Sea Witch Brief Glory, Long Victory by Joe Evangelista th great speed and imposing beauty, Sea Witch put "clipper ship" on everyone's lips from New York ro China in 1849. That year, she made it from Hong Kong to New York around the Cape of Good Hope in 7 4 days, 14 hours-a record for passage under sai l unbroken to this day. Over the decade between 1846 and 1856 she set some halfdozen major voyage records, becoming the first acknowledged member of a new breed of ship built expressly for speed: sha rpprowed, long and sleek, surmounted by a vast, complex orchestra of sail. Sea Witch was the brainchild of farsighted naval architect John W. Griffiths. Obsessed with ship motion and speed, for years he ran studies of existing vessels and made calcu lations on improved hull performance. Around 1840, he built a model rest tank to try rhese theories. Although Griffiths wasn't the only designer seeking to improve ship speed, it was in his theories that various elements of ship design affecting vessel speed coalesced into the overall concept of the clipper ship. Griffirhs exhibited a model of this radically new hull plan in 1843, immediately generating virulent debate because it floured a number of assumptions about ship design. "A cod's head and a mackerel's rail" was the sh ipbuilding maxim describing the rounded bow and narrow stern typical over centuries of merchant-ship design. The shape evolved for buoyancy when the ship pitched, bur also contributed to the problem it sought to fight, since the rounded bow tended to rise in the waves. To compensate, ships often set the foremast far forward, sometimes supplemented by square sails set our onto the bowsprit, to create a downward force pushing the bow against the sea. Griffiths proposed rheopposire: a sharp, concave bow to cur through the wavesexrending ideas from Baltimore clippers and early steam/sail vessels-with a flare outwards toward the top providing the saving buoyancy when the bow did plunge. Lengthening the hull, he moved rhe vessel's cemer of buoyancy backwards and, moving back rhe foremast, stretching the jib and foremast sraysails, gave lift to rhe bow.
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The clipper ship Sea Wirch as depicted by a Chinese artist, coming to anchor at Whampoa (Courtesy the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (M5162)) Griffiths improved speed with the afterhull as well. No ring rhar high speeds tended to raise rhe bow and sink the stern, he filled in stern sections to avoid sucking the stern down and to keep rhe vessel running fast. Speed alone was nor deemed worthy of driving ship design until the War of 1812, when fast Baltimore clippers-most of rhem modified schooners-were developed as privateers. Their speed came at the price of diminished cargo capacity, so rhey faded from rhe postwar marker, bur some of rhe design elements survived in the packet ships rhar, during three postwar decades, established the first regular fre ight services across rhe Adamic. The Ad amic packers evolved as merchants pushed for timetable-driven shipping, which for them translated into less cap ital tied up as inventory. When trade with the Orient bloomed after the 1842 Opium Wars, especially in lucrative but perishable tea, speed became as important as reliability. Ir was rhe beginning of a shipping revolution based on the concept of express freight. In 1843, New York merchants Howland & Aspinwall decided it was worth the risk to try some of Griffirhs's unusual ideas on a China packer. Thar first ship, Rainbow, was so successful they !er him pull our rhe stops for the next. Launched in 1846, Sea Witch inaugurated the era of speed under sail, which gave a generation of talented designers, builders and seafarers the chance to show what men and ships could really accomplish . Clipper ships played a key role in three world-changing economic booms: the China tea trade and the California and
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Australian go ld rushes-not carrying dreamers to riches (clipper rickets reached $1 ,000), but to exp ress ship the cosdy supplies that made the real Gold Rush millionaires-merchants, not miners. But the clippers were extremely expensive to build and operate. Streamlined for speed, they had a relatively low cargo capacity, making their commercial survival dependent on high freight rates-for a whi le, rates were so high that a single voyage cou ld cover a clipper's cos t. Once the tea trade waned and steamship competition in other areas set in, clippers became liabilities. American clippers vanished afrer the 1850s; English clippers, like the famous Cutty Sark now docked in Greenwich, London, remained competitive against steam until the Suez Canal opened in 1869. The clipper story runs like an Ayn Rand scenario: An individualistic designer flours conventional wisdom and propounds a design revolution. A merchant with a problem to solve rakes him up on the offer. They build ships and succeed. Others follow, helping yet more entrepreneurs realize their own grand plans, speeding commerce as never before, moving people in vast numbers, and helping change the wo rldjust by doing good business. Perhaps the reason President Kennedy kept a scale model of the Sea Witch in the Oval Office was that she represented a stirring snapshot of an American idealcapiralism at its finest and individuals at their best. ,!,
Information on a project to build a replica of the Sea Wirch can be found online at www.seawitchrediviva.org. 33