Waterman hand-picked a crew for her, mostly of men from the Natchez. He took her on her maiden voyage two days before Christmas in 1846. Putting to sea in the very teeth of a sharp northeast gale, he nevertheless made a fine twenty-five-day run to Rio de Janeiro. From Guanabara Bay he sailed to Hong Kong. Her New York to Hong Kong time was but one hundred and four days but it was his return passage from Canton to New York, against the monsoon, which put him on the front pages. He arrived in New York July 25, 1847, having made the run in eighty-one days, a record for the passage. Not only was the voyage a record, practically every leg of it set a new record. He set a new mark for the Anjer to the Cape run and his Anjer to New York time was also a new record. For ten days, during what the New York Herald called “a remarkably swift passage.” Waterman got an average of two hundred and forty-eight miles a day out of the splendid Sea Witch. But, according to David Weir, Waterman responded to congratulations on his speedy trip with “I was just getting her shaken down for the next scamper.”
In 1847 and 1848-49 he made two more “scampers” to China. On the run home from Canton in 1849 he set more records. His best twenty-four-hour run of three hundred and fifty-eight miles was far and away a record and a pace which would have whipped any steamer on the high seas. His was the all-time China-to-New York record for sail, too, seventy-four days and fourteen hours, anchor to anchor, Hong Kong to New York, some 14,225 miles. The New York lookouts were puzzled when the Sea Witch came booming up over the horizon. No vessels were due. The Sea Witch was not expected for days!
Although the press as well as the populace congratulated him on his feat—the New York Commercial Advertiser writing, “The splendid ship Sea Witch, Captain Waterman, arrived here from China having performed a voyage around the world in 194 sailing days!” —somehow, fantastic as it may seem, this record was forgotten in years to come. Waterman was long remembered for his earlier (1847) and slower trip of seventy-seven days on the Sea Witch, and this was considered to be the record from China to Gotham.
As Waterman’s reputation as a sailor grew, so too did his notoriety as a driver, or bully. And his highhandedness did not extend solely to forecastle and steerage. When the Sea Witch lay in the roadstead at Valparaiso on one of his trips, he invited a large party of the city’s elite aboard for a little trip “outside.” Waterman was no match for the Chileans at the Spanish game of cards called rocambor, and he lost all of his money. When the Chileans suggested that it might be time to return to port, the petulant Waterman pretended shocked surprise and stammered, “Return to port? Return to Valparaiso? Oh, no. I’ve squared away for China. But you can have a free passage—and return—if you like. You see, I’ve lost all my money and it would incommodate me to return to Valparaiso just now.” The excited Chilenos knew exactly what would change the captain’s plans. The reverse-mordida was accordingly paid and a once-again smiling clipper skipper returned his now disgusted guests to Valparaiso.
A good look at Bully Waterman might also have been had at Whampoa, below Canton, when a mutiny broke out aboard Captain A. Richardson’s Brooklyn. Captain Richardson called for an informal court-martial, composed of American ship captains in the area, to take place on the Brooklyn. From the clipper Race Horse came Captain Lockwood, from the bluff-bowed old Paul Jones came Captain John T. Watkins, and off the Sea Witch came Waterman. He stood by to see that the dozen lashes ordered served up for the mutineers were given out properly. Although the cook of the Brooklyn had not joined with the forecastle crowd in the mutiny, Waterman took a disliking to his glibness and, finding him altogether too “fussy,” as he put it, he personally ordered him served with a dozen lashes also... “for the general joy of the company.”
On his own ship, on each sailing day, Waterman would have a bucket of water brought to him on the poop. He would call all hands aft and then ceremoniously “wash off his shore face,” This was a solemn warning that he was lord and master and would brook no nonsense once they were at sea. The crusty Waterman’s flights of humor usually had a disturbing streak of cussedness in them. When he put into Valparaiso with the Northerner, some innocent made the mistake of observing that her owner, Captain Randall, was aboard and asked Waterman, “What is the Northerner doing with two captains?” The salty answer was, “Hell, he cleans the knives. I navigate the ship!”
A strict disciplinarian with his men, he was also hard on his ships. He carried too much sail, but he knew it and he got away with it. He kept padlocks on his topsail sheets and rackings so that they could not be let go when it looked as if the spread of canvas he’d ordered might capsize the Sea Witch, As he was proud to remind everyone, she never did turn turtle. In more than eighteen years on a quarter-deck, he never once lost a single spar or an inch of rigging, nor did he once call on the underwriters for one plugged penny of damage or loss. His was a proud record.
Waterman made three voyages in the Sea Witch, and then, in 1849, turned her over to his former mate, George W. Fraser. This Scot, no mean sailor himself, took her to Hong Kong and back. Then, on April 13, 1850, he took her to Frisco. He made the Golden Gate in only ninety-seven sailing days, smashing the California record by a good fortnight’s time. Fraser had learned well from Bob Waterman. He drove the ice-caked—literally ice-sheathed —Sea Witch around the Horn into bitter cold head winds, through floes and bergs of ice. Thousands of dollars in wagers changed hands in New York. The next year, Fraser raced two other clippers to California, padlocking his sails as his tutor had done and, from the bridge, defying God to make him take in sail, just as he had seen Waterman do. The Sea Witch took on all comers and if she didn’t always beat the Raven or the Typhoon, they always knew that they had been in a race by the time it was over.
On December 9, 1852, the Sea Witch paid her last visit to the Embarcadero. The following year her foremast was struck by lightning off the Cape of Good Hope—perhaps a divine answer to Fraser’s poop-deck defiance of the Almighty. Much of her ironwork was broken and her royal and topgallant masts were shivered. Putting into Valparaiso the next year, on June 25, 1854, she was leaking like a colander. Fraser was sure that some of the crew had bored holes in her bottom to scuttle her. In 1855, on a passage to China, her ninth voyage, the hard-driving Fraser was murdered by his chief mate. Apparently Fraser had learned his trade all too well from Bully Waterman. The Sea Witch put into Rio where a Captain Lang took over. The mate was sent to New York in chains, tried, convicted, and hanged. But now the Sea Witch was hexed. She was bound from Amoy for Havana with five hundred coolies when she was wrecked on a reef off the coast of Cuba, March 28, 1856, within only twelve miles of her destination. Her Chinese “cargo” was all rescued but the bones of the heavily sparred, rakish clipper with the Chinese dragon figurehead lie on the coast of Cuba to this day.
Waterman had decided to go into steam. After turning the Sea Witch over to his disciple, Fraser, he took the Pacific Mail Steamship Company steamer Northerner to San Francisco. Like many a man of sail, he did not like steam and he decided to swallow the anchor after this single trip. Waterman therefore went to his recently acquired ranch in Solano County. His retirement was brief, however. The Griswolds lured him out to make one last voyage by having a great new clipper built specially for him by W. H. Webb, the leading shipbuilder of America. And thus the Challenge and Captain Robert H. Waterman came together. The rest is history.
The building of the Challenge was a painstaking job. Only the most skilled mechanics were hired to work on her. The spars and masts were each carefully selected and were the finest that Yankee dollars could buy. She was strong. Her frame was bolstered with diagonal braces of iron. There were eleven feet of solid timber between the lower part of her keel and the upper part of her keelson. The mainsail alone used up 1,273 yards of cotton duck. She boasted a six-foot-square water tank which extended from the floor to the upper deck. Small wonder she cost $150,000.
To complete the rigging of the Challenge, she was towe
d to the foot of Wall Street. There her sails were bent and her running gear roved. Tons of cargo for Frisco were stuffed into her hold. She was then hauled out into North River, abreast Governors Island, where everything was made shipshape and Bristol fashion for sea. She was towed to Sandy Hook and lay there at anchor while her rival, the fleet Flying Cloud, increased her lead over Waterman’s new command. This did not please the captain any and he was in a truculent mood in any case, squabbling with his mate. He finally sent him ashore. Piece by piece, the parts of the tragedy began to fall into place.
As the Challenge was about to get under way, the packet Guy Mannering came up abreast of her and a small boat put off from her. In it was her first mate, James Douglass. He had gotten himself into some sort of scrape and was persona non grata in New York. He asked the skipper if he had a berth. Waterman sized him up and signed him on in an instant. Jim Douglass looked like the answer to a poop-deck prayer. Captain Waterman needed someone to back him up. He had a raw crew, an inefficient crew, and an undisciplined one. It was composed of the sweepings of New York’s jails, Bowery gutters and Water Street saloons. There was hardly an A.B. available in New York in midsummer 1851 except for the lame and the halt, and they had been grabbed off the beach by the Eagle, the Telegraph and the confounded Flying Cloud, which had all gotten away just before the Challenge. Waterman took what he could get and vowed to whip them into shape. At one point he seriously considered putting back into New York to sign on a more competent crew but he realized that he could not do so. The Griswolds had plunked down three months’ advance wages to each of the threescore hands aboard. He still had a thin chance at a bonus for a fast trip if he did not put back. He decided to make the best of a very bad bargain.
Captain Waterman called his crew aft and delivered a long-drawn-out harangue which must have been absolute gibberish to many of the forecastle hands, who constituted a melting pot of the races and nationalities of human kind. Waterman uttered all the usual platitudes, guaranteeing them good food and a comfortable ship if they jumped to it when he sang out an order. While he held the men’s attention, Douglass and the other mates, Alex Coghill and Hugh Patterson (alias Hugh Coe), plus the bosun and a couple of the idlers—the carpenter and the sailmaker—industriously and diligently ransacked the crew’s sea bags and chests in the forecastle. The small arsenal of slung shots, billies, knuckle-dusters, dirks, pistols and bowie knives which they uncovered were chucked overboard. When this mission was accomplished, Captain Waterman chose the watches and had each man lay his sheath knife on the main hatch where the carpenter neatly broke off the point of each blade. In this little precaution, Bully Waterman was only anticipating later merchant marine legislation. It was eventually made illegal for American merchant sailors to possess knives, by Section 4608 of the Revised Statutes of the United States—“No seaman in the merchant service shall wear any sheath-knife on shipboard….”
The Challenge sailed on the day before Bastille Day, 1851. It was not a favorable time to sail. There were only light northeast winds and the frequent doldrums were a curse. She finally escaped from a series of calms to meet some fine weather from 20 degrees south latitude to the area of the Straits of Le Maire, which lie between Staten Island and Cape San Vicente, the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Cape San Diego was sighted one morning and the clipper passed into the entrance of the Straits about 7 a.m. To all appearances, they would make a speedy transit of Cape Horn. They had actually rounded the Horn itself and were off rocky Diego Ramirez Islands, lying to the southwest of Horn Island, when the Challenge’s way was blunted by a snow squall. Even as daring a skipper as Waterman had to shorten sail and they made slow progress under a close-reefed topsail.
For thirty-three interminable, hellish days they fought the icy westerly gales of Cape Stiff before they made 50 degrees south and were able to “turn the corner” and make the Pacific. The continual storms of snow, hail and sleet were very hard on the lubberly crew. They were soft, incompetent and lazy. Most of them were waterfront scum seeking a quick trip to the Land of Gold. Their health was so poor that at one stage of the passage west, Waterman had seventeen of them laid up with one of the more “loathsome diseases” alone. He had to turn his sail room into a makeshift sick bay but even with excusing almost a third of his crew from duty, he sailed into San Francisco with eight men still sick in their berths and with five having died en route.
Waterman drove his motley crew too hard, but he had a $60,000 freight list in his cabin and a $10,000 bonus at stake—if he could make Frisco in ninety days or under. Even without pressure from the captain, there was more than enough work to keep the green crew hopping. And even without the foul, rough weather of the Cape, the Challenge was such a new ship that her rigging stretched and had to be continually adjusted. Her lanyards had to be set up three times before she even reached the Horn. Chafing gear had to be made. There was never any watch-and-watch. Those who were not laid up resented those who were. Some of the more surly members of the crew stowed away in the huge vessel and could not be found to stand their watch. Only six of the enormous crew of almost sixty could steer well enough to be trusted with a trick at the wheel. Waterman wisely made all six of them quartermasters and assigned them no duties other than steering, except when their help was needed to take in sail.
Captain Waterman alternately cajoled and bullied speed out of his clipper, keeping a watchful eye on her straining sticks, especially at night. But nurse her as best he could, only once did she log more than three hundred miles in a twenty-four-hour period (she covered a neat three hundred and thirty-six miles) and, despite her occasional spurts of fourteen to eighteen knots, it was slow northing she made up the South American coast against the relentless Humboldt Current. Waterman was well aware of the money that was riding on him in the form of bets. The Challenge was not only the proudest ship afloat, she was the fastest. Her admirers were already legion and they were bragging back in New York that not only would Bob Waterman set a record with her on her maiden voyage but also that her owners would then offer to race any British clipper, on any conditions which the lime-juicers might set, the winner to keep both vessels.
As each day passed, the morale of the crew—what there was of it—deteriorated. The captain had to depend heavily on his mates to get a lick of work out of the men. And these buckos did not let him down. At first they went armed, as did the captain, but eventually they left their sidearms in their cabins as there was no trouble anywhere en route to the Line. Chief Mate Black Douglass proved to be a real bruiser. He was two hundred pounds of bully, hated wholeheartedly by the crew but respected because of his fistic ability. When he had first come aboard from the Guy Mannering, he had ordered the ship’s boy, E. A. Wheeler, an inoffensive and hard-working youth, to hold a candle for him while he searched for something below decks. Wheeler did his best but it was not enough for Douglass. Dissatisfied with Wheeler’s help, he slapped the boy so hard that he saw stars. Unconsciously the boy made some remark of protest, whereupon the brutal Douglass made him put the candle out by eating it.
The mate delighted in this sort of bullying and drove the men to work like a flock of sheep, only instead of a shepherd’s crook he used a belaying pin. Wheeler heard him say more than once, “I’d rather have a good, knockdown fight with a lot of sailors than eat a good dinner.”
Off the Cape one howling day—of the seventeen they spent off the Horn itself—a cursing Douglass was trying to get his half-frozen watch to work together aloft. He slacked up the lee mizzen topsail brace. This threw the sail over the yard on the weather side. It plucked five men off the yard like helpless puppets. One screamed his way down, unheard in the gale, to smash his life away on a ventilator. The other four plunged into the raging sea and were never seen again. The crew from this day on called Douglass “the bloody murderer.” More than one of the ruffians and blacklegs passing for sailors in the fo’c’sle kept himself busy honing the blade of his blunted sheath knife
down to a dagger’s point.
The festering boil of resentment against Douglass broke on the morning of August 17. While the captain was preparing to shoot the sun, he heard a scuffle, saw a large number of the crew pummeling the mate and then, as he rushed to his aid, saw the burly Scot fall to the deck bleeding like a stuck pig. Waterman restored order, nipped the mutiny in the bud, and brought the Challenge on to San Francisco. Just what occurred on that fateful day in August and on the remaining seventy-two days of the clipper’s passage to Frisco would not be known until long after the turn of the new year, when a long round robin of trials in the United States District Court came to a close.
Waterman described the mutiny in a letter which he wrote to a friend in Boston. To a man of his long experience at sea, it was nothing to get excited about and he disposed of the incident in one paragraph: “When in the neighborhood of Rio, about fifty of the crew fell upon the mate with the intention of killing him, and afterwards, me, by their own confession. I was on the poop taking Observations while the mate stood forward at the galley. They stabbed him and had beaten him shockingly before I could get to him. I struck down three of them, rescued the mate, and quelled the mutiny. I flogged eight of them.” He explained the high mortality rate aboard the Challenge with a laconic statement: “Off Cape Horn three men fell from the mizzen topsail and were killed and, after a few weeks, four more died of dysentery.”
Shanghaiing Days: The Thrilling account of 19th Century Hell-Ships, Bucko Mates and Masters, and Dangerous Ports-of-Call from San Francisco to Singapore Page 10