Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  Delano also sponsored the construction of a Unitarian church in nearby Newburgh. As a devout, minimalist Calvinist, Delano could not bear to expose his family to a whiff of the “high church” Anglicanism that was sweeping New York society. However luxurious their estates, the Puritan values of New England remained strong among the clipper ship magnates. “There is no standing room for any creed between our Unitarian faith and the papal church,” Delano declared.5

  Commerce was visible all the time from Algonac’s windows, but it never came calling on the Delano family in their quiet home on the west bank of the Hudson River. Occasionally a paddlewheel steamer belonging to Cornelius Vanderbilt—its decks cluttered with sightseers—would chuff past on its way to Albany. Tall sloops carrying cargo bound for New York from the Erie Canal glided silently in the other direction, their trapezoid sails billowing in the wind. Delano could hear the roar of locomotives on the opposite bank.

  Here at Algonac—named for the Algonquin word for “hill and river”—the patriarch hoped, his Yankee Delano clan would reside for generations to come. It was a serene, semifeudal existence on America’s Rhine.

  Warren was now one of America’s few dozen millionaires. He had earned the $100,000 competence he had sought as a youth—enough to make one a member of the American upper strata—and, on his second trip to China in his middle years, he’d made far more, with his bride and young daughters at his side. His fortune was diversified in a variety of sectors, a strategy that seemed to insulate his family from the economic panics that shook the American economy every ten years or so. By the 1850s, according to family sources, Warren Delano and his brothers had ownership stakes in at least eight clippers. Although the records have been lost, it can be surmised that these included all swift ships flying his good friend’s Abbot Low’s house flag: Houqua, Samuel Russell, Oriental, Surprise, N. B. Palmer, Contest, Jacob Bell, and the recently salvaged Great Republic.6 He had additional holdings in Maryland copper mines, Pennsylvania coal mines, and Manhattan real estate.7 The Delano fortune seemed self-sustaining, generating enough income through dividends to allow Warren, Catherine, and their growing brood of children to live in halcyon splendor, secluded from the rest of the world.

  In an age when the average life expectancy was between just thirty-eight and forty-four years, Warren had waited until his thirties to get married, all because he had sacrificed so many of his prime years in China making money. This delay no doubt magnified Warren’s fervid obsession with family. He did not let the cares of business intrude into the pages of the “Algonac Diaries,” nor did he talk about his business accomplishments. According to one family member, “There was an inhibition handed down from father to son, and common in New England as in old England: ‘Don’t brag: it’s a man’s job to do things, but men of action should not talk of their exploits.’ ” Another side to the Delano ethos was that one should never burden people with your problems. Life was uncertain enough as it was, even in the grandeur of Algonac. Whining was never acceptable, especially in public.

  The Delanos occasionally paid visits to other stately homes, including the Staten Island, New York, summer retreat of William Henry Aspinwall—remembered in the family as a good friend of Warren’s. There he could view an art collection that included works by Spanish old masters Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Diego Velázquez (one of which, according to Delano family biographer Rita Halle Kleeman, was purchased from the Dutch royal family “for what was said to have been a fabulous sum”).8 Aspinwall may have visited the Delanos at Algonac, as his sister Mary Rebecca had recently married a nearby squire, the reclusive physician Isaac Roosevelt, whose Rosedale estate was just across the Hudson. Of this alliance of old Dutch pedigree and Yankee shipping money, Isaac’s grandson Franklin would write one day, “Thus the stock kept virile and abreast of the time.”9

  When in New York for the winter season, Warren and Catherine attended lectures by the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preached the values of “self-reliance” to adoring audiences. Although also a committed abolitionist, Emerson was afraid to attack slavery in public for fear of mob violence. In writing, however, he was explicit: if slavery continued, “the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.”10 By the 1850s, the Yankee poet was firmly in the patronage of the circle of merchants from his old Canton days, and his daughter, Edith, had married into the family: her husband was William Hathaway Forbes, son of John Murray Forbes.

  Of his daughter’s father-in-law, Emerson wrote: “Never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved, he was the benefactor.” In the nineteenth century, literary snobs looked down upon men in trade as uncultured; Emerson firmly removed Forbes from such a view because he believed the great China merchant had a holistic perspective regarding art, philosophy, and commerce: “How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to himself.”11

  Warren and Catherine Delano would have nodded in approval. Catherine was, after all, a Forbes cousin. On the matter of race and slavery, Warren Delano was as adamant as Emerson: “just laws for the Colored man as well as the White man,” he wrote to his brother Franklin, now retired from Grinnell, Minturn & Company and living across the Hudson with his wife, Laura.12

  Like Delano, John Murray Forbes detested chattel slavery. Although he never became a full-fledged abolitionist, he called for slavery’s restriction in the western territories and once entertained the fire-eating activist John Brown at tea. Many of their peers in Boston and New York—scions of the powerful Lowell, Appleton, and Lawrence families—were proslavery because of their huge stakes in New England’s textile mills. Abolishing slavery would disrupt the supply chain that funneled cheap cotton picked by enslaved African-Americans to the northern brokerages and then onward to the looms of New Bedford, Providence, Waltham, and Lowell. Many shipowners, if not openly proslavery, felt quite conflicted about the South’s “peculiar institution” for the same reason.

  Forbes, Delano, and other skeptics of slavery saw no contradiction in their being antislavery owners of fast clipper ships—the profits of which depended on crimps to forcibly round up crews, captains flogging their men for discipline, and paltry wages for the crew. Shipping fit neatly into the northern “free labor” system, in which sailors, unlike slaves, were paid (in the minds of the shipowners, fairly) for their work but still had no collective bargaining power or ownership rights. The same paternalistic mind-set carried over into their other enterprises such as mining and railroads. The best economic laws were “natural laws”: if new groups, especially immigrants, were willing to work for less and improve the company’s bottom line, so be it. “I cannot and will not pay any man more than $1.50 a day for ten hours’ work,” Warren Delano complained. He saw immigrants as a “new element that knows the value of shelter, food & clothing,”13 and felt no animosity toward them—although he felt little sympathy, either. Like the opium business, human suffering could be justified in the name of respectability, honor, and profit—for all the right people, especially one’s family.

  The Forbes and Delano families shared other views and ways. Forbes kept in regular touch with Warren and Catherine—after all, it was he who had brought the couple together in the first place, ten years before. And in business, the master of Naushon Island and the master of Algonac still worked closely together. Beyond their shared investments in various clippers, Forbes and Delano joined forces to invest in coal mining, the source of the main fuel powering the nation’s locomotives, steamships, and iron furnaces.14

  While Delano lavished his money on making Algonac beautiful, John Murray Forbes went for simple surroundings. The cottages of Naushon Island were spare and basic in decor. His daughter Sarah Forbes Hughes wrote, “In any building which he personal
ly used, he wanted room, warmth, and convenience; he did not like showy coloring, inside or out, but there ended his interest.”15 The real attraction for him was the great outdoors: horseback riding, sailing, and picnicking on the beach. The Forbes family yachts had nonshowy names such as Wild Duck.16 And he didn’t put on aristocratic pretensions about his family’s Scottish origins, joking that his ancestors were “probably a set of old cattle thieves.”17 Forbes himself, despite or perhaps because of his roots in the opium trade, donated generously to educational and cultural causes in the Boston area. His pet project was the reestablishment of Milton Academy, near his brother Robert’s home, as one of America’s most prominent nonsectarian boarding schools.

  The Delanos, although adopted New Yorkers, still made sure to give their children a good dose of New England values. They didn’t have a private island like the Forbeses’ Naushon, but they did have their historic homestead in Fairhaven, where the old salt Captain Warren had hung the Delano coat-of-arms above the door. Every summer, the Delano clan boarded a Fall River Line steamer in New York to spend a few weeks with Grandfather Warren. The old captain’s first wife, Deborah, had died in 1827. Sara and the other grandchildren were told to call their grandfather’s second wife, Elizabeth, “Mrs. Delano,” not “Grandmother.” They called her Grandmother anyway; Elizabeth and Captain Warren had been married for more than two decades. Sons Warren II, Franklin, and Ned gritted their teeth and barely tolerated their stepmother, perhaps because she, in their eyes, was an interloper in their Delano clan.

  Now in his eighties, Grandfather Warren was still formidable, always wearing a black frock coat and clutching a gold-headed cane. He also sported a toupee that the family thought was laughable, but no one dared mention it. At the dinner table, he always made sure that his grandchildren got large slabs of butter on their plates.

  “Grandpa, not so much butter,” they would protest.

  “Eat it, child, it’s good for you,” he’d growl.

  Although the old captain didn’t have the retinue of servants that his son’s family enjoyed at Algonac, he and his wife still employed a butler, one of whose tasks was to unfold, shake out, and refold the contents of their houseguests’ suitcases because, as granddaughter Sara remembered, her stepgrandmother “never know otherwise what might be brought into the house.”18

  For his part, Warren II made sure that his children never went to the public beach but rather swam by themselves in a secluded cove near their grandfather’s house. It may have been snobbery, but it also may have been fear of waterborne diseases, including the much-dreaded polio. Catherine Delano kept to herself whatever opinions she may have had regarding the family’s separation from the rest of the world.

  Yet there were cracks in the cool, confident Delano family façade. Ned—still fat, still unmarried, and still living with his brother Warren’s family at Algonac—worried that Warren’s furious pace of high living and high-stakes investing was simply not sustainable. Warren was “heels & head in business,” Ned wrote in his diary. “Mixing in all kinds. I fear he is branching out too much.”19

  Ned was right.

  After a brief few years of trading supremacy on the high seas, the extreme clipper ships were no longer making profits on the long-haul cargo run around Cape Horn to California. Filling the gap were slower, more capacious vessels, the medium clippers, which required fewer crew and could carry more cargo than their faster, more heavily sparred predecessors. William Henry Webb supposedly remarked to the mate of extreme clipper Young America in 1853: “Take good care of her, Mister, because after she’s gone, there will be no more like her.”20

  It was true. Webb built no extreme clippers after Young America, focusing instead on steam-powered vessels and fuller-bodied medium clippers.

  Not that Young America was a financial disaster for her owner. Far from it. A few successful voyages to California repaid Webb’s investment (more than $140,000, four times what it had cost to build the earliest clipper prototypes such as Houqua a decade earlier). But Webb, the most cautious and conservative of the core quartet of clipper ship builders, had seen what was coming. So had Captain Nathaniel Palmer, who would soon complete the nearly impossible task of rebuilding McKay’s Great Republic, his final building effort. So, perhaps, had the brilliant but erratic naval designer John Willis Griffiths, who left the shipbuilding world altogether to become a financially struggling publisher and maritime theoretician. In the pages of his Monthly Nautical Magazine and Quarterly Review, Griffiths slid into obscurity as he sought to popularize concepts such as “wave line theory” and propeller “slip,” and continued to insist against the evidence that his design ideas had kicked off the great clipper race.21

  Donald McKay was faring somewhat better, even after the tragic loss of his masterpiece Great Republic. He had grudgingly diversified into constructing medium clippers to meet the demands of some of his Boston clients, churning out a series of shapely midsized ships such as Defender and Daniel Webster. Still, the Nova Scotian stubbornly held on to the dream of extreme sailing vessels. The four extreme clipper ships he built for the Liverpool merchant James Baines, for use in the Australia trade, were arguably his finest work. Lightning, James Baines, Champion of the Seas, and Donald McKay were refined versions of the Sovereign of the Seas: three masts, flat bottoms, and rated at around two thousand tons each. His old friend John Willis Griffiths sang Lightning’s praises in his magazine: “No timid hand or hesitating brain gave form and dimensions to the Lightning. Very great stability; acute extremities; full, short midship body; comparatively [sic] small deadrise, and the longest end forward, are points in the excellence of this ship.”22 She proved to be yet another thoroughbred masterpiece. During her delivery run from New York to Liverpool in 1854, Lightning achieved speeds approaching 18.5 knots, and made 436 miles in a single day.

  McKay’s British clients did not understand or feel comfortable with the American clipper concept. Lightning’s new captain took one look at her hollow bows and ordered the company shipwrights to add additional planking for buoyancy. McKay was furious, calling them the “wood butchers of Liverpool.” Nonetheless, each of the four clippers proved to be fantastic vessels, breaking records and making huge amounts of money for Baines.

  These were the last of the true American-built extreme clippers. Despite their successes, there would be no more buyers for McKay’s vessels.

  His prestige and his records would remain. But fame had not bought financial stability for Donald McKay. By the mid-1850s, he was in a precarious position. Although he remained the heroic shipbuilder in public, in private he despaired at his financial distress. He reserved special ire for his younger brother Lauchlan, whom he accused of putting his grandiose dreams of being a great businessman ahead of his nautical craft: “As a boy, I knew you to be mean and selfish; but as a man, I forgot those early traits of character, and loved you affectionately as a brother,” Donald snarled at Lauchlan.23 The two brothers sued each other over what appears to have been real estate that they owned jointly in the Boston area (“You promised to send me $220,000 but only sent me $180,000”), though it seems that the conflict was more visceral than financial.

  Donald McKay was proud of being a craftsman, but he was clearly very sensitive to slights of his status as a businessman and a naval architect. It was hard to blame him; he was still smarting financially and emotionally from the loss of Great Republic, and he knew that he could never build a ship like her again. Frustrated and angry, McKay wrote another letter to Lauchlan, accusing him of general incompetence as a captain, embezzling funds from his voyages as master of Sovereign of the Seas, and taking up with a prostitute. Above all, McKay was furious that his brother was going around telling people that the great shipbuilder was “insane, a mere ‘woodchopper,’ void of all ‘business talent.’ ”

  “My ships are monuments on the ocean, and they float triumphantly on every sea,” Donald wrote his brother in retort.24

  Sadly, Lauchlan might have had a po
int. Donald McKay’s net worth at the time was only about $15,000—substantial for a tradesman but poor for the nation’s arguably most preeminent shipwright. In the high-stakes shipping game, McKay had dreamed large, built big, and triumphed in the quest for speed, but he’d lost in the race for riches.

  *

  One great McKay clipper flying the American flag was destined to make a bold second entrance onto the world stage. In the winter of 1855, a giant ship entered New York Harbor that made even the most hardened sailors turn their heads in awe. It was Great Republic, McKay’s masterpiece destroyed by fire on that catastrophic Boxing Day of 1853. She was no longer nearly as mighty looking as she had once been. A simple scrolled billethead had replaced her screaming eagle figurehead. She still had four masts, but they had been reduced in height by seventeen feet. There were three decks now instead of four, and she measured 3,300 tons rather than her original 4,500. Yet she was still the largest merchant vessel in the world, sail or steam.

  Captain Nat Palmer’s restoration was a miracle. He had produced a leaner, less heavily sparred ship that was much more economical to operate: she needed a crew of only fifty to operate her rather than her original hundred. Let loose with sails unfurled, Great Republic sailed across the Atlantic in a mere nineteen days, and, in the words of her captain, “behaved nobly.”25 The following year, she sailed from New York to San Francisco in only ninety-two days, just three days short of Flying Cloud’s record. Great Republic would soon be sailing to different ports. Owner Abbot Low found that the most profitable use of his big ship was not the fragrant tea trade but hauling smelly guano out of South America for use as fertilizer.

  The tragedy of Great Republic was that as beautiful as she was, she was only a shadow of what Donald McKay had meant her to be. She never got the chance to surge along under full sail—most likely smashing every record on the books.