A lucky ship

II

The jack tar of the mid-nineteenth century may have had the most dangerous job ever conceived by man. Richard Henry Dana, in Two Years Before The Mast, before he shipped 'round the Horn imagined that the typical sailor's life was an idyll of simply making the ship ready for sea, setting the sails, and going. He was quickly disabused of this notion. 

Indeed, the typical nineteenth century sailor was almost always busy. Rigging was always in need of tarring or repair, the metal fittings of a ship needed to have rust chipped from them, woodwork needed constant painting and varnishing, and the sails needed constant adjustment to catch the best wind in order to make the best time. Even old rope was picked apart to make oakum to fill the seams between the deck planking, and the decks themselves were sanded daily with large squared blocks of sandstone that reminded sailors of illuminated Bibles---the process was called holystoning, and made the wood of the weather decks white and silky, an advantage to the barefoot crewmen.

 

Of all the vessels that put to sea in that era, a clipper ship was the hardest to work. With at least 20 sails to work in full dress, and masts towering 100 feet above the deck, the crew was constantly aloft. This was no job for a man with vertigo, and though it may have been adventuresome in fair winds, it could be downright deadly in rough weather. A clipper captain like Flying Cloud’s Josiah Creesy would routinely spread the ship’s 30,000 square feet of sail to the wind on any given day, and leave it aloft in all kinds of conditions until the wind shrieked in the rigging and threatened to tear the sails from the spars.

The men would then be ordered to furl sail, and would need to climb into the unfriendly sky, day or pitchblack night, rain or shine, where the wind velocity was much greater than on deck. With the ship pitching and heaving, yawing and rolling, and the topmasts bending under the strain, the men would inch their way out onto the yards, shoving their bare feet through the foot ropes, pressing their bellies to the spars for balance, and, using their hands, would haul on the sheets to raise and lower the sails. Often, the sails and the ropes and spars were coated with ice or drenched with water, and weighed tons more than when dry. It was exhausting work at the best of times. In a blow, or in an Austral hurricane, the type of weather Flying Cloud met as it rounded Cape Horn, the crests of the waves might be as tall as the masts themselves, and the ship might twist and dance violently in the troughs. 

Death on board a clipper ship was not uncommon: men might get pitched into the sea in an unguarded moment, hurled to the deck to be broken like china dolls, or find their limbs crushed or maimed by a mistimed motion of the spars or the rigging.

Flying Cloud was considered a "lucky" ship to work. No one died or was maimed on its maiden voyage, nor on most voyages afterward. But Josiah Creesy had the reputation of a "driver," a hard skipper. He was respected by the ship's owners who knew he would make good, he was held in high regard by other captains, but he was disliked by all but the best of his men.

Cutty Sark, the last of the great Tea Clippers, was given her Scots-Gaelic name based upon an old legend. Tam O’Shanter, riding home one night, came upon a coven of witches dancing in a glade. One of the younger ones, Nannie, was wearing a ‘cutty sark,’ a short thin dress that left nothing to the imagination. Tam teased her: “Weel done, cutty sark!” and Nannie chased him, seizing his horse’s tail. When Cutty Sark left port, the figurehead of Nannie always had a horsetail in her fist. After her tea clipper days she ran cargo. She wqas sold to the Portuguese Navy who renamed her Pequena Camisola --- “Short Dress” --- but she was sold back to British interests an preserved as a maritime museum

Clippers depended on speed. "Speed," of course, is a relative term. Flying Cloud's average speed was about 12 knots (about the speed of a typical bicyclist with a destination in mind). No clipper ever exceeded 22 knots at its best (the speed of the Titanic when she met her fate with the infamous iceberg).  

The haste with which clippers were built and run was problematic. Flying Cloud had no sea trials, and her shakedown cruise was taken under tow from the shipyard in Boston to her permanent berth in New York. For comparison, Titanic had a half-day of sea trials, and her shakedown cruise was a one day run from Belfast to Southampton. 

Thermopylae, Cutty Sark’s chief rival, boasted a figurehead of Leonidas. She beat Cutty Sark in their 1872 tea race. Thermopylae ended her days in the Portuguese Navy as a target ship

In sum, neither Captain Creesy nor Captain Smith was familiar with the ship they commanded.

Titanic was both fast and slow, a triple-screw steamer that could cover 500 miles in a day, a lumbering vessel in maneuvers, that displaced a vast amount of water. Made of what was then called "steel plate" (essentially raw iron), the metal of the hull contracted and became brittle in the frigid North Atlantic. When struck by the iceberg, the frozen metal shattered. Marine engineering in 1912 still lacked the necessary tests for stress factors on a hull.

Unlike Titanic, Flying Cloud, as a wooden vessel, needed seasoning: The wood of the ship was meant to swell in the seawater and the humid air, sealing tight the joints and planking. Working the lines and tackle would have made raising and lowering the sails and spars easier. Flying Cloud was loose where she needed to be tight and tight where she needed to be loose. During her voyage, she suffered several moderately serious dismastings, and her mainmast cracked; the mainmast was also "sprung," meaning it was rotating in its base, a highly dangerous condition that increased the stress on the ship's structure manyfold times. The situation was serious enough for Captain Creesy to consider putting into port at Rio de Janeiro for repairs. Instead, he took his damaged ship into the Southern Ocean.

This was even more dangerous than it seems. Lacking modern shipbuilding technologies, there was no way for the builder, Donald McKay, to really measure the stress and load factors on what was, when she launched, the largest merchant vessel on earth with the largest rig on earth (by the time Flying Cloud reached San Francisco, she had been surpassed in these records by still-newer clippers). Thus, McKay was going by feel in calculating just how much force the ship could withstand. In reality, Flying Cloud, even intact, could have blown apart under the strain, particularly in the Southern Ocean's July winter with its hundred foot waves and gale-force winds; it had happened to other ships, both untried and tired.

Even more risky, Captain Creesy liked to sail his ships with a full complement of sails. On Flying Cloud this meant that 30,000 square feet of sail was spread to the wind on a typical day, and Creesy kept all sails aloft in all but the worst weather, While this was good for speed, it was stressful on the ship, her crew, and her passengers. In the Southern Ocean she suffered several knockdowns. Clippers were "wet" ships at the best of times. In a blow the decks could be intermittently submerged.

Captain Edward J. Smith of the Titanic was a babe in arms when Captain Josiah Creesy first took Flying Cloud to sea, but Captain Smith was brought up the ranks in sail. They would have instinctively understood one another. Neither Creesy or Smith liked to slow down. Titanic had a set schedule to keep, and Flying Cloud promised a better return on her cargo the faster it was delivered, a return in which the Captain shared. Captain Creesy stood to earn over $250,000 in 2013 dollars if he brought Flying Cloud into San Francisco in quick time.

Smith, who was retiring, had no such motivation, but he did have the largest and most opulent vessel in the world under his command. Even if Titanic was to set no records (and she couldn't, since the R.M.S. Lusitania and R.M.S. Mauretania had more powerful engines and had a routine cruising speed of 25 knots, Titanic's estimated top speed), it would never do to have his floating palace deemed a poky ship.

Both Captains, Creesy and Smith, were engaged in high-stakes risk management in ship handling, using essentially the same tools in the same medium. In the sixty years between Flying Cloud and Titanic, essentially nothing changed in commercial seafaring---not among skippers anyway. For Creesy, the risks paid off. For Smith, they spelled doom.