Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  His beautiful vessel was now out in the open sea, slicing through the North Atlantic at fine speed. Yet the poetry of wind, sea, and sails did little to calm McKay’s mind: he had been forced to take out two mortgages on the ship, with a Boston distiller and friend named Daniel Sortwell. One was made out for $100,000 at 9 percent per year—this was to pay back the angry creditors who showed up on McKay’s doorstep every day. It was not enough. To finance the completion of the ship, he had to borrow another $70,000 from Sortwell, equal to the value of most of the freight carried on this trip. McKay was able to keep $12,000 in reserve to purchase cargo in San Francisco for a possible run across the Pacific to China.15

  Glory of the Seas arrived in San Francisco on June 13, 1870, in 120 days, beating Sea Serpent to port by 3 days. It was a respectable time for a ship with fuller lines than her extreme predecessors, and a relieved Donald McKay was thrilled to stand on the deck of his masterpiece as she sailed through the Golden Gate, his blue eagle house flag flapping proudly in the wind. He had never sailed to San Francisco, the site of so many of his ships’ triumphant arrivals. He gazed on the brown cliffs flecked with greenery, the bright-blue harbor, and at the forest of masts and funnels clustered at the foot of Telegraph Hill. The old shipbuilder could take pride in the fact that his Glory of the Seas was one of the largest sailing vessels flying the Stars and Stripes; she dwarfed everything else on the San Francisco waterfront.16

  The newspapers rolled out the typical superlatives as they saw Glory of the Seas tie up at Cowell’s Wharf. McKay, aided by his wife, may well have had a hand in the copy. “One of the finest specimens of naval architecture afloat,” crowed the San Francisco Bulletin. The name Donald McKay was “a household word in nearly every American and English port of commerce—the vessels launched from his shipyard plow the seas wherever the white wing of commerce is known, and have earned a brilliant reputation among nautical men.”17

  However, once again fame did not bring fortune. McKay had sickening news in store for him the day after he stepped ashore: Glory of the Seas was no longer his ship to sell. A month before her arrival, while she was fighting her way around South America, Sortwell and other creditors had seized Glory of the Seas for unpaid debts. The legal notice beat the ship to San Francisco—most likely delivered by the new transcontinental telegraph (which, like the railroad, had benefited from a generous government subsidy).18 Her new owners loaded her with California grain and dispatched her around Cape Horn to Queenstown, Ireland, where she arrived in only 112 days. Glory of the Seas would go on to have a long and profitable career, lasting until 1923, when she was burned for her scrap metal off Seattle, Washington.

  McKay never saw a cent of her earnings. He returned to Boston in August and planned to sue Sortwell, when he learned of even more bad news: not only had they taken his ship, but also his creditors insisted on liquidating all of his assets. This meant selling the shipyard where he had worked side by side with his faithful men. He narrowly avoided losing his house, too. Eagle Hill, at least, he could save. He and Mary signed a legal document that put his entire life’s work on the auction block: engine lathes, tools, lumber, steel standards, blocking, sliding ways, iron, coal, implements, grindstones, office furniture, pictures, and other personal property. He even lost the builder’s model of Glory of the Seas, which was handed over to the contractor who had made the ship’s spars.19

  Still, within a few years of his financial catastrophe, Donald McKay decided that the grand house on White Street, the site of so many launching parties and family celebrations, was not worth keeping, either. Perhaps his partially dismantled, pitiful looking shipyard was too much to see from his windows. He had also begun to suffer from tuberculosis. He and Mary sold Eagle Hill and moved to a farm in Hamilton, Massachusetts, a rural community located north of Boston. It was the first time in his life Donald McKay had ever lived out of sight of salt water.20

  As Donald McKay prepared to leave East Boston forever, his most famous ship finally met her end, in the waters near the place of her Canadian creator’s birth. In June 1875 a group of torch-bearing men came aboard a ship that had lain wrecked in the harbor of Saint John, New Brunswick, for a year. Flying Cloud was more than twenty years old, worn out, paint peeling from her oak flanks. Her white pine decks had faded to moldy gray; her yards, masts, and rigging were a tangled mess swinging in the breeze coming off the Bay of Fundy. The sea flowed into her broken hull and over her splintered rock maple keel.

  The three-masted sailing ship had been working for years as a humble lumber carrier between Canada and England, just one of many prosaic vessels that tramped around the world looking for freight. The most recent captain, a shadowy figure known in the Canadian Maritimes simply as “Wild Goose,” had left Saint John on a routine crossing of the Atlantic.21 Finding that he could not make headway against a horrific gale, he had turned around to try to return to port. He missed the channel and ran hard upon the beach. Hoping to refloat the ship, the crew unloaded the cargo of Canadian lumber—“deal timber” for house floors and coal mine ceiling supports in the Mother Country—but it was too late. She broke her back on the sandbar and was a total loss. Now, a year later, the people of Saint John decided that the ship had to go. The best way to get rid of her was to burn her and collect her metal parts from the smoldering wreckage: iron bolts, copper hull plates, and any leftover brass.

  The flames rose higher and higher, consuming her masts and deckhouses. One by one, the three masts crashed into the ocean, followed by a hiss. Finally, the hull collapsed into itself, sending up great showers of sparks and embers. Within a few days, it was safe for salvagers to venture out to the blackened, charred pile and pick around for anything metal.

  *

  The farming life did not suit the great shipbuilder at all. As one descendant wrote of Donald McKay: “Farming was not his favorite pastime, but he made the most of it.”22 In the summer of 1880, the sixty-nine-year-old McKay was struck down by a paralytic stroke. After lingering for a few months, the greatest shipbuilder in America died on September 20, 1880, his second wife, Mary, and five of their ten surviving children: Lawrence, Anna, Nicholas, Guy, and Wallace, at his bedside.23 His only legacy consisted of his Hamilton farm; a silver water urn, serving tray, teapot, coffee pot, and sugar bowl; two sets of silver forks; a diamond pin; a gold watch chain; assorted livestock and farm equipment; and several ship models and sets of blueprints. There was also the hope of future proceeds from a cash settlement with the US Navy over the ironclad USS Nausett, but the McKay heirs were probably resigned to the fact that they would never see any of the money.

  To two of his sons, McKay had left nothing in his will because “they have already received as much of my property as is just.”24

  It would take another fifteen years of hard work by McKay’s brother Nathaniel to win the family’s settlement from the federal government. In March 1895, Congress finally passed a bill authorizing a payment of $101,592.73; according to a witness, Nathaniel McKay triumphantly carried the cash out of the Treasury Department in a hand satchel. The settlement was still only a third of what it had cost McKay to alter his ironclad design. When asked how he succeeded in getting the government to fork over the money, Nathaniel demonstrated the same persistence that had allowed his famous brother to succeed as an immigrant outsider in tightknit Yankee New England: “Every time I received a rebuff, it always made me more zealous. There are hundreds of demagogues in Congress who think that if a man has a claim against the government, he wants to loot the treasury for his own benefit.”25

  The settlement allowed Donald’s long-suffering widow Mary Cressy McKay to finally live in comfort. She died in 1923 at age ninety-one at her daughter Mary Bliss’s house in the Boston suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts, attended by a nurse, chauffeur, and four servants.26, 27

  Flying Cloud’s record of eighty-nine days and eight hours from New York to San Francisco under sail would stand until 1989, when the sixty-foot yacht Thursday’s Child, manned
by a crew of three and captained by Warren Luhrs, bounded through the Golden Gate after eighty days on the high seas. Her sails and rigging were made of synthetic fiber, not the canvas of old. Satellites, not the sun and stars, guided her passage.28 “Previous attempts to break the record have ended in disappointment or disaster,” noted the New York Times. “Three sailboats in the last six years that tried to better Flying Cloud’s effort broke up or sank shortly after rounding Cape Horn, the perilous meeting point of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the tip of South America.”29 Yet despite this triumph, Thursday’s Child was a yacht, not a ship engaged in active commercial service. “The record that will probably be set by Thursday’s Child and Mr. Luhrs may not stand as long as that of Captain Josiah Creesy and Flying Cloud,” the Times noted.

  To many diehard sailors, the immortal and forever beautiful clipper ship Flying Cloud still wears the Cape Horn crown.

  *

  I. Americans were not the only ones to take the hit. The timing could not have been worse for the owners of the newest and finest of the British tea clippers, Cutty Sark, built to beat the sixty-one-day Melbourne-to-London record from the rival British extreme clipper Thermopylae.

  CHAPTER 18

  KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY

  These were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon; but monuments carved from snow. For a few brief years, they flashed their splendor around the world, then disappeared with the finality of the wild pigeon.1

  —SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON

  As the Civil War at home played out at home, the Delano family continued life at Rose Hill as if they had never left the leafy sanctuary of Algonac. They had no exposure to Hong Kong’s Chinese culture. Going out into the streets unsupervised was unthinkable and learning Chinese was forbidden. Warren and Catherine were terrified that the children might actually understand what the servants were saying about them behind their backs.

  Warren furnished Rose Hill with the same acquisitive lavishness they had known back home. Household account books list velvet and silk wall hangings, sandalwood snuffboxes, and an ivory cross.2 Warren also opened separate bank accounts for each of his children, ranging from $37.50 for his youngest children to $50 for his eldest, as well as one for his wife for $500.3 For the Delano children, there were daily lessons from their strict tutor Aunt Nancy Church, boat rides on the Pearl River, occasional play dates with other expatriate children, and visits to the horse track that the British trading companies had constructed for their betting pleasure. A day at “Happy Valley” might as well have been at Ascot, except that the crowds wore cotton and linen instead of tweed to beat the tropical heat. The biggest thrill of the week was the so-called Chinese Scramble, in which untrained Chinese jockeys were paid by the fanqui to jump on horses and gallop around the track. More often than not, they fell off the saddles and crashed to the dirt, to the hoots and jeers of the white traders in the stands.4 Warren also found the time to take his family on a trip across the East China Sea to the formerly forbidden land of Japan. According to one of Delano’s associates, “Mr. Delano and his family have been north during the past three months, the young ladies having spent the greater portion of the time at Nagasaki, Japan, and have returned with a most glowing account of that beautiful country.”5 They surely sampled some of the fabled green teas that their father’s friend Abbot Low was importing to the United States.

  In 1865 Warren Delano decided that it was time for Sara, Warren III, and Philippe to go back home and continue their educations in America. By then, the Delanos had two new additions to the family: a boy named Frederic Adrian and a girl named Laura, both born at Rose Hill. And then there was the development that eighteen-year-old Dora Delano had fallen in love with William Forbes, a twenty-eight-year-old partner at Russell & Company. Will’s father was Paul Sieman Forbes, a man with whom Warren Delano had quarreled twenty years before, angered that the Forbes’s arrival in Canton might jeopardize his brother Ned’s position with Russell & Company, and dismissed as “without any great expectations.”6 He now gave his blessing to the engagement. After all, Will Forbes had plenty of prospects: he was on the verge of being tapped to join the board of the newly formed Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, established by the British to finance the ever-expanding opium trade.

  At the offices of Russell & Company, Warren was making money once more. He had defied Confederate commerce raiders throughout the war to ship opium and tea back to the United States. He made money in other things as well, sending thirty-eight bales of silk, for example, to Boston merchant George Peabody aboard the ship Formosa.7

  Whether Delano knew it or not, Russell & Company, like other shipping firms of its type, was doomed to fail within a few decades; the once-mighty partnership was buckling under competition from British shipping. But not before Warren Delano would be able to wrest out one more competence, once again becoming a millionaire. He would beat the naysayers, including his own brother Ned, who had dismissed his scheme as ridiculous.

  Yet Warren would continue working to permanently free his family’s fortunes from the caprices of the sea. And working with him back in Boston was his old friend John Murray Forbes—long-time fellow partner in Russell & Company; one-time denizen of the American Factory in Canton; his wife Catherine’s cousin; and soon-to-be-cousin-in-law (again) of his daughter Dora.

  Shortly before he left China for the final time, Warren Delano committed a mysterious and risky act that gave him the potential to earn even more money in the years to come. In January 1867 Warren Delano appeared at the home of American consul, Isaac Allen. There he met Wu Chongyao (“Young Houqua”), son of the great merchant and heir to the fortune, a portion of which had been under the management of John Murray Forbes. Delano then signed a legal document granting him the power of “true and lawful attorney, for me and in my name.” Delano was given the right “to ask, demand, sue for, recover and receive of and from the same John M. Forbes” for any funds that the Wu family wanted returned to China for their use. These family investments included holdings in the Iowa Lands Trust, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, the Michigan Central Railroad, the Michigan Pine Lands Association, and United States Treasury bonds. The value of the Wu family’s investment portfolio under John Murray Forbes’s management was an astonishing $477,858.45, which had produced $26,915.89 in interest and dividends during the first half of the previous year.8

  The enormous Houqua family trust was a crucial piece of one of the world’s great family fortunes, and it had plenty of growth potential given its holdings in American transportation and land. The income thrown off by the trust would allow any Chinese or American family to live in opulence. As America emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and became a global industrial powerhouse, these investments increased exponentially. Yet Houqua’s son and his progeny lived in a troubled China, and had not inherited the Patriarch’s business acumen. Despite the fine returns, they needed still more cash, as family expenses raced ahead of business income. “The demands of his family for increased allowances makes him anxious to take advantage of any favorable opportunity to add to his income,” a Russell & Company officer wrote to John Murray Forbes of Young Houqua.9

  As China was wracked by continued European incursions and civil unrest, Young Houqua and his family could rest assured that a substantial portion of their inheritance could be repatriated, if needed, by their shrewd American “cousin,” Warren Delano II.

  Had he found out about Delano’s secret deal with the Wu family, his old friend John Murray Forbes would almost certainly have viewed it as a shocking betrayal. Delano’s actions may have stemmed from jealousy of the substantial management fees that Forbes collected but he did not. Yet Delano appears never to have wielded his “power of attorney” to forcibly return funds to Houqua’s descendants.10 The US portion of the Houqua trust would remain under the aegis of John Murray Forbes and his firm for another decade, when the trust was formally dissolved and the proceeds dispersed to the Wu family.

  B
y late 1867, the Delanos were reunited as a family in Paris, where Warren, rich enough from his own opium and tea earnings to live in grand style, rented an apartment on the fashionable Avenue L’Impératrice. While there, Warren Delano considered the idea of not going back to the Hudson Valley. “I have for some years had in mind a plan of European residence and education,” he wrote to his lonely and loyal brother Ned. “Take the whole family down to the youngest to Europe (and) seek out a fine old country residence in a hilly country where woods abound and where saddle horses are good and cheap. I should want it to be a great degree if not entirely isolated from our countrymen or others who would speak English habitually, and I should want to organize my household as to combine the real comforts and proper luxuries of life with a system of studies, duties, exercise, and recreation.” He had developed such a strong dislike for Americans of his social class that he wrote half-jokingly that he should do “what might be considered equally snobbish and in our retreat sink for the time being our name of Delano and write ourselves ‘de la Noye.’ ”11

  The draw of Algonac, though, was too strong. In 1868 Warren, Catherine, and the Delano children returned to New York—all except for Dora and her new husband, Will Forbes, who sailed back to Hong Kong after they were married in Paris. In 1870 the family took up residence again in the Hudson River mansion named for the Algonquin phrase for “hill and river.” Everything remained in its place, including the big portrait of Houqua in the library. Frederic Adrian Delano, then only six, remembered the family’s homecoming to the magical place that he had heard so much about: “There was snow on the ground and great drifts of it on the lawn. Laura and I, dressed alike in warm winter coats, were literally baptized by being thrown into a great snowdrift. It was a novel experience, but we thought it was grand. Then followed many golden years.”12