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The city of Victoria, Hong Kong, ca. 1860s (detail of a gouache by an unknown Chinese artist), as it appeared when Catherine Delano arrived there with her seven children in 1862. (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.)
During the twelve years FDR spent in the White House from 1933 to 1945, he would occasionally escape momentarily from the stress of the Oval Office by reminiscing about the past. If you mentioned the Far East, he would very likely tell you that his maternal grandfather had been active in the Old China Trade of the nineteenth century. He would say that his grandmother, traveling with her children from New York to Hong Kong to join her husband, had narrowly escaped being captured by the Confederate raider Alabama during a voyage undertaken in the midst of the Civil War.
The President spoke with conviction, apparently unaware that he was remembering parts of the tale incorrectly or that he was adding information he had picked up elsewhere to round out the story. The danger posed by predators like Alabama was not a lesson he had learned in a history book. His source was his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had told him, during his boyhood years, about going to China on a clipper ship when she was a child.
In the 1880s and 1890s when Franklin was growing up, his mother's parents, Warren and Catherine Delano, lived at their Algonac estate on the Hudson near Newburgh, New York. In summer they would go to the Homestead in Fair Haven, Massachusetts, the property having passed in 1866 from FDR's great-grandfather, Capt. Warren Delano, to Warren Jr., his eldest son and namesake, Sara's father.
FDR's Delano grandparents died while he was in his teens, but their homes in New York and Massachusetts remained in family hands. To visit either one was to enter an environment that was evocative of seafaring and the Far Eastern trade. Being the older of the two, the Homestead became a magnet of memories that attracted the history buff not only in FDR but also in "FAD," his mother's youngest brother, Frederic Adrian Delano, with whom he established a close relationship.
One day in September 1928, while Uncle Fred was rummaging through old books and papers at Fair Haven, he found a "Family Journal" begun by his mother, Catherine, on board the clipper Surprise as she and her children departed on their perilous ocean journey in 1862, the year before he was born. Here was a valuable memento whose very existence had been forgotten within the family. Frederic's discovery may even have helped to persuade his sister Sallie (FDR's mother Sara) to record her own reminiscences for the benefit of her grandchildren. Her brief account, composed two months short of her seventy-seventh birthday in 1931, told how her father had become a partner in Russell & Co., the premier American firm trading at Canton in southeastern China in the 1830s and 1840s; how he had met and married her mother, Catherine Robbins Lyman of Northampton, Massachusetts, during a visit home in 1843; and how he had then returned to Canton with his bride, setting up house in a large residence called Arrowdale in the Portuguese colony of Macao, some sixty-five miles distant. Catherine would remain there whenever Warren's business took him to Canton, because the Chinese authorities were still reluctant to let the female members of a foreign merchant's family reside in the trading quarter, even though it was confined to a closely guarded area outside the walls of the city.
After leaving China in 1846 with a fortune large enough to provide a life of wealth in the United States, Sara's father was obliged to go back a third time, in 1859, because of losses suffered during the Panic of 1857. By then, Canton had been replaced by Hong Kong as the center of foreign trade with China. Although this British crown colony offered good living conditions, Warren traveled alone, hoping to recoup within two years. When he later realized he would need more time, he made arrangements to have his family join him.
In Sara Delano Roosevelt's memory Surprise seemed "more or less like a yacht," a ship that was rightfully called, in her day, "an unusually sightly vessel." Built in 1850 for A. A. Low & Bros., "she was beautifully fitted throughout." One of her captains, Charles A. Ranlett, was succeeded by his son, Charles Jr. In their hands, she made many fine passages, proving herself to be "one of the most successful clippers in the China trade," and "a mine of wealth for her owners."
In her 1931 reminiscences, FDR's mother described the master of the Surprise as "a young man of excellent education." "His name was Ranlett," she recalled, "and before we got to China, he and I had a grand birthday celebration." Indeed they did, as Catherine and the captain each bore witness at the time.
In recording these memories, Sara said very little about the long passage by way of the Cape of Good Hope, Java Head, and the South China Sea, but this vacuum is filled by her mother's "Family Journal," supplemented by Captain Ranlett's log of the voyage, which FDR received as a gift in the autumn of 1941, shortly after his mother's death. Together, these rich sources allow us to join the Delanos on board ship for an experience that only novelists or moviemakers could duplicate today.
Such a journey was not to be undertaken lightly. Catherine was thirty-seven years old at the time. She was leaving the safety of her home on the Hudson to travel across thousands of miles of ocean to a Far Eastern port of call on the opposite side of the globe. Trooping on board with her were seven children, ranging in age from sixteen to two: Louise, Dora, Annie, Warren 3rd, Sallie, Philippe, and Cassie (Kassie). The baby was jokingly dubbed the "posthumous child" because she had been born in 1860, months after her father had departed for Hong Kong. Assisting Catherine with last-minute details was a Delano cousin, Nancy Church of Fair Haven, who would assume the role at sea she normally filled at Algonac. Additional help would be provided by Cassie's nurse, Davis, and a maidservant, Ellen. There would be no other passengers because Warren Jr. had secured the vessel for his family's exclusive use. In addition to enough clothing for everyone to wear in all kinds of weather, and reading materials to help pass the time, Catherine had a piano sent on board to provide entertainment and to permit the older daughters (Louise, Dora, and Annie) to continue their music lessons.
The family's departure was memorable. Guns were fired and cheers were raised on Wednesday, June 25, 1862, as friends and relatives waved their goodbyes from a steam tugboat moving in company as a second tug towed Surprise down New York Bay to a point just outside the bar, where the harbor pilot departed. "We need not say," Catherine wrote, "it was sorrowful to leave our friends, but we must look forward to the happy meeting with our husband and Father at Hong-Kong."
At the outset, seasickness struck, as the captain noted in the idiom of the day: "Miss Louisa sickest of any of the girls and Dora smartest of the lot." Even "CRD," as Catherine referred to herself in her journal, fell victim to this malady, with Nancy, Davis, and Ellen no better off. To add to Catherine's concerns, her five-year-old son Philippe "suffered with a tooth-ache half the night, but was relieved toward morning by Laudanam."
"It took Sallie till noon to get dressed," her mother wrote, but Dora, a hardy fourteen, felt up to playing "Bonnie Doon" on the piaNo. After saying she did not like "this day-day," Baby Cassie won praise as "one of the best of sailors." Sixteen-year-old Louise, however, and her thirteen-year-old sister Annie were a sorry sight, the former lying on a mattress on deck and the latter stretched out "in the long Chinese chair." The ones who were feeling "bright" began to eat, but Louise and Annie could tolerate only congee. 1
A few days out of New York, the captain believed that his passengers were "gradually getting over their sea sickness . . . getting very smart & lively," but his optimism was premature. The most persistent sufferer was Louise. On the twentieth day out, she ate breakfast at the table for the first time but became seasick again that evening. A few days later, when a heavy southerly swell caused the ship to jerk about badly, Captain Ranlett noted: "Louise more miserable to day than Ever." Thirty days out (still months away from reaching Hong Kong) he wrote: "Louise almost as sick as Ever, again, to day." After nearly three months on board, Catherine's eldest daughter confessed: "I always have more or less vertigo. . . . I can say without exageration that I have been sick every time it has been at all rough."
Captain Ranlett was accustomed to dealing with the usual hazards of the sea, but a voyage during wartime meant greater risk. The journey to China had scarcely begun (Surprise was less than 500 nautical miles from Sandy Hook) when trouble seemed headed his way. The pertinent entry for Sunday, June 29, 1862, is laconic: "A large Eng. iron propeller passed near us bound South." Catherine's journal supplies the missing details: "About ten o'clk a steamer was in sight to leeward of us, and the Captain was quite anxious about her thinking she might be a privateer. . . . She came across our stern and Captain Ranlett [now] thought she might be an English mail steamer going to Bermuda." "CRD," her journal states, "was perfectly cool and not at all frightened."
Each Sunday throughout the voyage, the captain conducted a religious service for the family. Usually he would read one of Spurgeon's sermons, a Chalmers discourse, or something by Huntington. The congregation could thus dwell on "the friend that sticketh closer than a brother" or be reminded that "My House is a House of prayer." 2
On the Fourth of July, the ninth day at sea, Surprise was dressed appropriately, with all her flags flying. At noon Ranlett "Fired a National Salute of 13 guns" with the cannon he had on board. Young Warren, oblivious to mistakes in spelling, described the scene in a shaky sentence he added to his mother's journal: "We have had thirteen cannons fired and as sone as w[e] had fired them the men had what they called splicing the main brace witch was only taking a glass of whiskey."
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