The American clipper ship was the result of an evolution which can be
traced back to the swift privateers which were built during the War of
1812. In this type of vessel the shipyards of Chesapeake Bay excelled
and their handiwork was known as the "Baltimore clipper," the name
suggested by the old English verb which Dryden uses to describe the
flight of the falcon that "clips it down the wind." The essential
difference between the clipper ship and other kinds of merchant craft
was that speed and not capacity became the chief consideration. This was
a radical departure for large vessels, which in all maritime history had
been designed with an eye to the number of tons they were able to
carry. More finely molded lines had hitherto been found only in the much
smaller French lugger, the Mediterranean galley, the American schooner.
To borrow the lines of these fleet and graceful models and apply them
to the design of a deepwater ship was a bold conception. It was first
attempted by Isaac McKim, a Baltimore merchant, who ordered his builders
in 1832 to reproduce as closely as possible the superior sailing
qualities of the renowned clipper brigs and schooners of their own port.
The result was the Ann McKim, of nearly five hundred tons, the first
Yankee clipper ship, and distinguished as such by her long, easy
water-lines, low free-board, and raking stem. She was built and finished
without regard to cost, copper-sheathed, the decks gleaming with
brasswork and mahogany fittings. But though she was a very fast and
handsome ship and the pride of her owner, the Ann McKim could stow so
little cargo that shipping men regarded her as unprofitable and swore by
their full-bodied vessels a few years longer.
That the Ann McKim, however, influenced the ideas of the most
progressive builders is very probable, for she was later owned by the
New York firm of Howland and Aspinwall, who placed an order for the
first extremely sharp clipper ship of the era. This vessel, the Rainbow,
was designed by John W. Griffeths, a marine architect, who was a pioneer
in that he studied shipbuilding as a science instead of working by
rule-of-thumb. The Rainbow, which created a sensation while on the
stocks because of her concave or hollowed lines forward, which defied
all tradition and practice, was launched in 1845. She was a more radical
innovation than the Ann McKim but a successful one, for on her second
voyage to China the Rainbow went out against the northeast monsoon in
ninety-two days and came home in eighty-eight, a record which few ships
were able to better. Her commander, Captain John Land, declared her to
be the fastest ship in the world and there were none to dispute him.
Even the Rainbow however, was eclipsed when not long afterward Howland
and Aspinwall, now converted to the clipper, ordered the Sea Witch to be
built for Captain Bob Waterman. Among all the splendid skippers of the
time he was the most dashing figure. About his briny memory cluster a
hundred yarns, some of them true, others legendary. It has been argued
that the speed of the clippers was due more to the men who commanded
them than to their hulls and rigging, and to support the theory the
career of Captain Bob Waterman is quoted. He was first known to fame in
the old Natchez, which was not a clipper at all and was even rated as
slow while carrying cotton from New Orleans to New York. But Captain Bob
took this full-pooped old packet ship around the Horn and employed her
in the China tea trade. The voyages which he made in her were all fast,
and he crowned them with the amazing run of seventy-eight days from
Canton to New York, just one day behind the swiftest clipper passage
ever sailed and which he himself performed in the Sea Witch. Incredulous
mariners simply could not explain this feat of the Natchez and suggested
that Bob Waterman must have brought the old hooker home by some new
route of his own discovery.
Captain Bob had won a reputation for discipline as the mate of a Black
Ball liner, a rough school, and he was not a mild man. Ashore his
personality was said to have been a most attractive one, but there is
no doubt that afloat he worked the very souls out of his sailors. The
rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however,
until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under
canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she
seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her
there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the
quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then
in seventy-nine--records which were never surpassed.
With what consummate skill and daring this master mariner drove his ship
and how the race of hardy sailors to which he belonged compared with
those of other nations may be descried in the log of another of them,
Captain Philip Dumaresq, homeward bound from China in 1849 in the
clipper Great Britain. Three weeks out from Java Head she had overtaken
and passed seven ships heading the same way, and then she began to rush
by them in one gale after another. Her log records her exploits in such
entries as these: "Passed a ship under double reefs, we with our royals
and studdingsails set.... Passed a ship laying-to under a close-reefed
maintopsail.... Split all three topsails and had to heave to.... Seven
vessels in sight and we outsail all of them.... Under double-reefed
topsails passed several vessels hove-to." Much the same record might be
read in the log of the medium clipper Florence--and it is the same story
of carrying sail superbly on a ship which had been built to stand
up under it: "Passed two barks under reefed courses and close-reefed
topsails standing the same way, we with royals and topgallant
studding-sails," or "Passed a ship under topsails, we with our royals
set." For eleven weeks "the topsail halliards were started only once, to
take in a single reef for a few hours." It is not surprising, therefore,
to learn that, seventeen days out from Shanghai, the Florence exchanged
signals with the English ship John Hagerman, which had sailed thirteen
days before her.
Two notable events in the history of the nineteenth century occurred
within the same year, 1849, to open new fields of trade to the Yankee
clipper. One of these was the repeal of the British Navigation Laws
which had given English ships a monopoly of the trade between London
and the British East Indies, and the other was the discovery of gold
in California. After centuries of pomp and power, the great East India
Company had been deprived of its last exclusive rights afloat in 1833.
Its ponderous, frigate-built merchantmen ceased to dominate the British
commerce with China and India and were sold or broken up. All British
ships were now free to engage in this trade, but the spirit and customs
of the old regime still strongly survived. Flying the house-flags of
private owners, the East Indiamen and China tea ships were still built
and manned like frigates, slow, comfortable, snugging down for the night
under reduced sail. There was no competition to arouse them until the
last barrier of the Navigation Laws was let down and they had to meet
the Yankee clipper with the tea trade as the huge stake.
Then at last it was farewell to the gallant old Indianian and her
ornate, dignified prestige. With a sigh the London Times confessed: "We
must run a race with our gigantic and unshackled rival. We must set our
long-practised skill, our steady industry, and our dogged determination
against his youth, ingenuity, and ardor. Let our shipbuilders and
employers take warning in time. There will always be an abundant supply
of vessels good enough and fast enough for short voyages. But we
want fast vessels for the long voyages which otherwise will fall into
American hands."
Before English merchants could prepare themselves for these new
conditions, the American clipper Oriental was loading in 1850 at Hong
Kong with tea for the London market. Because of her reputation for
speed, she received freightage of six pounds sterling per ton while
British ships rode at anchor with empty holds or were glad to sail at
three pounds ten per ton. Captain Theodore Palmer delivered his sixteen
hundred tons of tea in the West India Docks, London, after a crack
passage of ninety-one days which had never been equaled. His clipper
earned $48,000, or two-thirds of what it had cost to build her. Her
arrival in London created a profound impression. The port had seen
nothing like her for power and speed; her skysail yards soared far
above the other shipping; the cut of her snowy canvas was faultless; all
clumsy, needless tophamper had been done away with; and she appeared
to be the last word in design and construction, as lean and fine and
spirited as a race-horse in training.
This new competition dismayed British shipping until it could rally
and fight with similar weapons The technical journal, Naval Science,
acknowledged that the tea trade of the London markets had passed almost
out of the hands of the English ship-owner, and that British vessels,
well-manned and well-found, were known to lie for weeks in the harbor
of Foo-chow, waiting for a cargo and seeing American clippers come in,
load, and sail immediately with full cargoes at a higher freight than
they could command. Even the Government viewed the loss of trade with
concern and sent admiralty draftsmen to copy the lines of the Oriental
and Challenge while they were in drydock.
British clippers were soon afloat, somewhat different in model from the
Yankee ships, but very fast and able, and racing them in the tea trade
until the Civil War. With them it was often nip and tuck, as in the
contest between the English Lord of the Isles and the American clipper
bark Maury in 1856. The prize was a premium of one pound per ton for
the first ship to reach London with tea of the new crop. The Lord of
the Isles finished loading and sailed four days ahead of the Maury, and
after thirteen thousand miles of ocean they passed Gravesend within ten
minutes of each other. The British skipper, having the smartest tug
and getting his ship first into dock, won the honors. In a similar race
between the American Sea Serpent and the English Crest of the Wave, both
ships arrived off the Isle of Wight on the same day. It was a notable
fact that the Lord of the Isles was the first tea clipper built of iron
at a date when the use of this stubborn material was not yet thought of
by the men who constructed the splendid wooden ships of America.
For the peculiar requirements of the tea trade, English maritime talent
was quick to perfect a clipper type which, smaller than the great Yankee
skysail-yarder, was nevertheless most admirable for its beauty and
performance. On both sides of the Atlantic partizans hotly championed
their respective fleets. In 1852 the American Navigation Club, organized
by Boston merchants and owners, challenged the shipbuilders of Great
Britain to race from a port in England to a port in China and return,
for a stake of $50,000 a side, ships to be not under eight hundred nor
over twelve hundred tons American register. The challenge was aimed at
the Stornaway and the Chrysolite, the two clippers that were known to be
the fastest ships under the British flag. Though this sporting defiance
caused lively discussion, nothing came of it, and it was with a spirit
even keener that Sampson and Tappan of Boston offered to match their
Nightingale for the same amount against any clipper afloat, British or
American.
In spite of the fact that Yankee enterprise had set the pace in the
tea trade, within a few years after 1850 England had so successfully
mastered the art of building these smaller clippers that the honors were
fairly divided. The American owners were diverting their energies to
the more lucrative trade in larger ships sailing around the Horn to San
Francisco, a long road which, as a coastwise voyage, was forbidden
to foreign vessels under the navigation laws. After the Civil War the
fastest tea clippers flew the British flag and into the seventies they
survived the competition of steam, racing among themselves for the
premiums awarded to the quickest dispatch. No more of these beautiful
vessels were launched after 1869, and one by one they vanished into
other trades, overtaken by the same fate which had befallen the Atlantic
packet and conquered by the cargo steamers which filed through the Suez
Canal.
Until 1848 San Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post,
a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected
hides--vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast--or a whaler
called for wood and water. During the year preceding the frenzied
migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark
and one brig, sailed in through the Golden Gate. In the twelve months
following, 775 vessels cleared from Atlantic ports for San Francisco,
besides the rush from other countries, and nearly fifty thousand
passengers scrambled ashore to dig for gold. Crews deserted their
ships, leaving them unable to go to sea again for lack of men, and in
consequence a hundred of them were used as storehouses, hotels, and
hospitals, or else rotted at their moorings. Sailors by hundreds jumped
from the forecastle without waiting to stow the sails or receive their
wages. Though offered as much as two hundred dollars a month to sign
again, they jeered at the notion. Of this great fleet at San Francisco
in 1849, it was a lucky ship that ever left the harbor again.
It seemed as if the whole world were bound to California and almost
overnight there was created the wildest, most extravagant demand for
transportation known to history. A clipper costing $70,000 could pay for
herself in one voyage, with freights at sixty dollars a ton. This gold
stampede might last but a little while. To take instant advantage of it
was the thing. The fastest ships, and as many of them as could be built,
would skim the cream of it. This explains the brief and illustrious era
of the California clipper, one hundred and sixty of which were launched
from 1850 to 1854. The shipyards of New York and Boston were crowded
with them, and they graced the keel blocks of the historic old ports
of New England--Medford, Mystic, Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland,
Rockland, and Bath--wherever the timber and the shipwrights could be
assembled.
Until that time there had been few ships afloat as large as a thousand
tons. These were of a new type, rapidly increased to fifteen hundred,
two thousand tons, and over. They presented new and difficult problems
in spars and rigging able to withstand the strain of immense areas of
canvas which climbed two hundred feet to the skysail pole and which,
with lower studdingsails set, spread one hundred and sixty feet from
boom-end to boom-end. There had to be the strength to battle with the
furious tempests of Cape Horn and at the same time the driving power to
sweep before the sweet and steadfast tradewinds. Such a queenly clipper
was the Flying Cloud, the achievement of that master builder, Donald
McKay, which sailed from New York to San Francisco in eighty-nine days,
with Captain Josiah Creesy in command. This record was never lowered and
was equaled only twice--by the Flying Cloud herself and by the Andrew
Jackson nine years later. It was during this memorable voyage that
the Flying Cloud sailed 1256 miles in four days while steering to the
northward under topgallantsails after rounding Cape Horn. This was a
rate of speed which, if sustained, would have carried her from New York
to Queenstown in eight days and seventeen hours. This speedy passage was
made in 1851, and only two years earlier the record for the same voyage
of fifteen thousand miles had been one hundred and twenty days, by the
clipper Memnon.
Donald McKay now resolved to build a ship larger and faster than the
Flying Cloud, and his genius neared perfection in the Sovereign of the
Seas, of 2421 tons register, which exceeded in size all merchant vessels
afloat. This Titan of the clipper fleet was commanded by Donald's
brother, Captain Lauchlan McKay, with a crew of one hundred and five
men and boys. During her only voyage to San Francisco she was partly
dismasted, but Lauchlan McKay rigged her anew at sea in fourteen days
and still made port in one hundred and three days, a record for the
season of the year.
It was while running home from Honolulu in 1853 that the Sovereign of
the Seas realized the hopes of her builder. In eleven days she sailed
3562 miles, with four days logged for a total of 1478 knots. Making
allowance for the longitudes and difference in time, this was an average
daily run of 378 sea miles or 435 land miles. Using the same comparison,
the distance from Sandy Hook to Queenstown would have been covered in
seven days and nine hours. Figures are arid reading, perhaps, but these
are wet by the spray and swept by the salt winds of romance. During one
of these four days the Sovereign of the Seas reeled off 424 nautical
miles, during which her average speed was seventeen and two-thirds knots
and at times reached nineteen and twenty. The only sailing ship which
ever exceeded this day's work was the Lightning, built later by the
same Donald McKay, which ran 436 knots in the Atlantic passage already
referred to. The Sovereign of the Seas could also boast of a sensational
feat upon the Western Ocean, for between New York and Liverpool she
outsailed the Cunard liner Canada by 325 miles in five days.
It is curiously interesting to notice that the California clipper era
is almost generally ignored by the foremost English writers of maritime
history. For one thing, it was a trade in which their own ships were not
directly concerned, and partizan bias is apt to color the views of
the best of us when national prestige is involved. American historians
themselves have dispensed with many unpleasant facts when engaged with
the War of 1812. With regard to the speed of clipper ships, however,
involving a rivalry far more thrilling and important than all the races
ever sailed for the America's cup, the evidence is available in concrete
form.
Lindsay's "History of Merchant Shipping" is the most elaborate English
work of the kind. Heavily ballasted with facts and rather dull reading
for the most part, it kindles with enthusiasm when eulogizing the
Thermopylae and the Sir Launcelot, composite clippers of wood and iron,
afloat in 1870, which it declares to be "the fastest sailing ships
that ever traversed the ocean." This fairly presents the issue which a
true-blooded Yankee has no right to evade. The greatest distance sailed
by the Sir Launcelot in twenty-four hours between China and London was
354 knots, compared with the 424 miles of the Sovereign of the Seas and
the 436 miles of the Lightning. Her best sustained run was one of seven
days for an average of a trifle more than 300 miles a day. Against this
is to be recorded the performance of the Sovereign of the Seas, 3562
miles in eleven days, at the rate of 324 miles every twenty-four hours,
and her wonderful four-day run of 1478 miles, an average of 378 miles.
The Thermopylae achieved her reputation in a passage of sixty-three days
from London to Melbourne--a record which was never beaten. Her fastest
day's sailing was 330 miles, or not quite sixteen knots an hour. In six
days she traversed 1748 miles, an average of 291 miles a day. In this
Australian trade the American clippers made little effort to compete.
Those engaged in it were mostly built for English owners and sailed by
British skippers, who could not reasonably be expected to get the most
out of these loftily sparred Yankee ships, which were much larger than
their own vessels of the same type. The Lightning showed what she could
do from Melbourne to Liverpool by making the passage in sixty-three'
days, with 3722 miles in ten consecutive days and one day's sprint of
412 miles.
In the China tea trade the Thermopylae drove home from Foo-chow in
ninety-one days, which was equaled by the Sir Launcelot. The American
Witch of the Wave had a ninety-day voyage to her credit, and the Comet
ran from Liverpool to Shanghai in eighty-four days. Luck was a larger
factor on this route than in the California or Australian trade because
of the fitful uncertainty of the monsoons, and as a test of speed it was
rather unsatisfactory. In a very fair-minded and expert summary, Captain
Arthur H. Clark, * in his youth an officer on Yankee clippers, has
discussed this question of rival speed and power under sail--a question
which still absorbs those who love the sea. His conclusion is that
in ordinary weather at sea, when great power to carry sail was not
required, the British tea clippers were extremely fast vessels, chiefly
on account of their narrow beam. Under these conditions they were
perhaps as fast as the American clippers of the same class, such as the
Sea Witch, White Squall, Northern Light, and Sword-Fish. But if speed
is to be reckoned by the maximum performance of a ship under the most
favorable conditions, then the British tea clippers were certainly no
match for the larger American ships such as the Flying Cloud, Sovereign
of the Seas, Hurricane, Trade Wind, Typhoon, Flying Fish, Challenge, and
Red Jacket. The greater breadth of the American ships in proportion to
their length meant power to carry canvas and increased buoyancy which
enabled them, with their sharper ends, to be driven in strong gales and
heavy seas at much greater speed than the British clippers. The latter
were seldom of more than one thousand tons' register and combined in a
superlative degree the good qualities of merchant ships.
* "The Clipper Ship Era." N.Y., 1910.
It was the California trade, brief and crowded and fevered, which saw
the roaring days of the Yankee clipper and which was familiar with
racing surpassing in thrill and intensity that of the packet ships of
the Western Ocean. In 1851, for instance, the Raven, Sea Witch, and
Typhoon sailed for San Francisco within the same week. They crossed the
Equator a day apart and stood away to the southward for three thousand
miles of the southeast trades and the piping westerly winds which
prevailed farther south. At fifty degrees south latitude the Raven and
the Sea Witch were abeam of each other with the Typhoon only two days
astern.
Now they stripped for the tussle to windward around Cape Horn, sending
down studdingsail booms and skysail yards, making all secure with extra
lashings, plunging into the incessant head seas of the desolate ocean,
fighting it out tack for tack, reefing topsails and shaking them out
again, the vigilant commanders going below only to change their clothes,
the exhausted seamen stubbornly, heroically handling with frozen,
bleeding fingers the icy sheets and canvas. A fortnight of this inferno
and the Sea Witch and the Raven gained the Pacific, still within sight
of each other, and the Typhoon only one day behind. Then they swept
northward, blown by the booming tradewinds, spreading studdingsails,
skysails, and above them, like mere handkerchiefs, the water-sails and
ring-tails. Again the three clippers crossed the Equator. Close-hauled
on the starboard tack, their bowsprits were pointed for the last stage
of the journey to the Golden Gate. The Typhoon now overhauled her rivals
and was the first to signal her arrival, but the victory was earned
by the Raven, which had set her departure from Boston Light while the
others had sailed from New York. The Typhoon and the Raven were only a
day apart, with the Sea Witch five days behind the leader.
Clipper ship crews included men of many nations. In the average
forecastle there would be two or three Americans, a majority of English
and Norwegians, and perhaps a few Portuguese and Italians. The hardiest
seamen, and the most unmanageable, were the Liverpool packet rats who
were lured from their accustomed haunts to join the clippers by the
magical call of the gold-diggings. There were not enough deep-water
sailors to man half the ships that were built in these few years, and
the crimps and boarding-house runners decoyed or flung aboard on sailing
day as many men as were demanded, and any drunken, broken landlubber was
good enough to be shipped as an able seaman. They were things of rags
and tatters--their only luggage a bottle of whiskey.
The mates were thankful if they could muster enough real sailors to
work the ship to sea and then began the stern process of whipping the
wastrels and incompetents into shape for the perils and emergencies of
the long voyage. That these great clippers were brought safely to port
is a shining tribute to the masterful skill of their officers. While
many of them were humane and just, with all their severity, the stories
of savage abuse which are told of some are shocking in the extreme.
The defense was that it was either mutiny or club the men under. Better
treatment might have persuaded better men to sail. Certain it is that
life in the forecastle of a clipper was even more intolerable to the
self-respecting American youth than it had previously been aboard the
Atlantic packet.
When Captain Bob Waterman arrived at San Francisco in the Challenge
clipper in 1851, a mob tried very earnestly to find and hang him and his
officers because of the harrowing stories told by his sailors. That
he had shot several of them from the yards with his pistol to make
the others move faster was one count in the indictment. For his part,
Captain Waterman asserted that a more desperate crew of ruffians had
never sailed out of New York and that only two of them were Americans.
They were mutinous from the start, half of them blacklegs of the vilest
type who swore to get the upper hand of him. His mates, boatswain,
and carpenter had broken open their chests and boxes and had removed a
collection of slung-shots, knuckle-dusters, bowie-knives, and pistols.
Off Rio Janeiro they had tried to kill the chief mate, and Captain
Waterman had been compelled to jump in and stretch two of them dead with
an iron belaying-pin. Off Cape Horn three sailors fell from aloft and
were lost. This accounted for the casualties.
The truth of such episodes as these was difficult to fathom. Captain
Waterman demanded a legal investigation, but nothing came of his request
and he was commended by his owners for his skill and courage in bringing
the ship to port without losing a spar or a sail. It was a skipper of
this old school who blandly maintained the doctrine that if you wanted
the men to love you, you must starve them and knock them down. The fact
is proven by scores of cases that the discipline of the American clipper
was both famously efficient and notoriously cruel. It was not until long
after American sailors had ceased to exist that adequate legislation was
enacted to provide that they should be treated as human beings afloat
and ashore. Other days and other customs! It is perhaps unkind to judge
these vanished master-mariners too harshly, for we cannot comprehend the
crises which continually beset them in their command.
No more extreme clipper ships were built after 1854. The California
frenzy had subsided and speed in carrying merchandise was no longer
so essential; besides, the passenger traffic was seeking the Isthmian
route. What were called medium clippers enjoyed a profitable trade
for many years later, and one of them, the Andrew Jackson, was never
outsailed for the record from New York to San Francisco. This splendid
type of ship was to be found on every sea, for the United States was
still a commanding factor in the maritime activities of South America,
India, China, Europe, and Australia. In 1851 its merchant tonnage
rivaled that of England and was everywhere competing with it.
The effects of the financial panic of 1857 and the aftermath of business
depression were particularly disastrous to American ships. Freights were
so low as to yield no profit, and the finest clippers went begging for
charters. The yards ceased to launch new tonnage. British builders had
made such rapid progress in design and construction that the days of
Yankee preference in the China trade had passed. The Stars and Stripes
floated over ships waiting idle in Manila Bay, at Shanghai, Hong-Kong,
and Calcutta. The tide of commerce had slackened abroad as well as at
home and the surplus of deep-water tonnage was world-wide.
In earlier generations afloat, the American spirit had displayed amazing
recuperative powers. The havoc of the Revolution had been unable to
check it, and its vigor and aggressive enterprise had never been
more notable than after the blows dealt by the Embargo, the French
Spoliations, and the War of 1812. The conditions of trade and the temper
of the people were now so changed that this mighty industry, aforetime
so robust and resilient, was unable to recover from such shocks as the
panic of 1857 and the Civil War. Yet it had previously survived and
triumphed over calamities far more severe. The destruction wrought by
Confederate cruisers was trifling compared with the work of the British
and French privateers when the nation was very small and weak.
The American spirit had ceased to concern itself with the sea as the
vital and dominant element. The footsteps of the young men no longer
turned toward the wharf and the waterside and the tiers of tall ships
outward bound. They were aspiring to conquer an inland empire of prairie
and mountain and desert, impelled by the same pioneering and adventurous
ardor which had burned in their seafaring sires. Steam had vanquished
sail--an epochal event in a thousand years of maritime history--but the
nation did not care enough to accept this situation as a new challenge
or to continue the ancient struggle for supremacy upon the sea. England
did care, because it was life or death to the little, sea-girt island,
but as soon as the United States ceased to be a strip of Atlantic
seaboard and the panorama, of a continent was unrolled to settlement,
it was foreordained that the maritime habit of thought and action
should lose its virility in America. All great seafaring races, English,
Norwegian, Portuguese, and Dutch, have taken to salt water because there
was lack of space, food, or work ashore, and their strong young men
craved opportunities. Like the Pilgrim Fathers and their fishing
shallops they had nowhere else to go.
When the Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind--taut, serene,
immaculate--were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic
and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig
and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight
of a huge carcass alongside. With a poor opinion of the seamanship
of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among their
favorite chanteys:
Oh, poor Reuben Ranzo,
Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo,
Oh, Ranzo was no sailor,
So they shipped him aboard a whaler,
Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo.
This was crass, intolerant prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of
appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there
were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars,
and trimming the yards to a hair. On a voyage of two or three
years, moreover, there was always plenty of time tomorrow. Brave and
resourceful seamen were these New England adventurers and deep-sea
hunters who made nautical history after their own fashion. They
flourished coeval with the merchant marine in its prime, and they passed
from the sea at about the same time and for similar reasons. Modernity
dispensed with their services, and young men found elsewhere more
profitable and easier employment.
The great days of Nantucket as a whaling port were passed before the
Revolution wiped out her ships and killed or scattered her sailors.
It was later discovered that larger ships were more economical, and
Nantucket harbor bar was too shoal to admit their passage. For this
reason New Bedford became the scene of the foremost activity, and
Nantucket thereafter played a minor part, although her barks went
cruising on to the end of the chapter and her old whaling families were
true to strain. As explorers the whalemen rambled into every nook
and corner of the Pacific before merchant vessels had found their way
thither. They discovered uncharted islands and cheerfully fought savages
or suffered direful shipwreck. The chase led them into Arctic regions
where their stout barks were nipped like eggshells among the grinding
floes, or else far to the southward where they broiled in tropic calms.
The New Bedford lad was as keen to go a-whaling as was his counterpart
in Boston or New York to be the dandy mate of a California clipper, and
true was the song:
I asked a maiden by my side,
Who sighed and looked to me forlorn,
"Where is your heart?" She quick replied,
"Round Cape Horn."
Yankee whaling reached its high tide in 1857 when the New Bedford fleet
alone numbered 329 sail and those owned in other ports of Buzzard's Bay
swelled the total to 426 vessels, besides thirty more hailing from New
London and Sag Harbor. In this year the value of the catch was more
than ten million dollars. The old custom of sailing on shares or
"lays" instead of wages was never changed. It was win or lose for
all hands--now a handsome fortune or again an empty hold and pockets
likewise. There was Captain W.T. Walker of New Bedford who, in 1847,
bought for a song a ship so old that she was about to be broken up for
junk and no insurance broker would look at her. In this rotten relic
he shipped a crew and went sailing in the Pacific. Miraculously keeping
afloat, this Envoy of his was filled to the hatches with oil and bones,
twice running, before she returned to her home port; and she earned
$138,450 on a total investment of eight thousand dollars.
The ship Sarah of Nantucket, after a three years' cruise, brought
back 3497 barrels of sperm oil which sold for $89,000, and the William
Hamilton of New Bedford set another high mark by stowing 4181 barrels of
a value of $109,269. The Pioneer of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan,
was away only a year and stocked a cargo of oil and whalebone which sold
for $150,060. Most of the profits of prosperous voyages were taken
as the owners' share, and the incomes of the captain and crew were
so niggardly as to make one wonder why they persisted in a calling so
perilous, arduous, and poorly paid. During the best years of whaling,
when the ships were averaging $16,000 for a voyage, the master received
an eighteenth, or about nine hundred dollars a year. The highly skilled
hands, such as the boat-steerers and harpooners, had a lay of only one
seventy-fifth, or perhaps a little more than two hundred dollars cash as
the reward of a voyage which netted the owner at least fifty per cent on
his investment. Occasionally they fared better than this and sometimes
worse. The answer to the riddle is that they liked the life and had
always the gambling spirit which hopes for a lucky turn of the cards.
The countless episodes of fragile boats smashed to kindling by fighting
whales, of the attack renewed with harpoon and lance, of ships actually
rammed and sunk, would fill a volume by themselves and have been
stirringly narrated in many a one. Zanzibar and Kamchatka, Tasmania and
the Seychelles knew the lean, sun-dried Yankee whaleman and his motto of
a "dead whale or a stove boat." The Civil War did not drive him from the
seas. The curious fact is that his products commanded higher prices
in 1907 than fifty years before, but the number of his ships rapidly
decreased. Whales were becoming scarce, and New England capital
preferred other forms of investment. The leisurely old sailing craft was
succeeded by the steam whaler, and the explosive bomb slew, instead of
the harpoon and lance hurled by the sinewy right arm of a New Bedford
man or Cape Verde islander.
Roving whaler and armed East Indiaman, plunging packet ship and stately
clipper, they served their appointed days and passed on their several
courses to become mere memories, as shadowy and unsubstantial as the
gleam of their own topsails when seen at twilight. The souls of their
sailors have fled to Fiddler's Green, where all dead mariners go. They
were of the old merchant marine which contributed something fine and
imperishable to the story of the United States. Down the wind, vibrant
and deep-throated, comes their own refrain for a requiem:
We're outward bound this very day,
Good-bye, fare you well,
Good-bye, fare you well.
We're outward bound this very day,
Hurrah, my boys, we're outward bound.