with his old friend Abbot Low in the new small opium schooners that they hoped would lead to even greater wealth. They were all heavily based on the “Baltimore clipper” model, only with less drag to their keels and less rake, or slant, to their ends.
Baltimore clippers were arguably the fastest type of ship on the high seas when the first generation of Yankees such as Captain Thomas Perkins entered the China trade. Conceived on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, in the early nineteenth century, Baltimore clippers were rigged as two-masted topsail schooners with towering, strongly raked masts. Their fore-and-aft sails gave them the ability to sail close to the wind. The one or two square sails on their foremast gave them an extra bit of push, as the foresail and mainsail on their heavily raked masts resisted being sheeted out. The skilled shipbuilders who fashioned these lithe and elegant craft also defied design convention by giving these vessels a very sharp entry below the waterline and a sharp V-shaped hull that minimized drag. The keel angled below the typical horizontal line of earlier vessels. Taken together, most of these design changes had the effect of reducing wetted surface and thus minimizing drag relative to other ships of the day.
No single designer or builder had come up with the concept for this swift type of schooner. Rather, it was a slow evolution with roots in the early Bermudian, Caribbean, and Chesapeake sailing vessels. These had come to full flower during the War of 1812, when shipowners armed and outfitted the speedy and agile schooners as privateers to raid British merchant ships and deftly outmaneuver the slow, heavily armed behemoths of the Royal Navy. When peace resumed, the Baltimore clippers became popular as pilot vessels and revenue cutters. These rakish ships, which had more than a bit of a sinister cut to their silhouettes, were also a slave trader’s dream, and were used to spirit their lucrative and shackled human cargoes across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the American South at speeds fast enough to avoid coastal patrol vessels. As Howard Irving Chapelle, a historian, observed, “Illicit and desperate practices followed close in their wakes throughout their existence.”5
One smart Baltimore merchant, Isaac McKim, built a full-rigged ship version of the Baltimore clipper in 1833 for the China trade, which he named after his wife Anna. As Ann McKim slid into the water from the shipyards at Fells Point, few observers could have imagined the influence she would have on future clipper ships. But certain sharp-eyed businessmen were watching, and not long after her launching, Ann McKim was purchased by New York merchant William Henry Aspinwall, partner in the shipping firm Howland & Aspinwall, who pressed her into the China trade.
Ann McKim cut an elegant figure in New York Harbor, and Aspinwall maintained her beautifully. She would eventually put in seven hard years of service. But the ship was more of a show horse than a workhorse; her design was too extreme, and she lacked the freight-carrying capacity that could make big money. “[T]he older merchants tended to view her unfavorably,” historian Arthur Hamilton Clark wrote in retrospect.6 Nonetheless, she captured the imagination of Aspinwall’s peers, who thought that this type of fast vessel would be perfect as an opium hauler.
The new, small schooners on which Abbot Low and John Forbes placed their bets would be based on the Baltimore clipper model. Mazeppa and her later sister ships Zephyr and Antelope, along with Brenda, Ariel, and Angola were, in Clark’s words, “formidable vessels, especially in light winds and calms, when they were propelled by long sweeps.”7
Forbes and Low had a wonderful fleet in the making, and another Low would soon be instrumental in making it real. But for now, the teenage Charles Porter Low worried his entire family because he simply could not sit still.
At Brooklyn’s Classical Hall, founded by his father, Seth, to cater to scions of transplanted New England families, young Charlie tormented his strict Yankee schoolmasters. Old Seth Low, an 1804 graduate of Harvard, had built a substantial business importing apothecary goods from Asia, and his firm thrived thanks to his brother William Henry I and son Abbot’s ties with Russell & Company.8 Young Charles, unlike his siblings, had no interest in growing the Low family’s wealth. When put to work as an apprentice merchant in a New York firm (not his father’s), Charlie complained that preparing remittances was “tiresome work, and I was always glad when it was over.”9
South Street, home to the wharves, was what caught his attention. In his off-hours, Charlie wandered and explored, listening to the laborers sing as they hauled crates of fragrant tea and pungent peppers into the Low warehouse. “We had lots of fun and never did anything wicked, but we created a good deal of talk about the bad boys of Brooklyn,” he recalled gleefully.10 When the owner of a cart bearing a load of gum copal (a resin used for waterproofing) left it to carry out some business inside his father’s store, Charlie jumped on the cart bench and started singing a family ditty: “Old Low! Old Low’s son. Never saw so many Lows since the world begun.” His singing startled the horse, and off they went, cart, horse, and Charlie, careening through the crowded streets until together they spun out of control on a sharp turn onto Platt Street. Charles flew out of the cart. “Both wheels had gone over me,” he remembered. He was bedridden for the next six months. “I recovered,” he remembered, “and went back to the store again and went to work on new plans for going to sea.”
Charles spent time with an old sailor named Jan Jansen on his Uncle James’s ship Cabot. “I learned from him all the running rigging,” he recalled, “and, as it is the same on all ships, I was a good sailor, and I knew just where to find a rope when I first went to sea.”11 Here, on the deck of a ship, under Jansen’s tutelage, Charles became intensely focused. He learned to lower the upper yards—the high spars, holding the sails—which had to come down fast to keep a ship stable in bad weather. Joining the two or three men who would scramble aloft to the very top of the mast, he would help furl the sail, secure it with gaskets, and then remove the yard from the mast; on deck below them, another two or three men would then slowly lower the yard, with its heavy furled sail, and secure it. He taught himself on the Cabot to get used to following orders, in a hurry, automatically, without regard to danger.
Charles took special pride in climbing Cabot’s main topgallant mast and helping the crew send down the royal yard, the highest of all. He knew that when he finally did join a ship, he would be singled out as the greenhornI who had to risk this task.12 As he balanced on the footropes, Charles must have sighed with joy as he beheld the city, the wharves, and the sparkling East River beneath him. He imagined what it would be like to be in a gale as the mast swung in an arc over the boiling seas. Rather than freezing with fear, Charles wanted more.
His father, Seth, wanted Charlie’s feet on the ground—and a quill in his hand—offering to take him into his prosperous drug importing firm as a partner, when he turned twenty, provided that he put in his time sitting in front of ledger books. “What my life would have been if I had accepted his offer I cannot say, but I refused it,” Charles wrote. “I could not give up the
sea. I loved it, and I was sure I should be unhappy on shore. At any rate, I felt I must try it.”13 He decided that if his family refused to let him go to sea, he wouldn’t stay in his father’s business; he would learn to farm, earn his own money for a sailor’s suit, and then run away to sea. In earnest preparation, he read Judd’s Agriculturalist.
Abbot Low, married recently to Ellen Dow, agreed with his father’s misgivings. He hoped desperately that his wild kid brother would grow out of his childish fantasy. Not only was going to sea dangerous, but he considered it beneath the higher social station that his newly acquired wealth had entitled his family. Captains were only employees, after all, not company partners. And common sailors were considered scoundrels: hard-drinking, tattooed, foul-mouthed loafers, spotted instantly by their walk: a rolling gait that they used to stay steady on the deck of a rolling ship. True, Abbot’s friend and Russell partner Robert Forbes was a master mariner who came from a prominent family, but Robert had not been the most prudent businessman.
Abbot probably thought that young Charles could go either of two ways: he could reform himself and become a proper merchant or become a frivolous wastrel and embarrassment to the family. The conflict between the brothers reached a flashpoint with Mazeppa. For Charlie Low, Mazeppa was a thing of beauty. “One of the handsomest vessels of the kind I ever saw,” he remembered fondly.14 For Abbot, it was an investment. As the steam tug towed Mazeppa out into the Upper Bay, Abbot and his brother Josiah Low bade the captain farewell and good luck on this treacherous run, and prepared to leave the ship. But to the fury of his brothers, seventeen-year-old Charles was nowhere to be found. After a ship-wide search, he was finally discovered hiding in a bread locker and was put aboard the tug to go back to the wharf.
After Charlie’s attempt to stowaway on Mazeppa, Abbot and the rest of the Lows realized that their kid brother would never make a proper merchant. They allowed him to attend basic navigation classes and then got him signed on to the Grinnell, Minturn & Company ship Horatio as an apprentice, under the command of Captain William Howland, cousin of William Henry Aspinwall and owner Moses Grinnell.
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