The Age of Gold (16 page)

To captain their prize vessel, the brothers lured Robert Waterman out of retirement. One last voyage, they explained to him—and to Cordelia— was all they asked. For his trouble—and hers—Captain Waterman would receive his regular fee, a share of the profits from the sale in California of the ship’s cargo, and, if the
Challenge
broke the Cape Horn record by reaching San Francisco in ninety days or less, a bonus of $10,000.

T
HE GOLD FLEET FOR
California comprised two distinct categories of vessels. In one category were those ships like the
Courrier de Cherbourg
, hired to haul argonauts like Jean-Nicolas Perlot and his fellows in La Fortune to the mines. The
Courrier
’s owners and its captain were happy to get
the argonauts to California as quickly as was reasonable, but having little direct interest in the mining, they had no desire to risk life or vessel to trim a few days or even weeks from the voyage. In the second category were the clippers, for whom speed was all. The clipper captains were prepared to risk everything—ship, cargo, and crew—to make the fastest time possible around Cape Horn. And if the possible weren’t fast enough, men like Robert Waterman were willing to attempt the impossible.

Waterman’s crew would join him in the attempt, even if unwillingly. The crew was typically the weakest element of any clipper, for although the law of supply and demand worked well enough on the quarterdeck, with captains like Waterman selling their services to the highest bidder, it failed in the forecastle. Despite an acute shortage of ordinary seamen, shipowners refused to raise their pay above about ten dollars per month for the Cape Horn run. To some extent this was a matter of circular reasoning: observing the crews they obtained at this wage, they couldn’t imagine paying such incompetents more. To some extent it was an acknowledgment of the strange effects California gold was having on the supply of sailors: with crews abandoning ship for the mines upon anchoring at San Francisco, owners often felt their crews ought to be paying
them
—for passage to California.

Nor was the problem simply low wages. Food was a chronic complaint: blandly monotonous at best, often wormy and rotten. Fresh water ran short. Rats ruled below deck. “They ate holes over-night through the hardwood cabin partitions, stole socks out of our shoes while we slept, also balls of twine and beeswax used in sail-making, and dragged them into their nests between the partitions where they seemed to produce a fresh family over-night,” wrote one seaman. Worst of all was the arbitrary discipline doled out by the captains and mates. Service aboard a clipper (as aboard other ships) was a form of indentured servitude; but where servants on land could appeal to neighbors and the sheriff in cases of mistreatment, crewmen at sea had no recourse. Their rights were only such as their captain deigned to recognize; he was judge, jury, and executioner for infractions of his code of conduct.

Between the low pay and the grim conditions, it was no wonder owners
had trouble filling out their crews, and hardly less wonder they relied on “crimps”: human scavengers of the waterfront who cajoled, coerced, or drugged and dragged unsuspecting and unwilling victims aboard just in time for sailing. When the victims awoke, they were at sea, beyond the reach of any law but the captain’s. Adding financial insult to physical injury, the crimps charged the owners per sailor delivered; the owners transferred the cost to the sailors, who had to work it off before receiving any pay of their own.

The crimps made good money filling the forecastle of the
Challenge
. When the ship cast off from its East River berth, its crew comprised fifty- six men, of whom half had never been to sea before; and of these, a substantial number had never wanted to go to sea. If not for the crimps they would have been home with their mothers or sleeping off their drunks in an East Side alley, a Bowery brothel, or the city jail.

Robert Waterman was accustomed to making sailors out of landsmen, but even he was shocked at the composition of this crew. A captain—especially a famous captain like Waterman—could wait until his ship had cast off before boarding; Waterman joined the
Challenge
below the Battery. He examined the crew and summarily fired the first mate, the man responsible for finding suitable hands. He might have put back into port had not a boat from an arriving ship brought aboard James Douglass, a first mate Waterman knew. Douglass said he was looking for work. This surprised Waterman; most seamen valued their shore time, and Douglass’s vessel hadn’t even tied up yet. But Douglass explained that the crossing from Liverpool had been rough, and he had been obliged to treat his men vigorously. On shipboard he was safe, but he feared reprisal on shore. Could Captain Waterman use a first mate?

Waterman certainly could, especially one with a reputation as a driver like himself. “Black Douglass” was what sailors called him; the name suited the man, and the man suited Waterman.

During the first weeks of the voyage, the men got a taste of the Douglass discipline. A clipper could be a daunting introduction to the nautical arts. To push reluctant landlubbers to the top of masts that soared and swayed two hundred feet above the deck, and to the ends of yards that
swooped and dipped far out across the sea, often required the kind of encouragement Black Douglass delighted in. Fortunately for the sailors, the weather was settled and breezes light. First trips up the rigging could hardly have come under less threatening circumstances.

Yet this crew was more reluctant than most. Several pleaded seasickness despite the favorable conditions; after a couple of days Douglass suspected malingering. He applied his own cures: a heaver (a stout stick of wood used to twist and thereby tighten ropes), a belaying pin (a short post inserted in the rail, to which ropes were fastened), a thick end of rope, or simply his fists. The more pliable found relief aloft; others nursed their injuries and plotted revenge.

The mood darkened as the
Challenge
entered the tropics east of the Bahamas and encountered the doldrums; day after day the vessel drifted, sails slack, the swells hardly more than the ripples of a pond. The sun baked the deck, steamed the men in their berths, and simmered the water in the drinking tank. One man died of a mysterious illness; his funeral cast an ominous pall over the vessel.

Crossing the equator off the multiple mouths of the Amazon, Robert Waterman cursed his luck. A record run required at least the acquiescence of the weather; this weather was damnably recalcitrant. And the crew compounded the weather problem. A clipper could make the most of the lightest breezes, but only if its crew looked lively when summoned and if they efficiently followed the captain’s commands. This crew was neither lively nor efficient. “I think it was the worst crew I’ve ever seen,” Waterman recalled later. Staring south, he cursed again.

T
HE EQUATORIAL DOLDRUMS
that delayed the
Challenge
also captured the
Courrier de Cherbourg
, albeit farther south. And though Per- lot and his companions in La Fortune had no such precise deadline as Robert Waterman’s ninety days, they were plenty eager to reach California. Every day lost to the absence of wind was a day deducted from gold- digging, a day on which those who beat them to California would claim a
larger portion of the wealth. For twenty-two days the calm held the ship fast—“twenty-two days which seemed to us as long as twenty-two years, and twenty-two years of purgatory.” The savants among the crew said it was precisely these calms that led the ancients to conclude that the tropics were impassable; Perlot started to think the ancients were right.

Finally a skein of clouds crossed the horizon. It drew closer, and as it did, the faintest whisper of wind ruffled the sails. The sea surface wrinkled; slowly the ship began to move—at first south, then southwest. Perlot and the others savored their release from prison. “A steady and pleasant wind rocked us softly and led us to our heart’s desire.”

But the soft rocking gave way, before long, to motion more violent. As the ship crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, the weather turned foul. The north wind jumped to the south, bringing rain, which in turn was followed by a west wind and thick clouds. For eight days the weather was a torment—“never two hours of the same wind, and never a good wind.” Eventually, however, by tacking west, then south, then west again, the captain was able to escape this turbulent region.

A northeast wind blew them to the latitude of the Rio de la Plata, which they sensed—by the color of the water, the sudden presence of seaweed, and the land-based birds—rather than saw. Several days later they did sight land: Patagonia. From the distance of six to eight leagues the coast seemed scarcely to rise out of the water, and the whole countryside had the appearance of a vast forest. Far in the interior, two volcanoes erupted. “The smoke of one of these volcanoes made a half-luminous trail in the evening, almost four leagues long; the other belched flames only at intervals.”

The passengers enjoyed the fireworks for three days before a sudden west wind drove them out to sea. The wind grew to tempest strength, compelling the captain to heave to and causing the ship to drift steadily, helplessly east.

When the storm abated they once again headed southwest. Three more days brought them within sight of the Falkland Islands, although at first even the captain wasn’t sure of the identity of those barren and
windswept outposts of Britannia. Having seen neither sun nor stars for ten days, and with no accurate way to judge their drift during the storm, he didn’t know where they were.

The wind continuing from the west, the
Courrier
beat painfully toward Tierra del Fuego, which seemed to Perlot “rather the land of snow than that of fire, with its cliffs as high as mountains.” The coast now trended southeast, and the ship followed its curve to the strait of Le Maire, which separates the main island of Tierra del Fuego from a neighbor island called Staten. Before a cold but steady west-northwest wind, they cleared the strait and proceeded swiftly toward Cape Horn—which, Perlot and the other novices learned, was a rocky island rather than a true cape.

But the Cape of Storms had its honor to defend, and it refused to let the argonauts pass without a contest. Hardly had Perlot and the others retired for the night than they heard the mate shout for the sailors to scramble aloft; almost at the same time they felt the ship shudder before a frightful blast from the west. The blast brought waves such as they had never seen. “The billows rolled over the waist of the ship; almost every wave passed over the vessel.”

The pounding continued all night; Perlot awoke to see the topsail, the only one that had been left set, in tatters—“as if someone had tried, with a machine made expressly, to make it into a canvas sieve.” The captain abandoned all hope of holding the Cape. Putting the wind astern, he
steered away from that perilous place. “I would leave you to guess if we made good time, pursued by a wind of unheard violence.”

Yet retreat offered no respite.

For two days they flew before the storm. By the time the wind dropped enough to let them feel at least comparatively safe, they had lost 160 leagues to the guardians of the Cape. The captain repaired his rigging and attempted to regain some of the lost distance. Three days of tacking yielded modest progress. But the closer they approached to the Cape, the harder the wind roared. The captain hove to again. For twelve days they drifted backward, bow into the wind.

Once more they began tacking. The weather was clear, but very cold, and the wind persisted from the west. They gradually regained their westering, but only by circling far to the south.

Eventually the wind dropped; as it did, clouds set in. An icy fog enveloped the ship. “All the ropes were covered with a layer of grime an inch thick; it was impossible for us to put about that day and the next; it was not till the third day, toward noon, that, breaking the ice which encased the ropes, we succeeded in putting about and going back toward the northwest.”

At this point they were at latitude 61 south, almost within sight of Antarctica. Though they didn’t spy the mysterious southern continent, they did see and feel the effects of
summer
—summer! this tempestuous season was—at high latitudes.

To the passengers’ disappointment but the crew’s relief, no icebergs were encountered. The disappointment was mingled with disorientation. “Our existence on board had become the strangest in the world,” Perlot said. “The night was suppressed, or virtually so. Daily habits were found to be completely upset. Thus, the cook would have to stay permanently at his stove, if he had wanted to satisfy everybody. This one, who had just got up, claimed his breakfast, while that one, up for a long time, demanded supper in order to go to bed. One claimed that the sun had just risen; the other affirmed that it was going to set. Both were wrong, for it was noon.”