Clipper Ships

“Never, in these United States,” wrote historian Samuel Elliot Morison, “has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a things as the clipper ship.”

The word “clip,” which meant simply “to cut,” later came to mean “to move quickly.” So a clipper ship was a fast-sailing one.

Clipper ships were the fastet and most beautiful sailing ships ever built. Between 1845 and 1849, American shipyards produced nearly 500 of them. The speediest were the giant Yankee clippers. With their masses of sail, these long, slender ships could travel up to 400 nautical miles a day.

Clippers were first built to carry goods to and from China. After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, they carried prospectors and supplies from the East Coast to the gold fields. Earlier, this 15,000-mile trip around the southern tip of South America took five months. But by the early 1850’s, speedy clippers such as the Flying Cloud had cut the time to three months.

Clippers set other records, too. In 1849, the Sea Witch sailed from Hong Kong to New York in 74 days. In 1852, the Challenger raced from Japan to California in 18 days. And in 1860, the Andrew Jackson sailed from New York to Liverpool, England, in 15 days. But by then steamships, which did not depend on the wind, were replacing the clippers. The era of these “greyhounds of the sea” was coming to a close.