Racing around Cape Horn with the California Clippers

Extract

“Imagine a Yankee Rip van Winkle,” says Samuel Eliot Morison in his Maritime History of Massachusetts, “who had slept out his twenty years within hailing distance of the State House dome. As he looked about him in 1853 the most astonishing sight would be —, not the railroad, not the telegraph, not the steamship — but the clipper ship. During the last half of his sleep there had taken place the greatest revolution in naval architecture since the days of Hawkins and Drake. Below in Boston Harbor, and setting sail for a port whose name he had never heard, were vessels four and five times as large as any he had ever seen, with canvas five and six times the utmost area that the old Boston East-Indiamen dared spread to the lightest air.”