The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (99 page)

Although the early nineteenth century had seen the development of a variety of fast ship types, it was not until the California gold rush that
“the search for speed under sail” became an imperative. The early 1850s saw the full flower of the clipper age, when speed generated higher profits than sheer volume. The
first extreme clipper, the
Stag Hound
of 1850, was the creation of the
Boston naval architect
Donald McKay, who subsequently launched such renowned and evocatively named vessels as the
Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas,
and
Great Republic
. The
Stag Hound
’s launch excited great interest and the
Boston Atlas
was effusive in its praise of McKay’s accomplishment:

Stag Hound
’s route was typical of many ships in the California trade. American merchants had been trading to China since just after the Revolution, and the trade expanded following Britain’s victory in the First
Opium War of 1839–42. Rather than sail out and back to Asia, ships generally circumnavigated the globe from east to west, sailing via Cape Horn to California, China, and, frequently, London. The average clipper could sail from New York to San Francisco in about 120 days, the fastest could make the passage in under 100, and the record was shared by the
Flying Cloud
and
Andrew Jackson,
both of which completed the run in 89 days—the
Flying Cloud
twice. No sailing vessel of any kind bettered this time until 1989 when the high-tech racing yacht
Thursday’s Child
covered the distance in under eighty-one days and in 2008 the
Gitana 13
made the passage in forty-three. However, these carried no cargo. That it took 130 years to register a 10 percent gain in speed testifies to the genius of the clipper builders.

Like any thoroughbred, clippers were too refined for more ordinary pursuits, and after the initial excitement of the gold rush passed a new breed of American square-rigger emerged, known as the
medium clipper or
Down Easter, the latter name deriving from the fact that many were built in
Maine, downwind and east of Boston. Although Down Easters were built for capacity, the spirit of experiment and improvement that informed the
clipper age was not forgotten and they had relatively fine lines. Such changes in ship design were not unique to the United States, and they enabled square-riggers of wood and later iron and steel construction to compete in a number of long-distance trades into the twentieth century. California grain,
Chinese tea,
Australian grain and wool, British
coal, jute from India, and guano from Peru’s
Chincha Islands were among the cargoes carried in square-rigged ships and barks worldwide.

The deepwater sailing ship more than held its own until the 1880s. Many of the period’s technological advances benefited both sail- and steam-powered ships, and sail gained a few advantages of its own. In Britain a great hurdle was overcome when the Merchant Shipping Act of 1836 revised the
tonnage measurement rules in force since 1773. Because tonnage is the basis on which port dues are charged, measurement rules tend to produce vessels of similar design as people seek to take advantage of them. The crude, earlier formula used as its only variables a ship’s length and beam, and as a result British shipbuilders produced “
the most unsightly and unmanageable ships in Europe”—short, deep in proportion to beam, with flat sides and bottoms, and said to be “built by the mile and served out by the yard.” The new rules were not made mandatory until 1855, and progress was slow in the intervening years, but British sailing ships tended to develop finer lines, which made them faster and handier. Shipbuilders also took advantage of the increasingly widespread use of iron and steel for hulls. Because these required less material for a given size, an iron or steel ship had more cargo space than a wooden ship of the same dimensions. At the same time, steel rigging, chain, and labor-saving winches and capstans reduced the number of crew needed. By the 1870s, the better sailing ships had
twice the capacity of older, wooden ships of comparable tonnage and carried crews one-third the size. Sail had three further
economic advantages: steamships needed more engineers and stokers than sailing ships needed sailors, which made their manning costs higher; sailing ships had no fuel costs; and steamers cost more to build. Overall, the registered tonnage of the British
merchant marine grew more than 80 percent between 1850 and 1880. Sailing ship tonnage increased through the 1860s and although it declined in the next decade, sailing ships still accounted for more than 60 percent of Britain’s merchant tonnage in 1880.

The end of the
Napoleonic Wars freed European powers to leverage their naval and commercial superiority in ways that represented a fundamental break with the accommodations reached by the majority of European and Asian merchants since the sixteenth century. This shift began in India in the 1750s and around the turn of the century in China. Two factors drove the British, the need to diminish their silver exports to pay for tea, and a desire to displace the Chinese as the dominant commercial carriers in East and Southeast Asia. Between 1805 and 1820, there were an estimated eighty-five
thousand tons of Chinese shipping (
about three hundred
junks) operating in East and Southeast Asia, and nearly three times that under the flag of the East India Company.

By the 1820s, virtually the only product the East India Company imported from China was tea, and duties amounted to nearly
10 percent of the British government’s total revenue. As British and other foreigners had little the Chinese wanted in exchange, they were forced to pay silver for tea. The pressing need for
bullion to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and for the pacification and administration of India had forced the East India Company to search for an alternative to silver, which took the form of Bengal opium. So successful was the company’s cultivation of China’s appetite for opium that it was able to stop carrying silver to China in 1805, and two years later it was actually importing Chinese silver. The problem with this trade was that it was illegal
in China, where the first
laws proscribing opium for nonmedicinal purposes were enacted in 1729. Opium consumption had moral and economic consequences the Chinese could ill afford. Trade in daily goods declined as addicts devoted more and more of their income to the drug, and bullion outflows from China had a direct impact on the imperial treasury.

In 1839, the emperor’s imperial commissioner at
Canton,
Lin Zexu, destroyed about twenty-one thousand chests of opium.
^c
In response, the East India Company dispatched a force of four thousand soldiers and sixteen ships to demand satisfaction. At the outset of the conflict, the British
blockaded Canton and a number of ports as far as the Yangzi. The emperor lost faith in Lin Zexu, but his replacement proved little better and was likewise cashiered for apparently ceding
Hong Kong to the British. Yet there was little anyone could do in the face of Britain’s technological advantage. The
Treaty of Nanking forced China to pay twenty-one million dollars in restitution, opened the “treaty ports” of Canton, Amoy,
Fuzhou,
Ningbo, and
Shanghai to British traders, abolished the Canton system, and allowed the British to trade wherever they wanted and to occupy Hong Kong. The French and the Americans obtained comparable concessions in 1844, and they were followed by the Germans,
Russians, and Italians. The First
Opium War may have illustrated China’s technological and cultural decline under the
Qing Dynasty, but the “unequal treaties” undermined any prospect that China would attain its former stature as a regional hegemon or that it would be viewed as an equal partner on the world stage. The drug-induced malaise fueled by opium contributed to the collapse of the Celestial Kingdom and the turbulent decades of
civil war and oppressive communist rule that ensued; China only began to find its way again at the end of the twentieth century.

Having prised open the trade of China,
westerners next looked to Japan, where restrictions on the movements of official emissaries, shipwrecked foreigners, and even repatriated Japanese castaways were severe. American whalers marooned in Japan were typically rounded up and mistreated, and Japanese blown offshore and returned by foreign ships could be imprisoned for their misfortune. Calling at the island of Kunashir in 1811, the Russian surveyor
Vasilii M. Golovnin and six of his crew were imprisoned for two years, while the Japanese rebuffed the attempts of
Stamford Raffles to send ships to Japan from British-occupied Java during the
Napoleonic Wars. But it was concern for the safety of their whalers and their interest in Pacific trade generally that prompted the
United States to take the lead in opening Japan. On the third visit of an American naval squadron, in 1854,
Matthew Calbraith Perry convinced the shogun to sign the
Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened the ports of Shimoda (southwest of
Tokyo) and Hakodate (near the southern tip of
Hokkaido) to American ships. By the next year, Britain, Russia, and the Netherlands had obtained trading privileges along the same lines.

Despite some resistance by traditionalists, Japan quickly shucked off two centuries of Tokugawa isolationist policy. Reformers may have feared that if they did not learn from China’s lesson the Japanese might suffer a similar humiliation at the hands of westerners. Following the shogun’s ouster, the emperor took the reign name Meiji, meaning “enlightened ruler,” and the
Charter Oath drafted in 1868 by leaders of the restoration included as its fifth and final point, “
Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.” Although the United States had initiated contact, it was soon preoccupied with civil war and Japan turned to Britain and France for help in modernizing its economy and navy. The country’s transformation was astonishing. The value of its foreign trade rose from less than two million dollars in 1859, when the
Peninsular and Orient Line established bimonthly steamer service between Yokohama and Shanghai, to more than twenty-eight million dollars seven years later.
The western expatriate community grew to several thousand, although the Chinese outnumbered Europeans, just as they had at Manila, Batavia, and other Asian entrepôts. In 1875,
Yataro Iwasaki founded the Mitsubishi Mail Steamship Company (forerunner of the modern Mitsubishi companies and now part of the
NYK Line) and introduced a Japanese-run service to Shanghai. Iwasaki also took over the government shipyard at
Nagasaki—later the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company—founded with Dutch help in the 1850s, and started turning out steamships, thus setting the country on the path to becoming one of the premier shipbuilders in the world.

Contact between Europe and maritime Asia was made immeasurably easier following the opening of the
Suez Canal in 1869. With their dominance of major
Mediterranean trade routes and proximity to Egypt, the French not unreasonably believed that they would profit most from a shortcut to the Indian Ocean, and eagerly subscribed to the Suez Canal Company (Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez), founded by
Ferdinand de Lesseps with the support of his friend and patron,
Said Pasha, Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. The canal was 192 kilometers long from Port Said (named for the viceroy) to
Port Suez (the ancient
Clysma) and, as built, 22 meters wide on the bottom, between 60 and 90 meters across on the surface, and 8 meters deep.
^d
While the French viewed the canal as a means to counter British dominance of ocean trade, and the British government resolutely defied British shipowners to oppose any efforts to plan or construct a canal, the canal confounded virtually all expectations. Mediterranean countries did not reap a windfall from the canal’s opening; rather, as
The Economist
presciently observed in 1869, the canal was “
cut by French energy and Egyptian money for British advantage.” (In fact the engineering was French, but the energy was provided by Egyptians, 120,000 of whom died in the eleven years it took to dig the canal—“
all for the advantage of the ‘barbarian,’ ” as an oracle had warned
Necho II in the sixth century
BCE
.) Among Britain’s considerable advantages were strong capital markets to draw on
for shipbuilding, longer experience of building iron steamships, and the best engines and steamship coal in the world. British tonnage comprised 60 percent of the total transiting the canal in its first year, three times that of French ships; twenty years later Britain’s share was three-quarters of the total and France’s was only 8 percent. In 1910, British tonnage still made up more than 60 percent and the German
merchant marine accounted for 16 percent.

By 1875, the government of Said Pasha’s successor had rung up a massive debt and, now convinced of the canal’s importance to Britain, Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli arranged to buy out his share in the Suez Canal Company for £4 million in return for a controlling interest. The next year, Egyptian finances were put under Anglo-French control, and in 1882 the British bombarded
Alexandria and seized the canal to begin a forty-year occupation of Egypt. To preserve appearances, the
Suez Canal Convention of 1888 guaranteed that “
The Suez Maritime Canal shall be always free and open, in time
of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag.… The canal shall never be subjected to the exercise of the right
of blockade.” Needless to say, these principled sentiments were inevitable casualties of war.