SAIL AND THE STREAM 291 



the brief period of a few decades only; by the time of the 

 Civil War it had passed. Only on the Grand Banks a thou- 

 sand fishing vessels, many of them the new fast Gloucester 

 schooner design then developing, still held supremacy for the 

 Yankees in this original field. 



We have briefly outlined the influence of the Ocean River 

 on the development of sail from the first discoveries to the 

 final glory of the great clipper ships. But we cannot go into 

 the story of the vessels, because the ocean itself is the focus 

 of our story. By the nineteenth century the pathways of the 

 sea for trade and immigration to the western side of the 

 Atlantic were well established. It all began with the fishing 

 colony of the Banks with the Yankees in charge. Then these 

 same Yankees pioneered the trade with Malaya and the spice 

 islands. Vessels from Salem and Boston rounded the Horn 

 to buy furs along the shores of the Pacific Northwest and 

 resell them to the Chinese. Next the fast, scheduled Black 

 Ball packets between New York and Liverpool showed the 

 first sign of other than New England ports taking leadership 

 in transatlantic shipping. Almost simultaneously Griffith and 

 McKay launched the clippers — the largest, swiftest, and most 

 beautiful vessels man had ever seen, which dominated the 

 China trade and the transportation to the California gold rush. 

 Then Australian clippers, copied from these American vessels, 

 began to give the English a fresh grip on world trade, and 

 the English pioneering and mastery of steam finally brought 

 that country supremacy in the Atlantic trade routes. 



With this new speed and regularity of ocean traffic, the 

 troubled peoples of Europe found readier access to the newly- 

 opened western lands of the United States, and the final racial 

 unity of Europe and the western continent grew in strength. 

 After the earliest English settlers in the eighteenth century 

 Germans from the Palatinate poured into Pennsylvania. 

 When the lead in fishing interests transferred to New Eng- 



