Four clippers sailed from New York in March 1851, and one sailed from Boston. The Gazelle sailed from New York on the 4th under Captain Henderson, and the Ino on the 12th under Captain R. E. Little.
The Donald McKay packet, Joshua Bates, under the command of Captain Easterbrook, sailed from New York in company with the Ino, and arrived at San Francisco in 156 days.
The tonnage of the Gazelle was twice that of the Ino, but both made 134-day passages. The Gazelle was built at William Webb's shipyard and had many of the features found in the Baltimore clippers and Webb thought her extreme deadrise to be excessive, but built her as her owners dictated. She proved to be fast in moderate winds, but could not match the large flatter floored clippers in the heavy winds. Captain Henderson of the Gazelle became quite sick early in the voyage and over the last fifty days was totally blind. One of the Gazelle's owners, Captain Dollard, made a swift journey from New York to New Grenada (known today as Panama) and crossed the Isthmus and took over command of the Gazelle in San Francisco.
The Maine built Alert cleared New York with Captain Bartlett in command on March 15th for a long 150-day passage. The Architect, under Captain Casper, followed on March 20th, and made a quite respectable 116-day passage to the Golden Gate.
The Shooting Star, 903 tons, was an extreme clipper that was built at Medford, Massachusetts by James O. Curtis for Reed, Wade & Co., of Boston and launched February 8, 1851. The Shooting Star cleared Boston on March 22, 1851, under Captain Judah P. Parker. A female figurehead clothed all in white garments wearing a girdle of stars graced her long, sharp bow. On her maiden run, she was dismasted in the South Atlantic and had to put into Rio Janeiro for repairs before completing her voyage of 124 sailing days.
The Game Cock sailed from New York on April 3, 1851, and sprung her mainmast in the South Atlantic on the 24th and was forced to put into Rio Janeiro.
The Witchcraft was commanded by Captain William C. Rogers, the son of one of her owners, and cleared from New York on April 4, 1851, to chase after the Game Cock and Shooting Star around the Horn. The South Atlantic took a heavy toll on most of the extreme clippers in 1851, and the Witchcraft was no exception for she, too, lost spars and had to put into Rio Janeiro for repairs and caught up with the Game Cock.
After 21 days at Rio, the Witchcraft set sail again for the Horn and sailed through the Golden Gate on August 11, 1851, in 107 sailing days, with a record passage of 62 days from Rio Janeiro.
On October 2nd, the Witchcraft cleared for Hong Kong and ran into a fierce squall 42 days out where she lost all three topmasts with everything attached. At Hong Kong, her captain could not find suitable replacement spars and had to settle for improvised teak wood spars which took three months to complete. The repairs were expensive costing $28,832 dollars. The Witchcraft sailed from Hong Kong on March 30, 1852, and 44 days later arrived back at San Francisco. Then sailed back across the Pacific to Shanghai, and from there to the Cape of Good Hope and on to New York. Captain Rogers, an owner's son, who had crawled through cabin window instead of the hawse pipe, had made a very good go of it.
The Game Cock was laid up in Rio Janeiro for 57 days for expensive repairs and reached San Francisco after 129 sailing days. From there, she sailed for Honolulu and Hong Kong, and then to Bombay and back. She left Whampoa on May 20, 1852, for the Cape of Good Hope and New York in 123 sailing days, very good time considering that it was the poorest season.
The N.B. Palmer and Charles Porter Low
The Houqua, Samuel Russell, and the Oriental had all proven themselves to be fine clippers as designed for the China trade. The Samuel Russell under Charles Porter Low's command, had made such an outstanding 109-day run around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1850. Where she was hailed as the "Queen of the clipper fleet" and made their owners so much money that the Lows had sent their agents scurrying up to East Boston the year before to Samuel Hall's shipyard. There, they had urged on the hasty collaboration of Samuel Harte Pook and the master shipbuilder to build the Surprise, along with Captain Phillip Dumaresq's supervision.
As the Surprise was rounding Cape Horn on her roaring maiden run to San Francisco to eclipse the Sea Witch's 97-day record by a day, a new Low clipper took shape on the stocks along the East River.
Jacob Bell's shipyard was swamped with work at the time. So the Low's chose to have their next clipper built at the shipyard of Westervelt & Mackey. Where the work was done under the supervision of Captain Nat in his fourth collaboration with the Lows to build a clipper suitable for all the trade routes of the world. The new clipper was be named the N. B. Palmer in honor of Captain Nat who had brought so much honor to A. A. Low & Bro. in the early clipper days over the China run.
She was quite large for a tea clipper, 202: 6 x 38: 6 x 21: 9. Captain Nat designed her with great seaworthiness in mind that incorporated certain mild features of the Dramatic Line Packets that Captain Nat had helped design and sail across the North Atlantic in his earlier days in the service of E. K. Collins. What he ended up with was a clipper able to withstand the turbulent seas of Cape Horn on the run to San Francisco. As well as a clipper able to catch the light trade winds across the Pacific and Indian oceans in the race to get back to New York ahead of the fleet with her precious cargo of tea. The "Palmer" was designed with buoyancy in mind in her after body as well as mid-ship-body to withstand the heavy weather she would encounter off Cape Horn and while sailing against the monsoons.
The Lows tried to get Captain Nat to come out of retirement to take the "Palmer" out on her maiden run around the Horn, but he declined.
The extreme clipper N. B. Palmer, 1399 tons, was launched at the New York shipyard of Westervelt & Mackey on February 5, 1851, and placed in command of Charles Porter Low.
For Charles Porter Low there was no other life but the sea. He was the youngest member of the Low clan who had moved to New York with his family from Salem in 1834 when he was ten years old. Despite all of his family's efforts to have young Charles join them in the counting house, Charles Porter Low had his sights on a sailing career and nothing was going to get in the way of that, regardless of his family's wishes.
Young fourteen-year-old Charles would often sneak away from the dry-goods store where he was learning the family business, and run off to the South Street waterfront to climb the rigging of ships moored along the piers. From the lofty heights, the forest of masts that ran along the East River and the constant activity along South Street below greeted him with a sense of wonder and excitement and spurred him on to his destiny. A prosperous life in the Low's New York counting house or a Canton Hong was not in the cards for him. But his family was not quite ready to let him go.
At fifteen, he was working at one of his father's stores on Fletcher Street across the street from a sailors' boardinghouse, where Charles spent many hours listening to tall sea tales, all the while learning many practical lessons of seamanship in his conversations with the sailors.
At sixteen, young Charles tried to stow away aboard the schooner Mazeppa, owned by his older brother Abbot, only to be discovered hiding in the bread locker before the schooner set sail. By then, his family was convinced that young Charles would only find happiness while at sea and agreed to send him to navigation school.
Then in November 1842, his family allowed him to ship before the mast as a cabin boy, at no pay, aboard the 470-ton Horatio. It was a Grinnell & Minturn ship commanded by Captain Howland, engaged in the China trade, that was known for four successive 104-day average out-of-season passages to and from China. Young Charles made one round voyage to China and back.
Young Charles' next ship was the Liverpool transatlantic sailing packet Toronto designed by Christian Bergh in 1835, where he served as an ordinary seaman. Four weeks after leaving the Toronto, young Charles "longed for the sea again" and soon shipped out as an able seaman aboard the Courier, the coffee trader owned by Andrew Foster that Donald McKay had built in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Charles served as an able seaman over the course of many fast runs between New York and Rio de Janeiro while the Courier was under the command of Captain William Wolfe. Of the Courier Charles Low wrote in his memoirs:
. . . after being on board the Toronto it seemed like child's play to handle her royal and topgallant sails.. . . . The voyage was one of the pleasantest I ever made.
When the Houqua was completed, Charles served as Third Mate under Captain Nat for her maiden voyage to Canton. He worked his way up to Second Mate, then First Mate under the steady command succession of Palmer brothers, as Captain Nat passed on command of the Houqua to Alexander, and then to Theodore.
Charles Low took his first command of the Houqua at the age of twenty-three. Captain Low soon proved his worth when a fierce typhoon caught up with the Houqua in the Indian Ocean, where her sails were quickly torn away from her masts, and the Houqua's hull rolled over on her beam ends sweeping Low overboard. Low saved himself by grabbing a line as he was falling and pulled himself back aboard. To save the Houqua, he slashed her rigging and let go her masts. All hands were soon at the pumps as Low jury-rigged the Houqua and made it to Hong Kong, three thousand miles away, where he was able to sell the Houqua's water-damaged cargo for a profit.
Captain Charles Porter Low then went on to take command of the Samuel Russell in 1850. He proved her to be the "Queen of the Cape Horn clipper fleet" when he brought her through the Golden Gate with a record 109-day passage. Low and his clipper held the record for 79 days before the Sea Witch came sailing through the Golden Gate on July 24th with a 97-day run. Later on in that same year Captain Low and the Samuel Russell made an outstanding run of 70 hours from Woosung to Hong Kong.
Over those four years, Charles Porter Low had proven himself as an able captain and had earned the right to take command of the N. B. Palmer.
Captain Low had recently taken a wife and Sarah Tucker Low decided to accompany her new husband on this voyage.
New Yorkers took notice of the Low's new clipper loading cargo at the East River docks. The N. B. Palmer cleared New York on May 6, 1851 on her maiden voyage, crossing the equator in 23 days, and made it around the Horn through the Golden Gate on August 21st, after a quite respectable passage of 107 days. From there, she sailed to Hong Kong for a cargo of tea, where she created quite a sensation among the British. A model of the N. B. Palmer was a popular exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851.
Captain Low was extremely proud of the N. B. Palmer and entertained lavishly aboard his ship as "a princely host" wherever she made port. Over the years, the N. B. Palmer established a reputation as a very fast ship and an excellent sea boat in heavy weather.
For over the next twenty years, Charles Low would remain with the N. B. Palmer until she was sold in 1872. Over that time, she was considered to be the most popular ship in the ports of Shanghai and Hong Kong where she was affectionately known as "the Yacht." The British honored her in 1863 as the "gem of the harbor" at Queen Victoria's birthday celebration at the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Flags flew all over her on that memorable occasion and Chinese lanterns throughout her rigging lit up the evening sky.
The Witch of the Wave
The Witch of the Wave, 1498 tons, was a very sharp and heavily sparred extreme clipper, said to be longer and leaner than her sister ship, the Sea Serpent, was launched from George Raynes' shipyard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 6, 1851. Both clippers were designed by Raynes and had the same 40-inch dead-rise at half-floor. Her main yard stretched out horizontally capable of laying out a spread of canvas to 81 feet over her clear and unobstructed decks. Her between-decks were most spacious. Her luxurious staterooms were fitted out in the finest manner of the day with rosewood, birds-eye maple, satin, and zebra wood, and white and gold cornices and mouldings.
A young lightly clad woman in flowing white and gold garments with feet barely touching the crest of the wave graced the Witch of the Wave's bow, and a child floating on a seashell drawn by dolphins graced her stern. An imp riding on a dolphin graced her port side, all done by John W. Mason of Boston. In charge of this work was Martin Fernald. The new clipper made her first round the world voyage with everything intact.
She was built for Glidden & Williams and Hunt & Peabody of Boston, and was to be towed to Salem, her home port, on May first. But sudden squalls, winds, and rain forced Captain Bertram to postpone the activities for a day, leaving those guests who had arrived early leisure time to inspect the ship.
Ephraim F. Miller, Collector of the Port of Salem, offered up a toast:
Success to the newest and youngest of the Salem Witches. She, perhaps, includes in her composition an equal amount of craft with her unfortunate predecessors. Had they possessed a proportional share of her beauty, we are confident that the sternest tribunal before which any of them were arraigned would never have had the heart to subject a single one to the trial to which their successor is designed, the 'Trial by Water.'
A pleasant breeze blew out of the northwest the following morning and Portsmouth bustled with excitement. Wagons arrived loaded down with bags, hampers, and boxes of good food, all packed in ice.
Soon, the R. B. Forbes steamed up the river and made ready to assist the Witch to her new homeport of Salem. The invited guests arrived on the morning train from Salem, Newburyport, and Boston, to join the Portsmouth guests, bringing up the numbers to over 200 people.
At eleven o'clock on May 2nd, all was ready and the Witch of the Wave, with colors flying, was towed down the river while the Boston Cadet Band played "The Star Spangled Banner," as the crowds that thronged along the waterfront wharves and shipyards cheered on. The R. B. Forbes, with the Witch in tow, passed through the narrows and rounded New Castle Point, and set her course for Cape Ann.
It was a beautiful clear sunny day and there were riggers aboard and the temptation to set some sails was too hard to resist. With her topsails, jib and fore topmast stay sail soon up and braced, the Witch soon began to dart through the water, just like a fish. Soon, she began to range up on the weather beam of the R. B. Forbes skipping along the blue waves that caught the sparkle of the sun through the spray.
Great joy erupted on board the Witch as the guests clapped hands and waved their handkerchiefs while the band played "A Life on the Ocean Wave." It was all too much for the R. B. Forbes as she tried to steam on ahead at thirty pounds pressure to try to keep ahead of the Witch. Finally, the Witch relented and took in her topsail yards, leaving only her small canvas to catch the winds. The two vessels rounded Thacher's Island as a banquet was served in the between-decks with tables decorated with the ensigns of all nations. Following the banquet, speeches were made by several prominent citizens. Among them, E. H. Derby, grandson of "King Darby," of early Salem fame, and others. The following account recorded the occasion:
Ship Witch of the Wave,
Off Salem Light, May 2, 1851.
At a meeting of invited guests, held this afternoon, it was unanimously "Resolved--That the ladies and gentlemen here assembled gratefully acknowledge the courtesy, kindness, and generous hospitality of Captain John Bertram and the other owners of the Witch of the Wave, on this festive day, and tender their best wishes for the success of this noble vessel.
E. H. Derby, Chairman.
Charles H. Parker, Secretary.
Later on in May, the Witch sailed to Boston and began loading 1900 tons of mixed cargo for San Francisco. The Witch cleared Boston on May 20, 1851, and was off on her maiden voyage, to chase after the Southern Cross that had left Boston the day before, so heavily loaded down with cargo that she barely seemed afloat. Still, she made it through the Golden Gate in 123 days and was the rare exception that year for she was not dismasted over the voyage.
From there, she made a 40-day run across the Pacific to Hong Kong. The Witch of the Wave sailed from Whampoa on January 5, 1852, at the height of the Northeast monsoon season, for Anjier, arriving there in 7 days, 12 hours, just shy of the record. From there, the Witch made excellent time to the Cape of Good Hope and in 90 days out of Whampoa, was working her way to windward up the English Channel with no other vessel even coming close to her. The British press was quick to take note of her: The Illustrated London News pictured her with studding sails flying on the mainmast up to the royals. The London Times article said this of the Witch:
The Witch of the Wave had been received into East India dock from Canton, having made one of the most rapid voyages on record and brought one of the most valuable cargoes of tea that has ever entered London-19,000 chests of the first quality. She was built at Salem, near the port of New York, last year. From China she made the passage to the Downs in 90 days and had she not encountered a strong easterly wind in the Channel, she would have done it several days sooner. As it was she was four days beating up the Channel from the Chops to river, while some of our large English vessels were two weeks. She is the object of much interest as she lies at the dock. Her bows are similar to those of a large cutter yacht.
The May 1, 1852 edition of the Illustrated London News elaborated even further:
This large and beautiful clipper-built ship, commanded by Captain Millet, recently arrived in the East India Docks, Blackwall, from Canton, having made one of the most extraordinary and rapid voyages on record; she also brought one of the most valuable cargoes of tea that perhaps ever entered the port of London, having on board no fewer than 19,000 chests of tea of the choicest quality.
This vessel is of 1,400 tons burthen, and was built at Salem, near New York, in the course of last year. She first proceeded to California, thence to Hong-Kong, and sailed from Whampoa, near Canton, on the 5th of January; made the passage to Java Head in seven days twelve hours; then had the wind W.S.W. to N.W. for several days, with a light trade wind, and made the Cape in twenty-nine days, then encountered strong easterly winds from the Western Isles, and took a pilot off Dungeness on the 4th of April, making the passage from China to the Downs in ninety days-a trip surpassing the celebrated runs of the Oriental and Surprise clippers.
Had she not encountered the strong easterly winds up the Channel, she would have made the voyage several days earlier; as it was, she was only four days beating up from the chops of the Channel, while some of our large vessels were nearly a fortnight doing the distance.
The Witch of the Wave left the river on Thursday, the 22nd ult., and while in the docks was an object of great interest, her bows and general appearance being similar to the America yacht, which carried off the plate at Cowes last year.
By the above it will be seen that she sailed round the world in ten months and a half, including loading and discharging at the above ports. The greatest distance she ran on the voyage was 338 miles in twenty-four hours.
( * The author notes that both accounts presented here got the location of where the Witch of the Wave was built wrong. The Witch was built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. )
The Witch of the Wave
On April 22, 1852, the Witch left London and 23 days later arrived in Boston, where she quickly loaded up for another voyage around the Horn to San Francisco, this time under the command of Captain Benjamin Tay, who sailed the Witch to the Golden Gate in 119 days.
The Witch then crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong in 41 days. En route to Calcutta, the Witch had to put into Singapore to have her rudder repaired. After taking on cargo at Calcutta, the Witch set sail on April 13th, and set the all-time record run from Sand Heads to the Cape of Good Hope in 37 days, and arrived back in Boston after an unprecedented passage of 81 days on July 6, 1852.
Six weeks later, the Witch would sail for the Golden Gate again, this time to chase after the Northern Light that had sailed the day before.
* * * * *
The Southern Cross, 938-tons, was a medium clipper ship that had both sharp clipper and New York packet characteristics. Her figurehead was a gilded eagle of the wing. Seven days out of Boston on her maiden voyage under the command of Captain Stevens, she ran into a squall on 15 May 1851 and lost all three topgallant masts. She ran into similar misfortune off the Platte during a raging pampero that lasted for nearly two days and sailed all the way around the Horn without topgallant sails. The Southern Cross arrived at San Francisco on September 22, 1851, after 136 days at sea.
The Eureka sailed from New York around the same time as the Witch and the Southern Cross sailed from Boston. The Eureka appeared to be a very sharp ship, but proved to be a slow sailer and did not live up to her owners expectations. She was battered by westerly winds while rounding Cape Horn on her maiden voyage and was forced to put into Valparaiso for repairs, and stayed at that port for 45 days. She reached San Francisco after 129 sailing days.
Next: Flying Cloud
The Era of the Clipper Ships
Bibliography / Sea
Witch / Directory / Maritime
Links
Home / McKay Clan / Ship's
Store / Introduction / Tradewinds