On April 20, 1854, the clipper ship Flying Cloud sailed into San Francisco's Golden Gate, setting a record of eighty-nine days and eight hours out from New York City. This would stand for 145 years, broken only in 1989 by a contemporary offshore racing yacht. That this record stood for so long, and that it was held by a commercial vessel no less, stands as a testament to the greatness of these pelagic thoroughbreds and the mariners who sailed them.
The clipper era was brief. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison remarked, clipper ships were “our Gothic Cathedrals, our Parthenon; but . . . carved from snow.” These swift, lithe steeds raced not only each other, but also the inevitable steamship and railroad, and were soon wounded by the American Civil War and thence dispatched by the transcontinental railroad, a great golden spike through these hulls of oak. Thanks to naval historians like Morison, the clippers continue to occupy an outsized place in our national mythology, their metaphorical names familiar to many today: Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, Great Republic (pace the N. B. Palmer, a swift ship saddled with a decidedly terrestrial name). The clippers were among the first industrial triumphs of the young republic, built initially to best the merchant ships of the British Empire at its apex. Now Steven Ujifusa, in his well-researched Barons of the Sea, and their Race to Build the World's Fastest Clipper Ship, offers us a fresh perspective on this fleeting era. In the book he follows some of the families of New York and Boston who made their fortune in the opium-trading factories of Canton before turning their sights to servicing the California Gold Rush. Many of the family names remain familiar today—Forbes, Delano, Low—while others have faded with time. These families and their competitive instincts spurred the development of the clipper ships, whether they were racing the British to Canton, the steamers that ran to and from Panama, the burgeoning railroads, or each other.
Read Full Article »