On a freezing December morning in 1850, 15,000 people gathered expectantly around the edge of Boston harbour, eyes fixed on the enormous yard of renowned ship designer, now shipbuilder, Donald McKay. Men stamped their feet and women, as much as they dared, lifted their skirts out of the frozen mud and slush. In front of them, the masts of the great ship pointed like gigantic fingers towards a low and ominous sky. Her sleek black hull—for the moment secure in its cradle—seemed to resemble a powerful animal about to be unleashed from its tether.
In this seafaring age, interest in the launch of any new ship was always high, but with this, the first vessel both wholly designed and built by the enigmatic, Canadian-born McKay, the anticipation among the gathered Bostonians—as well as the wider maritime world—was intense. McKay’s vessels were a new breed of ship. In the past few years, he had designed the ‘extreme clippers’ Reindeer and Moses Wheeler, of 800 and 900 tons respectively; these ships contained nothing less than a revolution within their sleek, futuristic lines. Now, for the first time, McKay had both designed and built his own ship, and the public was desperate to see it.
To add to the theatrical setting that chilly Boston morning, clouds of steam rose and swirled from the vats of boiling whale oil being applied to melt the frozen tallow that covered the slipway that ran down to the icy water’s edge. Suddenly, the excitement of the crowd rose as the sounds of mallets could be heard knocking away timber stays. ‘Your name is … Stag Hound!’ shouted a stentorian voice as a bottle of brandy was smashed against the ship’s side. Then, slowly at first, the Goliath began to move. A tremendous roar rose up all around. The sound of the great hull sliding, thundering and finally streaking down the slipway towards the water was drowned out only by the sudden eruption of every bell in the city pealing out in celebration of the birth of the mighty vessel. From somewhere, a cannon boomed then a band struck up and the cheering continued. The Stag Hound, perhaps the greatest extreme clipper ever to have set sail, was launched.
The reign of the American ‘Yankee clipper’ ships was brief but spectacular, ushering in a revolution in speed and travel that broke open the world, transfixing populations across continents, who could now reach each other in times unimaginable a generation earlier. They would dominate the grand climax of the Age of Sail up until the beginning of the American Civil War, after which British shipbuilders would adopt and perfect the design, using harder, drier woods that lasted much longer than the American ships.
The initial spur for the clippers was trade. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, after nearly two centuries, Britain at last began to dismantle her Navigation Acts, first installed by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth in 1651 as a protectionist bulwark against Dutch maritime traders. These laws stated that no trade in any English colony could be conducted by anyone other than English vessels manned by English sailors. As the British Empire grew, America in particular became increasingly infuriated at being thus shut out of the avenues of imperial commerce, such as the lucrative and expanding tea trade from places such as Hong Kong. The slight eventually became a contributing factor in the coming of the American Revolution.
For Britain, however, the Navigation Acts were a two-edged sword, and eventually her mollycoddled shipping industry began to fall behind, particularly in such areas as shipbuilding. In slow, round-bowed tubs, the design of which had not changed in a century, British merchantmen would ply their trade leisurely along the Empire’s shipping lanes, stopping at several ports along the way and generally taking their time, showing little interest in those newer, faster American vessels they would sometimes encounter racing past them on the high seas, or in some foreign port a long way from home.
In 1849, Prime Minister Lord John Russell decided to move with the times and, despite howling protests from virtually every member of the House of Lords—not to mention the entire British shipbuilding industry—he pledged to embrace the gods of free trade and release his seafarers from two centuries of protection, just as his predecessor Robert Peel had done with the Corn Laws in 1846. The shock, when it came, was palpable. Suddenly, in 1850, the first tea of the season was brought to London by the American clipper the Orient, which tied up to London’s East India Dock in 1850 to be greeted by a stunned crowd of locals who had never seen any vessel quite like it.
For 30 years from the mid-1840s until the advent of steam, the clippers rode the oceans as the true thoroughbreds of the Age of Sail. They were long, sleek and streamlined, riding low in the water and with their extra masts throwing up acres of sail to harness the wind. Some of the larger ships carried more than 30 individual sails with exotic names like moonrakers, royals and skysails. In conditions where other ships would shorten sail, the clippers would put on more and still more, heeling over until their booms and lee rails skimmed the surface of the water as it raced by at 10, 15 and even 20 knots or more. Their forecastles and other deck structures were trimmed down and configured to the centre of the ship to achieve the utmost balance.
Unlike their predecessors, which crashed their way doggedly through the waves like a battering ram, the clippers’ elongated bows sliced an effortless passage, leaving barely a wake behind them, the water seeming to part willingly before the progress of these graceful queens of the oceans.
Their genesis was in the small, fast raiders of the primarily maritime War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. Speedy little brigs, brigantines, fore-and-aft and topsail schooners, none bigger than 200 tons, would swarm out of Baltimore and other Atlantic harbours to harry the plodding vessels of the Royal Navy—which, in their exasperation, declared that the American sailors must have some ‘unlawful dealings with the great enemy of mankind for the malignant pleasure of annoying the English’.1 They were made for speed and, unlike the traditional European vessels with their barge-like ‘upside-down bell-shaped’ bows and ‘cod head and mackerel-tail’ hull, they traded their space for the ability to transport a smaller cargo across the world in record times. Initially, that cargo was tea.
In 1843, a brilliant naval architect and ship design theorist named John Willis Griffiths was given a chance to put his academic ideas into practice by a New York-to-China trading firm, Howland & Aspinwall, which took the gamble of commissioning his 750-ton Rainbow, a ship so revolutionary that the maritime establishment declared it unsafe to sail, that her construction was ‘contrary to the laws of nature’2 and that she would never return from her maiden voyage. Instead, the Rainbow achieved remarkable average speeds of 14 knots and set a new record for the return trip from New York to Canton of three months, bringing back the first of the new season’s tea chests for the highly competitive American market to the delight of the wealthy society ladies of New York and Washington.
In 1846, Griffiths built the even more remarkable Sea Witch, which stunned the world when, under the command of another of the great characters of the Age of Sail, ‘Bully Bob’ Waterman, she arrived from Hong Kong after just 77 days at sea, her holds bursting with the new season’s tea. At this time, a conventional cargo vessel could be expected to complete the same trip in no less than 160 days.3 Two years later, in March 1849, ‘Bully Bob’, who had in fact worked with Griffiths on the sail design of the ship, achieved another feat by appearing unscheduled as a fast-moving speck on the horizon approaching New York harbour. When curious telescopes revealed that it was Sea Witch under full sail, just 74 days out of Hong Kong, the city went into raptures. Bully Bob had beaten his own record of two years earlier by three whole days. It is a feat that still stands today—unbeaten by any ship under sail more than a century and a half later.
For three decades, the clippers ruled the world’s oceans, and as the demand for speed grew, shipyards up and down the east coast of America became alive to their construction—as described romantically in one of the classic accounts of the sailing age, Clipper Ships of America and Great Britain:
The hammer notes of ten thousand men rang from the shipyards sprawled along New York’s East River, and up and down the north Atlantic coast town after town hummed and boomed with industry. Man seemed to rival Nature in a perfect orgy of inspired invention and turned out sleek thoroughbred after sleek thoroughbred, whose long white arms stretched outward to embrace the breeze and draw into themselves the very essence of moving, pulsing life. Captains, hanging up new records, were mobbed and feted and idolized.4
The word ‘clipper’ derived from the antiquated ‘clip’, meaning to move quickly, the most salient response from those first bearing witness to the speed of these new ships. They were given suitably romantic names such as Flying Cloud, Ariel, Lightning, Sovereign of the Seas and, one of the greatest of all, the 1534-ton Donald McKay-designed Stag Hound, which on one voyage, despite being partly dis-masted in a storm, still managed to break the record for the run from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn, then one of the longest in the world. Initially tasked with whisking tea and other cargoes around the globe, it was the discovery of gold that ushered in the true heyday of the clippers, first in California then, in the early 1850s, Australia. Now the ships’ most lucrative cargo would be people, both well-heeled passengers paying their own way to seek fortune and adventure and those more desperate souls being assisted by their government to start a new life in a new land. One group of those less advantaged people would make the journey in the Ticonderoga.