This ship image was painted by Currier & Ives, the prolific publishers of Americana during the second half of the 19th Century. The word, clipper, was used to describe a ship that was a very fast sailer. The earliest American clipper design, the Baltimore clipper, appeared in numbers after the War of 1812. This basic style remained until the commercial need arose in the 1840s and 1850s for faster and bigger ships. Beginning in the 1840s American shipbuilders started to build a new kind of merchant vessel - the clipper ship. Several qualities set the clipper ship apart from other and earlier sailing ships. A clipper was technically a sailing ship with three masts on which sat a large expanse of square sails. It was designed to carry a small, highly profitable cargo over long distances at high speeds. The average size of an American clipper ship was 185 feet and the largest were over 300 feet.

Clipper ship masts could reach as high as two hundred feet and carried more sails and more kinds of sails than any other ship that had been built by that time. This expanse of sails were controlled by a complicated web of rigging that rose above a sharp bow and a sleek narrow hull. The long lines of the ship combined with the enormous driving power of the sails allowed the ships to "clip" along at speeds that earlier generations of sailors never dreamed of, and later generations of sailing ships never matched. A Clipper ship could average 250 miles a day compared to the standard cargo ships ability to do 150 miles a day. The very fastest clippers could do over 400 miles a day. Most of the significant speed records belonged to the American clipper ships. Todays racing boats can cover over 650 miles in a day, but are 60-110 feet and designed from the ground up for racing.

The brief period of American clipper ships was in the 1840s to1850s. Then a clipper ship was a large, ship-rigged vessel having a graceful sheer (an upward curve of the lines of the hull as seen from the side), low freeboard when loaded, generally a very sharp bow, and an extremely large sail area. The Clipper ships great speed advantage over standard ships meant it was only suitable for a narrow variety of cargoes. Based upon its specific use and/or design, clipper ships served both legal and illegal purposes. They were used in the naval service and for carrying light but valuable cargoes such as people, tea, coffee, silks and even ice. On the illegal trading side they were popular for carrying opium, slaves and whatever else would benefit from a fast transit.

Clippers varied in size and might be a schooner, brigantine, brig, bark, or ship rigged, but were equally sharp bowed for fast sailing. The ships having the sharpest bows, and hence the smallest cargo capacity were called extreme clippers. Then there were the moderate clippers, the medium clippers or half clippers. The medium clippers predominated.

Medium : 1 print : lithograph, hand colored

Created/Published : Currier & Ives, New York, 1875

Creator : Currier & Ives

Housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Frame : Size : 16" 5/8 x 24" Frame : silver gold surface with black edges

Price: $225.00

Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 weeks

Product #: FR0117