It would take three decades for the McKay family to be made whole.
*
The Delanos, along with many other families that had made fortunes in the China trade, were committed to the cause of Lincoln and the preservation of the union. Catherine Delano made sure the children sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with gusto when they worshipped at Newburgh’s Unitarian Church, and Sara and her sisters learned how to sew so they could make shirts for Union soldiers. “Made by a little girl seven years old,” said the label of one such garment that Sara made.23
Sunday was letter-writing day, and every week a batch of mail was sent by the family to their father a half world away in Hong Kong. For Warren Delano, at work in his old job at Russell & Company, the outbreak of the Civil War proved a huge boon. In addition to sending tea back to America, he took advantage of the huge market for opium-based drugs in the United States. Both sides in the conflict were using cutting-edge weapons far ahead of the Napoleonic tactics employed by the generals, and the carnage was awful. The rifled musket, the minié ball (a spin-stabilized bullet small enough to load through a barrel of a rifled long gun), the Gatling gun (a forerunner to the machine gun), and other killing machines led to thousands of casualties per day on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, and Bull Run. At the Battle of Antietam, an estimated 22,717 men were killed, wounded, or captured in the single bloodiest day in US history.
Many who were not killed outright were disfigured by amputations and facial injuries. At the war’s peak, there were over 135,000 filled hospital beds in the North. Pain, psychological as well as physical, had become a national epidemic, and opiate-based drugs such as morphine offered the only relief. Wrote Dr. Nathan Mayer, the regimental surgeon of the Sixteenth Connecticut Infantry: “In one pocket I carried quinine, in the other morphine, and whiskey in my canteen.”24
Ultimately, opium proved just as addictive in America as it had in China. In addition to the nearly 700,000 dead, the Civil War left an estimated 281,881 injured on the Union side and 194,000 on the Confederate side.25 Thousands more were left ravaged by disease. Besides being deprived of limbs, ears, and eyes, these men had to deal with the shame of no longer being fully productive members of society. An estimated 400,000 became opium addicts on both sides as a result of their morphine treatments.26
The use of opium was perfectly legal under American law. There were no state or federal agencies that regulated the use of opium-based painkillers, or any drug at all, for that matter. Charles and Abbot Low’s father, Seth, had built his first fortune importing camphor and other exotic plants into the United States for use in patent medicines. A half century later, Warren Delano had no scruples about taking advantage of the huge opportunity to sell opium to the US government. For Delano, selling the drug to Americans rather than to Chinese was an “honorable business.” As managing partner of Russell & Company, he contracted with the Medical Bureau of the US War Department to send large shipments of the drug to America.27
Some saw Delano’s opium shipments from Hong Kong to New York as a tremendous humanitarian effort for the Union cause. Others weren’t so sure. But for the family patriarch, there was little romance in business. It was a means to an end. He had a duty to save his family from financial embarrassment, not to mention to save Algonac for future generations. His interests were no longer merely making money but also protecting his family from the uncertainties of his youth: the British bombardment of New England during the War of 1812, the capture of his father by the Royal Navy, the decade of lonely bachelorhood in Canton, the siege of the Factories.
But as a husband and father, he could not bear to be so far away from those he loved. Warren Delano decided that if he could not go to the mountain, he would bring the mountain to him.
In the spring of 1862, as news of the Union defeats and colossal casualties filled the morning papers, the Delano family received a letter at Algonac. The letter itself has been lost, but it probably informed Catherine that things were going well in Hong Kong and he was making money, but not well enough for him to return within the year. He had therefore booked them passage aboard his friend Abbot Low’s clipper ship Surprise. They were to pack their bags for its June sailing from New York, and then make the long ocean journey to rejoin the patriarch in Hong Kong.
Despite being twelve years old, Surprise was still in remarkably good condition and well maintained. After Captain Philip Dumaresq’s then-record ninety-six-day run from New York to San Francisco in 1850, Surprise continued to make steady profits for the Low firm.28 Unlike other clipper ships, her rig had not been cut down, allowing her to make consistently rapid and reliable passages. For the Delanos, it was as if Papa had chartered the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of a Learjet for a trip halfway around the world. With good luck and fair weather, Surprise would carry the Delano family and their servants from New York to China in fewer than a hundred days.
On June 25, family and friends gathered in New York to see the Delanos off on their voyage to China. The traveling party consisted of a dozen people, including thirty-seven-year-old Catherine, sixteen-year-old Louise, fifteen-year-old Dora, thirteen-year-old Warren III, eight-year-old Sara, five-year-old Philippe, two-year-old Cassie, their thirty-five-year-old governess (and Delano cousin) Nancy Church, and two nurses named Davis and Ellen. Piled high on the deck of the steam tug that took the Delano party to the clipper ship anchored out in the Upper Bay were mountains of baggage from Algonac: changes of clothes, books, toys, and other souvenirs (and necessities) that the family would use over the coming months. Catherine Delano also carried a farewell gift for the children: a red notebook containing a children’s story, written in longhand, by cousin Elizabeth Babcock.
“We need not say,” Catherine wrote soon after Surprise headed out to sea, “it was sorrowful to leave our friends, but we must look forward to the happy meeting with our husband and Father at Hong-Kong.”29 The last time she had taken a long sea voyage, she was a young bride, nervous about leaving home for the first time but deeply in love with Warren. Now she was in her midthirties, with several children in tow, and driven there by loneliness and financial necessity.
The details of the arrangement between Abbot Low and Warren Delano are lost, but it is clear that in addition to giving the Delanos passage on Surprise, Low leased Algonac from the Delanos for the next five years, keeping it in tip-top condition. If Warren Delano succeeded in rebuilding his fortune within that time, his wife and children could look forward to returning home to the idyllic retreat they so loved. Houqua’s protégés looked after one another: during the siege of the Factories, the bombardment of Canton, the years of wild speculating on clipper ships and railroads, financial ruin, and a Civil War.
There was another reason the Delanos booked passage on Surprise: her speed offered some measure of protection against a new threat in the offing. In June 1862, as Surprise prepared to slip out of New York Harbor, the shipyard of John Laird Sons & Company near Liverpool was putting the finishing touches on a new vessel that looked like any other large steam-powered merchant ship, equipped with a screw propeller and three masts. At 220 feet long and 1,000 tons, she was about the same size as an American clipper ship. Yet concealed behind Enrica’s graceful lines was a set of fearsome weaponry: six muzzle-loading thirty-two-pound smooth-bore guns (three per side) and two hundred-pound pivot guns at her bow and stern. She was paid for by a Liverpool shipping firm that had a lucrative business in selling Confederate cotton smuggled past the Union blockade of Southern ports.
The Southern diplomat who arranged for the construction and purchase of this new weapon was a Georgia aristocrat named James Dunwoody Bulloch. (His niece Martha, a staunch Confederate supporter, had married a New York merchant named Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and stopped her husband from joining the Union army—something their son Theodore Jr. would never forgive.) Soon after Bulloch’s ship Enrica departed England, her new captain, Raphael Semmes, hoisted the Stars and Bars, and she was handed over to a Con
federate crew. Under a new name, CSS Alabama, the ship took its orders from Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy: loot, burn, and sink any Union vessels.
Armed and dangerous, the rechristened CSS Alabama began prowling the Atlantic sea-lanes for Yankee merchant ships that crossed her path. Able to steam at thirteen knots, she could outrace almost any merchant vessel, steam or sail, except possibly a China clipper such as Surprise. For Captain Semmes, a swift Yankee clipper ship was the ultimate war prize, and a family as prominent as the Delanos would be a fantastic diplomatic pawn if captured. Unfortunately for him, the Surprise was far gone by the time his ship was finished. Over the next several months, the Confederacy commissioned several more steam-powered commerce raiders from British yards. These vessels would ultimately wreak havoc on the Union’s merchant marine, despite the best efforts of William Henry Aspinwall and John Murray Forbes to scope out and purchase such vessels.
The Delanos surely knew of the threats as they glided past the Narrows and out into the open Atlantic, their old lives fading away in Surprise’s wake. The cooing of the mourning doves in the trees of Algonac had been replaced by the calls of gulls soaring around the masts of Surprise.
For the first several days after sailing from New York, the Delano family lay in their bunks, miserably seasick. After the evening meal, Captain Charles Ranlett Jr. entertained those who could get up by playing the small pipe organ in the clipper’s saloon. Probably among the tunes was a popular song from the 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl that would have made the Delano children homesick for Algonac:
I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls
With vassals and serfs at my sight,
And of all who assembled within these walls
That I was the hope and the pride.
I had riches too great to count
Could boast of a high ancestral name,
But I also dreamt, which pleased me most
That you loved me most
That you loved me still the same,
That you loved me still the same.
Catherine was no stranger to travel, having been on two long ocean voyages to China and back, but the ship’s strange motions and noises still bothered her. She wrote diligently in her diary, even if she could stomach only a few cups of rice gruel. Anything more would send her running for the water closet or the nearest leewardI rail. “Ship inclining to Leeward,” she wrote. “Louise and Annie suffering a great deal from seasickness. Nancy has a bad head. Davis’ head troubles her and Warren seasick. Dora not very bright and Sallie [Sara] uncomfortable.” The young were sleepless, cranky, and often unwilling to do their lessons. “It took Sallie till noon to get dressed,” a frustrated Catherine Delano wrote.
Sea travel limited the elaborate attire that women of Catherine’s class were used to wearing, such as multiple layers of petticoats, fancy hats, and the so-called caged crinoline: a steel contraption that gave a dress a fashionable bell shape. The ideal look also called for pale skin and a delicate demeanor.30 Now, Catherine lamented, “None of us present a very brilliant appearance.”31 Even if they wore more comfortable, simpler clothes aboard Surprise, all of the Delano women, including the little girls, almost certainly wore their laced corsets.32 The only way to do laundry was by hand, either with seawater or rainwater collected in canvas bags. What with all the small children on board, the washing chores must have been onerous. The odors of dirty cloth diapers almost certainly added to the stench of sweat on board, compounding everyone’s nausea.
Captain Ranlett did his best to make his miserable charges happy. He was a young man, and handling a big clipper ship was an overwhelming task without the distraction of important passengers. In addition to making sure the sails were trimmed and the Surprise remained on course, he fretted about those steam commerce raiders. “A large Eng. iron propeller passed near us bound South,” he noted in his log.
Catherine, too, noticed the strange ship. “About ten o’clk a steamer was in sight to leeward of us, and the Captain was quite anxious about her, thinking she might be a privateer.” By now a master of the Delano way of never showing fear, especially in front of the children, Catherine wrote that she was “perfectly cool and not at all frightened.”33 Fortunately, the English ship continued on its way. Surprise (and the Delanos) had dodged a bullet: soon iron-hulled, steam-powered ships flying the Stars and Bars would be terrorizing Yankee vessels around the globe. Whalers were favorite targets, especially when pointed into the wind as their crews harvested blubber strips from whale carcasses. The stinking black smoke from their flaming tryworksII could be spotted miles away.
Few, however, thought the fleet-footed clippers were at great risk—until 1863, when the raider CSS Florida gave chase to Jacob Bell on her way home from China with a cargo of tea and Chinese goods worth an estimated $300,000. Jacob Bell’s captain was lucky to have a strong wind astern, and the ship flew along at an astonishing clip, leaving the steam-powered Confederate vessel in her wake. The chase continued for four tense hours, the white-winged clipper surging ahead of the smoke-belching iron steamship. Then the winds died, and the magnificent clipper was left with her sails limp in the still air. CSS Florida steamed up to the wallowing Jacob Bell, raised the Stars and Bars, and fired two warning shots across the clipper’s stern. The Confederates then boarded the ship, took the passengers and crew prisoner aboard the Florida, and then looted the cargo, which would fetch handsome prices in the blockaded South. They then set Jacob Bell afire, and CSS Florida steamed away in search of more Yankee prey.34
Within a few weeks of sailing, the passengers and crew aboard Surprise had settled into their shipboard routines, and the days passed more pleasantly. On nights the family couldn’t sleep, they could always go up on deck and experience an awesome sunrise at sea. As Richard Henry Dana Jr. observed in Two Years Before the Mast: “There is something in the first gray streaks stretching across the eastern horizon and throwing indirect light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can.”35
To the cloistered Delano children, who knew so little about the world beyond the gates of Algonac, the ship was an object of wonder, as were the sailors who worked on it. If Warren had been present, he likely would have forbidden them from mixing with the crew, just as he had forbidden them from mixing with the public at the beach in Fairhaven. It was a mind-set inherited not just from his father but also from his experience in the Canton Factories. Yet Catherine, no doubt exhausted, realized very quickly that keeping her family confined to the passengers’ quarters was virtually impossible.
Catherine could not ignore the fact that her family was now living cheek by jowl with about forty men who worked for meager pay—men about whom she was almost as naïve as were her children. She saw the distribution of items from the slop chest as an act of charity on the part of the captain, not as deductions from their wages. “These sailors go to sea sometimes poorly provided, and were it not that the ship carries a chest of the needed articles, they would be poorly off,” she wrote.36 She also was likely ignorant of the fact that many of the crew had probably been recruited by the crimps who prowled New York’s saloons and whorehouses.
Sara and her siblings found their way to the sailmaker’s quarters and watched the leathery old man at work mending Surprise’s dozens of sails. Catherine didn’t mind them passing the hours with him. She described the sailmaker as “decidedly a resource.”37 He told tall tales to the children, keeping them amused during the long days at sea. Yet what really captivated little Sara was how the sailmaker stuck pins and needles into a withered, useless thumb as he worked.38
Sometime during the voyage, the Delano family heard the cry of “Man overboard!” Captain Ranlett hove the ship to before it had traveled too far and, in the words of Catherine Delano, “hove a rope aft which the poor fellow caught hold of and was pulled in.” The winds and
seas must have been relatively calm, as a more aggressive captain, hell-bent on speed, would have given up the man for lost.
Surprise crossed the equator on July 25, and the season changed abruptly from summer to winter. Then Maury’s charts failed them. The clipper lay becalmed for days in the Indian Ocean. The tropical sun beat down mercilessly on the stranded ship. Inside, the temperature of the cabin probably soared above 100 degrees. The ship’s turkey and one of the Delano kittens, in Catherine’s words, “departed this life and were thrown overboard.”39
To keep his passengers cool, Captain Ranlett stretched a canvas tent above the main deck. There Catherine Delano passed the hours reading old copies of Vanity Fair magazine, as well as the latest novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Cousin Nancy Church and the two nurses did their best to keep the children focused on their lessons, as well as protected from the blazing sun. It was an impossible task. The children much preferred jumping from the bulwarks and paddling around the gently bobbing vessel to reciting their arithmetic tables or practicing the piano in the stifling cabin below. Sometimes sailors would take them out for a row in one of the ship’s boats.
Finally, in mid-September, the winds picked up, and Surprise—two weeks behind schedule—sailed toward Java Head and the treacherous Strait of Sunda—not far from where Papa’s Memnon had been looted by pirates so many years before. They desperately needed to stop for reprovisioning, or else the Delano party would be forced to eat the same salted beef and hardtack as the crew.
“The land, the trees and the shore look very refreshing,” Catherine wrote as Surprise dropped anchor at Anjer in the Dutch East Indies. “There seems to be a perfect jungle.”40 All of the children got new sunhats, as well as a gaggle of pet birds. And there was exotic fare for the dinner table: tamarinds, bananas, cloves, and coconuts. The Delanos may even have sampled the spiky durian fruit, of which Captain Charlie Low said, “tastes like everything good mixed together,” but only after he and his wife got over its “very offensive smell.”41
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