PREFACE 



THE American sailing-ship has vanished from the 

 seas, but not from memory. The twentieth cen- 

 tury is witnessing a growing revival of interest in 

 the California clippers, the Liverpool packets, the 

 East Indiamen and China clippers, the African slave-traders, 

 and even the lowly coasting schooners. Something there was 

 about the clouds of towering canvas and the thoroughbred lift 

 and dip of a Donald McKay clipper which gripped the memory 

 of those who knew them and which to-day challenges the 

 imagination of those who are less fortunate. So alluring, so 

 imperative is this challenge that it is beginning to penetrate 

 through the loose ranks of sea yarns and reminiscences into 

 the guarded studies of objective scholarship j and in conse- 

 quence large stores of documentary treasure, buried for the 

 most part in Atlantic Coast libraries and customs-houses, are 

 gradually being salvaged and interpreted in the light of mod- 

 ern research methods. 



By no means the least interesting member of this departed 

 fleet was the whaler — ship, bark, or mere "plum-pud'ner." 

 As a vessel she was signally lacking in the grace, speed, and 

 slender feminine beauty of the clipper 3 but in staunch sea- 

 worthiness, in bulldog battling with wind, wave, and whale, 

 and in the range and seeming endlessness of her voyages she 

 was the peer of any craft afloat. In spite of her slowness, her 

 breadth of beam, and her broad-ended wallowing, the typical 

 whaler was the vehicle of a life which merged adventure 

 and exploitation, courage and brutality, abandon and niggard- 

 liness, as fully as any occupation in America, past or present. 

 Recent emphasis upon the social sciences and a growing 

 humanitarianism are partly responsible, no doubt, for an in- 



