Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  It was on October 31, 1862—128 days after clearing New York Harbor—that the clipper ship dropped anchor in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor. Compared with the clipper passages of the past, Captain Ranlett Jr.’s performance was mediocre at best. The ship’s underwhelming speed over the nineteen-thousand-mile trip was a combination of a variety of factors: doldrums in the Indian Ocean, the age of the vessel (twelve years, old for an extreme clipper), and the cautious seamanship on the part of the young captain. Ranlett probably wanted to make sure that his passengers weren’t exposed to the worst of a “driver” captain and a “bully mate.” In her diary, Catherine Delano recorded no drawn daggers, flying lashes, or blood spattered on the decks.

  The Hong Kong air was thick and humid. Looming above little Sara, her siblings, and her mother Catherine was the Peak, a lush, green mountain that soared more than 1,500 feet above the swirling waters of the Pearl River estuary. Whitewashed classical buildings, surrounded by palms and bedecked with ferns and awnings, were sprinkled like sugar cubes at the base of the mountain.

  Below, riding at anchor in the recently renamed Victoria Harbor, were dozens of ships: Chinese junks, British and American clipper ships, and steamships emitting wisps of coal smoke. The Union Jack snapped from the masts of most of the vessels. The Civil War had ended US hopes of supremacy in the China trade. A greatly expanded (and improved) British clipper fleet had by now cornered the market in shipping tea from China to London. They had names such as Fiery Cross, Robin Hood, Lord of the Isles, and Queen of Nations. Unlike American clippers, which were built entirely of wood, British clippers were of composite construction: iron frames and wooden planking. These iron-framed ships not only were stronger and more fire resistant than wood ones, but also their structural components were thinner, giving them greater internal volume and carrying capacity.42 They were harbingers of the all-metal shipbuilding practices to come, even if Americans were still generally skeptical of iron construction for deep-sea vessels. (According to one account, Captain Nathaniel Palmer bet an English shipbuilder that he could fire a musket ball through an iron plate. The shipbuilder called for a bet. Palmer grabbed an old gun, took aim, fired, and collected his money.43)

  A few old American clippers flying both the Stars and Stripes and the red-and-yellow A. A. Low house flag still fluttered on ships in the harbor. Among them was the N. B. Palmer, still under the command of Captain Charlie Low, who had recently sailed from Hong Kong with four hundred Chinese laborers as passengers, bound for San Francisco.44 The valiant little Houqua, twenty years old and Captain Palmer’s first true clipper, also showed up in the Pearl River from time to time. She still boasted the sad-eyed figurehead of the “adopted father” of Warren Delano and his comrades, whose carved mandarin cap and robes were weathered by years of salt air and pounding seas. Within a few years, Houqua would sail from Yokohama, Japan, and disappear at sea without a trace.

  The Delano children had grown up with Houqua’s face, which had gazed down on them as they played in their father’s library at Algonac. They had known Houqua’s villa, echoed in the construction and furnishing of their American mansion. The glittering treasures of China—colorful porcelain, silk wall hangings, green jade vases, and Buddhist temple bells—were everywhere. What’s more, two of the Delanos’ children had been born in China, and one had died there. Now the family was back.

  The Delanos, like all foreigners, were no longer confined to the gilded seclusion of the Factories. They could go wherever they wished, so long as they kept to the Chinese port cities. Eighty miles upriver from the colony of Hong Kong beckoned the ancient city of Canton, where Warren Delano and his fellow “bachelors” had dined at Houqua’s palace at Honam and hatched their plans for the first extreme clipper ships. In the twenty years since, Canton had gone from the single port of entry for Western trade into one of many. Hong Kong and Shanghai had surpassed it in trade volume years before.

  In fact, almost all physical reminders of Warren Delano’s youth in Canton were gone. Charlie Low had been shocked at the devastation when he traveled upriver a few years earlier. Scanning the Canton waterfront, he couldn’t even tell where the colonnaded Factories once stood. The foundations had been “pulverized,” the ground strewn with salt, and “whole acres of bare tumbling walls show the devastation made by fire and guns; it looks like the ruins you see in engravings.” Charlie felt pangs of guilt at the devastation wrought by British guns. “How many worthy Chinamen have been driven from their homes where generation after generation have found a living in peace and quietness?” the veteran clipper captain wondered.45 The one constant from the old Cohong days was opium, which flowed into the Middle Kingdom from Turkey and British India virtually unchecked.

  From aboard the Surprise, the Delano children saw a sharp-bowed, many-oared vessel: a “fast crab,” the type of boat used by smugglers to pick up crates of opium from the British and American storeships that anchored with impunity all along the Chinese coast. About a dozen Chinese men were pulling with all their might toward Surprise.

  Captain Ranlett almost certainly lent the Delano children his spyglass to look more closely. Through its lens, they saw a tanned, handsome man clad in a snow-white linen suit, standing erect in the boat, whiskers blowing in the wind, eyes glowing with excitement.

  “Papa!” they squealed as he climbed aboard Surprise, and showered him with hugs and kisses.

  “I think Papa is a very nice man!” toddler Cassie shouted as she jumped up and down.

  The Victoria’s Peak section of Hong Kong was now thoroughly English, right down to the architecture of its buildings. Among them was a mansion called Rose Hill, a light-orange villa owned by Russell & Company, fully furnished, with ponderous English furniture in the parlors and straight-backed chairs in the schoolroom. This would be their new home, their Algonac on the Pearl River. A retinue of Chinese servants had already been hired, ready to draw the children’s baths and cook their Western food.

  Scattered among the whitewashed Western homes and shops were manicured cricket fields and horse race tracks. The tea and opium trade had caused Hong Kong’s population to explode from a mere 8,000 in 1841 to almost 95,000 by 1860.46 The British Crown enforced a rigid apartheid system: the colony’s roughly 3,000 English and American residents lived on the east side of the island, while the Chinese were crammed onto the west.47

  As Papa and Mama Delano and the children were whisked away in their sedan chairs, did little Sara Delano gaze back at the clipper ship Surprise at rest in Hong Kong’s harbor? She would have seen an old lady, worn and tired from the long voyage, her oak and pine beams creaking from years of beating against the monsoon and around Cape Horn. Yet her bow was still sharp as a razor, masts raked and proud, looking every inch the revolutionary vessel that Delano and his partners had dreamed of so many years before.

  *

  I. The side of the ship sheltered from the wind.

  II. An iron pot set upon a brick furnace, used for rendering whale blubber into oil.

  CHAPTER 17

  GLORY OF THE SEAS

  In his later years, he endured misfortune and ingratitude with the same sturdy sweetness and equanimity that he had shown in the days when fortune smiled.

  —CAPTAIN ARTHUR HAMILTON CLARK1

  On a bright October day in 1869, Donald McKay—now in his late fifties—left his house on White Street in East Boston and strode down to his shipyard. He was still muscular and imposing but now was stooped slightly with age, his wavy, dark hair streaked with gray. He had made the walk from home to work for more than twenty years, during which time he had supervised the construction of thirteen extreme clippers, thirteen medium clippers, more than a dozen packet ships, and an assortment of schooners, barques, and other vessels—a monumental contribution not only to American shipbuilding but to the history of man and sea.2 Now his firm, reorganized under the moniker of McKay & Aldus Iron Works, had transformed into a prominent manufacturer of railroad steam locomotives and engines for New Engla
nd’s burgeoning factories and textile mills. It was one of the most advanced yards in America. And it still built ships.

  Shipbuilding work had declined severely since the Civil War. So had the number of American shipyards. McKay’s old friend William Webb had just that year put his once-thriving New York shipyard up for sale. Grass was sprouting on the East River banks where Webb’s yards once gave birth to clippers such as Challenge and Swordfish. Thanks to his extensive outside investments, Webb was far from penniless, yet his life’s work, his passion, was a dying vocation. European shipyards were producing ships at lower cost, and fewer young Americans seemed interested in enduring years of “slavocratic” apprenticeships. When asked by the New York Times why he was getting out of the business, Webb not only noted the skyrocketing costs of materials but also complained about “the evident disposition of workmen to avoid accountability, the unwillingness of the rising generation to apprentice themselves to mechanical business, and the consequent and increasing difficulty of obtaining skilled labor.”3

  Donald McKay refused to go with the trends.

  This day, he was headed for his yard’s launching platform, where he would be joined by his wife, Mary, and the five McKay children still living at home. The newest addition to the family, one-year-old Wallace, was in a baby carriage.4 Mary McKay had once again given her husband’s newest ship a mellifluous name: Glory of the Seas. She was a medium clipper—at 2,100 tons and 240 feet, a compromise between speed and cargo capacity. Fuller bodied than McKay’s 1850s speedsters Flying Cloud and Lightning, she lacked their rakish lines and sensuous grace. Looks no longer paid. But Donald McKay and his wife were still shameless about chasing publicity for his creations, and a friendly Boston newsman heralded the new vessel as “nearly perfect as a ship need be.”5 By naming her Glory of the Seas, McKay laid claim to his own glorious record as America’s finest shipbuilder.

  The serene, chiseled face of the ivory-hued figurehead stared down at the McKays and their guests as they gathered for her christening. The carving, set just below the bowsprit, was an expression of McKay’s idea of female perfection: a seminude classical goddess striding forward, one arm holding her billowing robe above her left breast, the other thrown dramatically behind her right shoulder. Above the figurehead flew a big American flag.

  As he stood on the platform, McKay must have remembered that he still owed wood-carver Herbert Gleason $362.35 for his masterful work.6 There was nothing to do but put on a brave face.

  As the crowd murmured with expectation, fifteen-year-old daughter Frances McKay swung the bottle of champagne and shouted, “I christen thee Glory of the Seas!”7 Down she slid into Boston Harbor. The spectators cheered. Another McKay clipper was ready to conquer the seas.

  She would prove to be his last.

  *

  Despite his reputation for honesty and fine workmanship, Donald McKay was struggling financially—again. The $300,000 loss from the US Navy contracts continued to cripple him despite his best efforts at a comeback. Lacking strong cash flow, McKay also owed banks and suppliers close to $250,000.8 The past December, the Boston Post had informed the entire city about McKay’s dire straits, something that must have caused tremendous anger at the Eagle Hill breakfast table.

  “The journal understands that during the past week the officers of the firm have been investigated, and it is reported that the assets are considerably in excess of its list,” the paper declared on December 5, 1868, hinting that McKay was hiding something from his creditors. “There is a general feeling of regret expressed that a firm doing so large a business and with such an excellent reputation for the machinery they make, should be obliged to suspend operations. It will be hard for the hundreds of machinists and laborers who are thrown out of employment at this inclement season by the stoppage of the works, and we hope for their sakes that some arrangements may be made to resume operations.”9

  The post–Civil War economic boom had left McKay high and dry, as it had others whose life was the sea. The war had devastated the Yankee merchant marine. Insurance rates for shipowners had skyrocketed, thanks to the havoc wrought by Confederate commerce raiders. To protect their ships and their cargoes, many Northern shipowners had registered their vessels under foreign flags. By the end of the war, most of the extreme clippers that had survived the 1850s had been sold to British concerns, among them the illustrious Flying Cloud and the star-crossed Challenge. In 1866, as a way of stimulating postwar American shipbuilding, Congress passed legislation banning ships such as these from being reregistered back under the Stars and Stripes. It was a shortsighted bill that had the opposite effect. Although domestic intercoastal trade remained healthy, American businessmen insisted it was cheaper to use foreign ships to send their goods out of the country than to invest the capital needed to rebuild the nation’s merchant marine. As a consequence, US ships engaged in foreign trade plummeted from 1,388 in 1866 to only 817 ten years later.10

  Congress did nothing to provide financial support for the American shipping industry, but it lavished millions of dollars on giveaways to railroads. As Glory of the Seas rose on the stocks, two beneficiaries of congressional largesse, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, were hard at work building the first transcontinental railroad, which would link San Francisco with the markets of the Midwest and the East. Congress backed the project by authorizing more than $100 million in government-backed bonds. Five months before Glory of the Seas’s October launch date, Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, drove the ceremonial final spike of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory. Cargo could now be shipped from New York to San Francisco in a consistent ten days, rather than a hundred days in an extreme clipper battling variable winds and currents.

  Those few American clippers still braving the dangerous Cape Horn run were doomed when the hammer struck the spike that day. The old China trade was also dealt a fatal blow later that same year, when in November the Suez Canal opened for business after more than a decade of construction. The 121-mile-long canal, which linked the Mediterranean and Red Seas, eliminated the need for ships to sail around the southern tip of Africa to get to China, shaving 5,000 nautical miles from the trip.11 Steamships could now sail economically to China and back on a regular schedule, with plenty of opportunities to refuel along the way. With the opening of the new Suez Canal trade route, even A. A. Low & Brother—the last American firm to successfully operate extreme clippers in the China trade—was squeezed to the breaking point.I

  The British were now in possession of an overseas empire, with government backing and support at nearly every single port: from Suez, Egypt, to Bombay, India; from Singapore to Shanghai. To compete, American companies wanted their own government subsidies—but none was forthcoming. Instead, shipowners and builders complained about high taxation.12 All of the nation’s resources were being devoted to the debts of the Civil War.

  The writing was on the wall. “I only know the English have always, in peace and war, manifested a determination to hold their supremacy on the ocean,” Abbot Low had told the assembled crowd at the New York State Chamber of Commerce in 1867, “and the supremacy which they have acquired by arms in war they have in peace acquired by subsidies. They have deliberately driven and intentionally driven the Americans from the ocean by paying subsidies which they know our Congress would not pay.”13 Following the Civil War, British capital flowed into US railroads, steel, and manufacturing, but when it came to ocean commerce, Britannia made sure that she alone would rule the waves.

  Low’s own once-profitable ships were bleeding red ink. In 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, he had sold off the grandest of his maritime assets, the giantess Great Republic, to Canadian owners. Even as rebuilt, she didn’t really pay. This McKay masterpiece—her rig even further reduced—would ply the seas for six more years before foundering in a storm off Bermuda. The divestment of Low’s ships would continue over the next decade—though his vast fortune remained intac
t thanks to his diversified holdings in railroads, real estate, and the transatlantic cable.

  Donald McKay was caught in the crosswinds of these mighty shifts of the American and global economies. He was determined to keep the doors of McKay & Aldus open at all costs. With many mouths to feed at home, he still showed up at the yard at six thirty in the morning along with the rest of his employees. Although he was no longer as strong as he used to be, he did not hesitate to wield an adze or pick up a sledgehammer to drive the wooden dowels that bound hull planking to frames. He was a proud man, and the thought of burdening his family with his debts was simply too much to bear. His new ship had to live up to the standards of his previous triumphs, or he and his family would be ruined.

  With Glory of the Seas, Donald McKay resorted to the same strategy that he had used for the acclaimed Sovereign of the Seas and the illfated Great Republic: he would build her on his own account, sail her on a successful maiden voyage to San Francisco, and, after she had proved her worth, sell her for a profit. It was the only way he knew how to make money. Friends probably told him he was a fool to try the same plan again, but the proud McKay was convinced that his masterpiece would pay if he spared no expense to create the finest sailing ship in the world.

  Glory of the Seas was towed to New York for loading and departed on February 13, 1870, bound for San Francisco. She left three days after a survivor from the California Gold Rush days: Grinnell & Minturn’s twenty-year-old clipper Sea Serpent, one of the very few ships of her type still making the punishing trip around Cape Horn. On board Glory of the Seas was an exhausted Donald McKay. He told the captain that he wanted the new ship to be driven just as hard as clippers were back in the days of the forty-niners.14