I have drawn heavily from bibliography the book, Eighty Days to Hong Kong to paint this picture. This section is from the Forward by Mister Heatter. I expect to return to this book again and again.

It was all part of the American dream-a dream not of conquest but of peaceful international trade.

England was the great sea power of the time, and her ships-the cumbersome East Indiamen-were slow and heavy and powerfully armed. Although they carried cargo, they were in every sense more closely akin to the warship than the merchant trader. Their officers wore naal uniforms, and their heavily armed gun decks were manned by naval gunners to fight off the roving pirates of the Arabian and China coasts.

It took a gale of a wind to move one of these elephantine ships, and when they did move, it was seldom at the rate of more than three to four nautical miles per hour.

But suddenly a new ship appeared-the Yankee clipper. She was long and lean, with a beautiful, sweeping sheer line, and such clouds of snowy canvas flying from her lofty spars as to make the old salts shake their heads and predict the clippers would capsize at their piers before even getting under way.

Men had been putting to sea in sailing vessels for the better part of five thousand years, but in all that time there had been astonishingly little improvements in hull or sail design. The East Indiamen were hardly any better than the clumsy galleons of the Spanish Armada. They in turn were hardly better than the rowing galleys of the Middle Ages.

How fast can a man row a boat? The light racing shells used by college racing teams- craft that are as light as feathers and not much wider than a man's two hands-have reached speeds of twelve knots. These were on mirror-smooth waters and for the briefest possible time.

The great seagoing galleys of the Middle Ages are known to have reached speeds of five to six knots under emergency conditions, but even under full sail they never exceeded this.

Again, the East Indiamen were not much better than the galleys of the Middle Ages.

Twenty knots or more was what the clipper ships were then capable of doing-not only in short bursts, as our racing catamarans can do today, but heavily loaded and for sustained periods. It was not unusual for the clipper ships running before the Pacific trades to average more than four hundred miles in a twenty-four hour perios, a speed seldom bettered by even the most modern steamers of today.

Fancy then how incredible it must have seemed to the mariners of a century ago!

No sailing ship ever built, or likely to be built, was as big, as beautiful, as smooth, or as fast as the great clippers roaring down the trade winds or battling around the Horn to make Hong Kong in eighty days.

Where did these great ships come from? Go back now and read The Origin Of the Clipper Ship, a unique story.