THE HISTORY ISSUE
Taller, sleeker, and much, much faster, it was the finest invention ever to issue from America's shores. Welcome to the "new economy" of the clipper ship.
Distance has died many deaths. It met its end when the Internet reduced space to a Send command. Before that, the jetliner transformed global travel into a day trip; before that, the car, the phone, the railroad, and the telegraph all destroyed our sense of distance and replaced it with another. What's astounding isn't this march of progress but our inability to recognize we're in flux, that at each stage we've reached not a zenith but a step on a continuum. Always, there are sound reasons to believe that this, too, shall not pass.
Before the telegraph, distance died with the clipper ship. In 1851, the American experiment was finally paying off. The US had emerged from colonial rule and from the internal strife that had been the consequence of its liberty. The nation's population was doubling every 20 years, its farms fed a war-ravaged Europe, and its Dixie cotton fueled Britain's industrial revolution. Suddenly, the US was a contender. Its newfound prosperity was a product of several factors, but chief among them was a native marine intelligence appropriate to a country that at the time was still largely one long coast. America's merchant ships ruled the seas, and the clipper, which within a decade had doubled the speed of sailing vessels, ruled its fleet.
Clippers satisfied the particular fetishes of an adolescent, upstart nation. They were bigger, taller, sleeker, and costlier than any previous species of vessel. Long and narrow, the masts stood higher than any urban edifice and carried so much sail that the first ones to launch were expected by many to capsize as soon as they were freed from their moorings. They inspired controversy, awe, heedless ambition, and poetry - Longfellow devoted a poem to the building of one. They generated new markets and new heroes, as well as feverish investment and massive fortunes, the size of which encouraged the use of the word millionaire in the American vernacular.
Even as the signs of imminent disruption emerged - the South threatening to secede, steamships ubiquitous in US ports, railways connecting most cities on the eastern seaboard, and a severe shortage of skilled sailors who could navigate the labor-intensive ships in perilous weather - the clipper craze reached hysteric proportions, and speculators flooded the market with new vessels.
No boom can withstand the force of its own enthusiasm. But in July 1851, this wasn't clear to the virtual dream team of businessmen, architect, shipbuilder, and captain that prepared to launch the Challenge, the most anticipated ship in the brief history of clippers. According to A.B.C. Whipple in his book The Challenge, the Griswold brothers, merchant princes of Manhattan, had witnessed the introduction of breakthrough engineering and were convinced: They looked at the facts, and the facts bore out - that the clipper was faster and made more money than any ship that had come before it. The eminent marine architect commissioned to build the Challenge, John Griffiths; the New York shipbuilder William H. Webb; and the infamous Captain Robert Waterman - all three, having contributed to the creation of this technology, joined in the effort to float the Challenge, its ultimate application.
But disruption happens - and not just once. Disruption happened again and again.
The Merchant Prince
Before it was a ship, the Challenge was an idea, and like so many ideas, this one had its origins in that constant of human predilections: the desire for profit. N.L. & G. Griswold was no stranger to profit. Prudent merchants and ruthless businessmen, the brothers Griswold personified the Connecticut Yankee. Having come to New York at the turn of the century to enter the West Indies sugar and rum trade, they expanded into China tea and, by the 1840s, counted 43 ships in their fleet. In 1849, they decided to enter the clipper trade with a splash. The firm spent the then enormous sum of $150,000 on the Challenge's construction, twice the amount spent on any clipper to date.
A giant among giants, the Challenge displaced 2,000 tons of water and measured 224 feet. It was the longest and the largest sailing ship on the sea. Like any square-rigged vessel of the time, it had three masts: a foremast, the stout mainmast, and a mizzenmast at the rear. The mainmast towered over New York's skyline, rising 230 feet in the air and topped by a gilded ball. It was nearly 3 feet in diameter. The Challenge employed as many sails as had ever been set to a square-rigged vessel, sporting on all three masts - in ascending order - a vast course-sail, a topsail, a topgallant, a royal, and a skysail, to say nothing of the various jibs, staysails, and studding sails that complemented the outfit. In all, the ship used 7 miles of cotton canvas, enough to outfit three merchant vessels built in the previous century.
So why would the Griswolds, famed for cautious investment, sink such a sum into a single ship? Simply put: for speed. In the mid-19th century shipping economy, the fastest vessel earned the most. In the great mercantile centers of London, Boston, and New York, the highest profits went to the shipping firms that could deliver the first tea of the season. The Griswold brothers, for instance, regularly grossed between $400,000 and $700,000 from a single cargo. One merchant in 1850 proved the clipper's value by instructing his captain to wait in China and purchase tea at reduced prices after the other ships had already filled their holds. The captain then beat his rivals back to market and reaped even greater profits.
But it was really the discovery of gold in 1848, at the now infamous Sutter's Mill at the foothills of the Sierra, that made swiftness the greatest attribute in shipping, as idlers, imbeciles, and the cream of the gentry alike hightailed their way to California mines. Before the discovery of gold, San Francisco had 435 residents. In 1849, its customhouse recorded 91,405 arrivals. And the only manufactured goods available to this population arrived by ship traveling around Cape Horn from the East Coast. With demand so high and supply so limited, the profits to be made through a speedy delivery were extraordinary. While for a dollar in New York, you could rent a hotel room in the high-end Astor House, a dollar in San Francisco would fetch you a single egg. "A phenomenon compounded of opium and slavery, of gold and tea," writes Whipple. "China's tea would be surpassed, after a decade, only by California's gold as the major incentive to produce the loftiest and largest ships in the history of sail."
Yet, as the gold-addled masses out West promised outsize profits to the smart merchant, the passage also posed huge risks, physical and financial. One ship, for example, arrived in San Francisco bearing vast quantities of stoves, which just months before had commanded a king's ransom. Having been beaten to San Francisco by competitors also carrying stoves, however, the later ship's goods were worth practically nothing. But gaining any profit, no matter how meager, assumed that a ship got around Cape Horn, with its perpetual tempests, mercurial winds, and icebergs. Merchants sought to earn back investments on a single voyage, because in all likelihood their ships wouldn't survive to make another.
The Griswolds' gamble adheres to a certain, very modern logic. Why spend a small fortune on a ship sure to fail in the so-called Cape Horn Sweepstakes when a large fortune would reap larger fortunes still? With determination and plenty of capital, all N.L. & G. Griswold needed was a ship designer to conjure the grand ambition of the idea into a working blueprint.
The Architect of Speed
By the time John Griffiths received the Griswolds' commission in 1849 to design the Challenge, he had already established his reputation as midwife to the clipper. Griffiths was the son of an East River shipwright and was by any measure born to his craft. To his inherited sea sense he grafted an aptitude for physics and mathematics. A naval draftsman by the age of 19, he produced the fastest frigate in the US Navy in his early twenties. Over the next eight years, his thinking diverged wildly from the common wisdom of the day. He advocated the use of mathematical equations to determine the relative efficiencies of various hull shapes, as opposed to the time-honored method of trial and error. He also employed the unusual technique of running "tank tests" - observing hull models in large vats of water before locking in the design.
In 1841, the young ship designer and maritime theorist exhibited a hull unlike anything his colleagues had ever seen. He had discovered that not only did a leaner form move more easily through the water, but a V-shaped hull increased a ship's speed even further. This turned hundreds of years of sailing convention on its head. "A cod's head and mackerel's tail" had been the maxim of hull design, which is to say, a rounded bow that rose up over the waves and a thin stern to let the water run past. Griffiths advocated the reverse: Sharpen the rounded bow to ease the ship's entry point, place the maximum width farther back, and create a flat, broad stern to form a smooth wake.
Griffiths' many critics slammed the notion, claiming that without a broad bow to push apart the water, a V-hulled ship would dive straight through the waves to a chilly, watery end. For several years Griffiths remained a marginalized theorist, until, in 1843, the merchant house of Howland & Aspinwall gave him a commission. The resulting ship, the Rainbow, combined Griffiths' radical hull design with more sails than any ship before it. Waterfront wags dubbed it Aspinwall's Folly - until it made Hong Kong in 99 days, and returned to New York in an unprecedented 84.
More remarkable still, the so-called Folly reached an unheard-of speed of 14 knots, a full 6 knots faster than the finest ships had boasted in strongest winds at the turn of the century. It was this speed, according to Whipple, that earned the Rainbow's merchant-patrons an enormous profit and earned Griffiths a reputation as America's foremost ship designer.
But Griffiths wasn't satisfied. He worked to improve his designs, which in 1846 resulted in the Sea Witch, the first true clipper, characterized by a daringly sharp bow. The Sea Witch set records in each of her successive voyages to China, attaining in one burst a speed of 16 knots.
The revolution had sounded, and Griffiths soon ranked as the most sought-after marine architect in America. His renown was to increase further with the design of the Challenge for the Griswolds. Griffiths not only expanded the scale of his previous ships to fit the increased size of this new creation, he honed the already sharp bow to a knife's edge, producing the first "extreme clipper," as the class of ship came to be known.
But whereas one man might design a ship, it took a league of hundreds to build one, all of them moving in lockstep to the orders of the master shipwright. The Griswolds knew just who should build their coup de grâce.
The Shipbuilder
More than a year before the launch of the Challenge, Griffiths delivered the plans for this largest of clippers to shipbuilder William H. Webb. The Griswolds instructed Webb to disregard expense in the Challenge's manufacture, so long as the ship was the largest, fastest, and sturdiest vessel afloat, and Webb took the brothers at their word.
Before the keel was laid, Webb first translated the fruit of Griffiths' drafting table into a realistic model. Unlike European craftsmen of the time, who carved their ship models from a single piece of wood, Americans like Webb used the "lift model." This technique required the representation of the ship to be completed in horizontal layers, or "lifts," which were held together with dowels. Because these segments could be separated from one another, they allowed the shipwright the liberty to test various modifications of the hull simply by alternating layers. So instrumental was this step that maritime scholars have credited the very evolution of the clipper to American builders' dependence on this design technique.
Once Webb was totally satisfied with his simulation, the model was again separated into layers, each of which was outlined on graph paper and measured. These dimensions were next taken to the "mold loft," a giant barnlike edifice on whose floor each lift was drawn in real size in differing colors of chalk, one on top of the other. The untrained eye might have seen only a crazy quilt of intersecting angles. But not Webb, nor his master shipwrights. They could look at the floor and visualize the nascent ship in the round. It was at this stage that Webb made his final creative contribution, fine-tuning the measurements until he was satisfied.
By this time, the shipyard was stacked with timbers, sorted by size, shape, and type of wood. In his definitive book on the Challenge, Whipple asserts that America had a great advantage over other maritime nations in its access to not only unimaginable quantities of lumber but a far greater variety as well. The Challenge used numerous species. The keel, for instance, was constructed of white oak, as was the ship's planking, its 6-inch-thick skin. The "knees," ribs of the ship that provide the shape of the hull, were composed of the best live oak from the swampy forests of the Southeast. Live oak was extremely expensive and so famed for its tensile strength that it could barely be bent into the L-shape of the knee. Instead, Webb picked out specific pieces where a large branch intersected the trunk at the proper angle. White pine was used for the decks as well as the masts, for which several separate tree trunks were joined at three points called doublings.
As the hull construction progressed, laborers moved across scaffolds to drill holes through the hull wherever two planks met. They were followed by other workers, who inserted treenails - pronounced "truh-nals" - into the holes. Made of locust wood and cured by weeks of direct sunlight, these round plugs were inserted through the overlapping planks, then, with wedges driven into their ends, crimped tight. When soaked with water, the locust wood expanded.
In the final steps of hull construction, the portion that would be submerged was sheathed in copper, then a vast team of painters streamed over the construction, applying coat after coat of thick black lacquer. Observers at the time were convinced that nothing could destroy this unprecedented feat of engineering.
A month before it was supposed to embark, the Challenge was set down into the East River before the largest crowd ever gathered for an event of its kind. "I have seen many launches," wrote one spectator in a New York newspaper afterward. "But never have I witnessed such interest and excitement before." The hype had crested even before the Challenge had undergone the most crucial and technologically demanding step of all: the rigging of the ship's sail plan. For this final stage, the Griswolds tapped the acknowledged master of not only the ships he captained but of the various theories of sail.
The Driver
Robert Waterman was the dark, curly-haired dandy of Manhattan's social and business elite. He was also the nation's preeminent clipper captain, known as a ruthless driver of ships as well as of the crews that worked their sails. Waterman's runs were so consistently fast that he built a reputation as having a mysterious extra sense, a metaphysical ability to ghost his way through light airs. Carl Cutler, in his 1930 book Greyhounds of the Sea, puts a 20th-century spin on the phenomenon: "Waterman brought to his work an alert, anticipatory intelligence that is rarely matched on land or sea. If there is such a thing as a wind sense, he had it." It's probably no accident that Waterman built much of that reputation on Griffiths' Sea Witch.
The Griswolds seduced Waterman out of early retirement (he was 42 in 1851) for both his skill as a driver and his mastery of the science of sail rigging. Given his understanding - even if intuitive - of aerodynamics, Waterman was truly a technologist: As with all the protagonists in the story of the Challenge, it was largely through the application of knowledge and science that he became successful. He possessed a profound understanding of how each of the 45 or more different sails common to a clipper worked, and how best to program them in order to maintain high speeds in diverse winds.
For instance, in rounding Cape Horn, Waterman might have close-hauled his sails, bringing them nearly parallel with the prevailing head winds. He might have partially closed the great lower sails and entirely furled those higher up, whose force might have threatened to dismast the ship. But understanding the need to maintain power when headed into a heavy sea, he would have kept the second-highest sails, the topsails, wide open, so that he could move against even the strongest gusts.
Sailing talents aside, the Challenge captain didn't earn the nickname Bully Waterman for nothing. Reaching the fastest possible speed on a long voyage meant changing the rigging with every little shift in the wind, and that often meant sending the crew aloft in gale-force weather. What was it like to be standing several hundred feet above a 30-foot sea in a raging storm? Imagine a roller coaster without any restraining device, and you're just partway there. And though anyone who drove a ship at the time was ready to use the lash in order to enforce discipline, Waterman was known for an especially liberal hand.
Long before directing his crew, however, Waterman was in charge of designing a rigging system that would take advantage of the Challenge's enormous size and hull refinements. To that end, he insisted that the ship's masts reach higher than any previous, so that the vessel could exploit very high, light winds. Her perpendicular yards (the horizontal beams from which a sail hangs) were also to reach farther out over the water than any other ship's. With studding sails - extra sails that could be added extempore to the end of each yard - the Challenge's main yard measured 160 feet wide. And despite his reputation as a cruel taskmaster, Waterman designed the ship's rigging so that his crew could work from the protection of the main deck, avoiding exposure to waves that could sweep them from the raised decks at the ship's front and back.
The Griswolds challenged their captain to reach San Francisco within 90 days and break the current record for the passage. If he did, he was to be awarded a bonus of $10,000 on top of his fee. And on the day the Challenge set sail, dockside speculators were already betting in his favor. Even as the a transcontinental railroad was more and more a subject of breathless discussion, and even as the steamship came into wide use, the observers of the Challenge believed that no technology would outstrip this ship and clippers like it. They waxed rhapsodic about the inventiveness and expertise of those in the business, investing millions of dollars in an industry they believed would only continue to grow, in a country sure to enter a period of prolonged peace and prosperity.
Epilogue
The Challenge failed to make its target time traveling to San Francisco. The ship took 108 days to make the passage, while a rival vessel, Flying Cloud, took 89, a sailing record that remained unbroken until 1989. At least nine sailors died on the voyage, one from wounds inflicted by the first mate during an attempted mutiny, three from falling off the yards while rounding Cape Horn, and five more from disease, exhaustion, and malnourishment. On arrival, Captain Waterman and his mate were indicted on charges ranging from "malicious cruelty" to murder.
And within three years, America's miracle economy fell victim to speculation and fiscal excess. A record 125 clippers were launched in 1853. In 1854, that number dropped to six. By 1857, shipping rates had declined from their high of $70 per ton to $10. The US entered a spiraling depression.
During the Civil War, at least 14 clippers fell under Confederate torches. Many of those remaining were finally sold to the British at a fraction of their original cost. Although so many in the shipping trades had failed early on to see its promise, in 1869 the transnational railroad was completed and began serving gold rush passengers at a fraction of the cost of a clipper ship's passage. Then, soon after, the twin propeller greatly increased the speed and dependability of the steam-driven ship, which was already safer and cheaper than the clipper.
In 1876, the Challenge itself ran aground off the French coast. A heavy sea pounded her hull into bits.
