The extreme clipper Flyi ng Cloud comes through the Golden Gate and into San Francisco Bay on August 31 , 1851, ending her maiden voyage as the first ship to make the passage in under ninety days-a record only twice equalled, once by the C loud herself. The artist, John Stobart, catches the lithe, heavily sparred, hungry-bowed clipper slipping in fro m the booming ocean under easy canvas . Her owners , Grinnell, Minturn & Co. , !Jave "their agent on the pier to greet the tall racer, but the real tribute is paid by the retired sea captain standing up in admiration in the small boat off the wharf.
THE SHIPS OF SAN FRANCISCO: Ships Built the City, and Their Heritage Challenges the City Today by Peter Stanford Francis Drake mi ssed the entrance when he sai led by in his round-the-world voyage in 1579 . But he landed close outside at a sandy cove just to the north known today as Drake's Estero . And there he claimed the land for Queen Elizabeth in the p_resence of Indians who welcomed the voyagers, standing in awe of the tall ships (as the Elizabethans themselves called them) that they had arrived in , and sailed away in. Two centuries passed until a Spanish ship sailed in through what was to become known round the world as the Golden Gate. The tempo picked up a little as European voyagers opened the Pacific world in various trades, and Mexican ranchers established cattle farms along the wild California coast. Richard Henry Dana , arriving in December 1835 aboard the little hide drogher Pilgrim (on a voyage he was to make famous in Two Years Before the Mast) , provides a vivid picture of "a magnificent bay, containing several good harbours, great depth of water, and surrounded by ferti le and finely wooded country." He noted the presidio on a point. "Behind this ," he noted , " is the little harbor, or bight, called Yerba Buena, in which trading vessels anchor. . . . " Thirteen years later, in December 1848 , President Polk confirmed the discovery of gold in California (the actual find had been made almost a year earlier) . .. and the California Gold Rush was on. Everything that could float, it seemed, was commandeered to get round Cape Horn or through the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific. (Some opted for the still more hazardous transit of the fever-ridden Panamanian jungles, to SEA HISTORY , WINTER 1985.-86
await seaborne pickup on the Pacific shore .) Even a runaway New York ferryboat, fleeing from the sheriff, made the journey and went on to earn an honorable living carrying goods and people inland to the gold fields from San Francisco Bay. Hundreds of ships that made the voyage were abandoned, and by 1852 the Chilean journalist Benhamin Vicuna-Mackenna described the growi ng settlement around Yerba Buena Cove as "a Venice built of pine instead of marble ... a city of ships , piers, and tides." And he noted at that early date: Ships, the largest I have ever seen , were unloading merchandise from all over the world ; Chinese silks, timber from Norway , flour from Talcahuano , and articles from Paris.
The California Clippers A new class of sai ling ship came into being to meet the extraordinary demand for fast passage round Cape Horn to San Francisco--a distance of some 15-18 ,000 miles round the stormiest corner of the ocean world. This new ship was the California clipper. There has been a revisioni st question raised lately as to whether these great ships, which broke records in all seas, were really a new "kind " of vessel. Rapidly overtaking the first generation of clippers built for the China trade , these huge , daringly rigged, sharp-bowed ships were certainly recognized as different in kind by the people who knew them and sailed in them . The fact is that people at the time were intensely conscious of the beauty of these ships and the drama of their fast passages. 9