SAIL AND THE STREAM 289 



clipper schooner. The best of these innovations that were 

 to evolve into the Gloucester fishing schooner were built at 

 New London and at East Boston by Samuel Hall about mid- 

 century. They had loftier rigs and were about a hundred tons 

 burden. 



At this same time the transatlantic packets were being built 

 and the big, deep-bodied, steep-sided clippers were coming off 

 the ways in Boston and New York. It would be impossible to 

 classify this sudden flowering of swift ships in exact categories. 

 Many of the so-called packets were almost on clipper lines, 

 and there were many deviations from the strict descriptions. 

 In the main the packets were shallower and had blunt, full 

 bows, while the larger and more elegant clippers had more 

 rake to the masts, steeper sides, greater draft, and hollow 

 rather than bluff bow lines. But it is still a matter of open 

 debate whether it was superior design alone, or more skillful, 

 harder-driving masters, that made the difference in the aver- 

 age speed of these vessels. At any rate they had so developed 

 in reach and speed that now the trade of the Atlantic began 

 to take on a world-wide nature. Vessels set out from Salem 

 to open up the spice islands of Malaya, and Boston vessels 

 rounded the Horn to start the profitable fur trade from the 

 Pacific Northwest with China. The ship Rajah of Salem as 

 early as 1795 came back from Sumatra loaded with pepper 

 and paid a profit of 700 percent. The answer to this new 

 success was to be found both in the kind of men and the kind 

 of ships developing on the eastern American seaboard. At 

 the age of twenty-one Richard Cleveland of Salem wrote: *T 

 had now the gratification of uncontrolled action. An innate 

 love of independence, an impatience of restraint, an aversion 

 to responsibility, and a desire to have no other limits to my 

 wanderings than the globe itself, reconciled me to the endur- 

 ance of fatigues and privations which I knew to be an unavoid- 

 able consequence of navigating in so frail a bark." It should 



