The American clipper ship was the result of an evolution which can be traced back to the swift privateers which were built during the War of 1812.In this type of vessel the shipyards of Chesapeake Bay excelled and their handiwork was known as the "Baltimore clipper," the name suggested by the old English verb which Dryden uses to describe the flight of the falcon that "clips it down the wind." The essential difference between the clipper ship and other kinds of merchant craft was that speed and not capacity became the chief consideration.This was a radical departure for large vessels, which in all maritime history had been designed with an eye to the number of tons they were able to carry.More finely molded lines had hitherto been found only in the much smaller French lugger, the Mediterranean galley, the American schooner.
To borrow the lines of these fleet and graceful models and apply them to the design of a deepwater ship was a bold conception.It was first attempted by Isaac McKim, a Baltimore merchant, who ordered his builders in 1832 to reproduce as closely as possible the superior sailing qualities of the renowned clipper brigs and schooners of their own port.The result was the Ann McKim, of nearly five hundred tons, the first Yankee clipper ship, and distinguished as such by her long, easy water-lines, low free-board, and raking stem.She was built and finished without regard to cost, copper-sheathed, the decks gleaming with brasswork and mahogany fittings.But though she was a very fast and handsome ship and the pride of her owner, the Ann McKim could stow so little cargo that shipping men regarded her as unprofitable and swore by their full-bodied vessels a few years longer.
That the Ann McKim, however, influenced the ideas of the most progressive builders is very probable, for she was later owned by the New York firm of Howland and Aspinwall, who placed an order for the first extremely sharp clipper ship of the era.This vessel, the Rainbow, was designed by John W.Griffeths, a marine architect, who was a pioneer in that he studied shipbuilding as a science instead of working by rule-of-thumb.The Rainbow, which created a sensation while on the stocks because of her concave or hollowed lines forward, which defied all tradition and practice, was launched in 1845.She was a more radical innovation than the Ann McKim but a successful one, for on her second voyage to China the Rainbow went out against the northeast monsoon in ninety-two days and came home in eighty-eight, a record which few ships were able to better.Her commander, Captain John Land, declared her to be the fastest ship in the world and there were none to dispute him.
Even the Rainbow however, was eclipsed when not long afterward Howland and Aspinwall, now converted to the clipper, ordered the Sea Witch to be built for Captain Bob Waterman.Among all the splendid skippers of the time he was the most dashing figure.
About his briny memory cluster a hundred yarns, some of them true, others legendary.It has been argued that the speed of the clippers was due more to the men who commanded them than to their hulls and rigging, and to support the theory the career of Captain Bob Waterman is quoted.He was first known to fame in the old Natchez, which was not a clipper at all and was even rated as slow while carrying cotton from New Orleans to New York.But Captain Bob took this full-pooped old packet ship around the Horn and employed her in the China tea trade.The voyages which he made in her were all fast, and he crowned them with the amazing run of seventy-eight days from Canton to New York, just one day behind the swiftest clipper passage ever sailed and which he himself performed in the Sea Witch.Incredulous mariners simply could not explain this feat of the Natchez and suggested that Bob Waterman must have brought the old hooker home by some new route of his own discovery.
Captain Bob had won a reputation for discipline as the mate of a Black Ball liner, a rough school, and he was not a mild man.
Ashore his personality was said to have been a most attractive one, but there is no doubt that afloat he worked the very souls out of his sailors.The rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however, until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under canvas.Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail.For her there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the quarter-deck.
Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then in seventy-nine--records which were never surpassed.
With what consummate skill and daring this master mariner drove his ship and how the race of hardy sailors to which he belonged compared with those of other nations may be descried in the log of another of them, Captain Philip Dumaresq, homeward bound from China in 1849 in the clipper Great Britain.Three weeks out from Java Head she had overtaken and passed seven ships heading the same way, and then she began to rush by them in one gale after another.Her log records her exploits in such entries as these:
