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"Clipper Ship 'Redj acket'.¡ In the ice offCape Ho rn, on herpassage.from Australia, to Liverpool, August 1854"; drawn by] B. Smith & Son, Brooklyn, L. ! ; on stone by C. Parsons. " Currier & Ives Lithograph, ca. 1855. (Courtesy, the US Library of Congress)
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"Clipper ship 'Great Republic'.¡ Length on deck 325 feet-Breadth ofbeam 53 feet-Depth ofhold 39 feet-Tonnage per register 4500. " Currier & Ives Lithograph, ca. 1835- 52. (Courtesy, the US Library of Congress)
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he clippers had imm ense, almost se nsational news value. Newspapers, led by the prominent yachtsman Jam es Gordon Bennett's Herald, reviewed the ships as one might review a first-night play on Broadway. An d, naturally, these sh ips were featured in the popular prints of C urrier and Ives, whose images of American life hung in the ho mes of the nation's emerging middle class. H ere are two examples of the genre. The Red j acket (to p), a Maine-built beauty of great speed and virtue, shows why the clipper builders rejected the heavy beakheads and abundant swags, carvings and gildings of earlier ships, to let the des ign of th e ship shine fo rth in austere but ravishing simplicity. The Red jacket seems to exert a magical control over the dangerous scene she stee rs through off Cape H orn. In a blow, the sharp ice floes and steepled bergs wo uld make short wo rk of any
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wooden ship, even one so en chanting as this. The Great Republic, saluted here in a rendition of J. E. Buttersworth 's painting, was indeed the largest of the clippers. Registering4,55 5 to ns, she was towed down from D onald M cKay's East Boston yard by the famo us tug R. B. Forbes, to be moored in triumph at South Street at the foot of Dover, just so uth of where the Brooklyn Bridge now stands. Loaded with grain and about to sail, she was burn t to the water's edge on the day after Christmas, 1853, when sparks from a bakery fire set her sails alight, already bent to her yards for departure. She was salvaged and rebuilt one deck lower, reducing her to 3 ,357 tons, still the biggest sailing ship of her time. Writers in her d ay and since have written fantasies about how she wou ld have performed under her origin al lofty rig, shown here, which was cons iderably reduced in her rebuilding. 1.
SEA HISTORY 88, SPRING 1999