Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [119]
"But suddenly a new ship appeared, the Yankee clipper. She was long and lean, with a beautiful, sweeping sheer line, and such clouds of snowy canvas flying from her lofty spars as to make the old salts shake their heads and predict the clippers would capsize at their piers before even getting under way."13 The first clippers were built in New York by an American consortium, the shipwright a young man named Donald McKay from Jordan River, Nova Scotia, who as far as we know had only built one vessel before, a barkentine (and whose accounts with a Shelburne blacksmith still survive—he bought rivets for crosstrees, for mast hoops, and for rudder bands; hinges for quarter boards; a strap for a martingale; hoops for a windlass). Alas, he went bankrupt, and decamped like so many before and after him for America.
Then the British repealed the law demanding that only British-built vessels be used for trade; and this allowed the Yankees to sail triumphantly into history.
The Yankee clipper was not massive, and her cargo capacity was modest. Her genius lay in speed, and with her knifelike bow and sweeping lines, she cut through the water twice as fast as anything else afloat—faster even than modern steamers. Under the hard-driving captain Bully Forbes, the Boston-built Lightning logged 436 nautical miles in twenty-four hours in a southern gale. It is probably the fastest day's run ever made under sail.
The Yankee clippers, though, were generally made of softwood and soon got waterlogged and sluggish. The British, no sluggards themselves in the art of shipbuilding, took the idea and made their own Clippers from iron and hardwood, and the China clippers that resulted are regarded as the apex of the shipbuilder's art—the perfect combination of grace and beauty on the one hand and cargo-carrying and seaworthiness on the other. Perhaps the greatest of all was the Taeping, made of iron and greenheart oak and teak, which carried nearly 2°y°square feet of sail, and covered 16,000 sea miles in a paltry ninety-five days.
Both to and from Australia, the traditional route for sailing ships was by way of Cape of Good Hope; the duration of passage was typically 120 days, but clipper ships cut that in half. Outward bound to Australia they turned well south of the Cape and headed across the bottom of the world to run their easting in the powerful winds and wild seas of the south latitudes known as the roaring forties. Running for home, they continued around the globe in the same direction, looking for strong stern winds in the world's loneliest ocean, then turned Cape Horn and headed up the Atlantic . . . The clipper ship's trade was distance. She was not capacious, so all her profit lay in speed. The breathtaking nerve and splendor caught the popular imagination as space flights do today; more bets were placed on her finish up the Thames than were placed on the Derby.
In the heyday of the China Clippers, it became de rigeur among the chattering classes in London to be the first to drink the freshest tea from China, debarked from the first vessel of the season to arrive—the Beaujolais nouveau of its time. In 1854 the Stornoway and the Chrysolite headed from Whampoa, China, to Liverpool, England, at a dead run, both arriving in exactly 105 days; the Stornoway's skipper remained on deck the whole time, sleeping what sleep he managed in a chair lashed to a hatchway. The Oriental made it the following year in 97 days.
It couldn't last. The Suez Canal, "that dirty ditch," marked the end to the