Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  The “Algonac Diaries” resumed right where they’d left off ten years before. “Stormy day and we all stayed home with books and work,” Warren or Catherine wrote at the end of one winter’s day. “Sallie and Cassie made caramels. Evening the Skeels came to see the Magic Lantern,” an early image-projection device.13

  For generations of future Delanos, the word Algonac was family code for good news.

  Yet the origins of Delano fortune remained off-limits to discussion, especially in public. Sometime around 1880, the aging yet still ebullient Robert Bennet Forbes reached out to all of the surviving Russell & Company partners, asking for contributions for a company history. He wanted to memorialize the old days: the boat races in the Pearl River, the all-night whist games with the gentlemen of the Union Club of Canton, the siege of the Factories, the building of the first clipper ships, and the Yankee domination of the high seas during the golden years of the 1850s.

  Warren Delano, by now blind in one eye and unable to walk without a cane, sent in a bland onepage summary of his time in China. He and Catherine had no interest in bringing up the opium demons of years past. They were more worried about the family’s reputation. When one of his sons committed a prank while at boarding school, Warren wrote to the headmaster that if he could raise a second family, he “would seek a home among the Chinese, because in China the sons of the family could be depended on and honor their parents and live up to their standards.”14 For Delano, his family, not his memoir or his philanthropic activities, would be his most lasting accomplishment.

  Robert’s brother John Murray Forbes, now established as one of Boston’s most generous philanthropists, also condemned the idea of a memoir. Robert Forbes published a rambling set of Personal Reminiscences anyway, but his younger brother intervened to make sure that nothing too negative got out, especially regarding opium. “I believe I have informed you that J. M. Forbes has bought the copyright of my memoir,” Robert complained to Warren Delano, “not to destroy the plates as one would have suppose(d) who knows of his dead set against the printing of anything about Russell & Co. but in order to add a chapter on that renowned house. His only condition is that he may use scissors in cutting out what he calls irrelevant private matters.”15 Nonetheless, Robert Forbes, who never valued reticence, talked about opium in his book, justifying the trade as best he could.

  In 1880, the twenty-six-year-old Sara Delano, now a regal and striking young woman, married fifty-three-year-old widower James Roosevelt, whose mother Rebecca had been the niece of William Henry Aspinwall. Tall and white-whiskered, “Squire” Roosevelt had promised Warren Delano that his bride would live in the utmost security and comfort at his own Hudson River estate at Hyde Park. The October wedding was held at Algonac. Some of the women present in the Delano parlor wept with sadness that “such a lovely girl should marry an old man.”16

  James and Sara Roosevelt’s only child, Franklin Delano, was born on January 30, 1882. Sara and her son traveled frequently to Algonac, where he spent many pleasant days with the growing brood of Delano cousins. She also loved to sing him to sleep with her favorite sea chantey, one she’d heard the sailors sing as a little girl as they turned the capstans and hauled upon the lines of Surprise:

  Down by the river hauled a Yankee clipper,

  And it’s blow my bully boys blow!

  She’s a Yankee mate and a Yankee skipper,

  And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow!

  The China trading house of Russell & Company, the success of which had fueled the rise of the clipper ship and made the Delano clan so rich, failed in 1891 after Warren’s son-in-law Will Forbes had overspeculated in silver. Daughter Dora Delano Forbes frantically sent telegrams from Hong Kong to New York, pleading for the old man to send money to save the business. “She, poor thing, was driven nearly mad with shame + chagrin,” wrote one young Russell partner. Finally, Warren Delano decided to put up $30,000, but it was not enough to save the firm.17

  Warren Delano II died in 1898 at the age of eighty-nine. The patriarch left each of his six surviving children $1.3 million, making him one of the few hundred richest men in America. The Delanos’ fortune was secure, as was their place in the nation’s ruling elite. A Unitarian clergyman said of the Yankee China trader: “This man seemed to have intuitions of right, justice, and equity in small matters, as in great. Dishonesty, pretense, chicanery, come how they might and in whom they would, felt themselves rebuked in his presence … His moral intensity and practical earnestness never relaxed their hold of what he felt to be good: the rest he left to God.”18

  Warren and Catherine’s daughter Annie Delano Hitch and her husband, Fred, inherited Algonac. Blessed with deep pockets, they continued to run it in the grand manner that the patriarch knew. Over the years, the Delano siblings and their children united frequently at the family homestead, romping through the rooms cluttered with Chinese antiques and chasing one another around the fruit orchards.

  Then, on a cold March afternoon in 1916, a fire broke out in the attic, caused either by a damaged flue or faulty electrical wiring. Annie Hitch smelled smoke, grabbed her fur coat, and ran outside. She watched in horror from the lawn as flames engulfed the upper floors of her father’s house. “Thanks to neighbors from far and near, most of the books, furniture, pictures, and bric-a-brac on the first and second floors were saved,” wrote her younger brother Frederic, who hurried from New York to the scene of the catastrophe, “but much was lost.”19

  The Lam Qua portrait of Houqua was one of the cherished family heirlooms that survived the conflagration. It remains in the possession of the Delano family.

  Sara Delano, by now widowed, had brought other bits and pieces of the patriarch’s Chinese collection across the Hudson to her husband’s home at Hyde Park. She commissioned a complete renovation of the Roosevelt family estate so that it could house her son Franklin, his wife, Eleanor, and their six children.

  Warren Delano’s grandson went on to survive a debilitating case of waterborne polio at thirty-nine. In March 1933 he was sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States. One day, while leading his country through the dark days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he shared his grandfather Warren Delano’s favorite bit of advice with his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau: “Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

  “Which hand am I, Mr. President?” Morgenthau asked.

  “My right hand,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with a smile, “but I keep my left hand under the table.”20

  The president kept a model of the clipper ship Surprise displayed prominently near his desk, one of more than two hundred models in his collection. He had built this Surprise himself.

  *

  In the spring of 1872, Captain Charles Porter Low sailed from New York for the last time aboard N. B. Palmer, the ship he had commanded for close to two decades. He was now forty-eight years old and had been at sea for most of his life. He was gray and balding, his face tanned and leathery, yet his crinkled eyes still burned the same bright blue of his youth.

  His ship was also showing her age, one of the last American extreme clippers still sailing the high seas. Yet the ocean was still full of sailing ships, and would be for the next twenty years. They were American downeasters built of wood in Maine, or iron-hulled British windjammers built on the banks of Scotland’s Clyde River. They were not as fast or as elegant as the clippers of the past, but they were sturdy and dependable on long-haul voyages.

  Captain Low’s wife, Sarah, who had finally tired of the sea, was back in Boston with their children. He was spending ten months or more away from shore each year and complained that he was “at home only some six weeks.”21 Sarah had more practical worries: out of all of the Low brothers, her husband Captain Charlie’s career had been the most colorful, but he was also the least financially successful, save for illfated William Henry, now dead for more than thirty years. “We shall always be poor,” the usually stoic Sarah lamented, “and
will always be obliged to go to sea; for making money enough to stay at home is out of the question.”22

  Others in their family, and the larger family of the clipper era, had long ago come to land. Abbot Low was living comfortably in Brooklyn on the wealth he had amassed. “His name is associated with many good works,” wrote an admiring journalist, “and his old age is a happy and honored one.”23 He died in 1893 as one of Brooklyn’s richest men. Abbot’s youngest son had used his father’s standing to become a reform-minded mayor of Brooklyn, and then president of Columbia University, and would eventually become mayor of the newly consolidated City of New York. As president of Columbia, Seth Low would put a large chunk of his paternal inheritance toward the construction of the most lasting of the family’s monuments: not a wooden clipper ship, but a marble library modeled on Rome’s Pantheon, at the heart of Columbia’s Upper Manhattan campus. He named it not after himself but after his opium-trading, clipper-ship-owning father, Abiel Abbot Low.

  John Murray Forbes died in 1898—the same year as Warren Delano II—at the ripe old age of eighty-five. He was one of Boston’s richest men, a premier railroad magnate and progenitor of a Boston Brahmin dynasty. His greatest legacy today is Milton Academy, a nondenominational preparatory school located near the Forbes family home. His son William Hathaway Forbes heeded his father’s lessons in reinvesting capital in new technology. He became the first president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

  John Murray Forbes’s oldest brother, Robert Bennet Forbes, lived out the rest of his days in the Greek Revival mansion he had originally built for their mother, Margaret, with his first fortune. He remained an active benefactor to the Sailors’ Snug Harbor of Boston until his death in 1889 at the age of eighty-five.

  Russell & Company finally failed in 1891, but the Canton bachelors had long since moved on. Some of the Russell fortune—passed down through Samuel’s cousin William Huntington Russell—wound up at Yale University, where it funds the secret society Skull and Bones to this day.

  Moses Grinnell, owner of McKay’s Flying Cloud, was still residing in New York when he died in 1877. After retiring from Grinnell, Minturn & Company, he became active in Republican politics, campaigning on behalf of Abraham Lincoln. He also served as collector of the Port of New York and president of the Union Club of the City of New York. He is remembered today for his important role in creating and financing New York City’s grandest ornament, Central Park, of which he served as a commissioner.

  William Henry Aspinwall amassed one of the largest collections of European old-masters paintings in America. Harper’s Weekly wrote of the collections of Titians, Van Dykes, and Veroneses: “Thus, as the foremost merchants of Florence, Venice, and Genoa became the greatest patrons of the arts in their day, so now we see many of the first men of our day following in their footsteps. This is the wise provision of Providence.”24 The president of the Panama Railroad and owner of the pioneering clipper Sea Witch, died in 1875. Aspinwall’s railroad would remain a vital highway of commerce for decades to come, even after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.

  The flamboyant and controversial Captain Robert Waterman, remembered both for commanding Aspinwall’s Sea Witch and for the star-crossed voyage of Challenge, founded the town of Fairfield in California’s Suisun Valley in 1856. It was named after his former home in Connecticut. In addition to running a gentleman’s farm, he served as San Francisco’s port warden and inspector of hulls. Captain Waterman died in 1884, a rich, unrepentant California squire.

  The great Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy, hard-driving master of McKay’s Flying Cloud, retired to a Massachusetts farm with his navigator and companion at sea, Eleanor. After serving his nation as a captain in the Union navy, the mariner who set the record from New York to California settled down to a comfortable life as an alderman and state legislator until being crippled by a stroke in 1868. He died in 1874 in Salem, Massachusetts, at the age of fifty-seven. Eleanor outlived him by twenty-six years, dying at their Salem home in 1900, aged eighty-five.25 They left no children, and no account survives in their own hand of that history-making voyage in the legendary Flying Cloud, save for the terse log that Josiah kept between June and September 1851, which can be found in the archives of the Mystic Seaport Museum.

  The great namesake of Captain Low’s ship, his mentor Captain Nathaniel Palmer, would die in 1877 in his hometown of Stonington, Connecticut, long retired from commanding and designing ships. The tradition that he represented, of young American men braving the high seas for fame and fortune, was fast fading away. America was turning inward, away from the sea, and toward the Mississippi River Valley and California. Yet the sea would continue to call to Americans in history, literature, sailing, and song.

  Charles Porter Low, the man who had tried to run away to sea aboard one of his brother’s ships so many years before, would heed his wife’s wishes and retire from the sea at age forty-eight. He moved his family to sunny Santa Barbara, California, dying there in 1913 at the age of eighty-eight.

  He would always be a man in love with his life’s calling and never forgot his last voyage as master of the clipper N. B. Palmer in 1872. He stood on the quarterdeck of his worn but still beautiful ship as she surged ahead, the trade winds swelling her white canvas sails that soared ten stories above his head. The sun glinted off the tarnished gilding on her stern, as well as the pitted brass compass and railings that the crew struggled to keep polished day in and day out. He glanced over at the helmsman and made sure he was on course, and then took out his sextant to shoot the sun at noon as he had done thousands of times before.

  “One who loves the sailing of a ship is always watching for the wind to blow,” Captain Low wrote, “and the wind is never in the same quarter for any length of time, and the sails have to be trimmed very often and the yards braced forwards or squared, to catch the veering winds. In the trade winds from Cape of Good Hope, you can run for weeks without altering the yards, in which time you can trice up all the running rigging clear of the rails, tar down all the standing rigging, scrape and oil the masts, paint the ship inside and out, holystone and oil the decks, and have her all ready to go into port in good shape; but in the variable winds, you must have everything ready for bad weather at any time.”26

  APPENDIX

  During the 1840s and 1850s, shipbuilders experimented with a variety of hull forms to maximize speed and cargo capacity while minimizing water resistance. William Henry Webb, designer of the Challenge, built clippers that, although fast, did not break China or Cape Horn records. Donald McKay, whose extreme clippers Lightning and James Baines achieved unprecedented speeds, gave his clippers a rounded (or arched) forefoot. The prows of his vessels also had a greater forward rake than earlier clippers, reducing the impact of the sea against the hull. The sternposts on his clippers had a slight rake aft, too, for greater buoyancy in that end of the vessel.

  The upper diagram demonstrates the numbering and lettering system that shipbuilders used to label frames during design and construction. The lower diagram indicates how, because of their sharp ends, clipper ships had less buoyancy in their bows and sterns than conventional vessels did. A strong keelson—an inside centerline structure that runs the length of the ship and holds together the frames—was critical to keeping the ship’s bow and stern from pulling downward (a process known as hogging) from the midship section. The stronger the keelson, the trimmer and more elegant a ship’s lines.

  This cutaway shows the key structural components of a clipper ship’s hull. The keel (an outside centerline structure) was the backbone of the ship, while the hanging knees held together the ship’s horizontal and vertical elements. The angle of the frames from the keel would define how steeply the ship’s sides rose upward, an angle known as deadrise. The higher the deadrise, the more closely the hull cross section resembled a V, a form preferred by John Willis Griffiths. The lower the deadrise, the more closely the hull resembled a flat-bottomed barge, a form favored by Captain Nath
aniel Palmer and Donald McKay.

  The record-breaking Flying Cloud, built by Donald McKay in 1851, had a fairly conventional ship rig, of the type used on earlier clippers such as the Sea Witch, Houqua, and Samuel Russell. What distinguished clipper ship rigs from more traditional vessels were the loftier masts and larger spreads of canvas.

  Built to challenge Donald McKay’s Flying Fish, William Henry Webb’s Swordfish utilized the Forbes rig (split topsails) on her foremast (the first mast aft from the bow) and mainmast (the second mast aft from the bow). This arrangement, pioneered by Russell & Company partner Robert Bennet Forbes, made furling the sails much quicker and safer for the crew.

  Young America, the 1853 extreme clipper masterpiece of William Henry Webb, had single topsails and a rare moonsail (set above the skysail) on her mainmast. The moonsail was usually set only in very light winds.

  Great Republic as originally built by Donald McKay in 1853. She was a four-masted barque with a Forbes rig and skysails on her fore, main, and mizzen masts. She boasted fifteen thousand square yards of canvas. After she burned to the waterline just before her maiden voyage, Captain Nathaniel Palmer rebuilt Great Republic with a substantially reduced rig.

  Most clippers were “full-rigged ships,” meaning that they had square sails on all three of their masts. The topmost yard of the clipper ship Challenge soared more than two hundred feet above her main deck. When the crew went aloft, only the footropes and physical agility protected them from falling to their deaths. Some clippers, such as Memnon, were three-masted barques, meaning that their aftermast was rigged with a fore-and-aft sail only.

  The Canton Factories, as depicted in 1805 by the artist William Daniell. Between 1685 and 1841 this was the only place where Westerners could conduct legal trade with the Celestial Kingdom. At the center of the painting is a British rowing gig, working its way through the junks and other traffic on the Pearl River. Warren Delano and his compatriots mixed with traders from many nations in the so-called “Golden Ghetto,” and lived in a manner far grander than they were accustomed to in their native New England. Alamy Images