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For instance, in the CACHALOT we carried a crew of thirty-seven all told, of which twenty-four were men before the mast, or common seamen, our tonnage being under 400 tons. Many a splendid clipper-ship carrying an enormous spread of canvas on four masts, and not overloaded with 2500 tons of cargo on board, carries twenty-eight or thirty all told, or even less than that.
These were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the points of their sheath-knives broken off, who killed and were killed, but who did their work as men.
The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed.
The New Man is a clipper-ship, that can run out of sight of land while one of the old bluff-bowed, round-ribbed craft is creeping out of port; but, from the very nature of his superiorities, he is apt to be shorter-lived, and more likely to spring a leak in the strain of a storm. He demands nicer navigation. It will not do for him to beat over sand-bars.
Her great ambition was to keep her family together, something on the old patriarchal system; and when her children grew up, and it seemed as if even their very extensive New Zealand property was not large enough for them, she sold it, and embarking her family and moveable possessions on board a clipper-ship, owned and commanded by one of her sons-in-law, they sailed through the Pacific in search of a home where they could remain together.
The substitution of the spinnaker for the jib and foresail made a very great difference in our rate of sailing. When I first came on deck I noticed some distance astern a splendid clipper-ship, bowling along with every stitch of canvas set that would draw, up to skysails and royal studding-sails.
She was two thousand tons, clipper, and with skysails. The captain was Freeman. We brought coals from Boston to San Francisco. That was long ago. I was young. I was young and handsome. And strong. Yes, I was strong and young. "That was it the Mongol. A clipper-ship from Boston, two thousand tons, and with skysails. Around the Horn it almost blew the sticks out of that Mongol.
The Yankee whittling a shingle with his jack-knife is commonly accepted as a caricature, but it is an unconscious symbolization of the plastic instinct which rises step by step to the clothes-pin, the apple-parer, the mowing-machine, the wooden truss-bridge, the clipper-ship, the carved figure-head, the Cleopatra of the World's Exhibition.
To own the poorest boat is better than hiring the best. It is a link to Nature; without a boat, one is so much the less a man. Sailing is of course delicious; it is as good as flying to steer anything with wings of canvas, whether one stand by the wheel of a clipper-ship, or by the clumsy stern-oar of a "gundalow."
I wash my hands o' the whole cussed mess if ye don't look at it and see for yerself. "I don't want the responsibility, and we've got to take some precaution. That's what the killin' was for, and I'll bet a clipper-ship to a doughnut-hole that writin' chap Trenhum knows about it, and he ain't no writin' chap, neither.
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