Under Sail 2

Under Sail 2

Most of these ships were laid down in the eighties, and left the yards

of Maine to find adventure and preferment in the longer routes of

commerce. The Horn and the Cape of Good Hope were their turning points,

and they smoked through the hum of the Roaring Forties, as they beat

from the Line to Liverpool, laden with California grain, or they ran

before the westerly winds, from Table Bay to Melbourne--_Running Their

Easting Down_--black hulled, white winged ships, with New York, Boston,

Baltimore, or Philadelphia standing out in golden letters on their

transoms.

 

Only the strongest and best found ships, and the most skilful and

daring seamen were fit to carry the flag across the world-long ocean

courses about the storm-swept Horn, and here again America more than

held her own in competition with the mariners of the old seafaring

nations of Europe.

 

Winthrop Lippitt Marvin in his valuable work, "The American Merchant

Marine,"[1] pictures this last Titanic struggle of the sea in stirring

fashion--

 

"It was a contest of truly Olympian dignity,--of the best ships of

many flags with each other and with the elements. Out through the

Golden Gate there rode every year in the later seventies and the

eighties, southward bound, the long lean iron models of Liverpool

and Glasgow, the broader waisted, wooden New Englanders, with their

fine Yankee sheer and tall, gleaming skysails, the sturdy, careful

Norwegian and German ships, often launched on the Penobscot or

Kennebec, and here and there a graceful Frenchman or Italian. The

British were the most numerous, because the total tonnage of their

merchant marine was by far the greatest. Next came the Americans. The

other flags looked small by comparison. In this splendid grain trade

there sailed from San Francisco for Europe in 1881-85, 761 British

iron ships and 418 American wooden ships. The Americans were the

largest vessels. Their average registered tonnage was 1,634 and of

the fourteen ships above 2,000 tons that sailed in 1880-1, twelve flew

the Stars and Stripes. The average tonnage of the British iron ships

was 1,356.

 

[1] Chas. Scribner & Sons, N. Y.

 

"The wooden yards of Maine had seen their opportunity and built

in quick succession many great ships and barks of from 1,400 to

2,400 tons, very strongly constructed on models happily combining

carrying capacity with speed, loftily sparred, and clothed with the

symmetrical, snow-white canvas for which Yankee sailmakers were famous

the world around. These new vessels were not strictly clippers, though

they were often called so. They were really medium clippers; that

is, they were less racer-like and more capacious than the celebrated

greyhounds of the decade before the Civil War. They could not compete

with steam; their owners knew it. But they were launched in confident

hope that they were adapted for the grain trade and for some other

forms of long-voyage, bulky carrying, and that they could find a

profitable occupation during their lifetime of fifteen or twenty

years. They were just as fine ships in their way as the extreme

clippers, and in all but speed they were more efficient. They were

framed with oak, and ceiled and planked with the hard pine of the

South. They were generously supplied with the new, approved devices in

rig and equipment."

 

In the last years of the nineties there were many survivors of this

noble fleet of American sailers still in the long voyage trade.

Ships like the _El Capitan_, the _Charmer_, the _A. J. Fuller_, the

_Roanoke_, and the _Shenandoah_, were clearing from New York for deep

water ports, and South Street was a thoroughfare of sailors, redolent

of tar, and familiar with the wide gossip of the seas, brought to the

string pieces of the street by men from the great sailing ships.

 

Then the crimp still throve in his repulsive power, and the Boarding

Masters' Association owned the right to parcel out, fleece and ship,

the deepwater seamen of the port. The Front Street House and a score

of others held the humble dunnage of the fo'c'sle sailor as security,

_cashed_ his "advance" and sent him out past the Hook with nothing

but a sparse kit of dog's wool and oakum slops, a sheath knife and a

donkey's breakfast.

 

Those were the hard days of _large_ ships and _small_ crews. In clipper

days, a flyer like the _Sovereign of the Seas_ carried a crew of

_eighty_ seamen, and most of them were as rated--A.B. The ship _A. J.

Fuller_, in the year 1897, left the port of New York, for the voyage

around Cape Horn to Honolulu with _eighteen_ seamen, counting the boy

and the carpenter, the _Fuller_ being a three skysail yard ship of

1,848 tons register.

 

It may be interesting to compare the size and crew of the _Sovereign of

the Seas_, as given by Captain Clark in his great book, "The Clipper

Ship Era,"[2] with the dimensions and crew of the ship _A. J. Fuller_.

 

_Ship_ Sovereign of the Seas A. J. Fuller

 

Length 258 ft. 229 ft.

Beam 44 ft. 41.5 ft.

Draft 23.5 ft. 18 ft.

Register Tonnage 2,421 tons 1,848 tons

Crew--

 

Master 1 Master 1

Mates 4 Mates 2

Boatswains 2 Carpenters 1

Carpenters 2 Able Seamen 16

Sailmakers 2 Boys 1

Able Seamen 80 ----

Boys 10 21

----

101

 

[2] G. P. Putnam and Sons.

 

This condition, of small crews and large ships, brought to the seven

seas a reputation for relentless driving and manhandling that has clung

to the minds of men as nothing else. The huge American ships were the

hardest afloat, and that remarkable booklet, "The Red Record," compiled

by the National Seamen's Union of America, in the middle nineties,

carries a tale of cruelty and abuse on the high seas that must forever

remain a blot upon the white escutcheon of sail.

 

These ships bred a sea officer peculiar to the time--the bucko mate of

fact as well as fiction. These were hard fisted men, good sailors and

excellent disciplinarians, though they lacked the polish acquired by

sea officers of an earlier day when the sailer was often a passenger

carrier, and intercourse with people of culture had its effect upon the

men of the after guard. Also, the sea had become less attractive as a

career. The boasted "high pay" of the American Merchant Marine, was $60

per month for the Chief Mate; $30 per month for the Second Mate, and

$18 per month for an A.B.--at least such were the magnificent wages

paid on the _A. J. Fuller_ of New York in the year 1897.

 

The mate, to earn his two dollars a day, and keep, had to be a seaman

of the highest attainments. His was a knowledge won only after a long

hard apprenticeship at sea. He had to have the force of character of a

top-notch executive, combined with ability and initiative. Then too,

he was supposed to be a navigator, a man having at least a speaking

acquaintance with nautical astronomy. In addition to this he might be

as rough and as foul mouthed as he saw fit, and some of them were very

liberal in this respect.

 

Then men still signed articles, voyage after voyage, for the long

drill around the Horn, or, to vary the monotony, if such it could be

called, made the voyage to Australia, or to China or Japan. In the

main, however, American ships clearing from New York carried cargoes to

the West Coast of the United States, or to the Hawaiian Islands, where

they came under the protective ruling of the coastwise shipping laws,

and were not compelled to meet the stringent insurance rates of Lloyd's

that barred American sailing bottoms from fair competition with the

British.

 

The sailor men of that day were still real seamen, at least a large

number of real seamen still clung to the remaining ships. They were

experts, able to turn in a dead eye in wire or hemp, and could cast

a lanyard knot in the stiff four-stranded stuff that was later on

replaced by screws and turn buckles when metal hulls succeeded those of

wood.

 

With the passing of the wooden ship--the wooden square rigged

sailer--went the American sailor, for comparatively few steel sailing

ships were built in the United States. With the sailor went the romance

of bulging canvas and of storm stripped humming bolt ropes. The

tragedy, and the hardships of the long voyages passed away, and with

that passing is gone much of the actual physical struggle with the wind

and sea that made the sailor what he was.

 

The square rigged breed of sailors, while not dead yet, for the

old salts die hard, has, by force of circumstances, failed to rear

a younger generation to take its place. But the old spirit of sea

adventure is as strong as ever; the ocean rages as loud, and lies as

calm, as in the days of departed glory. It is still the world route

to foreign trade, and a more ample domestic prosperity. Americans are

again turning toward the sea, are heeding its age old wisdom, and are

building and handling the newer craft of steam, and coal, and oil, with

as much skill and success as they did the sailing craft of old.

 

On the following pages is recorded for the seamen and landsmen of

today, a personal story of one of the last voyages around Cape Horn in

a wooden ship propelled by sail alone--a ship without a donkey engine,

a wooden Bath-built packet at her prime in point of age and upkeep.

The advance notes have been cashed by the boarding masters, who have

left the crew in tow of their crimps, and, after deducting for board

and slops, the last remaining dollars have been blown in on the Bowery

under the watchful eyes of the runners, who see to it that the men are

delivered on board.

 

Our ship is the _A. J. Fuller_ of New York, Captain Charles M. Nichols,

and she waits her crew, ready to cast off from her berth in the East

River at the turn of the tide, at daybreak on December 5, 1897, having

cleared for the port of Honolulu, capital of the Republic of Hawaii,

with a general cargo consigned to the old island house of Brewer and

Company.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

 

OUTWARD BOUND

 

"Oh for a fair and gentle wind,"

I heard a fair one cry;

But give to me the roaring breeze,

And white waves beating high;

And white waves beating high, my boys,

The good ship tight and free,

The world of waters is our own,

And merry men are we.

 

_Jacob Faithful._

 

 

"Cook!" bawled a deep voice from a door that burst open with a flood of

yellow light under the break of the poop, "serve a round of hot _cafay

nore_ to them passengers! And Mr. Stoddard," added the mate from whom

these orders issued, addressing the second officer who strode from the

edge of light toward the group of men tumbling on board, "turn all

hands to in five minutes! Stand by to cast off lines!"