Sara Delano was born on 21. Sep. 1854 at Algonac, Saint Clair County, Michigan. Sara Delano was born on 21. Sep. 1854 at Algonac-on-Hudson, Newburgh, Orange County, New York. She married
James Roosevelt, son of
Dr. Isaac Roosevelt MD and
Mary Rebecca Aspinwall, on 7. Oct. 1880 at Algonac, Saint Clair County, Michigan; 2 nd marriage James. Sara Delano died on 7. Sep. 1941 at Hyde Park, New York, at age 86. Extract from 'Before the Trumpet'
By 1862, Warren Delano’s fortunes had improved, not enough to permit him to come home, but enough for him to arrange passage on a clipper, the 'Surprise', and send for his family to join him at Hong Kong.
Again, Catherine did what he wished without complaint. 'I suppose it was altogether terrifying to my... mother to give up her beautiful home and its peaceful security for perhaps the rest of her life,' Sara said later, but if she felt anxiety or resentment she masked it from the children. Algonac was leased to Warren’s old Canton friend, Abbot Low, the owner of the 'Surprise', and she resolutely marched her children aboard at New York on June 25.
The voyage would be a family adventure, the greatest of Sara's childhood. Seventy-five years later she liked to entertain her great-grandchildren at Hyde Park by singing the chanteys the sailors sang as they raised the sails:
Down the river hauled a Yankee clipper, And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow She’s a Yankee mate and a Yankee skipper, And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow
The seven Delano children ranged in age from Louise, now sixteen and chronically ill, down to Cassie, just two and known to the rest off the family as 'the posthumous child' because she had been born while her father was away. Sara was seven. With them went Cousin Nannie and two nurses.
Catherine Delano kept a detailed journal of the trip. There is not a word of complaint in it; perilous sea voyages of 128 days were just another part of her job. Even the prospect of attack from a Confederate privateer did not faze her. The captain was alarmed when a steamer appeared on the horizon not long after they got under way, she noted, but she herself 'was perfectly cool and not at all frightened.' (It turned out to be a friendly British vessel.)
The children and their nurses were constantly seasick. It snowed one day off Madagascar, and registered 126 degrees on deck in the China Sea. Sara developed chilblains; Cassie suffered from heat rash. It rained for days and Catherine had to keep the children entertained below deck while the ship pitched and plunged through heavy seas. There were other long stretches when the clipper rested motionless in the water, becalmed. The captain was often 'very discouraged,' Catherine noted; she herself never admitted that she was.
Some of the younger children were obstreperous. Warren clambered all over the ship; Cassie was 'perpetual motion' whenever she could get free of her nurse’s arms. Sara remained cautious and sober, did as she was told. Her name appears less often in her mother’s diary than those of the other younger children.
She and Philippe were closest, and she often led him by the hand. Together they climbed into the sailmaker's loft almost every day, 'decidedly a resource,' their mother wrote, not knowing that the old sailor's chief attraction was his ability to jab needles deep into his callused thumb without apparent pain.
One morning Sara and Philippe were gazing drowsily into the water when the ship glided past a huge green sunfish, basking on the surface, twelve feet across from fin to fin. Sara shouted, and a sailor snatched up a harpoon and drove it into the great fish’s back. It was hauled on deck and hacked open: scores of little silver fish spilled onto the bloody deck.
The voyage was not all arduous or exotic. Captain Ranlett did his best to make his passengers feel at home. The adults read aloud the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and leafed through back numbers of the Atlantic Monthly. The children studied French, sang 'Bonnie Doon,' and danced the Virginia Reel around the new piano they were taking out to Macao.
On the Fourth of July, the captain fired thirteen guns in honor of the original states and let the older children touch off a fourteenth for luck. A special frosted cake appeared at tea, and, after dark, skyrockets were set off on deck. Then, while Captain Ranlett played the organ, passengers and crew joined in singing 'national airs,' the thin homey sound of 'Yankee Doodle' drifting out across the black surface of the alien sea.
The Delano children got their first glimpse of Hong Kong on the morning of October 31, a blue-gray smudge on the horizon, where their mother had told them their father lived. Shortly after ten, standing at the rail, Sara saw a small vessel moving purposefully toward them. It was the family houseboat, a dozen Chinese sailors straining at the oars.
At the helm, urging his men on, sat her father. Sara never forgot how he looked at that moment, 'all dressed in white... very tall and good-looking, with his side-whiskers and moustache, coming very quickly up the side of the ship on a ladder the sailors had let down.'
He sprang to the deck of the 'Surprise' and lifted her into the air in his great arms.