Under Full Sail Read online

  Griffiths even created a design-testing tank so he could prove his theories by towing small models in it, and study wave patterns and drag readings. It was these endeavours that convinced him that the ‘cod’s head and mackerel tail’ theory behind the shape of existing ships was wrong. His designs were long and lean and had a V-shaped bottom instead of flat floors.

  Rainbow was very much the centre of attention while being built on the waterfront in New York. She certainly impressed her backers, Howland & Aspinwall, after she was launched. Her top speed was a remarkable 14 knots, a rare achievement for ships of this time . . . and much more was to come. Little wonder that she was classified as an ‘extreme’ sailing vessel.

  Immediately she proved her worth on the China run, but sadly her career was to be short-lived. On 17 March 1848, she sailed out of New York Harbour on her fifth voyage, bound for China via the Chilean port of Valparaiso, and was never sighted again. It was thought that she had foundered off Cape Horn in bad weather with the loss of all hands.

  Rainbow would not be the only clipper ship of the era to disappear without trace: over the years an astonishing number of them would depart a port, sail over the horizon and never be seen again. The most common cause of these losses was gung-ho young captains like Bully Forbes, keen to break records and reap rewards, who would drive their ships too hard in extreme conditions. In such circumstances it would take only the combination of high wind strength and a massive rogue wave for the helmsman – or helmsmen, as some ships had twin steering wheels – to lose control.

  Almost inevitably, the ship would then broach across the face of a wave, be knocked down to a position where she was beyond her stability point-of-no-return, and be overwhelmed. With her masts in the water and sails flogging wildly, there would be no possibility of her recovery. Instead, within minutes, she would be overwhelmed by the might and brutality of subsequent waves before her hull filled with water and she sank.

  Sad as the loss of Rainbow was, she would forever be recognised as the foundation and standard-bearer of the remarkable clipper-ship era.

  Griffith’s next clipper, Sea Witch, a 170-foot-long three-master, was launched in 1846, again out of the Smith & Dimon shipyard. Months later, she stunned the New York waterfront when she arrived back in her home port with a cargo of tea from Hong Kong after just seventy-seven days at sea. At the time, the same passage would take a conventional cargo vessel around 160 days to complete.

  However, it was two years later that her true potential became undeniable.

  On 25 March 1849, a tiny white speck was seen on the distant horizon off the entrance to New York Harbour. Its approach aroused interest for those standing high on the hills at Navesink, just inland from the coast, primarily because its proportions were growing at a rapid rate. In a very little time, discussion centred on what this might be – obviously it was a sailing ship, but never before had one been seen to close on New York so quickly.

  This ship had every possible sail aloft, including studding sails set to windward. Lookouts who were in position to semaphore news of any approaching ship to downtown New York struggled to recognise the ship’s identity; they agreed she looked like a clipper, and if she was, she could only be returning from China with a cargo of tea, but the first of those was not expected so soon.

  A little later, when the ship was close enough to the coast to be identified using a telescope, the lookouts were stunned. This was Sea Witch on her return voyage, fully laden with tea.

  Her hard-driving master was one of the more colourful characters on the high seas at the time, American Robert ‘Bully’ Waterman, who had worked closely with Griffiths on the clipper’s design. His major contribution had related to the design of the rig and the amount of sail the ship would carry.

  Bully Waterman was on his way to achieving what no one thought possible. He was on the verge of completing what was usually a six-month passage from Hong Kong to New York in just seventy-four days, beating by three days the record time he had set two years earlier. To this day, this new mark has never been beaten by a commercial sailing vessel.

  *

  The birth of the clipper coincided with an era when navigators were developing techniques and equipment that would bring a new dimension to ocean travel.

  Matthew Fontaine Maury was an American naval officer who became known as the father of modern oceanography and naval meteorology. As the first superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory, over many decades, Maury gathered and studied the logs and charts of vessels that had traversed the world’s oceans, an effort that led him to develop highly detailed data relating to wind and current patterns, the likes of which had never been known. His subsequent publications showed how ships following his course directions between ports, while often covering a substantially greater distance than the direct route, could reduce their time for the passage by days, sometimes weeks.

  He also developed a theory about the existence of a northwest passage, his hypothesis being that an area of ocean in the region of the North Pole was on some occasions not frozen over, which meant it would be possible to sail a ship around the top of North America west to east and enter the Atlantic. This conclusion came to him after he analysed the logs he had gathered from old whaling ships. It had been noted in some of those logs that markings on harpoons embedded in whales captured in the Atlantic showed the harpoons had come from ships based in the North Pacific. Recognising that the timeframe was too short for them to have migrated from one ocean to the other via Cape Horn, Maury deduced that those whales must have been able to surface to breathe over the thousands of miles they would have to travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. This meant that a north-west passage must exist – probably not every summer season, but certainly during some. His hypothesis was confirmed as fact in 1854, when Irishman Robert McClure crossed the passage partly by ship and partly by sledge. Then, half a century later, Norwegian Roald Amundsen made the first successful transit solely by boat.

  On the opposite side of the Atlantic around the same time, John Thomas Towson was developing a separate theory that would revolutionise the art of navigating the world’s oceans. Towson started his commercial life as a successful maker of watches and navigational chronometers, but his talents and intelligence were such that history would see him as a contributor to many facets of life. Among his many noted achievements was the invention of a method for taking a photographic picture on glass, and the application of this method to the development of the reflecting camera.

  In the mid–1840s Towson turned his attention to navigation, and in particular the ‘great circle’ route. He devised a set of tables to allow the easy calculation of a great circle course – where by sailing an arc between two points and not along a latitude, the distance to be sailed would be considerably less.

  The benefits of this new navigational method were immediately proved on crossings of the Atlantic, and were soon being applied on many passages to and from Australia and New Zealand, in particular on the long legs across the southern seas.

  When the great circle route was coupled with the benefits that came from Maury’s research into the world’s ocean currents and wind patterns, the sailing time between England and the Antipodes by all ships could be reduced by weeks. It meant that the high-speed clippers could now make this journey at unimaginable speeds.

  *

  It usually took a year to build one of these leviathan vessels. The timber to be used for the ship’s construction – usually maple or oak in North America – had been felled up to a year before the build commenced, so that the majority of the sap, which could cause rot, had dried out.

  The designer, who was also often the builder, would often start with a 6-foot-long timber block and carve out what was called a half-model – one half of the ship cut lengthwise. Made using a mallet, chisels, saws and fairing equipment, the half-model was created to the hull lines drawn by the designer, with a bit of ‘feel’ often added to the shape by the builder.

/>   When this model was completed to everyone’s satisfaction, templates were taken from it at the proposed frame intervals then expanded to full size. This was achieved with the use of flexible battens and chalk: the battens were bent to the shape of each individual frame then that shape was scribed in full size onto the lofting floor using chalk. Patterns were then taken from these chalked lines so that all the frames and main timbers of the ship could be produced with the highest degree of accuracy. A timber structure that would form the platform for the vessel’s construction was erected at the edge of a waterway; this would also serve as a launching slipway. While some carpenters built the full-sized, horseshoe-shaped frames that would form the ship’s hull, others lifted completed frames into place with the assistance of large derricks, the cables of which were attached to work horses that plodded across the yard.

  Slowly but surely, the frames took on the shape of a giant ribcage, until all stood in place from bow to stern. The planks that would cover the hull were steamed in large ovens so that they became pliable enough to be bent around the frames. They were attached using treenails (pronounced ‘trunnels’): short lengths of dowel that were wedged into holes bored through the plank and the frame using an auger.

  When the ship-building industry was at its zenith in northeastern America, some 10,000 craftsmen – carpenters, joiners, dubbers, caulkers, riggers, mast-makers and the like – were employed by the yards in New York, Boston and elsewhere. From sun-up to sun-down the air along the waterfront was filled with the sounds of hammering, sawing and cussing as the workers went about their task, creating another maritime masterpiece from more than 1000 tons of timber.

  These industrious endeavours also provided great interest for the public: the construction of each clipper ship was monitored by enthusiastic spectators, thousands of whom would often be on hand for the launching ceremony.

  One regular visitor to the yards was noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was so captivated by the genesis of these majestic clipper ships that he dedicated a poem to them. It was titled ‘The Building of the Ship’, and described the entire procedure, starting with the making of the half-model:

  And first with nicest skill and art,

  Perfect and finished in every part,

  A little model the Master wrought,

  Which should be to the larger plan

  What the child is to the man,

  Its counterpart in miniature . . .

  Then, as the grand size and shape of the vessel became apparent, he wrote:

  Day by day the vessel grew,

  With timbers fashioned strong and true,

  Stemson and keelson and sternson-knee,

  Till, framed with perfect symmetry,

  A skeleton ship rose up to view!

  And around the bows and along the side

  The heavy hammers and mallets plied,

  Till after many a week, at length,

  Wonderful for form and strength,

  Sublime in its enormous bulk,

  Loomed aloft the shadowy hulk!

  With their ships continually left in the wake of the fleet-footed new ‘Yankee clippers’, the ship owners of Britain had change forced upon them. Eventually they would respond with their own versions of the American design, but in the meantime, if they were to be competitive, the shipping companies had no option but to buy vessels from America and Canada.

  The clipper ship design concept also influenced the shape of many sailing vessels built for pleasure in the mid-nineteenth century. The most famous of these was the 101-foot schooner America, which sailed across the Atlantic to Cowes, England, in 1851 and promptly trounced the best vessels the English could muster for a race around the Isle of Wight. The trophy she won would soon take the winning yacht’s name: it became the America’s Cup. Her victory in England was the start of what would become the longest winning streak in international sporting history: 132 years. After surviving twenty-four international challenges for the trophy, the New York Yacht Club finally lost the America’s Cup to the Australian contender Australia II in 1983.

  The actual impact that the clippers had on international maritime trade during their dominance is seen in the numbers. Their chubby-cheeked and cumbersome predecessors struggled to exceed 6 knots under full sail; the captain and crew would brag about covering 150 nautical miles in a day over pints of warm beer in the dimly lit and smoke-filled dock-front bars when they reached port.

  But in the early 1850s the newfangled clippers were leaving a frothing white wake streaming behind them while covering 250 nautical miles in a day. In 1854 Champion of the Seas – the second-largest clipper ever to sail the passenger service between England and Australia – covered an astonishing 465 nautical miles on a noon-to-noon run during her maiden outward-bound voyage. Her average speed for the twenty-four hours was almost 20 knots!

  Clippers were the perfect fit for the challenge that came with the tea market out of China, and the need to get cargoes of tea back to America and Europe as quickly as possible. This was a test that became the basis for legendary races between rival ships, races that could today be identified as the first trans-ocean sailing contests the world has known.

  For those on board, the greatest adrenalin rush came when a clipper would surf down a large sea then become semi-submerged as the white, foaming bow wave burst onto the foredeck and flooded aft. Yet such occasions were made even more exciting when there was a rival in sight, as was the case in this reflection (probably embellished) from midshipman Frederick Paton. At the time he was well braced on the deck of the charging tea clipper Flying Spur:

  One morning Flying Spur was snoring through the NE trades under all sail to royal staysails, with her lower yards just touching the backstays. At 11.20am a sail was sighted on the horizon ahead. This proved to be the Glasgow clipper, Lochleven Castle, 80 days out from Rangoon to Liverpool. At 1pm the Flying Spur was up with her, and as we went foaming by, the Lochleven Castle’s main topgallant sail went to ribbons with a clap of thunder, and her mainsail split from top to bottom; at the same moment our cook with all his pots and pans was washed from the galley to the break of the poop. An hour and a half later the Lochleven Castle was out of sight astern.

  After three spectacular decades – from 1845 to 1875 – the era of the clipper ships began to wane. Their presence on the high seas began to be overtaken by that of the smoke-belching, coal-consuming, soot-covered steamships. Worse still, for so many of the men and women who had been part of this most majestic period in maritime history, the transition from one form of ocean transport to another was difficult to witness – like seeing the ever-so-graceful albatross, which glided effortlessly across the undulating surface of a seemingly boundless blue ocean, replaced by an ungainly mechanical contraption.

  However, in those thirty or so years when the clippers were in their prime, they played a key role in the transformation of much of the world.

  Commercially, the timing of the clippers’ emergence proved more providential than anyone could have imagined to the tea trade and other businesses. Yet almost simultaneously, much broader opportunities transpired: to carry millions of passengers along maritime highways to the scenes of the two major 1850s gold rushes, and to transfer migrants from their home countries to emerging lands of hope and opportunity. The impact of clipper ships was such that it has been asserted Marco Polo alone carried 15,000 passengers to Australia, and as a result more than 1 million Australians can now lay claim to being descendants of those same travellers.

  While the presence of the clippers in commercial enterprise spanned only three decades, their record-breaking achievements would stand unmatched in the history of sail. And on rare occasions, the commanders and navigators who helped achieve these feats were actually women.

  The true spirit of these clippers was embodied in their names. Many ships built in the first half of the nineteenth century were registered with uninspiring names like Agnes, Maggie Lauder, Euphemia, Ellen and Wallace. But not the
clippers. They sailed proudly under names such as Champion of the Seas, Romance of the Seas, Cutty Sark, Dreadnought, Flying Cloud, Great Australia, Lightning, Great Republic, Neptune’s Car and Sea Witch.

  These ships were so magnificent to see under sail that some observers drew on the words of Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair to best describe them:

  She walks the waters like a thing of life

  And seems to dare the elements to strife

  The clippers were ground-breaking, record-breaking and history-making. There was nothing else like them, nor will there ever be.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Golden Clippers

  The Californian gold rush, the American clipper industry and the first female sailors

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the finding of two gold nuggets in the shallow and crystal-clear water of an American mountain stream, and the discovery of more nuggets in the Australian bush, would dramatically enrich the history and growth of both countries in an almost identical way.

  The great gold rushes that both these events triggered – the first in California in 1848 and the second in Australia three years later – were fuelled by a belief among prospectors that unimaginable wealth could be unearthed with ease. But there were as many benefits for the State as there were for successful diggers.

  In both circumstances, the discovery of gold could not have come at a more expedient time for national development. Life for the majority in both countries was tough, migration to many areas – particularly to rural regions – had stagnated, and consequently the economic future of both nations was cloaked in uncertainty.

  Then, almost overnight, in both America and Australia, gold fever brought the masses to the diggings from across the nation and the world. And linking both historic events were the mighty clipper ships, the fastest form of maritime transport for prospectors heading from both distant and foreign ports to the fields of gold.