Maiden Voyage of the Flying Cloud
On the afternoon of June 2, 1851, the clipper ship Flying Cloud slipped out of New York harbor on her maiden voyage, bound for San Francisco. She had been built that spring at Donald McKay’s yard in East Boston, and everything about her was new and untested. At her helm was Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy. At the chart table was his wife Eleanor, the ship’s navigator, who had learned the craft from her seafaring family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
The Gold Rush was at its peak, and the fastest route from the East Coast to California was by sea: south down the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, and north through the Pacific. Thousands of miles, weeks of open ocean, and the worst weather on earth at the tip of South America. The previous record for the passage was 96 days, set by the clipper Surprise earlier that year. The Flying Cloud made it in 89 days and 21 hours. In 1854 she beat her own time by 13 hours, setting a record that would stand for over a century.
The famous clipper shares her name with the forecastle song The Flying Cloud, though the two have little else in common. The song tells the story of a slave trader turned pirate under a “Captain Moore,” captured and condemned. No record of such a captain or a slaving vessel by that name has been found, and scholars from Colcord to Hugill have concluded that the song is probably fictitious. But the name stuck, and it is almost certainly McKay’s celebrated clipper that gave it its ring.