According to Arthur H. Clark’s “The Clipper Ship Era,” which contains a complete and fascinating account of this whole period (and it is actually a story for a book rather than for a mere chapter into which it is impossible adequately to compress it), the first clipper ship ever built was the Ann McKim, a ship built at Baltimore in 1832.
During the War of 1812 a number of Chesapeake Bay ships which came to be called “Baltimore clippers” proved very successful as privateers. These ships were fast, and probably the name “clipper” had some connotation at the time suggesting speed. But these “Baltimore clippers” were not, as the word was later used, clipper ships in the true sense. The Ann McKim, as I have said, was actually the first of these.
This ship was an enlargement to scale of one of the small, fast sailing vessels which two hundred years of ship-building experience had taught American shipwrights to construct. The Ann McKim, then, was a small sailing ship built by the foot, so to speak, while her smaller counterparts had been built by the inch. Her proportions were identical to those of the small fry that skimmed about Chesapeake Bay. Only in size and in the elaborateness of her finish did she differ.
Before the advent of the Ann McKim, no one seems to have thought of building a ship of her size—she was 143 feet long—on any lines but those which for so long had been accepted as proper for a ship, and they were far different from the lines accepted for small boats. But despite her originality the Ann McKim proved to be fast.
It seems to be true that this ship did not directly affect ship design. But in the next nine years a number of fast ships appeared, and then John W. Griffiths, a young naval architect of New York, in a series of lectures on the subject of ship design, laid down the basic rules that brought into being those beautiful ships—of which there were never more than a handful, by comparison with the other ships of the world—that suddenly leaped into world-wide prominence.
To the uninitiated, the changes proposed by Griffiths seem unimportant and perhaps uninteresting, for it resulted only in sharper bows and finer lines, in the movement, farther toward the stern, of the ship’s greatest beam, and of “hollow” water lines—that is, the curve of the hull aft from the bow along the water line was concave before it became convex, as it long had been for its whole length on other ships.
The first ship to be built along these new lines, and therefore the first clipper ship of the new order of things, was the Rainbow, which was launched in 1845. It is interesting, too, to note that, while she was lost—perhaps off Cape Horn—on her fifth voyage, few of the later clippers ever broke the records she set. Griffiths, with the touch of genius that he had, had instantly approached such perfection as mortal man can reach.
THE GREAT REPUBLIC
The greatest clipper ship ever built. Unfortunately, before she made her first voyage she caught fire and had to be sunk. She was refloated and refitted, but never made a voyage in her original rig. When new masts were put in her they were made smaller than the first ones. Still she turned out to be one of the very fastest of the clippers.