For the peculiar requirements of the tea trade, English maritime talent was quick to perfect a clipper type which, smaller than the great Yankee skysail-yarder, was nevertheless most admirable for its beauty and performance.On both sides of the Atlantic partizans hotly championed their respective fleets.In 1852 the American Navigation Club, organized by Boston merchants and owners, challenged the shipbuilders of Great Britain to race from a port in England to a port in China and return, for a stake of $50,000 a side, ships to be not under eight hundred nor over twelve hundred tons American register.The challenge was aimed at the Stornaway and the Chrysolite, the two clippers that were known to be the fastest ships under the British flag.Though this sporting defiance caused lively discussion, nothing came of it, and it was with a spirit even keener that Sampson and Tappan of Boston offered to match their Nightingale for the same amount against any clipper afloat, British or American.
In spite of the fact that Yankee enterprise had set the pace in the tea trade, within a few years after 1850 England had so successfully mastered the art of building these smaller clippers that the honors were fairly divided.The American owners were diverting their energies to the more lucrative trade in larger ships sailing around the Horn to San Francisco, a long road which, as a coastwise voyage, was forbidden to foreign vessels under the navigation laws.After the Civil War the fastest tea clippers flew the British flag and into the seventies they survived the competition of steam, racing among themselves for the premiums awarded to the quickest dispatch.No more of these beautiful vessels were launched after 1869, and one by one they vanished into other trades, overtaken by the same fate which had befallen the Atlantic packet and conquered by the cargo steamers which filed through the Suez Canal.
Until 1848 San Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post, a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected hides--vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast--or a whaler called for wood and water.During the year preceding the frenzied migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark and one brig, sailed in through the Golden Gate.In the twelve months following, 775 vessels cleared from Atlantic ports for San Francisco, besides the rush from other countries, and nearly fifty thousand passengers scrambled ashore to dig for gold.Crews deserted their ships, leaving them unable to go to sea again for lack of men, and in consequence a hundred of them were used as storehouses, hotels, and hospitals, or else rotted at their moorings.Sailors by hundreds jumped from the forecastle without waiting to stow the sails or receive their wages.Though offered as much as two hundred dollars a month to sign again, they jeered at the notion.Of this great fleet at San Francisco in 1849, it was a lucky ship that ever left the harbor again.
It seemed as if the whole world were bound to California and almost overnight there was created the wildest, most extravagant demand for transportation known to history.A clipper costing $70,000 could pay for herself in one voyage, with freights at sixty dollars a ton.This gold stampede might last but a little while.To take instant advantage of it was the thing.The fastest ships, and as many of them as could be built, would skim the cream of it.This explains the brief and illustrious era of the California clipper, one hundred and sixty of which were launched from 1850 to 1854.The shipyards of New York and Boston were crowded with them, and they graced the keel blocks of the historic old ports of New England--Medford, Mystic, Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, Rockland, and Bath--wherever the timber and the shipwrights could be assembled.
Until that time there had been few ships afloat as large as a thousand tons.These were of a new type, rapidly increased to fifteen hundred, two thousand tons, and over.They presented new and difficult problems in spars and rigging able to withstand the strain of immense areas of canvas which climbed two hundred feet to the skysail pole and which, with lower studdingsails set, spread one hundred and sixty feet from boom-end to boom-end.
There had to be the strength to battle with the furious tempests of Cape Horn and at the same time the driving power to sweep before the sweet and steadfast tradewinds.Such a queenly clipper was the Flying Cloud, the achievement of that master builder, Donald McKay, which sailed from New York to San Francisco in eighty-nine days, with Captain Josiah Creesy in command.This record was never lowered and was equaled only twice--by the Flying Cloud herself and by the Andrew Jackson nine years later.
It was during this memorable voyage that the Flying Cloud sailed 1256 miles in four days while steering to the northward under topgallantsails after rounding Cape Horn.This was a rate of speed which, if sustained, would have carried her from New York to Queenstown in eight days and seventeen hours.This speedy passage was made in 1851, and only two years earlier the record for the same voyage of fifteen thousand miles had been one hundred and twenty days, by the clipper Memnon.
Donald McKay now resolved to build a ship larger and faster than the Flying Cloud, and his genius neared perfection in the Sovereign of the Seas, of 2421 tons register, which exceeded in size all merchant vessels afloat.This Titan of the clipper fleet was commanded by Donald's brother, Captain Lauchlan McKay, with a crew of one hundred and five men and boys.During her only voyage to San Francisco she was partly dismasted, but Lauchlan McKay rigged her anew at sea in fourteen days and still made port in one hundred and three days, a record for the season of the year.
