Now they stripped for the tussle to windward around Cape Horn, sending down studdingsail booms and skysail yards, making all secure with extra lashings, plunging into the incessant head seas of the desolate ocean, fighting it out tack for tack, reefing topsails and shaking them out again, the vigilant commanders going below only to change their clothes, the exhausted seamen stubbornly, heroically handling with frozen, bleeding fingers the icy sheets and canvas.A fortnight of this inferno and the Sea Witch and the Raven gained the Pacific, still within sight of each other, and the Typhoon only one day behind.Then they swept northward, blown by the booming tradewinds, spreading studdingsails, skysails, and above them, like mere handkerchiefs, the water-sails and ring-tails.Again the three clippers crossed the Equator.Close-hauled on the starboard tack, their bowsprits were pointed for the last stage of the journey to the Golden Gate.The Typhoon now overhauled her rivals and was the first to signal her arrival, but the victory was earned by the Raven, which had set her departure from Boston Light while the others had sailed from New York.The Typhoon and the Raven were only a day apart, with the Sea Witch five days behind the leader.
Clipper ship crews included men of many nations.In the average forecastle there would be two or three Americans, a majority of English and Norwegians, and perhaps a few Portuguese and Italians.The hardiest seamen, and the most unmanageable, were the Liverpool packet rats who were lured from their accustomed haunts to join the clippers by the magical call of the gold-diggings.There were not enough deep-water sailors to man half the ships that were built in these few years, and the crimps and boarding-house runners decoyed or flung aboard on sailing day as many men as were demanded, and any drunken, broken landlubber was good enough to be shipped as an able seaman.They were things of rags and tatters--their only luggage a bottle of whiskey.
The mates were thankful if they could muster enough real sailors to work the ship to sea and then began the stern process of whipping the wastrels and incompetents into shape for the perils and emergencies of the long voyage.That these great clippers were brought safely to port is a shining tribute to the masterful skill of their officers.While many of them were humane and just, with all their severity, the stories of savage abuse which are told of some are shocking in the extreme.The defense was that it was either mutiny or club the men under.Better treatment might have persuaded better men to sail.Certain it is that life in the forecastle of a clipper was even more intolerable to the self-respecting American youth than it had previously been aboard the Atlantic packet.
When Captain Bob Waterman arrived at San Francisco in the Challenge clipper in 1851, a mob tried very earnestly to find and hang him and his officers because of the harrowing stories told by his sailors.That he had shot several of them from the yards with his pistol to make the others move faster was one count in the indictment.For his part, Captain Waterman asserted that a more desperate crew of ruffians had never sailed out of New York and that only two of them were Americans.They were mutinous from the start, half of them blacklegs of the vilest type who swore to get the upper hand of him.His mates, boatswain, and carpenter had broken open their chests and boxes and had removed a collection of slung-shots, knuckle-dusters, bowie-knives, and pistols.Off Rio Janeiro they had tried to kill the chief mate, and Captain Waterman had been compelled to jump in and stretch two of them dead with an iron belaying-pin.Off Cape Horn three sailors fell from aloft and were lost.This accounted for the casualties.
The truth of such episodes as these was difficult to fathom.
Captain Waterman demanded a legal investigation, but nothing came of his request and he was commended by his owners for his skill and courage in bringing the ship to port without losing a spar or a sail.It was a skipper of this old school who blandly maintained the doctrine that if you wanted the men to love you, you must starve them and knock them down.The fact is proven by scores of cases that the discipline of the American clipper was both famously efficient and notoriously cruel.It was not until long after American sailors had ceased to exist that adequate legislation was enacted to provide that they should be treated as human beings afloat and ashore.Other days and other customs! It is perhaps unkind to judge these vanished master-mariners too harshly, for we cannot comprehend the crises which continually beset them in their command.
No more extreme clipper ships were built after 1854.The California frenzy had subsided and speed in carrying merchandise was no longer so essential; besides, the passenger traffic was seeking the Isthmian route.What were called medium clippers enjoyed a profitable trade for many years later, and one of them, the Andrew Jackson, was never outsailed for the record from New York to San Francisco.This splendid type of ship was to be found on every sea, for the United States was still a commanding factor in the maritime activities of South America, India, China, Europe, and Australia.In 1851 its merchant tonnage rivaled that of England and was everywhere competing with it.
The effects of the financial panic of 1857 and the aftermath of business depression were particularly disastrous to American ships.Freights were so low as to yield no profit, and the finest clippers went begging for charters.The yards ceased to launch new tonnage.British builders had made such rapid progress in design and construction that the days of Yankee preference in the China trade had passed.The Stars and Stripes floated over ships waiting idle in Manila Bay, at Shanghai, Hong-Kong, and Calcutta.
