Chapter III: The Perfection of Sails—the Clipper Ships

In the 17th Century a new people began to make their mark in the world of the sea. Formerly the development of ships had been almost exclusively, at least for two thousand years, in the hands of Europeans—the Mediterranean peoples first, and later, the peoples of northern Europe.

One of the important reasons for the north European interest in ships had come about as a result of the discovery of the New World and, with that, the discovery that the world was actually round. That dynamic age now often called the age of discovery opened up new lands that lent themselves to colonization, and because Europe was filled with energy and was in a proper frame of mind to take advantage of the opportunity, important colonies sprang up in the Americas, in the Pacific, and in Africa.

From the point of view, however, of influences on the development of ships these colonies, in themselves, had, with one exception, little effect. This one exception was the row of British colonies that lined the Atlantic Coast of North America from the Bay of Fundy to Florida. Here there began to grow up a people whose forebears had known the boisterous seas of northern Europe, and who were scattered along a narrow coastline where they found ready and at hand the best timber in the world from which to build ships. Furthermore, the fisheries of this coast were rich, and, too, traffic between these colonies soon sprang up and demanded ships to carry it, for roads were either bad or were non-existent and the great boulevard of the sea lay outside the entrances to the numerous fine harbours that indented the coast.

_These merchant ships, which sailed from England to the Far East, were almost as much like warships as they were like merchantmen. They were finely built, but they took their time on their voyages out and back._ ]

At first, naturally enough, the ships that were built were small, but by the beginning of the 18th Century the business of building ships was an important one, particularly in New England. So important was it, and so well and so cheaply were ships built in this new part of the world, that Europeans found it to their interest to buy ships from the many yards that dotted this coast. This business continued to increase in the American colonies until, in 1769, according to Arthur H. Clark, in “The Clipper Ship Era,” 389 vessels, of which 113 were square-rigged, were built. All of these, it is true, were small, none of them being over 200 tons, but the business was flourishing and valuable experience that later proved of great importance was being secured.

During this same time “The United Company of Merchant Venturers of England Trading to the East Indies,” or, as it was later generally called, the East India Company, was gradually developing, for the long voyages from England to the East, those magnificent ships that now are universally referred to as East Indiamen.

So lucrative was the trade that these ships were engaged in, for it was a carefully controlled and legalized monopoly, that truly great amounts of money were made for the stockholders of the company and for the officers of the ships. And because the trade was exceptionally profitable these ships were wonderfully built and cost sums that, for those days, were huge. The ships, because they were navigating waters frequented by pirates and might be called upon to fight their way both out and back, were almost ships of war, and the discipline on board was more like the discipline of ships of the British Navy than like that of ordinary merchant ships. The crews were spick and span in neat uniforms. The men were drilled as carefully as man-of-war’s-men, and the crews were large, and consequently their work was not hard.

The ships themselves were built in the finest possible manner, and the cost of one 1,325-ton ship built for this service is said to have been more than a quarter of a million dollars—£53,000 to be exact—a sum truly huge for those days, and one not exactly to be sneezed at to-day.

This great company, with its monopoly that sometimes made it possible for a ship to earn 300 per cent. on her entire cost in a single round trip from England to India or China, was organized in 1600. The fact, however, that there was no competition for them to face resulted in a conservative outlook that made for slowness rather than for speed, and little actual advance in the science of design of either hulls or sails came as a result of the building of these costly and sturdy ships.

For two and a third centuries, however, this grand old company continued, and during that time many a fortune was built up for the investors, but finally the people of Britain rebelled at this monopoly, and Parliament, in 1832, withdrew the charter and threw open the trade to the East to other British lines.

_Ships of this type carried the transatlantic passengers of the early part of the 19th Century. Because of the demand of the owners of the Black Ball Line and of its competitors, America, where these lines were owned and where their ships were built, developed the designers who ultimately gave the world the clipper ships._ ]

But the conservatism of the sea is strong, and, while other lines took advantage of the opportunity to send their ships to the East they patterned them more or less after the ships of the East India Company, and little effort was made to secure speed.

But later, in 1849, the Navigation Laws which limited trade between Great Britain and her colonies to British ships, were repealed, and foreign carriers were, for the first time, permitted to enter this lucrative field.

This was the end of one act and the beginning of another, for the repeal of these laws gave the opportunity it needed to that new country, now a nation, that for two hundred years had been teaching itself to build ships of the trees from the rocky soil of New England.

But a little more is needed to understand just why the ship-builders of the United States of America were in a position to leap so suddenly into prominence among the carriers of ocean freight.

For two hundred years, as I have said, Americans had been building ships, and in that time the industry had had its ups and downs. British legislation, in colonial days, had had its adverse effect. The Revolutionary War, and, later, the War of 1812, had dealt disastrous blows at American shipowners, but these people were of sea-going stock, and each time they recovered. Then, after the War of 1812, and particularly after the long Napoleonic struggle was brought to an end in 1815, trade between the new American nation and Europe, and particularly between America and Britain, developed by leaps and bounds.

International commerce grew as it had never grown before, and, shortly, lines of “packets”—that is, passenger ships running regularly between two ports—went into service between Britain and America.

The Black Ball Line was the first of these. Its ships were distinguished by a large black circle on the foretopsail below the close reef-band, where it would be visible as long as the ship carried even a shred of sail. The earlier ships of this line were from three hundred to five hundred tons, and before long more than a dozen were in service. They sailed regularly and for the first ten years of the line’s existence averaged, according to Arthur H. Clark, twenty-three days for the voyage east, and forty days for the return, the discrepancy between these two being due to the prevailing winds of the North Atlantic which, on the route these ships sailed, are from the southwest. The Gulf Stream, too, or rather the continuation of the Gulf Stream, sometimes known as the Gulf Stream Drift, aided them on their eastward voyages.

_With a lookout at the masthead these ships cruised all over the earth in the first half of the 19th Century._]

During the thirty years following the founding of the Black Ball Line a number of other similar lines were founded, notably the Red Star Line, the Dramatic Line, and the New Orleans Line from New York. All of these, and others, were American owned, and with the opening of the Erie Canal, which gave access to the Great Lakes, and opened a vast new land, trade greatly increased.

These ships were not large at first, but gradually they increased in size until, in 1849, the _Albert Gallatin_, of 1,435 tons, became the largest of the lot, although a number of others approached her in size.

These ships were in a new kind of service. Before the origin of the Black Ball Line there had been few passenger ships. More often than not ships had accommodations for passengers, as the East Indiamen had, but ships had seldom, prior to the opening of the 19th Century, devoted much space to passengers. In a later chapter I shall discuss the reasons for this. But once ships began to carry passengers to the practical exclusion of freight, speed became desirable, and the North Atlantic packets were designed more and more with speed in mind. This resulted in a demand for really scientific naval architects and because Americans were the ones chiefly interested in building faster ships, and because, too, the packet lines could afford to pay for their services, able men turned their attention to this important problem.

Thus it was that, between 1816 and 1849, a demand on the part of the American packet lines for faster ships produced in America a group of designers who evolved a type of sailing ship that the world has never seen surpassed for speed on the wide stretches of the open sea. And thus it was, too, that with the repeal of the Navigation Laws in England, America was able to put into service between Britain and the Far East such ships as made conservative British seamen gasp for breath ere they, too, set about following, with eminent success, in the footsteps of their transatlantic brothers. Then, instantly, the gigantic rush of gold hunters to California gave added impetus to the demand for faster ships, and almost overnight the era of the clipper ship had begun.

_The clipper ship that made the fastest trip across the Atlantic ever made under sail. Her record from Sandy Hook to Rock Light was thirteen days, one hour._ ]

According to Arthur H. Clark’s “The Clipper Ship Era,” which contains a complete and fascinating account of this whole period (and it is actually a story for a book rather than for a mere chapter into which it is impossible adequately to compress it), the first clipper ship ever built was the _Ann McKim_, a ship built at Baltimore in 1832.

During the War of 1812 a number of Chesapeake Bay ships which came to be called “Baltimore clippers” proved very successful as privateers. These ships were fast, and probably the name “clipper” had some connotation at the time suggesting speed. But these “Baltimore clippers” were not, as the word was later used, clipper ships in the true sense. The _Ann McKim_, as I have said, was actually the first of these.

This ship was an enlargement to scale of one of the small, fast sailing vessels which two hundred years of ship-building experience had taught American shipwrights to construct. The _Ann McKim_, then, was a small sailing ship built by the foot, so to speak, while her smaller counterparts had been built by the inch. Her proportions were identical to those of the small fry that skimmed about Chesapeake Bay. Only in size and in the elaborateness of her finish did she differ.

Before the advent of the _Ann McKim_, no one seems to have thought of building a ship of her size—she was 143 feet long—on any lines but those which for so long had been accepted as proper for a ship, and they were far different from the lines accepted for small boats. But despite her originality the _Ann McKim_ proved to be fast.

It seems to be true that this ship did not directly affect ship design. But in the next nine years a number of fast ships appeared, and then John W. Griffiths, a young naval architect of New York, in a series of lectures on the subject of ship design, laid down the basic rules that brought into being those beautiful ships—of which there were never more than a handful, by comparison with the other ships of the world—that suddenly leaped into world-wide prominence.

To the uninitiated, the changes proposed by Griffiths seem unimportant and perhaps uninteresting, for it resulted only in sharper bows and finer lines, in the movement, farther toward the stern, of the ship’s greatest beam, and of “hollow” water lines—that is, the curve of the hull aft from the bow along the water line was concave before it became convex, as it long had been for its whole length on other ships.

The first ship to be built along these new lines, and therefore the first clipper ship of the new order of things, was the _Rainbow_, which was launched in 1845. It is interesting, too, to note that, while she was lost—perhaps off Cape Horn—on her fifth voyage, few of the later clippers ever broke the records she set. Griffiths, with the touch of genius that he had, had instantly approached such perfection as mortal man can reach.

_The greatest clipper ship ever built. Unfortunately, before she made her first voyage she caught fire and had to be sunk. She was refloated and refitted, but never made a voyage in her original rig. When new masts were put in her they were made smaller than the first ones. Still she turned out to be one of the very fastest of the clippers._ ]

And unlike the _Ann McKim_, the _Rainbow_ did affect ship design. It is true that critics announced that these new ships would capsize from the very weight of their spars, that they could not stand up in a boisterous sea, that they were freakish and ridiculous. But still they were built, and there were races out to China and back again; and sometimes they brought to New York the news of their own arrivals at Canton or Shanghai.

So quickly had Griffiths’s ideas of ship design taken hold that in the four years from the launch of the _Rainbow_ until 1849—when the repeal of the Navigation Laws permitted foreign ships to compete for business between Britain and her colonies and the rush to California opened up another profitable field—a number of these new clipper ships were making regular voyages.

The story of the first American clipper ship to carry a cargo of tea to Britain from China is an interesting one, and I can do no better than quote directly from Mr. Clark’s account of the voyage in “The Clipper Ship Era.”

“The _Oriental_,” says Mr. Clark, “sailed on her second voyage from New York for China, May 19, 1850 ... and was 25 days to the equator; she passed the meridian of the Cape of Good Hope 45 days out, Java Head 71 days out, and arrived at Hong-kong, August 8th, 81 days from New York. She was at once chartered through Russel & Co. to load a cargo of tea from London at £6 per ton of 40 cubic feet, while British ships were waiting for cargoes for London at £3:10 per ton of 50 cubic feet. She sailed August 28th, and beat down the China Sea against a strong southwest monsoon in 21 days to Anjer, arrived off the Lizard in 91 days, and was moored in the West India Docks, London, 97 days from Hong-kong—a passage from China never before equalled in point of speed, especially against the southwest monsoon, and rarely surpassed since. She delivered 1,600 tons of tea, and her freight from Hong-kong amounted to £9,600 or some $48,000. Her first cost ready for sea was $70,000. From the date of her first sailing from New York, September 14, 1849, to her arrival at London, December 3, 1850, the _Oriental_ had sailed a distance of 67,000 miles, and had, during that time, been at sea 367 days, an average in all weathers of 183 miles per day.”

_Which, with the_ Fiery Cross, Taeping, Serica, _and_ Taitsing, _sailed what was, perhaps, the greatest race ever run. After sailing 16,000 miles from Foo-Chow, China, to London, the_ Ariel, Taeping, _and_ Serica _docked in London on the same tide, the_ Taeping _the winner by only a few minutes. The other two were only two days behind, although the first three took 99 days._ ]

Such performances were not rare for these ships, and because they were the rule, rather than the exception, the reputation of clippers grew apace, and interest rapidly grew in their comparative speed. Thus it was that many races were sailed, half around the world, during which every stitch of canvas possible was carried for every mile of the way, and captains studied winds and currents with such care and success that well-matched ships were often in sight of each other off and on during voyages of thousands of miles.

The development of the clipper ship was rapid, and her decline was almost equally fast. Eight years after the _Rainbow_ took the water Donald McKay, an able designer and builder, launched the _Great Republic_, one of the very largest sailing ships ever built. While this ship has been surpassed in size by several later sailing ships, no other ship ever built was designed to carry so enormous a press of sail.

The mainmast of this great vessel was a huge “stick” 131 feet long and 44 inches in diameter. Above this were the topmast, 76 feet long; the topgallantmast, 28 feet long; the royalmast, 22 feet long; and the skysailmast, 19 feet long. All of this was topped by a 12-foot pole. The great structure of the built-up mainmast towered more than 200 feet above her deck.

But this greatest of all sailing ships was destined never to take a voyage with these gigantic masts and spars. Just after she had finished loading in New York for her first voyage, a warehouse fire ashore dropped embers in her rigging and she was so badly burned that she was sunk in order to save what was left. Her beautiful masts had had to be cut out of her during the fire, and when she was finally raised and rebuilt freight rates had fallen so far that it was not thought best to re-rig her in her original dress. A reduced rig was installed, making possible a great reduction in the size of her crew, but even with her reduced rig she crossed the Atlantic from Sandy Hook to Land’s End in 13 days.

Until the Civil War broke into the peaceful development of America, clipper ships were built in many yards, although the introduction of iron as a ship-building material was giving Britain the upper hand again, after the Americans had temporarily wrested it from her. This introduction of iron in itself would have caused the elimination of America from mid-19th Century ship-building, but the Civil War laid a heavy hand on the young country, and American ships largely disappeared from the sea, save along the Confederate coast where great fleets lay in wait for fast blockade runners that slipped out to Bermuda and the Bahamas for cargoes of European goods to take through the blockade to the needy South.

_Such schooners as this are common in the New England fishing fleets. They are seaworthy and fast, and probably the men who sail them are the greatest seamen of our time._ ]

England, however, had once more found herself, and soon her yards were building clipper ships that equalled the Americans—surpassed them, some say, but more than one challenge for an ocean race was issued by groups of Americans only to find no takers in British shipping circles. Now and then, it is true, British ships outsailed American. But now and then, too, Americans outsailed their transatlantic brothers, so it is difficult to decide as to their relative merits.

But there is no doubt of one thing—the greatest ocean race ever sailed was one in which five British tea clippers were engaged. The _Ariel_, _Taeping_, _Fiery Cross_, _Taitsing_, and _Serica_ sailed from Foo-chow, China, within two days of each other, on the 29th, 30th, and 31st of May, 1865, all bound for London. Forty-six days later the _Fiery Cross_ rounded the Cape of Good Hope, followed by the _Ariel_, which also made that meridian in forty-six days; the _Taeping_ in forty-seven days; the _Serica_ in fifty days; and the _Taitsing_ in fifty-four days. Through June and July they sailed, and on August 9th the _Fiery Cross_ and _Taeping_ sighted each other. The ships passed the Azores in the following order, _Ariel_, _Taitsing_, _Fiery Cross_, _Serica_, and _Taeping_, all closely grouped. From there to the English Channel the race continued, with each ship unacquainted with the position of the others, save occasionally when their courses brought them together. Yet on the morning of September 5th, two of these ships sighted each other as they entered the English Channel. As they came closer together each recognized the other—they were the _Ariel_ and the _Taeping_, which had left Foo-chow within twenty minutes of each other more than three months before. Up the Channel they raced, side by side, and on September 6th, these two ships, and the _Serica_, which had sailed up the Channel four hours behind them, docked in London on the same tide and all three of them within an hour and forty-five minutes of each other, the _Taeping_ the winner by a few trifling minutes. Nor were they far ahead of the other two, which docked on the 7th and 9th. Three ships had sailed 16,000 miles in 99 days, and the other two in 101. Never before or since has a long ocean race shown such evenly matched ships.

_Square-rigged ships have largely disappeared because, among other things, their crews were large. These schooners, which sometimes have four or five masts, can be handled by small crews and consequently are able to continue to vie with steam._ ]

But the days of the clipper ships were numbered. Steam was already making inroads, and when the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, steamships could make the voyage to the East through the narrow waters of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, where sailing ships were impotent to follow, in much less time than even the clippers could round Cape Horn. And so there passed from the sea what were probably the most beautiful of all the ships that ever sailed its dark blue surface. Yachts there may be whose fragile lines are just a bit more delicate, whose sails are bleached more white. But such comparison is odious. It is as if Du Barry were compared with Juno. Now and again a watchful eye may still see a square-rigged ship being impudently towed about some teeming harbour by some officious tug, and occasionally a fortunate voyager may see one with her sails set as she harnesses the wind to take her half across the world. But the romantic days of sail have gone. The voyages from London to China around Good Hope, from New York to San Francisco around the Horn—they are things long past. Steam and a ditch through the sandhills of Suez did it. And now another ditch through the hills of Panama has double-locked the door, and sail is gone.

But hold! Sail is nearly gone, and yet it is here!

No more do fleets of monster ships with towering masts spread square sail after square sail to the honest winds of heaven. They, it is true, have almost disappeared, and what is left is not to be compared with what is gone. Yet in these days of steam and coal, of grimy stokers and machines _called_ ships, there still remains, to gladden the eye of the white-haired men who sailed the clipper ships a half a century and more ago, a type of sailing ship that has proved to be so handy, so capable and efficient, that all the machines of a machine-mad world have not been able to drive them from the sea.

These are the schooners and the other craft whose sails, based on those old Dutch vessels that first used the jib, are of a different design.

The clipper ships and their predecessors were “square-rigged” ships. A schooner is a “fore-and-aft” rigged ship, and to-day the “fore-and-aft” rig is the only rig in common use.

It will have been seen, from this account, that the development of sails was slow. Century followed century and ships progressed but little. Even the most rapid period of development covered the four centuries, from 1450 to 1850, so that, while fore-and-aft sails have reached their present stage more rapidly than square-rigged ships, still the story is one that covers centuries.

I have already told of the origin in Holland of the jib, which seemed to grow out of the lateen sail. It was from that beginning that the “fore-and-aft” rig developed.

The narrow waterways of the low countries demanded a type of sail that could be handled more easily and could sail closer to the wind than the square sail could. This the fore-and-aft sail did, and so it filled an important need. I have not the space, in what remains of this chapter, to trace its growth in all its detail. Furthermore, E. Keble Chatterton has done so admirably in “The Story of the Fore-and-Aft Rig.”

Let it suffice to say that the growth has been more a perfection than a series of revolutionary changes. At first the rig was crude. The sails were laced to the masts, for hoops sliding on the mast and to which the sail is made fast, while now almost universal, were then unknown. A boom was used to spread the foot of the sail, but not until the famous yacht _America_ crossed the Atlantic and won the cup that still is held in America as the greatest racing trophy in the world was the foot of the sail laced to the boom.

Many times I have sat at the wheel of the _America_ as she lies in the basin of the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, her masts denuded of the pile of canvas that drove her to that famous victory, and thought of her and of the little group of men whose careful thought resulted in her triumph. Such men as those, in the thousands of years through which ships have grown, have been the men who have made possible the growth of the dugout canoe with its sail of skin into the _Great Republics_ and the _Americas_ and, later, the _Majestics_. Such men as those have aided greatly in the advance of civilization.

I have space here for but one more thing. The Dutch, as I have said, were responsible for the origin of the fore-and-aft rig, and Europeans largely developed the yawl, the ketch, the brig, and several other forms that use fore-and-aft sails. But schooners are the most numerous of these and they originated, as their name did, in a New England shipyard. The story is an old one and well known, but I shall include it here, for it is the only case of which I know in which a new ship form together with its name appeared so abruptly.

It was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that port now famous for the ablest schooners that sail the seas, that the schooner originated. In 1713 an ingenious builder built a boat and placed in her two masts bearing fore-and-aft sails. For a head sail he spread that triangular canvas now so common, but this was the first time that these sails, all long familiar, had been arranged according to the now common plan.

She left the stocks and floated lightly on the water, and an interested spectator cried, “Look! See how she scoons!”

The owner must have been a man of wit as well as originality for he replied: “Very well. A scooner let her be.” And schooner she still is, but in the two centuries since that time her form has impressed itself on many thousand ships, and the port that gave her birth has gained a reputation that is world-wide as the port of the ablest schooners and the ablest sailors that ever graced the great expanse of ocean.