THE CLIPPER SHIPS

 

From the earliest days of Colonial maritime activities, speed was an obsession with American shipbuilders and owners.  The infamous British Navigation Acts literally forced American maritime traders to be smugglers and the main access to success was through a fast ship.  The pitifully outnumbered American Navy, during the American Revolution, found that the ability to sail away from the British forces was the secret of survival.  The initiation of scheduled service between England and America in 1840 brought a demand for faster and more dependable packet ships.  Once more the fastest ships were American.  The opening of the China trade after the Opium War and the final abrogation of the Navigation Acts in 1848 freed American ships to enter the China trade and to compete with other nations in the tea trade.  Again, speed was the order of the day, and shippers were ready to pay a heavy premium to get their perishable cargo to London and New York.

 

The clipper did not suddenly appear as a type of ship.  It was the result of an evolution, combining the best aspects of all of the world’s ships which appeared in American ports.  There is no single design for a clipper ship.  In fact, not all clippers were ships, and the record books are quite rigorous in discriminating between clipper ships, Basques, and schooners—although many ships of the mid-nineteenth century claimed to be clippers.  In fact, the clipper ship type itself was generally described as one of three variations:  the full-built ship with convex cheeks in the bows; the medium-sharp clippers with a bow that was almost wedge-shaped and the extreme sharp-built clipper personified by Swordfish, Flying Cloud and Chanllenger.  In 1843, there was a quiet revolution in American ship design.  There was no single great invention.  Donald Mackay of Boston described himself as only one applying long-appreciated knowledge in new ways. In the search for speed, the clippers were built long and narrow with very sharp ends.  They had both deep V-shaped bottoms and flat floors and both types set speed records.  They were very heavily sparred and the captains who drove them were masters of seamanship and reckless bravery.  The long sharp ends required much larger ships to carry enough burden to be profitable.  The fast packets of 1840 were seldom larger than 400 tons.  The clippers built in the late 1840s were generally in the range of 1,000 tons, and the mighty queens of the 1850s were registered at 2,000 tons.

 

If you count just clipper ships, only about 200 of them were built between 1840 and 1855.  By 1855, the British were capturing large charters with steam ships which the Americans were virtually ignoring.  The economic depression of 1853 and the deep reduction of premium cargoes forced the greyhounds of the sea into settling for cargoes of guano and even into the coolie slave trade.  Thus, the clippers had a heyday of about 15 years before they came home to be re-rigged with a small top hamper to save cordage and to be able to be manned by smaller crews.  The last recorded voyage of a clipper ship under sail was made by Dashing Wave in 1910.

 

Reference:  1.  “Greyhounds of the Sea,” Carl C. Cutler, United States Naval Institute, 1960.