The Clippers : 265 



packets were round and full forward. The Baltimore vessels were 

 apt to employ a V-shaped cross section below water. The packets 

 already tended to use flat floors with little dead rise. The Baltimore 

 vessels, operating from a river, kept to a fairly shallow draft particu- 

 larly in the forward section of the vessel. Their maximum depth was 

 aft so that they were built with what is technically known as aft- 

 drag. This, of course, was balanced by a sail plan that brought the 

 largest areas of canvas aft. The masts were not stepped perpendicular 

 to the water line or to the deck of the vessel, but were sloped back- 

 ward or given a rake. 



Some of the Baltimore vessels had hollow water lines at the bow 

 and this was one of the features that characterized the clipper design. 

 Most of the Baltimore vessels were two-masted and thus in a tech- 

 nical sense they were not ships; they were schooners or topsail 

 schooners, brigs or brigan tines; but a few of them were rigged as 

 small ships. 



The ship Ann McKim was built by Isaac McKim in Baltimore in 

 1833. She was unusually large for a Baltimore vessel, running to 493 

 tons. For her times she had an unusually large bow and a slight con- 

 cavity in her water lines. She preserved a certain amount of after- 

 drag. The Ann McKim is sometimes referred to as the first clipper 

 ship. Even if we reject this view, she certainly foreshadowed many 

 of the features that were more completely developed in the charac- 

 teristic clipper models and it is generally agreed that she had an 

 influence on at least two of the New York designers who later built 

 the great clippers. 



In 1837 she was purchased by the firm of Rowland & Aspinwall, 

 who were outstanding merchants in the China trade. This firm or- 

 dered only a few ships built to their account. It had long been their 

 practice to buy packets after they had served for a period of time on 

 the transatlantic line and proved their qualities, and then employ 

 them in lengthy voyages to China. The Ann McKim proved one of 

 the fastest of such vessels and it is supposed that on some occasion 

 when she was drawn up in one of the New York yards for overhaul, 

 she stimulated the thinking of men like Capt. N. B. Palmer, John 

 Willis Griffiths and Donald McKay. 



N. B. Palmer of Stonington, Connecticut, was an accomplished, 

 practical and many-sided man. As a young man he had served in sail- 

 ing vessels that were operating in Antarctic waters and it was in 

 1821, when he was twenty-two years old and in command of a tiny 

 sloop, that he discovered the coasts of the Antarctic that bear his 



