The China Clippers
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THE CHINA CLIPPERS Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Great Tea Race of 1866 Dr Simon Daniels Senior Lecturer in Maritime Law, Southampton Solent University, Warsash Maritime Academy Campus, Newtown Road, Warsash, Southampton SO31 9ZL, UK [email protected] 1 1 INTRODUCTION HURRAH FOR THE AMERICA’S CUP One day, during the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, an American businessman suggested that an American schooner try its luck with English yachts. The challenge was eagerly accepted, and the result won immortality for the schooner-yacht America. Schooners were much admired by merchant shipowners in the United States, as they were in Great in Britain, and George Steers was the great schooner-builder on the eastern sea-board. So he was top choice for the job – this time, for a sporting, not a commercial, vessel. The success of the beautiful America became a legend, founding the race for a cup which has not lost any of its glamour, or its style, in a hundred and fifty years. The story has passed into legend, that, as the yacht swiftly passed the Royal Yacht, saluting the royal party watching the race, Queen Victoria asked one of her attendants who was in second place. ”Your Majesty, there is no second,” came the reply. That brief conversation has been immortalised in the history of the America’s Cup, and sums up the very spirit of this most superlative of races. And nothing has changed about that: on 25 September 2013, The America’s Cup official website proudly proclaimed1: Oracle Team USA won the 34th America’s Cup in a winner-take-all nineteenth race, defeating challenger Emirates Team New Zealand by 44 seconds in today’s clincher. Led by 35-year-old skipper Jimmy Spithill, Oracle Team USA won by the score of 9-8. “It was a fantastic race. We wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Spithill, the two-time Cup winner. “We came from behind, the guys showed so much heart. On your own you’re nothing, but a team like this can make you look great… We were facing the barrel of a gun at 8-1 and the guys didn’t even flinch.” Such a sport surely can have no equal on the planet, and the excitement permeates throughout all the people, be they devoted sons of the sea or die-hard land-lubbers; indeed, judging by conversations in every pub and office the morning after the final race of the 2013 America’s Cup, it seemed that the entire population of Great Britain had stayed up to cheer Sir Ben Ainslie when he turned defeat into startling success for the United States yacht. In Ainslie’s home town of Lymington, in Hampshire, The Ship Inn on the quayside reflected the carnival of celebration; yet, as Arthur H Clark wrote as long ago as 19102: …nevertheless, it must be frankly admitted that yacht racing, even across the Atlantic, in comparison with the old clipper ship racing, resembles snipe shooting as compared with hunting big game in the wilds of Africa, while the gold and silver racing cups appear as mere baubles beside the momentous state of commercial supremacy for which the clippers stretched their wings. For all the cutting-edge technology and the lycra fashions of today’s America’s Cup, just stand for five minutes at the bend of the narrow street that leads from Greenwich’s Docklands station to the Cutty Sark, and watch the faces of the tourists as they catch their first sight of the immortal clipper. Then you will understand what Arthur Clark meant. 1 http://www.americascup.com/en/news/3/news/18441/final-preview-barker-vs-spithill-for-winner-take-all-race-at-1315 2 Clark, A, 1910, The Clipper Ship Era, G E Putnam’s Sons, New York 2 2 THE CHINA CLIPPERS It is a crucial thread running through history, that the whole essence of British greatness - and hence its overriding concern - was its obsession with maritime adventure. The nineteenth century Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, wrote a haunting parable in which the European powers were characterised with all their special mischiefs, and to the King of England he ascribed the mighty idol of Sea Power and Commerce, which was the same as Mammon….3 The London Tea Auction was the centre of the commodity market for 300 years. From the very first event in 1679, until the last sale on 29 June 1998, the auction was a regular event that made London the centre of the international tea trade4. The first auctions were held by the Honourable East India Company, which held the monopoly for the import of goods from the Far East until it lost its monopoly of the China tea trade in 1834, opening up the race for the glittering prize of competition to the London traders and, of course, to the shipowners who competed to fix charters that brought the tea home. By the middle of the nineteenth century the commodity rate was negotiated according to the quality of the cargo under the hammer, so that the freshest crop of the season fetched the highest price at auction, and the traders created the incentive to shipowners to provide the fastest vessels – the extreme clippers. It is, perhaps, surprising that the world's greatest maritime nation produced no outstanding naval architect in the eighteenth century, but the most glittering of all Imperial prizes, the cargoes of the Honourable East India Company, were demanding the quality of excellence in naval architecture for the carriage of goods by sea which reflected the design of the fast, daring frigates of the Royal Navy, the eyes and ears of the Admiralty and defenders of the far-flung merchant routes. As Napoleon commented bitterly, Wherever you find a fathom of water, there you will find the British. When you combined the East Indiamen with the frigates, nothing could touch you5; and so it was, for a generation. In 1812, still basking in its triumphs over the European fleets, with ships and men that made it England’s pride, the Royal Navy went to war in complete confidence of its superiority over the American fleet. And met the Baltimore Clippers. The nickname ‘clipper’ had first been applied to fast horses before it became synonymous with the racing merchant ships that had originated in the Upper Chesapeake Bay, not so many years before, boasting the fore-and-aft sails of a schooner, but topsails on the foremast that allowed hard-on-the- wind sailing, while the hull was sharp and streamlined. Handled with all the skill and courage of their experienced skippers, these audacious little ships caught the eye of every man of business in great waters, and in the Baltic evolved the idea further with splendid three-masted topgallant schooners, which could lift cargoes large enough to return big profits to the shareholders – and the clipper ship era was born. But by the mid-nineteenth century, much bigger American clippers were leaving British competitors, on the trade routes of her own empire, struggling in their wake with out-dated ships. So it was, that, one evening in 1851, two years after the repeal of the highly restrictive Navigation Acts, British 3 Mickiewicz, A, 1866, Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage 4 United Kingdom Tea Council. http://www.tea.co.uk 5 As attested by Fredrick Chapman in his highly successful design of the merchant frigate: see Chapman, F,1768, Architectura Navalis Mercatoria 3 shipbuilder Richard Green of London, famed for the record-breaking Blackwall frigates, threw down the gauntlet to the Americans in thrilling style in an after-dinner speech: We have heard a great deal tonight about the dismal prospects of British shipping, and we hear, too, from another quarter, a great deal about the British lion and the American eagle, and the way in which they are going to lie down together. Now I don’t know anything about that, but this I do know, that we, the British shipowners, have at last sat down to play a fair and open game with the Americans, and, by Jove, we’ll trump them!6 It proved to be a bitter contest between Great Britain and the United States on the high seas of the Orient that gave birth to this new, streamlined ocean greyhound, dubbed with the superlative ‘extreme-clipper’, and the commercial contest was indelibly marked by the spirit of a sporting rivalry. The comeback of the British clipper ships, signalled so bravely by Green’s speech, fuelled the rivalry, as the New York clipper Oriental, built in 1849 for the China run7, and her stable-mate Surprise of 1850, were outclassed by the Chrysolite and the Stornoway, both clippers built by the famed Aberdeen yard of Alexander Hall in 1851. The Yankee clipper Memnon had sailed in the first clipper race around Cape Horn, but when she was beaten soundly by Chrysolite in a thrilling race in the Gaspar Straits, the Americans had to rally a fight-back. As a result, a group of high-spirited young merchants and shipowners8 in Boston formed the American Navigation Club, which issued the following challenge which they had published in all the main British daily newspapers in September 18529: The American Navigation Club challenges the ship-builders of Great Britain to a ship-race, with cargo on board, from a port in England to a port in China and back…. These ships to be modelled, commanded, and officered entirely by citizens of the United States and Great Britain respectively… The stakes to be £10,000 a side.