The story of America, we frequently remind ourselves, is the story of the conquest of a continent. It begins at Jamestown, at Plymouth, or wherever one chooses, and goes through forests, mountains, and prairies all the way to the sunset; and it shows a restless, acquisitive, and usually indomitable breed of men converting an immense stretch of land to the uses of a large, energetic, and intricately organized society. The pioneer of course is the hero, complete with such artifacts as the axe, the long rifle, and the covered wagon, going west with prodigious strides, followed presently by the promoter, the sturdy artisan, and the far-seeing man of business. It is a fabulous story, and we could recite it in our sleep.
What we sometimes overlook is the fact that before the pioneer could conquer this continent, he first had to cross the ocean. After he had crossed it and settled down to his wilderness-taming, he had to get supplies from the old country, find markets there for the products he was wresting from the new land, make money enough to finance further pioneering, and arrange for a sea-borne transportation system that would intimately link this new country with the larger, older, and wealthier countries beyond the seas. He had to conquer the oceans, in other words, as well as the land, and his salt-water pioneering was as important as anything he did ashore. Along with his seven-league boots he had to have webfeet.
This restatement of the obvious is evoked by Carl C. Cutler’s excellent new book, Queens of the Western Ocean, which shows how an important part of that deep-sea pioneering was accomplished and what it meant to America.
Mr. Cutler addresses himself chiefly to one aspect: the establishment of regular, scheduled lines of sailing vessels connecting the eastern seaports with England and Europe, and the simultaneous creation of scheduled lines running along the American coast, all the way from New England to Louisiana. Here, he remarks, was one of the most significant chapters in American history. It was a short chapter, running through forty-odd years up to 1860; after that the nation focused its attention on shoreside matters and let someone else do its sea-borne carrying. But while it lasted it represented the extension of a discovery made early in the game—that the colonies, like the young republic which grew out of them, had to build and control their own merchant marine if they were going to prosper.
The going was tough. In the colonial period there were restrictive laws designed to keep colonial trade in the hands of British shippers. There were extensive wars, during which naval cruisers and privateers harried the sea lanes; and at all times American vessels had to compete with bigger, richer, better-established shipping firms overseas. As a result—whether he was dodging the king’s revenue cutters, getting away from sea raiders, or simply trying to beat his rival into the market—the American sailor had to have a fast ship. The design had to be good, and the seamanship had to be superb. Right from the beginning, the American merchant mariner learned to put a high value on a speedy passage.
It paid off. The growing merchant fleet, made up for the most part of small vesssels but handled by canny traders with the acutest competitive instincts, found markets for American exports, and—Mr. Cutler insists—actually served to finance a good part of the development of the new nation. By the time the War of 1812 was out of the way and the world at last was at peace, America was ready for deep-sea trade on a large scale. The nation had a big surplus of exportable surpluses, and Europe had war-emptied warehouses waiting to receive them. Also, there were increasing numbers of immigrants eager to take ship for the United States.
There were boom times for a couple of years, then there was a recession. The surpluses had been exported, Europe’s most pressing needs had been met, and during the boom the merchant fleet had been overbuilt. By 1817 the trader had to scratch for what he could get. It was time for really sharp competition.
Out of this came the packet lines. The first of these, the famous Black Ball line of sailing ships between New York and Liverpool, was based on the idea that it would pay to compete for the high-priced trade-passengers, and package merchandise. The competition would be based on something new under the sun: ships that would sail on regular, established dates, whether or not they had filled their holds.
It sounds simple now: that is the way all ships go. But nobody had ever done it before. A ship would be posted to go from New York to Liverpool, and it would lie at its wharf, week after week, passengers fretting unavailingly, until at last it had a cargo, and then it would leave. Here, for the first time, was a fixed schedule. A traveler could say, “I am going to leave next Friday,” and next Friday he would leave, no matter how slowly his ship might go. It was revolutionary … and, after a few hard years, it paid.
Queens of the Western Ocean, by Carl C. Cutler, with a foreword by Chester W. Nimitz. United States Naval Institute. 672 pp. $12.50.
It paid so well that many other lines followed, giving birth to the expression, “ocean liner.” There were regular schedules everywhere—from American ports to England and Europe, and from one American port to another American port; ships were made larger and faster, they were driven harder and harder, and a successful packet captain was a public figure of renown. The passenger had a chance—for the first time—to travel in something like comfort. Staterooms previously had been pigeonholes, five feet high and six by six; now they had modern dimensions and livability, and their occupants were not compelled to have a Spartan attitude toward life.
This coincided with the period of America’s great growth and development; it was part of it, and it contributed measurably to it. As Mr. Cutler remarks, the vision, daring, and resourcefulness of these sailing-ship men “advanced by many years the financial and industrial growth of the nation, and, in addition, provided the funds to purchase the vast territories that now comprise two thirds of its area.” Steam caught up with them, to be sure, in the 1850’s. The very demand for regularity and speed which they had evoked made their ships and their skills out of date, at last, and the sailing packet became one with the Phoenician galley. But it was a great day while it lasted.
The Racing Machines
By BRUCE CATTON
The climactic years of sail were spectacular all along the line. In addition to devising transatlantic vessels which for a time held their own with steam, American designers and traders brought out the Cape Horn clippers, the inexpressibly beautiful ships that set unimaginable speed records and captured men’s imaginations as no other form of transportation has ever done. The clippers were highly uneconomic, as cargo carriers, and they flowered only during a brief time when special conditions prevailed in two or three long-distance trade routes, but while they lasted they were something special.
Many people have written about them, in the century since they disappeared forever, but the classic is still Mr. Cutler’s Greyhounds of the Sea, originally issued in 1930 and brought out now as a companion volume to Queens of the Western Ocean. It covers some of the same ground that is covered in the more recent book, but it centers most of its attention on the flyers which briefly crowded the British out of the China tea trade, cut a month or more off the ordinary time between New York and San Francisco, and raised the general prestige of the American merchant ship to the highest point it ever reached.
Mr. Cutler emphasizes a point worth remembering. The greatest of the clippers were only in part a matter of successful design. The design was there, to be sure, and the business of shaping a hull so that the wind could take it through the water with great speed was understood perfectly by such men as John W. Griffiths, Donald McKay, and William H. Webb. But the skipper was equally important, if not a little more so. The clippers had to be driven to the very limit of their capacity by men who understood seamanship down to its last obscure footnote. They needed expert handling precisely as a racing automobile needs it; and they got it from sea captains who had been trained in the packets, in the down-Easters, in the cotton carriers, and the China traders. As Mr. Cutler remarks, such sailors as Robert Waterman and Nathaniel B. Palmer would have made a fair clipper-ship era all by themselves regardless of the vessels they commanded. They and a few more like them were men who knew, by instinct and by hard experience, precisely how to drive a ship to the outer margin of safety without ever going beyond it. It is probable that no men ever lived who understood sailing better than they did.
Greyhounds of the Sea, by Carl C. Cutler, with a foreword by Charles Francis Adams. United States Naval Institute. 592 pp. $12.50.
It was the gold-rush era in California that really brought the clipper ship to its peak. Just when the old mania for making fast passages had produced incomparable ships and men who knew how to handle them, boom times on the west coast created a temporarily insatiable desire for vessels that could take passengers and freight out to San Francisco in the shortest possible time. The clippers responded in a dazzling manner. Average sailing-ship time from New York to the Golden Gate had run between 175 and 200 days. The clippers cut this down to 120, then to no. A few made the trip in less than one hundred days, and two—the famous Flying Cloud, and the Andrew Jackson— did it in eighty-nine. The Sea Witch, which already had set the all-time speed record for the trip from China to New York, got out to San Francisco in ninety-seven days; the Flying Fish did it in ninety-two, after losing three mortal days in calms within one hundred miles of the Golden Gate.
To go from New York to San Francisco in three months does not sound very exciting now, when a jet plane can make the trip between lunch time and dinner time and a transcontinental train can get its passengers across the continent in surpassing comfort over a weekend; but in the 1850’s it was nothing less than fabulous. For a few brief years it looked—to sailingship enthusiasts, at least—as if the windjammer had provided its own answer to the challenge of the steamship. Not for a generation would a steamer equal the clipper Lightning’s run of 436 nautical miles in twenty-four hours. (The mark was beaten by two other clippers, however—the Marco Polo and the Champion of the Seas.)
The golden age was short, but while it lasted it put an indelible streak of color in the record of the American merchant marine. What men thought of the clippers is evident from the names they gave them—Herald of the Morning, Surprise, Sovereign of the Seas, Twilight, Flying Cloud, Young America, Shooting Star, Northern Light; the list is a long one, the names coming off like poetry. The wholly prosaic business of carrying cargo from one port to another briefly entered a new dimension and became a reaching out for perfection itself.
It ended almost as quickly as it had begun. By 1855 the boom was over, and some of the world’s fastest ships lay idle at the wharves, waiting for freight. They were racing machines, after all, costly to build and costly to operate, and they gave way before long to bulkier vessels which carried larger cargoes more cheaply and more slowly. One great difficulty was that the hard driving which the clippers were given racked them to pieces. Their lives were short; the ones which survived had their sail plans drastically cut down and thereafter sailed more humbly and sedately. Mr. Cutler points out that no one who did not see the clippers before 1860 ever saw them in all their glory. They were like Samson after his haircut. Many of them were still in service, but the old magic was gone. The unusual economic conditions which made the clippers pay did not last very long. When those conditions vanished, so did the flyers. The national intensity of purpose which had created them found different objectives—the internal development of the country, and then the terrible quarrel that led to the Civil War. America was turning away from the sea.
The Shanghai Passage
By BRUCE CATTON
It remains to make one more point which is essential to any attempt to understand the heyday and the long decline of the American sailing ship. It was a time which was very hard on the ships themselves, but it was infinitely harder on the men who sailed them. The foremast hands who took those winged racers so far and so fast were driven much more mercilessly than the ships they manned. The skippers and mates of the packets and the Cape Horners were, as noted, consummate seamen, but they also bore a strong resemblance to Simon Legree. They ruled with belaying pins and knuckledusters, and the human costs of their achievements were often sickening.
One reason was, quite simply, that the supply of willing seamen had run out. The sailor’s life, at best, was hard, and young Americans were quitting the sea for easier, better-paid jobs ashore just when the clipper-ship era was getting started. The captains had to take what they could get when they made up their crews, and increasingly what they could get was the sweepings of the seaports, ne’er-do-wells, landsmen who hardly knew one end of a ship from the other, men who went to sea, in a sense, in spite of themselves. Quite literally, the captain who wanted to make a fast passage and keep his ship afloat had to beat these men into shape.
Even more important was the fact that during its final half-century the deepwater windjammer was fighting a losing fight economically, a matter which became even more pressing after the clippers had vanished. The sailing ship of the latter half of the nineteenth century had to operate on the cheap, and in the last analysis this meant that it could operate only by exploiting its crews to the very limit. The “bucko mate,” who ruled by unadulterated brutality, was a necessity, and the name “hell ship” was attached to one after another of the vessels that struggled to compete with steam. Rarely in the world’s history have supposedly free men been so evilly handled as were the crews of the last windjammers.
There is a detailed account of how this worked and what it meant in Richard H. Dillon’s Shanghaiing Days, a somewhat disorganized and poorly assembled book which does shed a graphic light on the almost incredible conditions under which men went to sea in the last days of sail. It belongs with Mr. Cutler’s books: they show the beauty and the romance; this one shows the dark underside, a useful and shocking corrective to the picturesque accounts of noble ships and dauntless skippers.
To begin with, the sailor was wholly at the mercy of the waterfront crimp, an antisocial character who infested the seaports and got a monopoly on the business of supplying sailing ships with sailors. The waterfront boardinghouses which the sailor automatically headed for when his ship paid off were run by the crimps who separated the sailor from his money as rapidly as possible, got him into debt, and then signed him up for a new voyage, cashed his advance note, and shipped him off to sea.
At its best, this was a bad deal. The sailor tolerated it, partly because there was not very much he could do about it—if he wanted to get another ship, he had to get it through the crimps, who controlled the hiring—and partly because he could usually count on a couple of weeks of gaudy carousing of the kind traditional for seafaring men from time immemorial. But the business was not at its best very often. For the crimp developed a way of giving his man one night’s binge and then either getting him dead drunk or feeding him knockout drops (which was simpler and cheaper) and promptly delivering his inert carcass aboard some deepwater ship that was just about to sail. The sailor would come to, with aching head, to find that he was off on another long cruise on some ship he had never heard of before.
This was the famous “Shanghai passage,” invented apparently in San Francisco but widely copied. As the pressure for men grew stronger, the crimp reached out for non-sailors, and there were times and places when any man who entered a waterfront saloon did so at his dire peril—he might wake up in a squalid forecastle, completely at the mercy of a captain and a mate who would kick and club him into performance of dangerous and unfamiliar tasks.
The shipping firms, both American and British, put up with this because it paid. When crimps persuaded sailors to desert a ship—and they were expert at this task, promising men anxious to get off a “hell ship” all sorts of shoreside jobs—the money that was due those men in wages did not have to be paid. When a new crew was to be hired, to be sure, the crimp had to get his blood money, but the fees were deducted from the pay the new hands would earn.
Shanghaiing Days, by Richard H. Dillon. Coward-McCann, Inc. 352 pp. $4.75.
Mr. Dillon examines this business in all of its dreadful detail, coupling his recital of the horrendous things that were done to sailors ashore with a description of the equally horrendous things that were done to them afloat. The story is simply incredible, or would be if it were not so amply documented. The whole thing is a stain on the American record, and it leaves one with the feeling that the sailing ship did not go out of existence too soon.
This exploitation did finally come to an end, of course. Public opinion was at length revolted and laws were passed. The sailing ship gave way to the steamer, and the crimp’s place in the picture automatically declined. Also, the sailors finally got a union and were able to do something in the way of asserting their rights. In the end—somewhere in the early 1900’s—the sorry old system died out.
One of the men who helped to kill it was a sailor named Andrew Furuseth, who helped to establish the union which the sailors needed. Furuseth once summed up conditions on the old sailing ships as neatly as any man could. Arrested after some organizing fracas on the docks, he was sentenced to jail, and he remarked that he did not mind very much—no jail, he said, could possibly give him worse living quarters, worse food, or more inhuman treatment than he was used to on shipboard.
