Maritime encompasses far more than naval, and in fact the non-naval dimension of seafaring is what gives navies their overriding purpose. Were that not the case, navies would barrel around the seas aimlessly or wage battles for no apparent reason. Or they wouldn’t exist at all. Governments and the societies would—rightly—balk at funneling taxpayer money to pay for fighting forces that serve no public purpose.
Characteristically, Julian Corbett expresses this relationship more elegantly than Alfred Thayer Mahan. Maritime strategy, writes Corbett, is about preserving and enhancing the “national life” of seagoing peoples—chiefly their economic life. But Mahan takes a grander view of sea power while also delving more deeply into what makes a society fit to venture seaward. The navy, he says, exists to protect the seaborne supply chain for domestically manufactured goods and for foreign imports. A government only needs naval access to distant trading regions to facilitate diplomatic access, and it only needs diplomatic access to facilitate commercial access. Commerce is king—the navy merely its guardian.
Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Steven Ujifusa’s book Barons of the Sea. Mahan observes that a seagoing society needs industry not just to manufacture goods for sale abroad but also to carry those goods across the sea to foreign seaports where buyers can purchase them. Production, distribution, consumption: this is the geography of global commerce. Mahan hoped America would maintain its own merchant fleet, reversing the post-Civil War practice of dispatching goods in foreign bottoms. (One imagines he would blanch at the state of the U.S. merchant marine today.)
Ujifusa relates the tale of American shipbuilding firms’ efforts to design and build clipper ships able to ferry cargo to China and back in record time. Buying and selling cargo was a highly speculative endeavor during the fairly brief age of clippers, which, roughly speaking, spanned the middle half of the 19th century. Speculators would take out short-term loans, purchase cargo, transport it to Asia or Europe, and—with luck—sell it for enough to repay the loans. They reaped a profit if the sale price exceeded the loan total. Speed was of the essence. The firm that deployed the swiftest vessels to haul goods boasted an advantage in the bareknuckles game of seaborne commerce.
Hence the race to construct the fleetest ships. If the book is about nautical enterprise, then, it’s also about naval architecture. Warship designers must balance among speed, protection, and armament. Clipper-ship designers—chiefly in New England and New York—sought the ideal balance among speed, hauling capacity, and seakeeping ability. Speed was at a premium, but a clipper needed to carry enough freight to pay for its construction and upkeep while yielding a profit. And a large, fast ship was of little use if it foundered in brutal weather such as ships encountered when rounding Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, en route to China or, from the midcentury gold rush forward, California. They experimented ceaselessly with hull forms and sail plans, and kept close tabs on how the latest designs performed.
The author also explores how New Englanders and New Yorkers interacted with Asia. As sea-power strategist extraordinaire Geoffrey Till notes, the sea is a medium for cultural interchange as well as for plying mercantile and martial endeavors. Many American shippers were descended from whaling families in coastal cities like New Bedford and Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Donald McKay, America’s premier shipwright, pursued his craft in East Boston. Heck, I even learned that Medford, Massachusetts, on the northern fringe of present-day Boston—and the town where I attended graduate school—flourished as a shipbuilding center for a spell. Evidently the Mystic River, which connects Medford to the Atlantic, could accommodate the shallow-draft vessels that carried on trade in the age of sail.
The sea is one, as Admiral Jim Stavridis, another former denizen of Medford, points out. Seafaring placed the American east coast in contact with the Far East. Many succumbed to the allure of Asian cultures. Japanese art laid the foundation of the collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Captains of seaborne industry took up residence in China in hopes of making their fortunes and returning home to live in comfort if not splendor.
Barons of the Sea doubles an elegy for what turned out to be a short era. It was a short era because it coincided with the rise of steam propulsion. Steamships could keep a regular schedule and could carry more freight. Clippers no longer paid as steak technology matured. In 1870, in fact, McKay arrived in San Francisco after tagging along on Glory of the Seas, the last clipper built at his yard, only to find the ship had been impounded during the voyage to repay his debts. Over time, then, steam propulsion elbowed sailing craft out of seagoing trade.
The era Ujifusa chronicles was not without its blemishes. Far from it. After all, the clippers existed not just to bring tea stateside from China but to take opium to China. Drug-running was a major impetus behind the China trade. European empires fought a series of Opium Wars to wrest open access to Chinese seaports—but Washington negotiated access on similar terms afterward, taking advantage of European nautical victories. Barons of the Sea is a rousing story of nautical derring-do and enterprise for sure, but the story has its dark side.
Read the whole thing.
