Flying Cloud: Around the Horn in Under 90 Days

On this date 169 years ago (August 31, 1851) the clipper ship Flying Cloud, on her maiden voyage, sailed into San Francisco’s Golden Gate and docked, having completed the 15,000 mile passage from New York via Cape Horn in the record-breaking sailing time of 89 days and 21 hours. At various points of the voyage, she logged speeds in excess of 18 knots (almost 21 mph), and covered as many as 374 nautical miles in one 24 hour period. While these rates of speed seem ponderously slow by modern standards, the fact that anywhere from 150 to 200 days was considered typical for the same passage just a few years earlier helps to lend appreciation for the sensation that a passage in less than 90 days caused at the time.

The clipper ships were the result of innovative construction on the part of several forward-thinking ship builders in the 1840s, who applied the sleek-hulled designs of smaller vessels to large ocean-going ships intended for around-the-world voyages. While unquestionably built for speed, more conservative seamen of the day doubted whether the clippers, with their knife-edged prows and slender proportions, could handle without foundering the rough seas and 50 foot swells that a Cape Horn passage could throw at a ship, but these fears were soon put to rest. And speed definitely meant irresistibly big profits for the owners: rapid deliverability of goods, especially tea from China during the 1850s – 1870s, realized huge profits for these ships which sometimes paid for their cost of construction many times over in a single voyage. Even after the advent of ocean-going steam ships by mid-century, it was decades before they could consitently outmatch the clippers (and their wind-driven successors, the steel-hulled windjammers) in speed, range, and reliability.

After selling his cargo of butter and cheese in San Francisco and scraping together a new crew (most of the original crew had immediately abandoned upon docking for the California gold fields), Captain Josiah Creesy weighed anchor and set off on another race across the Pacific for China and a load of tea to be delivered back in New York following a return passage around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Throughout this and subsequent celebrated voyages (including one three years later in which the Flying Cloud bested its own time for the New York to San Francisco passage by four hours, setting a new record for an exclusively sail driven vessel that stood for 135 years) the ship was expertly guided by her navigator, who was none other than Mrs. Eleanor Creesy, wife of the captain! A Massachussetts native, she had studied the arts of navigation since childhood, with the intention of one day marrying a sea captain and accompanying him around the world, just as she was now doing. Up to date on all of the latest navigational aids and techniques of her day, she was one of the first to make extensive use of Matthew Fontaine Maury’s detailed charts of global wind patterns and oceanic currents, which had been laboriously compiled by the latter, whose own career at sea in the US Navy had been cut short by an injury which landed him a desk job – along with access to what he came to realize was a treasure-trove of information contained in ships’ logs stretching back decades, lying mouldering in the Navy’s archives and begging to be compiled and published.

Longfellow’s poem The Building of the Ship was inspired by watching the Flying Cloud take shape and then being launched from Boston’s shipyards.

Build me straight, O worthy Master! 
Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel, 
That shall laugh at all disaster, 
And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!
. . . And see! she stirs! 
She starts, — she moves, — she seems to feel 
The thrill of life along her keel, 
And, spurning with her foot the ground, 
With one exulting, joyous bound, 
She leaps into the ocean's arms!