Sam Jefferson - Clipper Ships and the Golden Age of Sail: Races and rivalries on the nineteenth century high seas

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Published by Adlard Coles Nautical

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Text copyright Sam Jefferson 2014

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First published by Adlard Coles Nautical in 2014

ISBN 978-1-4729-0028-9

ePDF 978-1-4729-0030-2

ePub 978-1-4729-0029-6

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

From a very early age I was utterly obsessed with ships and the sea. Bearing in mind that I come from a particularly landlocked part of Cumbria, no one in my family could really account for it. They looked on with bemused interest as I spent my days up in trees pretending it was the rigging of a ship or floating pieces of wood down the river that ran by our house in order to recreate some race or naval battle. At first my nautical obsession was very general, although I always favoured sail over power, but at the age of 12 my interest was put sharply into focus when I received a book entitled Clipper Ships by David R MacGregor. I read the book with my usual interest until I reached the following passage. A recollection by Frederick Paton, who had served as midshipman aboard the tea clipper Flying Spur; after grumbling a good deal about how his captain did not drive her hard enough, he proceeded thus:

One morning Flying Spur was snoring through the NE, trades under all sail to royal staysails, with her lower yards just touching the backstays. At 11.20 am a sail was sighted on the horizon ahead. This proved to be the Glasgow clipper, Lochleven Castle, 80 days out from Rangoon to Liverpool. At 1 pm the Flying Spur was up with her, and as we went foaming by, the Lochleven Castles main topgallant sail went to ribbons with a clap of thunder, and her mainsail split from top to bottom; at the same moment our cook with all his pots and pans was washed from the galley to the break of the poop. An hour and a half later the Lochleven Castle was out of sight astern.

I was hooked; there is so much drama, excitement and beauty in that one paragraph, that one jubilant morning when two ships were pushed to their absolute limit for the sheer sport of the race that I simply wanted to know more. I was delighted to discover that over the span of 20 years these beautiful ships were raced across the oceans and their adventures were more compelling than any fiction.

Before starting this book, it is important to clear up exactly what a clipper was; there are many out there that think that any vessel setting square sails is a clipper. This is not so. Clippers were commercial vessels built with speed as the foremost consideration and cargo carrying secondary. This meant that her hull must be very sharp. Clippers in their purest form were only built between 1845 and 1875. After that date, they made way for the lordly tall ships, windjammers, as they were somewhat scornfully labelled by those obsessed with the relentless progress associated with the turn of the steamships screw. Some of these old timers still work as sail training vessels or are preserved as museum ships in the various corners of the globe which they eventually washed up in. These vessels have their own grandeur, but none of the grace of the clipper ships, which were little more than yachts of large tonnage. As an example, the tea clipper, Leander was launched in 1868 and was so sharp that her hold could not be filled before her load line was underwater. This was not practical, but her lines were irresistible and somehow that was more important.