GOLDEN AGE OF SAIL

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 18, 22 January 1938, Page 24

GOLDEN AGE OF SAIL

The wreck last year of the Herzogin Cecilie caused a pang to many who had no traffick'with the sea.' If came as a sad reminder that a great era is near its end. Though she sailed under a foreign flag, the British public knew her, almost alone among sailing ships, for her share in the annual voyage of the grain ships-round the Horn—a-pic-turesque jf dim survival of the days when the China clippers. raced to London, skippers driving madiy and one rail under with the first of the season's tea crop, to be retailed at six shillings and.more a pound. .

In. "The TalL Ships Pass," W. A. L. Derby reminds us that these days are passing. Writing mainly of the Herzogin Cecilie, he lists the sixteen big trading square>riggers, all foreign, that fight a losing battle against steam. Soon they, too, will have gone, and, pleasure craft apart, the lovely sight of billowing canvas will be seen no more. Much of the romance and splendour of the sea will have gone with them.

It was the Americans who set the pace. The first clippers—with coffinshaped, round-bottomed hulls, quite unlike the shapely craft to which the term was eventually applied—were the little New England schooners and brigs which served successfully as privateers in the war with England in 1812-14.

The Chinese opium trade of the forties led to the development of fast, small vessels of light draught; and in 1844 Smith and Dimon, of New York, launched the .Rainbow, and made history. With her hollow bow and yacht-like lines she was the "first of the extreme clipper ships. The same, firm's Sea. Witch, the loveliest as well as the fastest vesselof her day, set. up new records of sixty-nine days from New York to Valparaiso, and seventyfive days from Canton to New York. The repeal of the Navigation Acts passed between 1381 and 1660 to protect British ships from foreign competition opened the China trade in tea and silk to the Americans, and for five years the Yankee fliers skimmed the cream and earned large profits. In 1352 the Witch of the. Wave made the voyage from Canton to England in ninety days, then a staggering performance. The: discovery of gold in California and the feverish rush from Europe and the Eastern States, followed by the Australian gold rush, all created a new demand for speed, and the American builders were the first- to meet it. It is a .matter of history how the Flying Cloud, in 1851, sailed the 17,597 miles from New York to San Francisco at an average speed of lu statute miles a day, how toe Lightning, three years later; established an all-time record with 436 nautical miles in twenty-four hours. This was about 100 miles better .than, the fastest then possible under steam.' Unlimited supplies of soft' wood arid the genius of Donald McKay, of Boston, produced such masterpieces as . Flying Cloud Sovereign, of: the Seas, and James ■Barnes, driven by .resolute ..skippers through: heavy seas as no ship had ever been driven before. ■ The boom lasted only a decade. The American soft-woods were, cheaper £an the teak and oak of the British bunders, but not so durable; moreover Brish 'clippers like Thermopylae and Cutty Sark, dainty as .yachts, were SK-roWters, . They could carry canvas in-a gale and "ghost"..along m ffit breezes where McKay's creations would have been lost. -The Sixties-the great. Tea Race SsEiP£n»'£ fea are being replaced by clippers of I the air; • ' : ■ ;■ ■