Aristotle Onassis and Donald Trump weren’t the first megabuck moguls to flaunt their wealth with seagoing pleasure palaces.
America’s first luxury yacht, a magnificent Salem, Mass., brig called Cleopatra’s Barge, was launched in 1816.
It perished just eight years later–some say because of a drunken yachting party; others blame only a drunken captain–just a short while after the deaths of its only two owners, Boston’s super rich George Crowninshield and King Kamehameha II of Hawaii.
This summer, a team led by Paul Johnston, a Smithsonian Institution historian, is working off the northern shore of Hawaii’s Kauai Island to rescue the recently discovered remains of the wreck, before the Pacific completely devours the few artifacts that have survived.
But the team has already uncovered enough lore to satisfy the most avid sunken ship nut, including tales of piracy, kidnapping, presidential clout and (to be truly gross) the uneaten leftovers of a cannibal meal that proved to be the unfortunate Capt. James Cook.
“There were many, many famous ships to come out of Salem, but this is the most notable,” said Johnston. “No one had ever built a large ship purely for pleasure in the United States before this.”
At the time of Cleopatra’s Barge’s launching, the average brig or comparable ship cost about $5,000.
Crowninshield paid $100,000 for his yacht.
“He spent $50,000 to build her and another $50,000 on furnishings and fitting her out in exotic woods,” Johnston said. “She was basically a small house. This was so unusual for the period that up to 2,600 people a day came to see her in 1816.”
Rather like the modern-day Trump, who took out ads in magazines to announce he had acquired a huge yacht, Crowninshield was thrilled by the public attention his maritime status symbol attracted and delayed the departure of a long-planned Mediterranean cruise for two weeks to allow the gapers to get their fill.
The Crowninshields were the Vanderbilts (or if you will, the Bill Gateses) of their day, having made their pile as “privateers” during the American Revolution, when Crowninshield vessels were licensed by the Continental Congress to steal British shipping at cannon point and pocket the profits, and as legitimate merchantmen.
Crowninshield was an enthusiastic yachtsman, and took his prized possession to no fewer than 16 Mediterranean ports on his first cruise, showing off Cleopatra’s Barge to as many as 8,000 dockside visitors a day there.
The very rich got the same special treatment they do now. Using the clout of his brother Benjamin, then Secretary of the Navy, Crowninshield got President James Monroe, a sometime guest aboard Cleopatra’s Barge, to write all manner of glowing letters of introduction to European potentates Crowninshield wanted to visit.
The Europeans were impressed with the fact that even Crowninshield’s ship’s cook was a master at solar navigation, which the man had learned years back as a young seaman in the Sandwich Islands (as Hawaii was then known).
Crowninshield dined out on a less than savory anecdote about his crewman. While in Hawaii in 1779, the ship’s cook come across the freshly roasted but only partially eaten remains of what he thought was a pig. Snatching up the entrails, he made himself a tasty meal, only to later discover they belonged to the famed British explorer Capt. James Cook, who’d just then been killed and partially eaten by natives following a dispute.
Crowninshield’s far-flung hobbing and nobbing was cut short in 1818. While aboard his yacht planning another grand voyage, he keeled over from an apparent heart attack and died.
Adventures in paradise
His family stripped the brig of its expensive fittings and furnishings and auctioned it off. She fetched only $15,400 from a ship’s broker because she had begun to rot in the stern. The wily brokerage, Bryant Sturgis of Boston, found an unsuspecting buyer in the young King Kamehameha II of Hawaii, who in 1820 agreed to purchase the yacht for $80,000 in valuable sandalwood.
Unlike the modern-day Sultan of Brunei, who acquired arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi’s huge yacht as partial payment on a bad debt but quickly turned around and foisted it on the starry-eyed Trump in 1987, King Kamehameha decided to keep Cleopatra’s Barge, renaming it Ha ‘aheo o Hawai ‘i, or “Pride of Hawaii.”
Once restored, the yacht was used by the king to ferry Christian missionaries, as a royal merchant vessel and as a diplomatic “ship of state,” which is to say, he sailed it around to the various islands and used its imposing presence to intimidate the locals.
At the time, the northern island of Kauai was the only one which resisted domination by Kamehameha’s ruling family.
Kamehameha sailed his yacht up to the island, threw a big yacht party for the local king, and then, when his guest was feeling nice and jolly, weighed anchor and sailed off to Oahu, where he married his prisoner off to his sister-in-law and kept him thereafter in exile.
This was considered kidnapping and an act of piracy, but it served to make Kauai part of Hawaii.
The yacht was at Kauai when Kamehameha met his own peculiar fate thousands of miles away. In late 1823 he took one of his several wives to England to visit Britain’s King George IV. But he and his wife were kept waiting for weeks at a hotel because King George was too busy to see them. Before their audience was granted, they both contracted measles and died, causing an international scandal.
It was just as well Kamehemeha didn’t come back. While he was away in England, some local chiefs began taking his yacht out for joy rides. On one particularly uproarious night, the drunken revelers and/or the drunken captain brought the ship into Kauai’s Hanalei Bay at full speed and plowed it into a reef, wrecking and sinking her.
Uncovering the wreck
Johnston, curator of marine history for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has been obsessed with Cleopatra’s Barge ever since 1981, when he left graduate school and joined the staff of Salem’s Peabody Museum, which has artifacts and a reconstruction of the ship’s main salon on display.
His obsession continued when he came to the Smithsonian in 1989 but it was not until last year that he was finally able to begin organizing an actual expedition.
Johnston and his team knew the general area where the yacht went down–near the mouth of the Waioli River.
Using remote sensing devices and a magnetometer, they were able to pinpoint the wreck’s location last July between 75 and 100 feet offshore, with the remnants under 2 to 5 feet of sand.
The hull and masts were gone, eaten by a kind of undersea termite called the teredo worm.
“It’s the famous ship’s worm that’s in waters everywhere all over the world,” Johnston said. “They bore into the hull of a ship and then consume the wood.”
To protect against this scourge, 19th Century sailing ships had copper plated bottoms the worms could not penetrate. They got into the yacht because her wooden parts went underwater, and copper plating is mostly what’s left.
In initial dives last summer, Johnston recovered a number of copper pieces. They also brought up a few artifacts, including pieces of American and foreign ceramics, a leather holster, half an hour glass and some bone.
“It was all animal bone,” said Johnston.
This summer, they’ve been going after the rest of it, not simply because the objects are maritime relics but because they are the only known artifacts “of early Hawaiian monarchy about which virtually nothing is preserved.”
“This is America’s only authentic royalty,” Johnston said, “and we’re trying to make a significant contribution to our knowledge of that material culture.”
