The Clippers : 263 



assume an increasingly important place in the life of the nation. This 

 involved a greater demand for materials such as American cotton 

 and Australian wool as well as new markets for the finished products. 

 China and other parts of the Far East were new and rich sources of 

 trade both for American and European merchants. The sense of 

 speed and timing arose from the fact that many of the articles of 

 trade were produced in seasonal cycles and tended to reach their dis- 

 tant markets also in cycles. Such crops were fruits and grains but 

 especially tea, cotton, wool. There was thus a special profit for the 

 ship and trader who first reached the market with the new crop and 

 thus relieved any shortages built up during the unproductive period. 

 There were other factors working on the mercantile world to in- 

 crease the sense of urgency. From the early packets of 1820 to 1840 

 ships were getting larger; they cost more to build. The operator had 

 more money tied up in each unit and each carried a larger cargo 

 which affected the shippers. Slow passages meant slow returns on the 

 investments. 



These were the economic factors; but there were other incentives 

 to speed. Steam had come into use for transportation on land and 

 water early in the century. It was a long time — 1840 — before a loco- 

 motive could beat the thirty-five miles per hour that represented the 

 speed of a race horse and it took half a century or more to develop 

 steamers that had the speed, the range, the reliability, the safety and 

 the economy of the ships in sail. Still, steam was there as a threat, a 

 challenge, a promise. 



As far as North Atlantic travel was concerned, the old packet lines 

 met the challenge by hard driving and by gradually increasing the 

 size of the ships. They contributed to the sense of speed. They had 

 not in the beginning tried for speed; their purposes were scheduled 

 reliability and cargo-carrying capacity and steady year-by-year profits. 

 But schedules meant speed and a safe margin for turn-around in 

 port; competition meant speed; passengers meant speed. 



The packets contributed to the interest in speed but packet line 

 owners for the most part insisted on building ships that followed the 

 general traditions of packet architecture. There is a curious point 

 here. It was not the Atlantic packet operators that stimulated the 

 creation of the early clippers or provided the incentives for their de- 

 velopment. After the clipper ship emerged a few were used in the 

 Atlantic packet lines. The first ships to look like clippers came into 

 being and found their opportunities in a different kind of service and 

 later the characteristic clipper sailed from an Atlantic port to some 



