Antonio Jacobsen, Flying Cloud at sea under full sail, 1913. Public domain.
On the eleventh of June, 1851, a brand-new ship lay in the North Atlantic with a decision to make. One that would make or break her attempt to win the most famous sea race of the century.
But the decider wasn’t the captain.
Nine days earlier the Flying Cloud had cleared Sandy Hook, bound for gold-mad San Francisco. She was one of the most expensive gambles on the East River that spring—bought, before she was even finished, for ninety thousand dollars—with less cargo room than an ordinary merchantman her size. The bet was that the profits would justify the expense, and the profits lived in one place: speed. The fastest ships charged the highest freights. The record to San Francisco stood just under ninety-seven days.
Yet four days out, the new ship’s rig had come down. Two topgallant masts and the main topsail yard, hanging a hundred feet above the deck while the ship ran off downwind at twelve knots. The crew got it down and built it back up again underway, but everyone aboard—seventy-eight souls, by one passenger’s count—had now watched the sky fall on them once.
Ahead lay the question every captain bound south in June had to answer: where is the wind? The old answer, the one every master had been taught, was east—stand toward Africa, make your easting, turn south when the trades let you. Slow, but proven. Turn too early, convention said, and you’d be driven onto the rocky coast of Brazil by the currents.
At the chart table there was a different answer. It came from a book so new and so radical that most captains had never seen it. Those who had, called its recommendations madness. It was simply titled Sailing Directions, by a Navy lieutenant named Matthew Fontaine Maury. And the reason for the skepticism was that the book was based on a concept entirely foreign to the world of sailing. Not stories or hearsay, but science. Thousands of real observations, collected and organized from thousands of logbooks.
And Maury’s science said something completely different from conventional wisdom about the path to Cape Horn. It said not to go too far east, but aim to just weather Brazil’s Cape St. Roque, which would allow a ship to cross the thinnest band of the doldrums, the windless desert in the sea that often held ships helpless for weeks at a time.
The navigator believed him. The captain did not—not yet. A ship nine days out and already patched, fortunes riding on her keel, spooked passengers, a record to beat, and the navigator asking the captain to leave the only road he knew and bet the entire voyage on an untested theory.
But the navigator was his wife, and in the end, she persuaded him.
At 30°48′ north, 39°52′ west, the Flying Cloud turned south.
Maury, Trade Wind Chart of the Atlantic Ocean, 1851, the sheet published the spring the Flying Cloud sailed. American Geographical Society Library, UW–Milwaukee. Public domain.
Her name was Eleanor Creesy, wife of the captain, Josiah Perkins Creesy of Marblehead, and history would later understand that the call she made that day was the deciding factor in what would become the most celebrated sea victory of the century.
For on August 31st, 1851, the Flying Cloud would drop anchor in San Francisco Bay, a mere 89 days and 21 hours after leaving New York—obliterating the previous record by almost a week.
But neither the gold rush nor the record attempts stopped there. As the fastest clippers and the best captains in America risked everything to gain the legendary status and enormous profits of beating the Flying Cloud’s record, only one ever managed it. In 1854, the Flying Cloud broke her own record, logging 89 days and 8 hours, also led by the team of Creesy and Creesy.
After that, the record remained unbroken for 135 years.
The newspapers of the era hailed the legendary captain, and he became a vaunted celebrity of his era. His wife, and his greatest trade secret, remained, as women did at the time, in the shadows.
But she is there no longer. In October of 2026, Eleanor Creesy was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame for her pioneering accomplishments, and even the Smithsonian calls her “the woman navigator of the Flying Cloud.” Who she was, and how little of her survives, is a story of its own. This is the story of what she did.
What Eleanor was up against
Gold turned up in California in 1848, and San Francisco became a boomtown that would pay almost anything for whatever the East could ship it. The trouble was the distance. Decades before a canal through Panama or a railroad across the plains, the only shipping road from New York ran around Cape Horn, and the old way it took six months. In 1849 a passage of 180 days was respectable. By 1851 anything approaching a hundred counted as fast.
So they built ships designed to go fast rather than to carry more. Donald McKay launched the Flying Cloud at East Boston on the fifteenth of April, 1851, and when she came to New York the crowds came to look: “one of the most perfect models of marine architecture,” the Post said, “that ever floated in our waters.”
Donald McKay, by Southworth & Hawes, c. 1850–55. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.
McKay’s Shipyard, East Boston, Southworth & Hawes, c. 1855. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Public domain.
Lines of the Flying Cloud, from Basil Lubbock, The China Clippers, 1914. Public domain.
What they were admiring was a ship nobody had tested. Two hundred and thirty-five feet long, she carried ten thousand yards of canvas at full press. The tallest rig they’d ever built—to set the skysail, men had to scale a fourteen-story building as it rolled on the ocean swells—and no one knew how much the masts could take. Four days into the voyage, they found out the answer: not enough.
Two days after Eleanor turned her south, they found out again. The mainmast—thirteen tons of timber, three feet thick—was found badly sprung where an iron hoop had let go in the dismasting. The carpenter nailed wooden staves around the crack and bound them with line: at best, a splint on a broken leg. But this broken leg was bound for Cape Horn.
Then there was the novice crew—many seeking only passage to the goldfields. Others—in a world where sailors had become miners overnight—were nursing bitterness that they’d not come aboard by choice, but had been drugged in a waterfront tavern and delivered to the pier. Two of them would try to sink her en route.
And at the bottom of the world waited Cape Horn. Sailors measure it from fifty degrees south in the Atlantic to fifty south in the Pacific, and westbound it is a fight against the wind and current that even old salts used to danger called Dead Man’s Road. The wrecks of hundreds of ships and thousands of souls lay beneath its waters.
Against all of that, Eleanor had a sextant, a chronometer, her tables, and a new science of wind and currents that she trusted before anyone else aboard did.
The road she chose
Was she right?
The doldrums answered first. Ships often lay in the doldrums for weeks. When they entered that stretch of still air, the heat was so oppressive that tar dripped from the rigging. One day a current carried the ship forty miles the wrong way. And yet, a mere three days after entering the doldrums, the winds appeared and the ship was carried forward.
And when they picked up, they picked up hard. On the ninth of July the Flying Cloud ran three hundred miles in a day. On the tenth, they faced a gale off the River Plate, the ship close-reefed and laboring, a brig to leeward losing her masts in plain view. “Heavy gales,” the log reads, “ship laboring hard & shipping large quantities of water.”
And in the middle of it, the carpenter found holes in the ship.
Two auger holes, bored through the deck under a sailor’s berth in the forecastle where water shipped two to three feet deep in heavy seas and ran straight into the hold. The two men were thrown into irons—one had been seen leaving the forecastle with an auger in his hand. The next day they came out again, “in consequence of wanting their services,” because a ship in a gale cannot spare two pairs of hands, even those two.
Where Eleanor put the ship when the sky went blind
South of the Plate the sun went out. Not for an hour. For days.
A navigator in 1851 was only as good as her last sight. Between one fix and the next she had dead reckoning—speed, heading, time, and every honest guess she could make about the current setting her sideways. The Flying Cloud was closing a coast whose charts could not be trusted, in weather that would not show her a star, with sixty-five fathoms under the lead.
On the nineteenth of July a patch of blue opened. Eleanor took her sight and worked it. Four hundred miles north of the Strait of Le Maire.
To reach Cape Horn, a ship could go the long way, out around Staten Island into the open Atlantic, where the westerlies could hold her off for weeks. Or she could take the shortcut: the Strait of Le Maire, fourteen treacherous miles of water between Tierra del Fuego and Staten Island, with tidal currents that ran like a river, reefs the charts had never found, and cliffs rising straight out of the sea on either hand. Maury himself warned never to attempt it at night or in thick weather.
Eleanor chose the strait.
The next day a hard gale came on with thick weather and snow, and Cape San Diego—the corner that marks the entrance to Le Maire—bore south, ten miles off, but the weather made it too dangerous to attempt. On her reckoning, the ship wore round and hauled off to the north to wait for better conditions. At five the next morning they tried again, passed a ship with her foresail blown clean out of her, headed for its doom, and nothing the Flying Cloud could do to help. They had their own problems. Eleanor estimated the weather had pushed them too far west, and they had to turn around a second time.
Two days in the blinding snow, standing off a coast she could not see, holding the ship’s position in her head. She didn’t give up.
On the twenty-second the wind went east and the Flying Cloud made the strait in a brisk three-hour sail. One passenger wrote: “On both sides cold snow tipped cliffs rise barren, forbidding and abrupt from the sea.”
Admiralty Chart 1373, Tierra del Fuego, Staten Island and Cape Horn, surveyed by FitzRoy and the officers of HMS Beagle, published 1841. Public domain.
Seven days around the bottom of the world
Maury’s advice for the Horn was to hug it as closely as wind and rocks allow. The day dawned surprisingly warm for a Southern Ocean winter. The thermometer read fifty-two. The sky was clear, and Eleanor hugged the treacherous cape tightly.
At eight in the morning on the twenty-fourth of July the Flying Cloud passed Cape Horn a few miles off, wind in the east, making ten and a half knots. “The whole coast covered with snow,” the captain wrote; “wild ducks very numerous.” A passenger recorded his verdict: “The Capt says we should not have such luck once in 500 times.”
Luck. Perhaps. Also skill. Eleanor had put the ship in the right place on the right day, and the Horn let her by. Fifty south to fifty south took her seven days. Eight thousand two hundred miles from New York in fifty.
James E. Buttersworth, The American Clipper Flying Cloud running before a gale off Cape Horn, 1854. Public domain.
The day she worked the sight twice
To know a ship’s speed in 1851 you heaved a knotted line over the stern and counted the knots that ran out while a sandglass emptied. On the thirty-first of July the Flying Cloud was running so hard the man heaving the log had to be held back to keep from being pulled overboard, and the line wasn’t long enough. “During the squalls,” the captain wrote, “18 knots of line was not sufficient to measure her rate of speed.”
At noon Eleanor took the sun. She worked the sight, and the number that came out was a number no ship had ever made. So she worked it again.
Three hundred and seventy-four nautical miles, noon to noon. “An average of 15 14/24th knots per hour.” A modern cruising sailboat like mine is thrilled to achieve eight knots. The Flying Cloud averaged fifteen and a half for a full day and touched more than eighteen in the squalls—“greater speed,” her owners wrote, “than any Steam Boat ever made.”
That night it blew storm-force, dead aft, the lower yards dipping into the crests, and Captain Creesy refused to shorten the main topsail. He was trusting a mast with a splint on it. If Eleanor trusted her data, her husband trusted his ship.
She brought her home
On the twelfth of August the Flying Cloud crossed the equator, seventy-one days out and twenty from the Horn. She was far from done, with both calms and headwinds hitting her within sight of the California coast, the ship tacking six times and speaking to a British bark bound for the same port that had been sailing for 180 days.
Two days from San Francisco a squall finally dismasted the fragile ship again, taking the fore topgallant mast. The crew worked all night to send it up again. “We’ll try,” the mate said. “You will not try,” the captain told him. “You will do it.” They did.
Then the dark came down with the Farallon Islands somewhere ahead, and Eleanor made the last call of the passage. At two in the morning, on her word, unable to know the exact position of the jagged teeth that spelled so many wrecks on the California coast, the ship hove to and waited for daylight. She’d pushed through every danger, but she also knew when not to push her luck, six hours from a safe arrival. The log finishes the sentence: “anchored in San Francisco Harbor at 11h30m am after a passage of 89 days 21 hours.”
A Sunday morning. Hundreds swarmed to North Beach to look at the largest merchant ship they’d ever seen and its unheard-of record of 89 days, 21 hours.
San Francisco harbor, 1850–51, daguerreotype. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Public domain.
The Golden Gate, Entrance to the Bay of San Francisco, Ayres / Kuchel & Dresel / Britton & Rey, c. 1855. Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Public domain.
What it cost to be her
In 1854 she did it again. New York to San Francisco in eighty-nine days and eight hours, thirteen hours inside her own record. That mark stood for a hundred and thirty-five years, until a sixty-foot racing sloop with a crew of three came under the Golden Gate in 1989. When it fell, the Associated Press noted that Eleanor Creesy remains the only navigator to have guided her husband around the Horn to a record twice. The National Sailing Hall of Fame inducted her in 2026.
And that is nearly all the record will say.
Nesbitt & Co., Printers, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve crewed on a tall ship, the Bark Europa, in the Strait of Le Maire and I can tell you what it looks like from on deck. I carry a sextant on my own boat in case of electronics failure, and I know what it is to bring the sun down to the horizon and work a sight.
What I can’t tell you is how a woman from Marblehead, Massachusetts—in a century in which doctors regularly counseled females that too much thinking would damage their reproductive organs—came to be the person who decided where that ship went. About the only thing that survives in the historical record is that she’d been taught navigation by her father and was married to the captain.
Everything else is up for debate. How did she and Captain Creesy work together? Live together? Love together? What did she have to give up to get there, and to whom? What did it cost to be the only woman aboard, in charge of the one thing the ship could least afford to get wrong, when the man she had to persuade was her husband?
No portrait of her survives. No painting, no daguerreotype, no charcoal sketch. Family tradition says she sat for the trumpet-blowing angel on the shipping line’s “89 days” sailing card, which would make an advertisement the closest thing we have to her face. History is silent on most everything else. But she deserves far more. So I built her story as fiction.
Where her story begins
My novel about Eleanor Creesy starts a decade before the Flying Cloud. Marblehead, 1841. A twenty-six-year-old who can chart a course better than any man twice her age—and now, with her father in the grave, a navigator no ship will sign. Nothing waits ashore but a marriage to a cabbage farmer. Then the harbor delivers the last man she expected to see again: a captain in desperate need of a navigator, who can give her back the sea only as his wife.
The sea would belong to her again. She would belong to him.
That is the bargain, and the woman who made it is the one who turned a ninety-thousand-dollar ship south on the eleventh of June, 1851, and won. The captain commanded the ship. She decided where it went. I wanted to know what it took to become her, so I wrote it.
The Navigator is the first book of The Navigator Series, and it’s free. Step aboard with Ellen here, watch the trailer, or browse the whole series. You don’t need to know a sextant from a sandglass. You only need to want to find out what she did next.
The Flying Cloud at a glance
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Type | Extreme clipper ship |
| Builder | Donald McKay, East Boston, Massachusetts |
| Launched | 15 April 1851 |
| Owners | Grinnell, Minturn & Co., New York (bought before completion for $90,000) |
| Size | 235 ft overall · 41 ft beam · 1,782 tons register |
| Captain | Josiah Perkins Creesy of Marblehead, Massachusetts |
| Navigator | Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, the captain’s wife |
| Maiden voyage | New York, 2 June 1851 → San Francisco, 31 August 1851, 11:30 a.m. |
| 1851 record | 89 days 21 hours (previous record just under 97 days) |
| Best day’s run | 374 nautical miles, noon to noon, 31 July 1851 |
| 1854 record | 89 days 8 hours—unbeaten for 135 years, until 1989 |
| Later life | Sold to British owners in 1862 (Black Ball Line, Australia trade); timber trade from 1871; wrecked at Saint John, New Brunswick, 1874; burned for her metal, 1875 |
Quick answers
What was the Flying Cloud?
The Flying Cloud was an extreme clipper ship built by Donald McKay at East Boston and launched on 15 April 1851. Bought by Grinnell, Minturn & Co. of New York for $90,000, she sailed from New York to San Francisco on her maiden voyage in 89 days 21 hours and set the sailing record for that passage.
Who navigated the Flying Cloud?
Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, the wife of her captain, Josiah Perkins Creesy. The Smithsonian calls her “the woman navigator of the Flying Cloud,” and the National Sailing Hall of Fame inducted her in its Class of 2026. On the 1851 passage she chose the route from Maury’s new Sailing Directions, worked the sights, and kept the ship off the rocks at Le Maire and the Farallones.
How fast was the Flying Cloud?
On 31 July 1851 she logged 374 nautical miles noon to noon, an average of about 15.6 knots, and touched 18 knots in the squalls—a day’s run no ship had made before. Over three days she covered 992 miles by the log.
What record did the Flying Cloud set?
New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn in 89 days 21 hours in 1851, then 89 days 8 hours in 1854. The 1854 time stood as the sailing record for 135 years, until Thursday’s Child beat it in 1989 in 80 days 20 hours.
How long did a ship take from New York to San Francisco in 1851?
Around four to six months. In 1849 a passage of 180 days was respectable; by 1851 anything near 100 days counted as fast, and three clippers that year took more than 200. The Flying Cloud did it in just under 90.
What happened to the Flying Cloud?
She was sold to British owners in 1862 and sailed for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line in the Australia emigrant trade, then in the timber trade between Britain and Saint John, New Brunswick. In June 1874 she went aground on the bar at Saint John in a gale, was refloated with her back broken, and was condemned; she was burned in 1875 for her copper and iron fastenings.
Is there a book about the Flying Cloud?
Yes. The standard nonfiction account is David W. Shaw’s Flying Cloud: The True Story of America’s Most Famous Clipper Ship and the Woman Who Guided Her. For Eleanor Creesy’s story as a novel, start with The Navigator, the first book of The Navigator Series, which is free.
Is The Navigator a true story?
The Navigator and its sequels are historical fiction inspired by the true story of Eleanor and Josiah Creesy. The voyages and the record are real; the novels imagine the inner life and the marriage that the historical record never wrote down.
Further reading
- Cheyenne Richards, The Navigator (Book One of the historical fiction series inspired by Eleanor Creesy)
- David W. Shaw, Flying Cloud: The True Story of America’s Most Famous Clipper Ship and the Woman Who Guided Her
- Margaret Elizabeth Lyon & Flora Elizabeth Reynolds, The Flying Cloud and Her First Passengers
- Smithsonian, Time and Navigation—“Meet the Navigator”
- National Sailing Hall of Fame—Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, Class of 2026
- The captain’s abstract log of the 1851 passage survives at Mystic Seaport (Log #355) and the Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.
- Who Was Eleanor Creesy? The Real Navigator of the Flying Cloud—her biography, what survives of her, and what doesn’t.