Sailing Directions

III

There were approximately 80 crewmen aboard Flying Cloud (including Eleanor "Ellen" Creesy, the skipper’s wife, who was also the Navigator). The hierarchy among the sailor jacks on board was literally vertical. Only the most experienced and strongest men were sent aloft to handle the skysails and the topgallants. By need, most of them were compact and wiry men, all brawn, but intelligent as to doing of their assigned tasks. Under the best of conditions, this would describe all the sailors aboard a given ship, but the Gold Rush had made such men a desperately-needed commodity. With the increase in traffic to San Francisco, most ships sailed with less experienced or inexperienced hands, many of them merely seeking a way to get to the gold fields themselves. The less experienced men were allowed only so high up on the rig, less out of concern for them than for the safe management of the ship. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the "boys" (who could be eight or eighty), given the deck-level jobs, handling only the lowest sails, filling the whale oil lamps, caring for the livestock on board, assisting the sailmaker, carpenter, or cook.

It was not unusual for junior officers to carry a cat-o'-nine-tails to literally whip a lazy man into line. Lazy sailors were called "slackers," "soldiers," or, at the worst, "marines" (and to this day, the worst thing a marine can call another is a "sailorman"). 

Although there were no beatings on board Flying Cloud, Captain Josiah Creesy was not an easygoing skipper. When the ship crossed the Equator, he refused to allow the traditional "shellback" hazing ceremony for the new crewmen. He could be explosive and foul-mouthed with the crew. Having come up the ranks himself, he showed little tolerance for men who did not do their jobs to his exacting standards. His reputation as a "driver" made him unpopular with Flying Cloud's dozen passengers; as for Creesy, though he was perforce polite to them, he believed passengers had no business aboard a cargo vessel.

There was a minor mutiny and some sabotage aboard Flying Cloud on her first passage. A pair of disgruntled men before the mast (the forecastle was where the least experienced men berthed, and it was right at the bows, subject to every wave --- cat's-paw or tsunami --- the ship met) drilled a hole in the deck in order to ruin the cargo. Fortunately, this damage was quickly discovered and repaired, and a full day chained in the bilges was enough to bring the miscreants back to their senses.

Captain Creesy had more trouble with his First Officer, who he considered a slacker, and who he relieved of duty. To be fair to the man, Captain Creesy had also relieved a previous First Officer in a previous command; Creesy was so difficult in fact that he had been dismissed from the Union Navy during the Civil War for his manner of command --- and this in an era where a Captain was a petty king aboard ship. 

Offsetting Captain Creesy's harsh personality was Ellen Creesy's gentle one. Ellen made certain that the men had fresh meat twice a week, plum duff every Sunday, and that they knew they were valued. She acted as her husband's conscience: Ellen Creesy once saw a man washed overboard and ordered the ship about to rescue him; her husband did not demur, and the man was found, still alive.

For her time, Ellen Creesy, was a thorough modernist. She was skilled with a sextant and knew the intricate math involved in celestial navigation. She did not use, as many modern sailors do, the sight reduction tables, because, as of 1851, they hadn't been invented yet.  Modern sailors rely on GPS, but dead batteries can equal dead sailors, so it's always good to know how to handle a sextant on the trackless sea.

One innovation Ellen did use was Matthew Fontaine Maury's compendium known in short as Sailing Directions. Until Maury, oceanic sailors generally went out and coped with the ocean as a completely mysterious, utterly arbitrary, element. Maury applied science to sailing, and over the course of two decades, he and his dedicated team reviewed every U.S. Navy log, most commercial U.S. sailing ship logs, scores upon scores of private logs, and foreign language logs dating back to Columbus' day, for technical information on prevailing winds, currents, seasonal weather conditions, local hydrography, sea life, and a score of other factors, from which Maury created an advisory for sailors, which was first published in 1850 (and is till published and constantly updated today). Thus, Ellen could know when they crossed from the Labrador Current to the Gulf Stream or whether they faced a chance of being caught in a mid-Atlantic cyclonic storm in September, and most importantly what these things meant in terms of the voyage---and since clippers depended on speed, such information was crucial.

Captain Creesy was more old-fashioned. He still believed that a Master could whistle up the wind in the midst of a dead calm. (There was a superstitious ban aboard most ships in relation to whistling, which, it was thought, might raise an unintended gale and wreck a ship---hence the old mariner's expression for those who whistled on board ship---"Bosuns and idiots.") He didn't put much stock in Maury, but he trusted his wife's judgement implicitly, and she did put much stock in Maury.

As for Maury, "The Pathfinder of The Sea," he joined the Confederate Navy in 1861, and became a C.S. Fleet Admiral. It is an indicator of how highly he was esteemed that at the end of the Civil War, he was reinstated in rank to the U.S. Navy without objection, and continued his work on the Sailing Directions for the rest of his lifetime.

Despite his rough edges, away from the decks, Josiah Creesy enjoyed books and concerts and dress balls, he relished creature comforts, and he loved his wife with a fierce passion matched only by hers. Such was the "driver" in private life. He was enamored of the sea, and some of his log entries were lyrical (despite his only passable spelling and grammar).

Given the strains to which Flying Cloud was constantly subjected, it is no wonder that the ship underwent a full refit after only four voyages in three years. Returned to the sea in 1855, again under the Creesys, the ship made several more passages to Frisco and to China before being sold. Her valiant masts were shortened, and she became first a troopship and then a livestock ship, and finally a timber ship. Badly neglected, she did not survive a grounding in a gale, and was burned for her metal fittings in 1875.

Her hard-driving poetic Captain and his extraordinary wife managed to sail from New York to San Francisco in 89 days, 21 hours on Flying Cloud's maiden voyage, a world's record that was only bested once --- by Flying Cloud under command of the Creesys, who brought the ship around in 89 days, 8 hours, a record that still stands for clippers.