Near the peak of commercial sailing technology, clippers are somewhere between an awesome feat of engineering and a work of fine art.
Clipper ships were by far the fastest ships of the Great Age of Sail. Any way you look at it, their name is derived from their speed. An old saying says that they are called clippers because they clip time off your voyage. The more generally agreed story is that it comes from the use of “clip” as an adverb to indicate speed, as in “going at a good clip”. Wherever the name comes from a clipper is a fast ship. Every ship that rates the name clipper is built for speed with a sharp narrow bow, and a lot of sail relative to the size of the ship.
The clipper is an American invention, and they were initially not cargo carriers, but rather pilot ships, privateers, or navy ships. The famous Baltimore Clipper of 1812 is the best example of the early clippers. When America annexed California the golden age of the clipper began. Fast ships that could carry goods around the Horn of South America through the passage first used by Ferdinand Magellan became desirable. With the gold rush of 1849 a gold rich California was the place to go with a fast ship with a small hold laden with luxury goods. From the developing seaport of San Francisco sailing west to China for tea and silk also became popular for clipper ships. A China Clipper set a record probably only broken by inflation bringing back a cargo worth over 2 million dollars on a single voyage. Two million was a fortune five or ten times over in the 1850's.
That many clippers are called California Clippers or China Clippers reflects this great heyday in the middle of the 19th Century. Clippers are tall masted and generally have four or more masts. Their rigging was very complex and included about virtually every known type of sail . . . square, lateen, top gallant, fore gallant, gaff, etc. With their sleek graceful lines and complex rigging they were known for their maneuverability as well as their speed. They usually carried a crew of from 25 to 50 sailors, and set speed records along almost every route they traveled. They were expensive to maintain, but could often bring in enough to build another ship on the same design in a single voyage. Carrying small loads of luxury goods, and filling shortages at high prices was their specialty.
The golden age of the American Clipper was over soon after the Civil War when the transcontinental railroad was completed. British China Clippers continued to ply the seas with great success until the Suez Canal was completed. This canal was great for steam ships, but was very difficult for clippers to use. Clippers are among the most beautiful of sailing ships, and are very popular as models today, but add the Panama Canal to the sea lanes, and large lumbering freighters take over most cargo routes for good.
A clipper set a transatlantic speed record of 12 days six hours in 1854 which was several days faster than most steam ships of the time. It is not that steam ships were faster that spelled doom for the clipper. It was that the steam ships could carry a lot more without being very much slower. The clipper sacrificed carrying capacity in exchange for speed, and unlike the steam ship depended upon favorable winds.
Clippers may be among the most beautiful products of American ingenuity, but their demise is a matter of economics and large scale global trade. Yankee Clippers tend to lack the figureheads and elaborate decorative carving of some of their European counterparts, but have a beauty of line and function that is breathtaking to behold in surviving photographs and paintings. All in all, despite the brevity of their golden age, clippers are among the best and most beautiful of human inventions and are the product of centuries of accumulated sailing experience on the seas dating back to the first caravels, and even to Viking longboats which have a similar, if more primitive, beauty.
