The Clippers : 269 



flaring her bows outward above the water line; thus the deeper her 

 bows entered the water the greater was the area for her support. She 

 had a greater length in proportion to her beam than was customary 

 at the time, a long straight keel and the flat floors that were also 

 characteristic of Palmer's model. The water line was carried farther 

 aft than was customary. 



All of these features Griffiths could defend with arguments. He 

 was one of the first theoretical designers and he had benefited con- 

 siderably by study, and whereas the usual builder worked by prac- 

 tical experience and rule-of-thumb methods, Griffiths not only read 

 scientific works which he thought had a bearing on his subject but 

 also had conducted some experiments of his own working with mod- 

 els in a tank. 



The Rainbow did all that was expected of her. Though Captain 

 Land, who was driving her to the limit, lost some spars and sail, she 

 completed her run out in something over seventy-nine days. The 

 most unusual part of her performance was that she completed a 

 round trip including the time in port in seven months and seventeen 

 days and returned a handsome profit for the voyage. This was the 

 same season that Waterman drove the old Natchez from Macao to 

 New York in seventy-eight days. 



Had social history pursued a normal course, the clipper design 

 that was proving its merit in the China trade might well have expe- 

 rienced a slow and steady evolution. What it might have been we 

 shall never know for history seldom moves steadily. Almost simul- 

 taneously a series of events developed that greatly accelerated and 

 enhanced clipper development. First there was a boom in all normal 

 trade; next gold was discovered in '48 in California and the gold 

 rush was on for a number of years. The California fever had hardly 

 abated when gold was discovered in Australia, and this brought on 

 another fever of shipbuilding. 



One of the results of this extraordinary set of occurrences was that 

 ideas in ship design that had formerly lain idle or gone begging were 

 instantly in great demand. 



Among the men who had ideas for sale was S. H. Pook, a young 

 man who had recently set himself up as a consulting architect. The 

 Lows went to him and in 1850 he produced the extreme clipper Sur- 

 prise. He had shoved her tonnage up to 1,006 tons and no sooner was 

 she launched when she went roaring around the Cape to establish a 

 record of ninety-six days to California. This beat by just one day the 

 passage that the Sea Witch had recendy completed. 



