As to the lines of the clippers note that while Donald McKay supposed that the Lightning made her great speed because she was "hollow" at the bow, the modern yacht designers, who have tried out the hollow lines for years, have entirely abandoned them. The famous America had hollow lines; no modern yacht has anything of the kind.

The Dreadnought, with her unequalled North Atlantic record, was called a "semi-clipper," in her day. Her lines, as printed in Griffiths's Nautical Magazine, show that she was as full as many ships that were never classed as anything but plain cargo carriers. In connection with this fact recall the records of a ship or two built long before the clipper era—Derby's Mount Vernon, for instance, with her passage of 17 days from Salem to Gibraltar. The Silas Richards, formerly a packet between New York and Liverpool, left New York in June, 1836, for Canton, and she was back in New York at the end of March, 1837. Her run home was made in 91 days. Even the old Desire (high in poop and low in spars, when compared with the clippers) made the passage, away back in 1640, from Boston to Gravesend in 23 days.

Out of 157 vessels that arrived at San Francisco in 1852, no less than seventy had been designed as clippers, of which, however, only three or four made notable passages.

No complete list of the ships built with clipper lines was ever made, nor can one be made now; but out of the 2656 ships and barks launched between 1843 and 1855, which was the clipper era, it is certain that at least 10 per cent—256—were of the clipper model. But only a few more than a score ever made better records than the previously built packets had made. Indeed, many of the leanest and sharpest of the clipper hulls, together with (curiously enough) others that were built from the drawings of some of the successful clippers, were absolute failures, so far as speed was concerned.

This is not to deny that the clippers were in some respects grand ships. They were superior in the strength of hull, in the breadth of beam, and, consequently, in the spread of canvas under which they could stand. In the general proportions of their hulls many of them were right—as was the old frigate Constitution, which had a bow as round as an apple and yet had a record of better than 12 knots an hour. But even when all of that is said, the fact remains that the full-lined Natchez was but a day behind the record from Canton.

If it was not to the model of the ships, to what, then, were the splendid records due? The answer is of the utmost importance in any study of the American merchant marine. The records were due to the fact that our seamen were the most ambitious and the most efficient sailors of the sail that the world has ever seen. While the gale permitted the ship to hold her course, the captain paced the deck the whole night long and caught his sleep by day in short naps under the weather rail in order that he might see that she was kept going. The sheets and halyards of the important sails on those record ships were made of chains, and they were locked fast in place—held by padlocks, so that frightened sailors, unseen by the master, could not let them fly when the ship, rolling to the blast at night, dragged her lee rail through the solid water. When the captain gave an order, the crew ran with all their might to do the work—or they were knocked across the deck with a pump-brake in the hands of the nerve-racked mate. Captain Waterman even shot men off the yards because they seemed to be handling the sails slowly. Studding sails were spread to the zephyrs when the ship crossed the equator, and they were yet seen in place while she sailed with trade-winds so strong that ships from Europe close-hauled were reefed down to the cap. Indeed, all sail was often carried when ordinary ships were seen reefed down on the same course. As Clark Russell notes in one of his novels, the skipper of the ship from Europe, as he paced the deck with anxious eyes upon his shortened canvas, fearing that it would be blown from the bolt ropes, very often saw a tiny white speck upon the horizon, watched it grow into a splendid ship with "every rag set," saw her fling the Stars and Stripes to the gale, as she went roaring by, and then with feelings that cannot be described, gazed after her until she disappeared in the mists far down the lee.

If the two crews thus meeting in mid-ocean could have changed ships, the bluff-bowed hulk from Europe would soon have gone smoking away while the clipper would have rolled her spars over the lee rail before her new crew could have learned the lead of a single sheet or halyard.

It was the man on the quarter-deck—he who had handled ships among the rocks of the South Shetlands, or had lanced whales in the North Pacific, or had skimmed the sands of Cape Hatteras, in order to learn the arts of the sea as handed down from the beginning—it was the master mariner evolved by two hundred years of battle—with the sea and its people—who made the American flag supreme upon all the seas of the whole world.

CHAPTER XIII
DEEP-WATER STEAMSHIPS—PART I

IN order to comprehend the story of the efforts to establish lines of steam packets under the American flag between the United States and various ports in Europe, it is necessary at this point to review briefly our foreign relations in the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and then to consider what was done by the British in the early development of steam navigation.