12 BULI.ETIN 127, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEU:M. 



terested the building world were decided, but it was the final result 

 of 40 years of study and investigation following the War of 1812 

 that the sailing ship reached substantial perfection as an ocean car- 

 rier, and scarce any advance has been made from that day to this." 



Previous to 1850 the packet ship began to be superseded by the 

 trans- Atlantic steamship, and though she held on for some years 

 thereafter, canning freight and the cheaper class of emigrant travel, 

 her occupation was doomed, so far as trans- Atlantic travel was con- 

 cerned. However, her glorious career gave birth to the extreme 

 clipper ship, which was the legitimate successor of the earlier trans- 

 Atlantic packet, and was called into existence chiefly to meet the 

 requirements of the California trade " around the Horn," and was 

 also in demand for the Australian service and the China tea trade. 

 Many of the American clippers, after discharging their cargoes at 

 San Francisco, went to China, and, owing to their great speed, soon 

 obtained a monopoly of the China trade with Great Britain. 



The clipper ship was designed primarily for carrying freight, and 

 the chief object in her construction was to obtain the maximum of 

 speed when laden with a cargo. From 1815 to 1845 the packets were 

 the swiftest vessels on the sea, but after 1845 several branches of 

 trade developed in which speed was as important for the purposes 

 of commerce as it had been for passenger travel. " For instance," 

 writes Hall, " there was the tea trade from China to the United 

 States, in which speed had always been thought essential. The car- 

 goes consisted of teas, spices, coffee, dried fruits, etc., which were 

 liable to deteriorate in a long voyage of four months to the home 

 port, and to shorten the voyage as much as possible was desirable 

 for obvious reasons. Furthermore, there were no telegraph lines 

 and ocean cables in those days, and the uncertainty of the markets 

 made fast trips home from the East Indies very important. Mer- 

 chants had repeatedly suffered hestYj loss, sometimes ruin, by the 

 decline in cotton and other eastern goods brought home by ships 

 during their absence in the voyage out and back, and good ships 

 were therefore required in that trade. Both in America and in 

 Europe up to 1845 the East Indiamen were, as a rule, the large 

 and fast freighting ships of their day. After 1815 a friendly rivalry 

 broke out among owners of ships sailing to China, and every year 

 races took place homeward with the first offerings of the new crop 

 of tea which had come down to Chinese ports. The shipping houses 

 gave their captains good vessels, and the captains did their part by 

 driving the ships homeward through all sorts of weather, with all 

 the canvass spread that they could carry. Americans earned a 

 world-wide reputation for speed soon after 1814, and finally put 

 the English so much on their mettle that the latter sent out a new 

 and finer class of merchantmen than they had ever before owned 



