Clipper Ships and the Golden Age of Sail

by Sam Jefferson

  The Challenge at sea. This picture must have been painted later in her life as her sail plan seems much more modest than originally specified. During the fitting out of the clipper, Waterman clashed with her designer, William Webb, who originally specified a more manageable sail plan. Her rig was therefore drastically cut down in later years.

  A dramatic painting of a clipper ship passing Minot’s Light, off the Massachusetts coast.

  Another fast clipper ship was the Golden State, built in 1852. Here she is seen leaving New York Harbour.

  The Griswolds hadn’t exaggerated when they had described the Challenge. She truly was a remarkable vessel, built to compete with the Boston clippers of Donald McKay, which were cutting a dash at the time. McKay had just completed his masterpiece, the Flying Cloud, which was due to leave New York a matter of weeks before the Challenge. The rivalry between the two vessels was clear to all and deepened by the competition between these two great shipbuilding cities.

  There was a real fear in New York that the Boston yards of McKay and Pook were getting ahead. McKay’s Staghound had been an extremely innovative ship and the quickest yet to be launched. Now came the Flying Cloud, bigger and potentially even faster. The sailing community of New York looked to the Challenge to restore its reputation as America’s leading shipbuilding city.

  Waterman must have taken a look over the Flying Cloud as she loaded up on South Street. He would doubtless have admired her clean lines and powerful aspect. The Flying Cloud was commanded by Josiah Creesy, who knew Waterman well, even if Waterman didn’t remember him. He, too, had been in the China trade and had marvelled at the remarkable passages Waterman had managed to make. He had driven his own ship as hard as he dared; yet, year after year, Waterman had eclipsed him. Now, with a new ship, Creesy had a chance to show the world what he was capable of achieving. He sailed from New York on 2 June and, a little under three months later, the Flying Cloud smashed all records with a run of 89 days to San Francisco.

  Sailing ship cards were common in the US and were handed out to advertise the departure of a vessel to shippers.

  The Challenge had to wait a little longer. Her fitting out was a fraught affair, as Waterman personally supervised her rigging and was dissatisfied with her sail plan, insisting it was too small for his purposes. William Webb, her designer, must have been severely tempted to tell the arrogant skipper to mind his own business. Instead, he held his tongue and extended her already powerful sail plan to extreme proportions.

  The Challenge was going to be a real handful with this big rig, but Waterman was confident he could whip any crew into shape. On the Sea Witch he had been famed for his tough driving style. One story told about him was that on departure, he would order a bucket of seawater to be pulled aboard to ‘wash off his shore face’. Henceforth, his shore manners, which so impressed New York society, were gone and Bully Waterman, terror of crews the world over, returned.

  Rotten crew

  Delays in finding crew meant that the Challenge didn’t get away until 13 July. Whether Waterman was mindful of the evil omen of sailing on the 13th is unclear, but he ran straight into trouble. All summer, ships had been clearing out of New York headed for the gold fields and by July there was a serious shortage of good-quality sailors. In those days crews were generally secured by means of ‘crimps’, who drugged potential crew members on the eve of a voyage and smuggled them aboard. The first thing a ‘shanghaied’ sailor knew about it was waking up with a sore head as the ship slipped out of port.

  By the time the Challenge was anchored off Sandy Hook preparing to sail, Waterman knew that he had a thoroughly rotten crew made up of landlubbers and jailbirds, many suffering from a range of unsavoury diseases. To make matters worse, Waterman chose this moment to argue with his mate, who was ultimately responsible for recruiting this miserable bunch. Firing him on the spot, the mate was sent ashore, while the captain fumed aboard. Waterman must have been sorely tempted to demand a fresh crew, but time was pressing and he had to get to San Francisco by 11 October to pick up the $10,000 prize money.

  The Challenge at sea.

  He later conceded that at this point he had considered turning back, but pride and vanity were too great and pushed him onward to disaster. As Waterman paced the poop, pondering his ill fortune, a longboat pulled alongside carrying a man by the name of Jim Douglass. ‘Black Douglass’ had served his time on the transatlantic packet run and had earned a reputation as a veritable fiend for whipping the surly Scouse ‘packet rats’ into shape. He pulled alongside the Challenge with the express intention of cutting and running from a vengeful crew that he had knocked about on the passage from Liverpool. Waterman hired him there and then.

  Shortly afterwards, the Challenge made sail and slipped away from New York. Waterman summoned all hands and made the usual speech about fair treatment, while the mate sneaked forward and turned over their belongings for weapons. This was a sensible precaution, as mutinies and violence were not uncommon. Indeed, the Flying Cloud, racing out ahead of them on her way into the history books, had to quell a mutiny during the voyage after a couple of crew members schemed to make the ship divert to Rio by drilling a sizeable hole in her hull. Their bizarre and fool-headed scheme was, however, uncovered and the McKay clipper raced on.

  Aboard the Challenge, both captain and mate were soon exasperated by the incompetence of their crew; out of a complement of 56, only six could helm and many couldn’t speak English. Bearing in mind that the Challenge was a finely tuned racing machine, requiring finesse to handle, this was disastrous. Douglass had never been afraid to dole out a little ‘belaying pin soup’ on truculent crew members, whereby dallying crew were liable to receive a sharp blow to the back of the head with a belaying pin or truncheon. This particular bunch of malingerers needed all the encouragement they could get to climb up the Challenge’s towering spars.

  An action shot of the barque Olivebank leaning into a strong breeze. This photograph gives an excellent impression of the sometimes alarming angle which a tall ship heeled over to and also how vital it was for crew to hang on tight in heavy weather.

  In the stormy conditions encountered off the Horn, sailors would often have to wade through icy water to handle the ship.

  This picture, taken from the rigging of a tall ship, shows very clearly how terrifying the swaying yards of a clipper could be in a storm.

  Crew at work bending a topsail and illustrating how tenuous your position was when working high up aloft.

  The Flying Cloud battling her way through the Cape Horn seas on her way to San Francisco.

  The mood of the officers was not helped by the ship’s slow progress down the North Atlantic; the Challenge seemed dogged by light winds and progress was painful. By the time the doldrums around the equator had been reached, the ship was a truly oppressive place to be and the crew sweltered and squabbled through the tropics, their own smouldering anger stoked by the mate’s red hot fury.

  Trouble broke out after allegations of thieving. Douglass opted to turn out the crew’s belongings on deck – with a little encouragement from his trusty truncheon. Conflict came from an unusual source. There were four decent sailors on board who spoke English and were generally favoured by the mates. Unfortunately, one of these had a marlinspike in his sea chest and Douglass pounced on it, berating the man for thieving. It was too much for the wrongly accused seaman, who flew on the mate in an absolute fury, pinning him to the ground. The rest of the crew, seizing their opportunity to exact revenge on their hated oppressor, rushed the pair and piled on the mate as he lay on the floor. Douglass was stabbed in the leg at this point, and there is little doubt that he would have been killed if Waterman hadn’t been alerted by a passenger.

  At the time, the captain had been taking sights on the poop, and he reacted quickly, wading in and smashing the mate’s assailants with his sextant. The men hesitated and were overpowered. The man who had punched Douglass was sought out, but he had disappeared and it was asserted that h
e had jumped overboard in terror.

  From then on, the Challenge turned into a veritable hell ship as Douglass sought revenge for what he and Waterman saw as mutiny. The key troublemakers were severely flogged by Douglass, who later conceded that he couldn’t remember how many lashes he had doled out. For the first time on an already unpleasant trip, the Challenge’s decks ran red with blood.

  The Flying Cloud making her final approach to the Golden Gate in 1851. During the passage she was partially dismasted twice and two of her crew drilled a hole in the hull in a desperate attempt to scare her captain into stopping in Rio.

  A clipper approaching the end of its voyage. No matter how harmonious a ship was, it was always a relief to reach your final destination. In the case of the Challenge, all aboard must have been eager to finally make San Francisco.

  The Challenge arrived in San Francisco after a 108-day passage, but all was not well aboard.

  Crisis at Cape Horn

  The stunned crew grew surlier and less inclined to work, not helped by the fact that all this time the Challenge was working her way toward the bleak, icy waters of Cape Horn. Beating into the Roaring Forties, as these wild waters are known, is no place for amateurs; and there is little doubt that these men were almost useless. Many did not have shoes so walking the decks, awash with icy water and slush, would have been agony. Some simply retired to their bunks and had to be forcibly put to work.

  The Challenge was rounding Cape Horn at the very height of the southern winter, with gates blowing savagely from the west for days on end. Hurricane force winds lashed the vessel to the point where her lengthy yardarms dipped their tips in the icy grey water. Day after day, giant waves thundered all around the clipper, threatening to inundate and overwhelm her slender form. Up above, the rigging let out a magnificent and utterly terrifying roar that can only ever be heard on a tall ship in a very heavy storm.

  Waterman was a consummate seaman, yet even he was struggling to get through this icy torment and almost went down to the Antarctic Circle in the hope of gaining a bit of westing to weather the dreaded cape and begin the run up to the warmer climes of the Pacific. It was down in this hell on earth that the worst atrocities were committed against the crew. First, there was a demoralising accident as the second mate’s watch tried to furl the Challenge’s massive topsail. Several crew members reluctantly climbed to the maintop, but there they remained, shivering and terrified. Fear had paralysed them and they refused to climb out on to the massive yard.

  The second mate, a man by the name of Coghill, ascended the mast. Cursing and snarling, he had to literally kick his men out onto the wildly swaying yard to get them to bring the sail in. Down on deck, Douglass, impatient at the delay, eased the braces to spill the wind, yelling at Coghill to get his ‘sons of bitches’ to get hold of the flogging sail. Perhaps the mate’s agitation was why the braces were released too rapidly, allowing the mighty topsail yard to swing free and then pull taut with a sickening twang that catapulted four men off and sent them, plummeting into the icy sea, a maelstrom of giant breaking waves. They were immediately lost and nothing could be done. There were mutterings among the crew that Douglass had done it deliberately.

  Another William Webb clipper, the Young America, lying alongside the wharf at San Francisco.

  This was highly doubtful, but Douglass was unquestionably getting out of control. He was in acute pain from his own leg wound and his inept crew seemed to whip him into a sadistic rage. One of the most notorious malingerers was hurled into the freezing scuppers after refusing to go up the rigging and then lashed to the rail for an hour in the midst of a blizzard. Shortly afterwards, he died. Another crew member, a particularly incompetent elderly Italian known as PawPaw, also refused duty. When confronted by the mate, he gestured to his bare feet, completely swollen and unusable due to frostbite. Douglass bellowed at him to get moving, but PawPaw simply gabbled in Italian and the mate handed him such a beating that he died a few hours later.

  In the midst of all this, Douglass determined to find the seaman who had stabbed him in the leg several weeks before. The crew had sworn that he had jumped overboard in terror, but Douglass didn’t believe them and opted to make a thorough search of the fo’c’sle. Eventually the man was found hidden inside the frame of one of the bunks. Douglass waited for the guilty man to extricate himself from his hiding place and aimed a blow of his truncheon at his head. The man raised his arm to shield himself and the impact of the blow broke it in two places. He was dragged whimpering down below and clapped in irons for the rest of the voyage.

  In all, nine crew members died on the passage, some from illness, some in accidents, others from brutal treatment. It was an ugly statistic, one that Waterman must have been pondering as the Challenge raced up the Pacific before the trade winds. By now he must have realised that he wasn’t going to make his 90-day target and this can’t have helped his mood. In fairness, his chances had always been slim as he sailed at an unfavourable time of year with light summer winds in the northern hemisphere, followed by brutal winter storms off Cape Horn.

  In the better sailing conditions of the Pacific, Waterman became increasingly annoyed with the incompetence of his helmsmen and made a habit of lingering behind them with his truncheon in hand. If they deviated too far from their course, they could expect a sharp blow to the head. The whole ship simmered with discontent, but with San Francisco and the gold fields within striking distance, an uneasy truce prevailed.

  In the end, the Challenge sailed through the Golden Gate 108 days out. It was a good passage and she had beaten her nearest rival by two weeks. In fact, no ship ever bettered this time sailing at such an unfavourable time of year. Given his crew and the trouble aboard, it was actually a remarkable achievement. Yet it was utterly overshadowed by the Flying Cloud’s 89 days, celebrated the world over. Besides, the scandal brewing would make passage times irrelevant.

  The reckoning in San Francisco

  The clipper swung to her anchor in San Francisco Bay, awaiting a berth alongside the wharves. While Waterman and Douglass remained aboard, the surviving crew rapidly decamped to the bars of San Francisco, where they told, and no doubt embroidered, their tales of brutality. Stories of Waterman and his mate throwing sailors over the side still alive abounded and rumours of unimaginable cruelty spread across the city like wildfire.

  San Francisco during the heady days of the gold rush was a city growing uncontrollably as thousands of prospectors descended upon it to seek their fortune. The waterfront was littered with hundreds of ships that had sailed in and then been abandoned as crew and officers alike cut and ran for the gold fields, leaving their vessels to rot.

  Many prospectors set up home in makeshift tents on the hillsides of the city and every few weeks fire would sweep through these shanty towns, decimating the dwellings and generally causing panic. The authorities were always struggling to keep up with policing the city as it expanded and there was a genuine sense of lawlessness. Among the streets, crammed with gambling houses, drinking dens and brothels, vigilantes took the law into their own hands.

  A view of San Francisco as it was in the early days of the gold rush. Although the town is still a tiny, ramshackle affair, the harbour is already crowded with ships, many abandoned and left to rot.

  As tales of the Challenge spread around town, hysteria started to set in, not helped by an article in the California Courier that read: ‘The ship Challenge has arrived and Capt Waterman, her commander has also – but where are nine of her crew? And where is he and his guilty mate? The accounts given of Waterman towards his men, if true, make him one of the most inhumane monsters of this age. If they are true, he should be burned alive – he should never leave this city a live man.’ The article went on to describe Waterman as a ‘beast in human form’ and detailed the hair-raising tale of the four men that had been shaken off the mainyard off Cape Horn.

  As the ship was towed alongside the wharf at San Francisco, an angry mob had formed with the express int
ention of executing Waterman and his mate. The pair were in real danger at this moment. Earlier in the year, a mob had taken it upon themselves to dispense justice to a pair of Australians accused of robbery, while in 1856 a 6,000-member vigilante group was assembled after a couple of high-profile shooting incidents. This lynch mob hanged the suspects without trial. Waterman realised the best thing was to show no fear and, with customary bravado, he marched ashore, overawing the mob leaders and heading to his agent’s offices.

  While the mob awaited Douglass, it became more vociferous and the mate realised that caution might well be the better part of valour. As the ship was being unloaded, he arranged to slip over the side into a rowing boat, which would enable him to enter the city at a more secluded place. Unfortunately, as the rowing boat slid away, the mob spotted him and immediately gave chase. Spurred on by pure fear, Douglass headed into the eerie maze of rotting ships in the harbour, disappearing into the dark, dripping recesses of this nightmarish labyrinth, and rowed for dear life.

  (below) Three different views of San Francisco in the heady days of the gold rush. Many ships were abandoned as crews cut and ran to the gold fields up country. Some ships sank at their anchors, while others were converted into ramshackle makeshift quays, jetties and even bars and warehouses.

  Once Waterman departed the Challenge, she sailed on, making a passage to England loaded with tea. Here, she is seen arriving off the South Coast.