Lines of the Medium Clipper Coeur de Lion built at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1854. Taken off the 

 half-model in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Athenaeum. A painting of this ship, in the Watercraft 

 Collection, is shown, opposite. 



building boom was almost fully deflated before 

 1857, for high freight rates were no longer obtainable 

 in the California and China trades, owing to the 

 huge number of ships competing for cargoes and the 

 increasing ability of California and the Northwest 

 coast to provide many of the necessities formerly 

 brought from the East. 



The whole development and decline of the American 

 clipper ship occurred in the short period of 9 or 10 

 years. Although Americans did not build any 

 extreme clippers after the Civil War, the British 

 continued their development through the 1860's and 

 into the 1870's. In the last years of British develop- 

 ment many very extreme ships, some as extreme as 

 the Sunny South, were built in England and Scotland, 

 though of an entirely different model. 



Attempts to make comparisons between British and 

 American clipper ships are useless, for the two 

 national types were designed to meet entirely different 

 requirements of weather and sea and trade conditions. 

 In the 1850"s, when British and American ships were 

 temporarily in the same trades, the Americans appear 

 to have had the faster ships on the average but late 

 in the 1850's the American advantage had almost 

 disappeared in any of the trades where the ships 

 competed. Such competition was so limited, however, 

 that any conclusion based on relative speed of indi- 

 vidual clippers is misleading. While the Americans 

 can claim credit for introducing the extreme clipper 

 and the clipper designs, they did not maintain a 

 monopoly on the design of very fast merchant ships 

 and many such were launched in Europe during the 

 last years of the American clipper ship period and for 

 about 10 years thereafter. 



A reason for the American failure to resume building 

 fast vessels after the Civil War lay in the fact that 

 there were few American trades in which fast vessels 

 were in demand. Of these few, the two most impor- 

 tant were the fruit trade with the Bahamas, the W'est 

 Indies, and Florida, and the coffee trade with Brazil. 

 The latter in particular was carried on by vessels of 

 some size, small barks and many brigantines and brigs 

 being employed. Most of these were built at Balti- 

 more, on the Chesapeake, and on the Delaware, but 

 some notable coffee traders were constructed at New 

 York and in New England. These vessels were 

 usually fast sailers. The barks were sometimes almost 

 medium clippers; the builders' model of the Albemarle 

 in the Watercraft Collection (see p. 63) is a good 

 example of the type of bark used ; but few of the ves- 

 sels, barks or brigantines or brigs, were very sharp- 

 ended. Some brigantines were employed in the fruit 

 trade, but most of the fruiters were schooners, and 

 toward the last of the sailing fruit trade 3-masted 

 schooners became popular. A particularly favored 

 model was built at Bath, Maine, for this trade, and a 

 few of these 3-mastcrs were also built in Maryland. 

 Fast fishing schooners and coasters were often em- 

 ployed in this trade, which was seasonal. The Ba- 

 hamas and Florida fruit trade was mostly in pine- 

 apples; on the Florida east coast the Indian River 

 country was being exploited in the years immediately 

 following the Civil War, growing pineapples and, 

 later, oranges. 



Coasters 



In colonial times the coasting trade was of very 

 great importance. The small size of port villages and 

 towns and the limited back countrv thcv served made 



37 



