Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  The crowds cheered, and cannons boomed across Boston Harbor. Great Republic was afloat.

  “Great Republic launched at 12 o clock, which was successfully and beautifully done,” Robert Bennet Forbes proudly noted in his diary. “This ship has the Forbes Rig and is about 4000 tons measurement.”15

  Two months of work remained before Great Republic was ready to be towed to New York. There were masts and spars to be raised, rigging to be hung, and lavish interiors to be fitted out. The ship’s thirty-eight-foot beam gave McKay’s interior designers a generous floor plate to create a true floating palace that matched the finest Collins transatlantic steamers in luxury. Visitors who came aboard marveled at the gleaming mahogany paneling and wainscoting in the main saloon. Tufted velvet sofas and stained glass adorned the public rooms and passenger staterooms. For the crew, the nasty, cramped fo’c’sle was a thing of the past. There was enough room on board for a crew library, stocked with books on seamanship.

  Prominent visitors streamed into the shipyard to see the beautiful and imposing clipper at her fitting-out berth, as her four masts rose one by one. Forbes returned to the shipyard, this time with his children, among them sixteen-year-old Robert Jr., whom he had left behind as an infant during his 1838–40 trip to Canton. Shipbuilding had progressed by leaps and bounds in the past two decades, and Great Republic was the shining exemplar of America’s role in a technological revolution. As for Donald McKay, he was anticipating the day when he would stand on her quarterdeck and see his company’s black eagle ensign flapping overhead as his masterpiece barreled ahead under full press of sail past the gates of New York Harbor, into the great Atlantic beyond.

  Captain Nathaniel Palmer journeyed down from his native Stonington, Connecticut, to take a look at McKay’s maritime marvel. In the two years since his well-earned retirement, Captain Nat had been living the life of a gentleman yachtsman. From a white Italianate mansion on Long Island Sound, he spent his time racing a series of swift boats for pleasure rather than profit. Now, gazing up at Great Republic’s vast bulk, Palmer was nonplussed. The old man grunted that McKay was a brilliant artist but had a poor understanding of maritime economics.

  The great China merchant Abbot Low joined Palmer in inspecting the ship. “She’s beautiful enough to burst your heart,” Palmer reportedly told Low. “But there aren’t winds enough on this planet for her. What was this farmer’s lad from Nova Scotia thinking of—sailing her to the moon?”16 It was estimated—perhaps by Palmer—that Great Republic would cost an astounding $10,000 a month to operate.17

  Little did Nathaniel Palmer and Low know that before long, they would be the proud owners of this greatest ship in the world.

  *

  All had not gone well during construction. McKay and his brother Lauchlan apparently clashed over the amount of sail the massive ship would be carrying. Still, after several weeks of fitting out, the steam tugboat R. B. Forbes towed Great Republic out of Boston Harbor. Her destination: Peck’s Slip at the foot of South Street, in New York. The great ship’s sails remained tightly furled.

  Over the next several days, Great Republic was loaded with thousands of tons of grain, as well as tools, provisions, and dry goods—worth a grand total of about $350,000. The governor of New York came aboard to marvel at McKay’s latest creation, as did politicians, prominent businessmen, and thousands of ordinary New Yorkers. Captain Lauchlan McKay’s orders: sail Great Republic to Liverpool under the McKay house flag. There, Donald McKay hoped, he could sell her—and her cargo—to a British shipping company. Yet apparently it was clear that even when fully loaded with cargo and provisions, she could not carry all of her sails and spars (full rig) as designed. “I saw with regret,” Captain McKay wrote his brother, “when too late, that the ship could not carry her topgallants aloft when laden.”18 Less sail area almost certainly meant a reduction in speed.

  A few days before her scheduled departure, a buyer stepped forward and offered McKay the unprecedented sum of $280,000 for the ship.19 The offer may have raised McKay’s confidence in the value of Great Republic, yet the sum would still represent a loss of an estimated $20,000 from his cost of building the ship. He turned it down.

  *

  The day after Christmas 1853, final preparations were made. The crew climbed aloft and unfurled all of her sails below the royals. Great Republic strained hard at her lines in the breeze, ready to break free.

  Meanwhile, New Yorkers enjoyed a day of rest. Uptown in Bryant Park, at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, visitors strolled through the glass-and-cast-iron concourse of New York’s own Crystal Palace (inspired by the one built a few years before in London), poking amidst the exhibits and curiosities brought in for a new World’s Fair, the “Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations,” earlier in the year. These included clocks, daguerreotype cameras, printing presses, and an early Singer sewing machine.20 The exhibition’s most important display, the “hoist machine,” would not be ready for several months: a young inventor named Elisha Otis would manipulate a series of levers—connected to a cable and a set of wheels—to raise a platform up and down. If the cable broke, a spring mechanism would prevent the platform from plunging to the ground. It was to become the world’s first safe and practical elevator.

  Those who wanted to take in a play could go to the National Theater and watch a staged production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s provocative abolitionist novel. Those seeking something less controversial could stroll over to Barnum’s American Museum, on Broadway, ostensibly to be educated but more likely to be amused by novelties such as a flea circus or disgusted by the much-ballyhooed Feejee Mermaid (a fishtail sewed to the mummified torso of a monkey). Among the living curiosities Phineas Taylor Barnum advertised that day included giraffes and the Bearded Lady, which could be viewed “without extra charge.” Singing and dancing acts such as “Hot Corn,” “Faint Heart,” and “Major Jones” had been “singularly adapted to the current holidays.”21

  As the temperature plummeted, homeowners stoked their hearths and stoves. The acrid bite of coal and wood smoke filled the chilly winter air. That day, E. Merriam of the New York Daily Tribune also warned all firemen: “The cold has come and may be severe, and during its continuance fires may break out and a difficulty may be found in the use of leather hose from the actions of the frost.” The best solution to this problem, Merriam continued, was for the fire department to provide barrels of brine.22 Two decades earlier, most of New York’s commercial district had been wiped out in a devastating fire on a night that the temperature fell to seventeen degrees below zero. Five hundred buildings were destroyed in the blaze, including the New York Stock Exchange, and in response to this disaster, the city had built arguably the most advanced municipal water system in the world.23 Yet despite this measure, cold weather still remained the New York water system’s Achilles heel, and on this night, the fire department failed to place any barrels of brine on the street corners.

  Fires were a common occurrence in a city heated by open fires and lit by tallow candles and whale oil lamps. Usually, they were put out by a few pails of water or by tossing the burning furniture into the street. Otherwise the alarm was sounded, and volunteer firefighters—wearing their colorful uniforms—raced to the scene in their gaudy red horse-drawn engines.

  Night fell, and the temperature dropped below freezing. Aboard Great Republic, the crew members slumbered in their bunks, resting up for one last day of work before sailing. A potbellied coal stove in the fo’c’sle kept them warm. Up on deck, the night watchman paced the vast ship’s empty decks, his oil lantern flickering on the white pine planking. Moonlight streamed into darkened saloons and staterooms, ready to receive the ship’s first passengers. Thousands of sacks of American grain, most of it floated down the Erie Canal from the nation’s fertile interior, sat in her holds. All of this bounty was bound for Australia to feed hungry prospectors searching for gold.

  Just after midnight, on Dece
mber 27, flames leapt out the windows of the E. Treadwell & Sons Novelty Bakery at 242 Front Street, far downtown.24 The fire was most likely caused by an unattended oven. A gale blowing from the northwest fanned the flames until they consumed the entire structure. Then, pushed on by the bitterly cold winds, the blaze jumped from one building to the next, heading straight toward the warehouses and piers of South Street.

  A reporter from the New York Times arrived on the scene, as did firefighters from several volunteer companies in the area. “The flames were still extending in every direction,” the journalist wrote in his first dispatch, “all efforts to get it under way having failed. A general alarm is now being sounded, and engines from all quarters of the City are hastening to the scene of the disaster.” Their efforts were in vain. The horses pulling the fire engines skidded on the icy cobblestones. The water froze in the leather hoses. The conflagration devoured a provisions store, a coppersmith and bell foundry, a clothing store, the Fourth Ward political headquarters, and a boardinghouse “occupied by a large number of poor families.” The reporter then looked toward the East River and saw something even more terrifying: one by one, the masts of the ships docked on South Street were catching fire. Sparks from the burning buildings had landed on the hemp ropes and furled canvas sails of the packet ship Joseph Walker and the clipper ships Red Rover and White Squall, setting them ablaze. Soon each ship had become a fiery torch, their burning masts and spars towering a hundred or more feet in the air, lighting up the night sky with a bright orange glow.

  “A ship on fire is at any time a grand scene,” the Times wrote, “but the appearance is remarkable when contrasted with the dark sky of early morning.”25

  The crowd milling around the waterfront then turned their eyes to the biggest ship of all: Donald McKay’s Great Republic. Her mainmast was one of the tallest objects in Manhattan: towering 215 feet (about twenty stories) above the main deck. One by one, each of her four masts caught fire, dropping flaming canvas and hemp onto her decks. Captain Lauchlan McKay rushed out of his cabin, looked up at the conflagration, and realized that the only way to save the ship was to cut down the masts so that they landed in the water. Then, somehow, he had to get a steam-powered vessel to tow her out into the East River, away from South Street.

  The spray of the fire engines could barely reach the main yards of Great Republic. No firefighter volunteered to climb up into the rigging. It would be suicide. Captain McKay quickly consulted with one of the ship’s underwriters, who had rushed to the scene. He then ordered the crew to hack away at the stays that secured each of the four masts. First the foremast and foretopmasts came crashing down like blazing trees, sending up clouds of hissing steam as they toppled into the East River. Then came the main and jigger masts.

  Yet McKay had miscalculated: a tangled mass of burning spars missed the water and fell onto the ship itself, flattening deckhouses, smashing the steam engine, piercing three decks, and igniting a fire in the hold. Clouds of thick smoke began to billow from its cargo hatches. Those still on board ran for their lives.

  “The fire still raging with unabated violence,” the Times correspondent wrote at three o’clock in the morning. “The sparks and burning cinders are falling in showers upon the Piers between Peck slip and Catherine Ferry. The mammoth clipper, the Great Republic, is on fire, and will in all probability be totally destroyed!”26 There was only one thing left to do: Captain McKay ordered Great Republic deliberately sunk at her berth. Blazing from end to end, the giantess sank ten feet into the swirling East River.

  The winter dawn revealed the smoldering hulks of dozens of burned-out buildings, their brick sides caked with ice from the futile efforts of the firefighters. Great Republic continued to burn for two days until the river quenched the flames. Miraculously, the great eagle figurehead, with blazing eyes and protruding tongue, survived the conflagration. It poked grotesquely above the lapping waters, just beneath the blackened stump of the bowsprit.

  A telegraph line had linked Boston and New York for the past five years, so Donald McKay received news of the disaster by the early morning of December 27. Numb with shock, he paced the halls of his Eagle Hill home at sunrise, holding the telegram in his hands. His masterpiece was being consumed. Donald and Mary McKay were already in mourning this Christmas season: their two-year-old son, Lauchlan had died from meningitis only a few months earlier.27 Now, in the darkest hours of his career, Donald McKay must have taken some comfort in his wife’s love and support, even if he didn’t express it at the time.

  The following day, McKay took the boat to New York, where he viewed the smoldering wreckage of Great Republic. There, according to grandson Richard, “he realized that all possible had been done to save his ship.” Donald returned to Boston to work on the Australian clippers commissioned by James Baines in Liverpool, “determined not to be idle, despite the calamity which had befallen him.”28

  The underwriters met and awarded Donald McKay $235,000 for the lost ship. As part of his gamble, and to save money on underwriting fees, he had insured Great Republic for $65,000 less than she was worth. He had no choice but to accept the judgment. Neither did he have much interest in rebuilding the ship.

  The underwriters put the wreck of the giantess up for sale to the highest bidder. Conservative to the end, Abiel Abbot Low saw his chance for a bargain: he purchased Great Republic where she lay. He then called Captain Nathaniel Palmer out of retirement for the biggest challenge of his career: rebuilding Great Republic into the finest and fastest vessel flying the flag of the House of Low.

  *

  On January 25, 1854, Flying Cloud, which had been in the port of New York but had escaped the blaze that consumed Great Republic, set sail on her third voyage to San Francisco via Cape Horn. Captain Creesy was still in command; his wife, Eleanor, still his trusted navigator.

  What Josiah Creesy thought as his ship passed the blackened, half-sunk wreck of Great Republic is unknown, but his competitive instinct remained as strong as ever. His previous San Francisco dash in the Flying Cloud was a respectable 105 days. Yet it rankled him that Captain Low in the N. B. Palmer had outsailed him yet again on his recent China to New York run. Creesy was determined to set a record on this next San Francisco passage, even if the record to beat was his own. Battling fierce winter gales, Creesy followed a course plotted by Eleanor, using Matthew Fontaine Maury’s newest version of Winds and Currents charts. On April 20, Flying Cloud sailed triumphantly into San Francisco Harbor. Her sailing time had been 89 days and 8 hours anchor to anchor: 13 hours faster than the record she had set three years before.

  Flying Cloud’s record trip around Cape Horn under sail would stand for another 140 years. It was also the last time McKay’s beautiful Flying Cloud would display such a remarkable burst of speed. Her principal owners—Moses Grinnell and Robert Bowne Minturn—felt that maintaining the vessel to run at such a clip was no longer a profitable investment. Freight rates were dropping, big crews were harder to come by, and the strain on the ships was too great.

  Josiah and Eleanor Creesy decided the time was right to retire from the sea. Their next trip would be their last.

  *

  I. A tenon is a projecting piece of wood that is inserted into a hole known as the mortise to form a joint.

  CHAPTER 15

  HILL AND RIVER

  The shores are cultivated by the water’s edge, and lean up in graceful, rather than bold elevations; the eminences around are crested with the villas of the wealthy inhabitants of the metropolis: summer houses, belvideres, and watersteps give an air of refreshments to the banks.

  —NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS, American Scenery (1840)1

  The 1850s was a golden age of gardening in America, and the Delano’s family estate Algonac was one of the horticultural crown jewels of the northeastern United States. Influenced by the grounds of aristocratic English estates designed in the seventeen hundreds by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, Algonac’s landscape blurred the line between natural and manmade.
There were apple orchards, spruce groves, formal flowerbeds, and a kitchen garden that supplied produce for the table. Like many large houses of its era, Algonac had greenhouses for cultivating fresh flowers—such as exotic and fashionable orchids—year-round. Warren Delano’s son Frederic wrote admiringly of landscaper Andrew Jackson Downing’s skill with Algonac’s plantings. “[E]mphasis was naturally placed on adaptability to every season,” he wrote of his childhood home, “thus evergreens (Norway Spruces, Hemlocks, and Pines); Sugar Maples, Elms, Ashes, Beeches; Locusts, Nut Trees, and Oaks for other seasons, not to mention other less familiar shrubs and the like.”2

  In the middle of one summer night, Warren Delano awakened his entire family, including little Sara, to see something special in the garden. Warren wrapped Sara in his strong arms and led his brood outside into the moonlit grounds, the Hudson River glimmering in the distance. There, in front of them, was a night-blooming cereus, a species of cactus whose luminous white and gold flowers appear only once a year.

  Native to China, cereuses were expensive and difficult to grow outside of the tropics. Those who could afford to cultivate them often hosted parties to celebrate their blooming. Sara and her siblings never forgot the flower’s magical bloom, as well as its rich fragrance.

  By dawn, the cereus flower had withered away. But the enchantment of Algonac to the Delano children grew with each passing year. As one of them wrote, “As the years rolled on, the family increased in numbers, the trees grew, and it became more and more truly a home.”3 There were family accidents, of course. One day little Sara tripped and hit her head against a cabinet in the drawing room. Rather than call a doctor, Warren grabbed a needle and thread and sewed up the wound himself.4