New York’s nooks and crannies teem with nuggets from its glorious past — some recognized, some not. Melbourne Smith and Matt Carmel think they just found one of the latter. Six feet under.
John Willis Griffiths, a hero of the golden age of American clipper ships, lies in an unmarked grave in the Linden Hill United Methodist Cemetery in Queens, according to cemetery records — a tragedy Smith and Carmel hope to rectify.
Who was John Griffiths? He was a maverick of American ship-building at a time when it was one of the city’s most important industries. His ships set numerous records, and he advanced his trade enormously, helping a still-young nation achieve supremacy on the seas and commercially.
This was the 1800s, and the shipyards of Lower Manhattan were churning out vessels like biscuits on an assembly line. The early Baltimore clippers appeared in the late-18th century. Small, sleek sailing schooners and brigs known for speed, they were used in the slave trade and as privateers in the War of 1812. Later, larger tea and opium clippers served “the China trade” and the California and Australia gold rushes.
Greater speed meant greater profits, so the race was on to build the fastest ships. Ann McKim, launched in 1833, was the first ship-rigged Baltimore clipper. But it was two swifter Griffiths ships — Rainbow and Sea Witch — that ushered in the clipper era’s grandest (and most profitable) days more than a decade later.
Born to a shipwright in 1809, Griffiths became a draftsman while young. At 19, according to the 1888 “Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography,” he laid the lines of the frigate Macedonian — then the fastest ship of her kind in the US Navy, according to the Newburyport Clipper Ship Museum.
Early on, he’s said to have read about a discarded European notion that questioned the conventional “cod’s head and mackerel tail” ship shape — a rounded bow and tapered body. A man of science and math who could perform his own “hydrostatic” calculations, Griffiths conducted tank tests to confirm his inverted design — a sharp bow extending far out over the water line, with a concave hull, its widest stretch further aft and a more rounded stern — as theoretically faster.
The industry mocked the idea. But in 1845, Rainbow — the first “extreme clipper” — proved Griffiths right, setting several records for her New York-China runs. Within a few years’ time, she and a few other ships had cut what had been a 12-month round-trip voyage in half.
Sea Witch, launched the next year, set more records. In 1849, her Hong Kong-New York run took just 74 days; no single-hulled sailing vessel to this day has ever made better time.
Steam engines, iron hulls and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought a quick end to clippers. Griffiths died in poverty in 1882, but by then he’d devised numerous inventions; built several ships; written and published journals and books; and, most important, ushered in a more serious reliance on hard science in ship design.
Sea Witch, wrote William Crothers in “The American-Built Clipper Ship, 1850-56,” had “more influence on the configuration of fast vessels than any ship built in the United States.”Even Boston’s Donald McKay, perhaps the most famous of the clipper-ship builders, nodded to New York’s Griffiths.
No wonder Smith and Carmel are fans. Smith, a maritime historian and a ship-builder himself, designed the original Pride of Baltimore (a replica of a 19th-century Baltimore clipper topsail schooner) and other ships; Carmel is an inventor and a licensed captain who’s built his own small sailboat. For years, the two, along with others, have been trying to drum up funding to build a Sea Witch replica, which could be docked, perhaps, at the South Street Seaport.
Carmel recently visited Griffiths’ grave in Queens and was horrified to discover its lack of a headstone. Indeed, you’d never know this was the last resting place of one of America’s greatest naval architects.
If Sea Witch isn’t rebuilt, the least Smith and Carmel can do is see that its designer gets a proper monument (McKay’s got one at his grave and two others in Boston).
And yet even that may prove tricky; funds aside, they need to get the cemetery’s permission — which might prove rough sailing.
New York, and the nation, owe Griffiths an appropriate headstone — at the least. Here’s wishing Smith and Carmel fair winds and following seas in their efforts to get him one.