Clipper (3m).
L/B/D:
220 × 41.2 × 22.2 dph (67.1m × 12.5m × 6.8m). Tons:
1,679 om. Hull:
wood. Built:
Irons & Grinnell, Mystic, Conn.; 1855.
Andrew Jackson was launched as Belle Hoxie but renamed when purchased by the New York firm of John H. Brower & Company. A medium clipper, she combined comparatively large stowage capacity with very fine lines. She had a round stern, a design element found only in Mystic-built sailing ships in the United States and not used in Britain until the advent of iron in shipbuilding. She made a number of fast passages between New York and San Francisco, averaging 106 days over six voyages as compared with 104 days for Flying Fish and only 103 for
Flying Cloud. She was the only ship to make the run between New York and San Francisco in less than 110 days four years running. This was due to a number of factors, not least her hard-driving Captain John Williams, a veteran of the Black Ball Line of transatlantic packets, who was memorialized in a sea chantey:
'Tis larboard and starboard on deck you will sprawl,For kicking Jack Williams commands that Black Ball.
On December 25, 1859, Williams dropped the pilot at New York en route for San Francisco. Andrew Jackson arrived at the pilot station on the California coast 89 days, 4 hours later, a passage credited as being four hours faster than the record set by Captain Josiah Cressy in Flying Cloud in 1854. Upon his arrival at San Francisco, Williams was awarded a commodore's pennant for the fastest run between New York and San Francisco and upon his return to New York, John Brower presented him with a chronometer watch engraved "89 days 4 hours." Although clipper historians Octavius Howe and Frederick Matthews ignited a debate—sixty-six years after the fact—over whether Andrew Jackson was entitled to the record, there is no record of any of Flying Cloud's numerous supporters contesting the validity of Williams's claim of a record from pilot to pilot, although Flying Cloud holds the record from anchor to anchor. (At the end of her record run, Andrew Jackson had to wait until the following morning for a pilot.) It is also worth noting that Flying Cloud twice made the passage in under ninety days, and her overall average of 103 days between the two ports is two days better than Andrew Jackson's.
These times remained the fastest by any sailing vessel on the Cape Horn route for 140 years, when a series of purpose-built yachts employing the most sophisticated construction materials and navigation and weather forecasting systems began vying for the honor. The record was broken first by Warren Luhrs's Thursday's Child, then by the trimaran George Kolesnikov's Great American in 76 days, 23 hours, and again in 1994, by Eucureuil Poitou-Charentes 2, a 60-foot monohull skippered by Isabelle Autissier, in 62 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes. The latter time was faster than that of the battleship
USS Oregon, which steamed from Seattle to Florida in 1898.
In 1860 Andrew Jackson established an uncontested transatlantic record by sailing from Liverpool to Sandy Hook in 15 days (November 3-18). She had also sailed to Liverpool in 15 days—two days shy of the record—at the start of the same voyage, and the New York Herald reported that on the voyage out and home she was "only 30 days at sea, including two days of calms, and sailed over 6500 miles, thus averaging nearly 220 miles a day throughout—a rate of speed rarely, if ever, equaled, continuously in a sailing vessel before."
Andrew Jackson made her last passage under the American flag in 1863, carrying spars from Puget Sound for Spain. Sold to H. L. Seligman of Glasgow, she came under command of Captain McCallum and was put in trade to the Orient. On her first voyage under the Red Duster she loaded lumber at New Brunswick for the Orient, returning from Java in 1865. Three years later, while homeward bound from Singapore, she was wrecked on a reef in the Gaspar Straits on December 4, 1868.
Cutler, Greyhounds of the Sea. Howe & Matthews, American Clipper Ships.
