USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 39
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COLLINS, JOSEPH WILLIAM, and SMITH, HUGH MCCORMICK .- Report on the Fisheries of the New England States ( UNITED STATES: COMMIS- SION OF FISH AND FISHERIES, Bulletin, Vol. X, Washington, D. C., 1892)-See pp. 73-176; also published separately. The report relates to the calendar year 1889 and includes the entire commercial fisheries of the New England coast.
COPELAND, MELVIN THOMAS .- The Cotton Manufacturing Industry of the United States (Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. VIII, Cambridge, 1912) -Thorough in every respect.
CRANE, EDWARD .- Abstract of an Address on the Subject of Transporta- tion (Boston, Wright & Potter, 1868).
CURTIS, WILLIAM ELEROY .- Trade and Transportation between the United States and Spanish America (Washington, D. C., 1890).
HALE, NATHAN .- Remarks on the Practicability and Expediency of Estab- lishing a Railroad on one or more routes from Boston to the Con- necticut River, by the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser (Boston, William L. Lewis, 1827)-Presents with special authority the view- points and observations of contemporaries.
HAZARD, BLANCHE EVANS .- The Organization of the Boot and Shoe In- dustry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press, 1921)-Tells the story of technical progress of the industry and its shift from home craft to factory.
HULBERT, ARCHER B .- The Paths of Inland Commerce (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1920)-Concerned with trails and waterways that were the trade routes of early days.
JOHNSON, EMORY R., VAN METRE, T. W., HUEBNER, G. G., HANCHETT, D. S .- History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (2 vols., Washington, D. C., Carnegie Institution, 1915)-Vol. I is valuable on the substance of this chapter.
LOCKE, AUGUSTUS, WEBBER, WILLIAM O., KIMBALL, GEORGE A .- Report of an Investigation into the subject of the Gradual Abolition of the Crossing of Highways by Railroads at Grade (Boston, Wright & Pot- ter, 1889)-Has an excellent map, in part the basis for that on the end-papers of this volume.
MESERVE, H. C .- Lowell-An Industrial Dream Come True (Boston, Na- tional Association of Cotton Manufacturers, 1923)-Eulogistic of industrial idealism of the mill men.
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
MEYER, BALTHASAR HENRY, editor .- History of Transportation in the United States before 1860 (Washington, D. C., Carnegie Institution, 1917)-See especially chap. xii, "The Transportation Problem in New England."
MORSE, SAMUEL FINLEY BREESE .- Samuel F. B. Morse; his Letters and Journals (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1914)-Edited by E. L. Morse. Contains notes and diagrams bearing on the invention of the telegraph.
POOR, HENRY V .- Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Internal Im- provements, and of the Internal Commerce, of the United States (N. Y., H. C. V. & H. W. Poor, 1881)-Reprinted from the Manual of the Railroad of the United States for 1881.
QUINCY, JOSIAH .- Address delivered Nov. 19, 1886, before the Boston Board of Trade, on the Railway system of Massachusetts (Boston, Mudge & Son, 1866).
SEMPLE, ELLEN CHURCHILL .- American History and its Geographic Con- ditions (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1903)-A standard work of the first importance, by the preeminent authority.
SHALER, NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE, editor .- The United States of America (2 vols., N. Y., Appleton, 1894)-Excellent account of natural re- sources and their influence on economic development.
SHAW, JOSEPH T .- The Wool Trade of the United States (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1909).
STANWOOD, EDWARD .- American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1903).
TOWER, WALTER S .- A History of the American Whale Fishery (Phila., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1907).
TROTTER, SPENCER .- The Geography of Commerce (N. Y., Macmillan, 1903).
TRYON, ROLLA MILTON .- Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640-1860 (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1917).
VOSE, GEORGE LEONARD .- "Notes on Early Transportation in Massachu- setts" in Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies (Dec., 1884)-Also published separately.
WELLS, LOUIS RAY .- Industrial History of the United States (N. Y., Macmillan, 1922).
CHAPTER XV
THE CLIPPER SHIPS
BY SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON Author of The Maritime History of Massachusetts
THE GLORY OF THE CLIPPERS
It will always remain a proud boast of Massachusetts that during a brief period of five years (1850-1855) her ship- builders produced the noblest class of sailing vessel that has ever been or can ever be-the clipper ships. These ships, the pride of all who sailed in them and the wonder of all who beheld them, were an achievement of which any people might well be proud. An achievement with no victims or regrets, such as must always be associated with a successful battle, an industrial conquest, or even a political victory. For the clipper ships were not ships of war. Hard they were to those who sailed them, no toys indeed for weaklings, and testing the finest qualities of manhood. Yet their triumphant progress around the world, breaking every record on every trade route, was a clean well-earned victory for daring and skill. They performed no small part in welding the chains of peaceful commerce that preserved the American Union whole, at peace with the world, and respected by those capable of respect.
The clipper ships were built for use and profit, not for play and admiration; yet they were undoubtedly the highest crea- tion of artistic genius in the Commonwealth during the three centuries of her history. Unconsciously they conformed to the aesthetic canon which places beauty of line, structure, and proportion above ornament and detail. The lines of their hulls were quick and virile as those of a living tree or of a column of the Parthenon. Their spars, sails, and rigging
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THE GLORY OF THE CLIPPERS 435
obeyed some secret law of proportion, as though the Cyprian goddess herself had whispered the formulæ of the ancients in the ears of our practical Yankee shipbuilders. Lest I seem to exaggerate, let me quote from an undoubted authority, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted :
"Whatever else it may be in the last analysis, it cannot be separated from this fact, that a fine clipper ship, such as we had in America just come to build and rightly sail, when the age of such things passed away, was as ideally perfect for its essential purpose as a Phidian statute for the essential pur- pose of its sculptor. And it so happened that in much greater degree than it can happen in a steamship, or in the grandest architecture, the ideal means to this purpose were of exceed- ing grace, not of color, but of form and outline, light and shade, and of the play of light in shadow and of shadow in light. Because of this coincidence it was possible to express the purpose of the ship and the relation and contribution to that purpose of every part and article of her, from cleaving stem to fluttering pennant, with exquisite refinement. These qualities, with the natural stateliness of the ship's motion, set off by the tuneful accompaniment of the dancing waves, made the sailing ship in its last form the most admirably beautiful thing in the world, not a work of nature nor a work of fine art.
"If any reader doubts the fascination of this seafaring beauty, the grandeur of it, the refinement, the spur it gives to the imagination, let him read the stories of Clark Russell. But no writer, poet, or painter can ever have told in what de- gree it lay in a thousand matters of choice-choice made in view of ideal refinements of detail, in adaptation to particular services, studied as thoughtfully and as feelingly as ever a modification of tints on painter's palette. One needed but a little understanding of the motives of seamanship to feel how in the hull every shaving had been counted, and how in the complicated work aloft every spar and cloth, block and bull's- eye, line and seam, had been shaped and fined and fitted to do the duty required of it in the most sinewy way. Phidias could not have told the special duty of every curve and line more beautifully. I have seen a boy rope's-ended for leaving on a rope's end a fray of twine that could not have been seen two yards away. Such untidiness was shockingly incongru-
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THE CLIPPER SHIPS
ous with the lovely form and fine array of the Ann McKim, and the mind too indolent to see this needed a stimulant."
Each clipper ship differed from the other, so that any sharp- eyed lad of the period could tell them apart as easily as do his descendants the different makes of motor cars; yet each in itself was a thing of wonder, that engraved her image on the hearts of those who beheld her. Opinions have differed, and will always differ, about the relative beauty of the master- pieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting ; but that of the clipper ships was so notorious that there were no dissenters. I have heard of a cultivated, high-bred lady and a poor lab- orer, animated at the same instant by the same impulse of admiration for' one of these noble vessels gliding up the harbor, each exclaiming, "The beauty!" I have caught the flash in the eyes of an aged seaman as he straightened his bent back and said, "I sailed on the Flying Cloud under Cap- tain Cressy." And once, after lecturing on the clipper ships, I was approached by a fine old lady who asked me some questions about the launching of the Great Republic and said, "I was there!" with the air of one who had heard Lincoln speak or had seen the surrender of Cornwallis. If that was the impression that the clipper ships made on contemporaries, we who live in the age of steel and gasoline may be indulged in a little sentiment, as we think on the glory that departed from our shores with the conquest of sail by steam.
THE MARITIME COMMONWEALTH (1630-1830)
In the production of this supreme type of sailing vessel, maritime Massachusetts must share the credit with her sister seaports of the other New England states, with New York, and with Chesapeake Bay; but there is plenty of glory to go around. Two centuries of experience were behind the Massa- chusetts clipper ships, the swiftest of that peerless class. Many seamen, shipwrights, and a few master builders were among the first settlers at the Bay. They began building vessels almost at once, and before the seventeenth century was over Massachusetts-built brigs and ketches were well known in our southern ports, in the West Indies, in British ports,
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THE MARITIME COMMONWEALTH
and in the Mediterranean-wherever, in fact, the Acts of Trade permitted colonial vessels to go, and in a good many places where they were not supposed to go. The American Revolution and the War of 1812 stimulated the building of privateers, designed chiefly for speed; and between those two wars Massachusetts vessels penetrated every part of the known world. None were particularly large-a vessel of 150 feet length was counted a great ship-or particularly speedy ; but they were officered and manned by native Yankees, and oper- ated with an economy and efficiency that frequently evoked the admiration of their British and French rivals. By 1812, there were certain definite shipbuilding centers in Massachu- setts, and each seaport had some specialty in trading routes.
The gist of it all is that Massachusetts during the first two centuries of her history was essentially a maritime State. The sea was the chief outlet for enterprise, and the high road to wealth. Until the decade of the eighteen-thirties, when the factory system became acclimated and the westward move- ment gathered momentum, the chief interest in Massachusetts was the maritime one. Boys and youths from the farming regions who wanted change and adventure, or merely wished to lay by a little money to marry on and buy a farm, shipped before the mast or apprenticed themselves to a shipbuilder. The "big money" of the time was made by the merchants, who combined the owning and operating and financing and in- surance of ships with buying cheap and selling dear in every market of the world. The produce of New England farms, mills, fisheries, and workshops, as well as the exotic products imported from both Indies, both coasts of Africa, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean, were distributed from the wharves of Newburyport, Salem, and Boston by coasting vessels, all up and down the Atlantic Coast. The Connecticut Valley and the Berkshires naturally found their outlets at the ports of Long Island Sound and New York rather than at Boston and Salem; but the whole State talked, thought, and "calculated" in terms of sea-borne commerce; whilst in the seaports them- selves men talked familiarly of Hawaii and the Fijis, Smyrna and Archangel, Canton and Calcutta, Surinam and Santo Domingo, as their descendants now brag about motor trips.
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THE CLIPPER SHIPS
to Montreal and Florida. The father of a large family ex- pected one of his sons to be a seaman, just as he hoped one would be a scholar or a minister.
The profession of shipmaster required the highest manli- ness, besides judgment, in those days before the telegraph and wireless; it was so often lucrative, for ships' officers always had a percentage of profits beside their wages and often be- came shipowning merchants by the age of thirty, that a promising seacaptain generally had the pick of the pretty girls in his home town for his wife. "She's good enough to marry an East India cap'n!" was the highest commendation for a Cape Cod damsel. Seafaring, moreover, had social prestige in Massachusetts, for the first families sent their sons to sea, and following the sea was the way to found a first family yourself.
Such a one was Robert Bennett Forbes. At the age of eight he was passenger with his parents on a Baltimore clip- per privateer that ran the British blockade in 1813. At thirteen he shipped before the mast on a China trader, with a capital consisting of a Bible, a Bowditch, a sea chest, and his mother's blessing. At twenty he was captain; at twenty-six, master of his own ship; and at fifty, the foremost merchant of Boston. By 1835 or thereabouts there were thousands of active, enterprising young men like him, working in the ship- yards, serving before the mast or in merchants' counting- rooms; talking ship, thinking ship, and dreaming of ships greater and more beautiful than the world had ever seen- ships with hundred-foot yards and clouds of sail, ships with the American flag at their spanker gaffs and "Boston" on their counters, that would break all records for speed and en- durance. In a few years there came a unique combination of events that made their dreams come true.
THE PRE-CLIPPER ERA
From 1815 to the clipper-ship era there was a gradual im- provement in naval architecture; but before describing it we must have a few definitions. "Clipper" comes from a now obsolete meaning of the verb "to clip," meaning "to fly rapidly"; it has survived as a substantive in the phrase "going
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THE PRE-CLIPPER ERA
at a fast clip." The derivative "clipper" came into use early in the nineteenth century both for fast sailing ships and for race horses, the two loveliest objects in the world. Either during or just after the War of 1812, the term "Baltimore Clipper" was applied specifically to a type of "long, low, rakish" schooner beloved by novelists and favored by priva- teersmen and pirates, built on Chesapeake Bay, particularly at Baltimore. They were small, heavily masted and rigged, but with very fine ends and hulls, and had an almost V-shaped cross-section and shoal draught, so that their carrying capacity was slight. It had been a maxim of shipbuilders for cen- turies that you could have speed or burthen, not both; you had to choose between a small fast vessel, or a large, deep, and slow one.
After the War of 1812, Baltimore builders modified the type, making it a little more burthensome and rigging it as a brig or brigantine for the Rio coffee trade, as did Massa- chusetts builders for the Mediterranean fruit business and the Smyrna trade. In 1833 Isaac McKim, a wealthy merchant of Baltimore, first applied the clipper principle of construction to a ship; i.e., a three-masted vessel with square sails on every mast. The Ann McKim, as he named her, was the first clip- per ship. She was still very small-only 143 feet long and measuring less than 500 tons-and proved very fast; but she had so little carrying capacity that she was regarded by other American shipbuilders as a freak, and no other clipper ship was built for over twelve years.
At the same time there was a gradual improvement in the model, rig, and handling of the deep-sea freighters, which carried the bulk of Massachusetts commerce to Europe and the Far East. The shipbuilders of the Medford and the Merrimac were chiefly responsible for this. A Medford-built East Indiaman of 450 tons, handled by 18 officers and men, could carry half as much freight as a British East Indiaman of 1500 tons measurement with a crew of 125, and could sail half again as fast. These vessels were bluff, full ships, but with sweet water lines, lofty rig, and sails of Lowell cotton duck, well cut and setting flat, so that they could sail much closer to the wind than the older type, and be handled
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THE CLIPPER SHIPS
briskly. The enterprise of Frederic Tudor in discovering a method of packing ice so that it could be exported to South America, China, and India, created a new winter industry for Massachusetts and employed a large fleet of East India traders.
The China trade also gave rise to a fleet of small fast brigs and schooners, which were used to smuggle Indian opium into China and therefore were called the opium clippers. Natur- ally they needed all the speed that could be had. Two of the most successful, the schooner Zephyr and the brig Antelope, were built by Samuel Hall of East Boston, later one of the most successful designers and builders of clipper ships; and another dainty little craft engaged in this dirty business was the Medford-built Ariel, of only 100 tons burthen. Some of the later clipper ship commanders, such as Philip Dumaresq, had their first experience of fast vessels on these little opium clippers, which must have made many builders ambitious to turn out a heavy cargo carrier which would produce the speed and weatherly qualities of those saucy smugglers.
THE WESTERN OCEAN SAILING PACKETS
A third type of vessel, which fell just short of doing that, was the Western Ocean packet ship. These were the first "liners," or fleets of vessels which made regular sailings on scheduled time, instead of merely waiting for a full comple- ment of passengers and freight. Down to 1850, New York had the most famous sailing packet lines between this country and Liverpool: the Black Ball, celebrated in sea chanties, the Swallow-Tail, the Red Star, and the Dramatic. Blow high, blow low, these vessels left Liverpool or New York on their scheduled dates of sailing. Down to 1840 none of them were really large-700 tons being considered the maximum size that would pay; but they were as comfortably fitted up for passengers, both cabin and steerage, as a sailing ship of that size could be, and they were driven by their masters and owners as no vessels had been before and none, save the clip- per ships, since. The consequence was that by 1820 the American-built sailing packets had driven the English packets from the Atlantic.
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WESTERN OCEAN SAILING PACKETS
"The reason will be evident to anyone who will walk through the docks at Liverpool," wrote an English traveller in 1827. "He will see the American ships, long, sharp built, beautifully painted and rigged, and remarkable for their fine appearance and white canvas. He will see the English vessels, short, round and dirty, resembling great black tubs." But there were other reasons beside design, build, and upkeep, why the American ships made better speed than the English. Johnny Bull has a curious reluctance to drive a sailing vessel. He will shorten sail out of caution, before it is really neces- sary; while your Yankee captain will carry sail night or day, until the very last moment, risking a blowout, since he can always bend on a new one. True, we are always hearing of broken spars and ripped sails on the Yankee clippers; but we also hear of them as tearing along with skysails set, passing British vessels under double-reefed topsails or even hove to. Further, Yankee seamen have a much keener sense for fol- lowing the wind. The Britisher will jog comfortably along, rap-full; while the Yankee braces his yards up sharp, watches the weather clew of the mizzen royal like a cat watching a rat hole, and encourages the helmsman to take advantage of every puff and flaw to squeeze a yard or two to windward.
In 1840 the British issued a challenge to the Yankee sail- ing packets in the shape of the Cunard Line. Boston was selected as the American terminus because it was nearer than New York to Liverpool. The early Cunarders, side-wheelers all, were little, if any, more comfortable than the packets- especially for eastward voyages, when the prevailing westerly winds often enabled sail to beat steam. At first they took only the cream of the transatlantic trade, passengers and freight.
Soon, however, other lines were established, and the "tea- kettles," as the seamen called the steamships in their less pro- fane moments, began to make serious inroads on the sailing- packet business. In consequence, the packet-ship owners began to build larger vessels, and were eager to experiment with faster models. At the same time (in 1843) a public- spirited merchant-shipowner of Boston, named Enoch Train, decided to make another try at establishing a Boston-Liver-
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THE CLIPPER SHIPS
pool sailing packet line. Fortunately he hit upon, and brought to Boston to build his packets, a young shipbuilder of New- buryport, who was destined within ten years to build the greatest sailing ships of all time. This was Donald McKay.
DONALD MCKAY
Donald McKay was born at Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1810. At an early age he emigrated to New York to learn the trade of shipwright, and was fortunately apprenticed to Isaac H. Webb, the premier shipbuilder of New York, who recognized his superior ability and released him from his in- denture before it had expired. After working as foreman in several New York shipyards, Mckay removed to New- buryport, where he superintended the building of a small ship for John Currier, Jr., with such skill that William Currier, another member of that old shipbuilding family, took him into partnership in 1841. Among Donald McKay's first orders at Newburyport were two packet ships for New York lines, the St. George and the John R. Skiddy, the latter just short of 1000 tons. His first vessel, a small ship named the Delia Walker, was such a favorite with her owner, Dennis Condry, that when Enoch Train happened to mention his packet-line ambition to that gentleman, he recommended Donald McKay. Train called on Mckay at Newburyport, hit it off with him at once, and in an hour the contract had been made to build the first ship for the Train Line. The Joshua Bates, as she was called, was so superior in construction and design, so fault- less in every detail, that Train insisted on Mckay setting up his own yard at East Boston and financed him in the under- taking.
East Boston was a new section of the city when Donald Mckay established his home and shipyard there in 1844, and the shipbuilding industry there was only ten years old. It was made possible only by a company of enterprising Boston- ians, who at once developed the land and purchased stands of timber on the Niagara River and elsewhere in the interior, which they arranged to have brought to Boston by the Erie Canal and coasting vessels. Hitherto, Massachusetts builders had cut their timber locally, but the time had come when the
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THE FIRST CLIPPER SHIPS
great hardwood forests of the West must be called upon to provide ribs, knees, and planking for a newer and finer type of vessel. Samuel Hall, of the old North River breed of ship- rights, had placed his yard at East Boston in 1837, and had turned out some fine vessels. He was soon to find a worthy rival in Donald McKay.
Donald McKay built packet ships not only for the Train Line but also for some of the New York firms; and in ac- cordance with the trend of the time, those were built larger and larger. Only ten years before, a 900-ton New York packet had to be taken off the Western Ocean trade, as she did not pay. McKay's third packet ship, the Anglo-Saxon, was of just that size; and only four days later (Sept. 9, 1846) he launched for a New York firm the New World, of 1400 tons. The Train Line immediately countered with a 1300-tonner, the Ocean Monarch, launched in 1847. Both she and the Anglo-Saxon were lost at sea under tragic circumstances; but the New World was still doing business under the German flag in 1884. McKay built for the Train Line in all seven packet ships, so well-constructed, fast, economical to operate, and comfortable for passengers that,in spite of disastrous ac- cidents to two of them, the Train Line became one of the most popular packet lines running out of Liverpool. Unfortunately it succumbed in the financial panic of 1857, and by that time the competition of steam was so severe that no other sail line was established.
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