ow, which created a sensation while on the
stocks because of her concave or hollowed lines forward, which defied
all tradition and practice, was launched in 1845. She was a more radical
innovation than the Ann McKim but a successful one, for on her second
voyage to China the Rainbow went out against the northeast monsoon in
ninety-two days and came home in eighty-eight, a record which few ships
were able to better. Her commander, Captain John Land, declared her to
be the fastest ship in the world and there were none to dispute him.

Even the Rainbow however, was eclipsed when not long afterward Howland
and Aspinwall, now converted to the clipper, ordered the Sea Witch to be
built for Captain Bob Waterman. Among all the splendid skippers of the
time he was the most dashing figure. About his briny memory cluster a
hundred yarns, some of them true, others legendary. It has been argued
that the speed of the clippers was due more to the men who commanded
them than to their hulls and rigging, and to support the theory the
career of Captain Bob Waterman is quoted. He was first known to fame in
the old Natchez, which was not a clipper at all and was even rated as
slow while carrying cotton from New Orleans to New York. But Captain Bob
took this full-pooped old packet ship around the Horn and employed her
in the China tea trade. The voyages which he made in her were all fast,
and he crowned them with the amazing run of seventy-eight days from
Canton to New York, just one day behind the swiftest clipper passage
ever sailed and which he himself performed in the Sea Witch. Incredulous
mariners simply could not explain this feat of the Natchez and suggested
that Bob Waterman must have brought the old hooker home by some new
route of his own discovery.

Captain Bob had won a reputation for discipline as the mate of a Black
Ball liner, a rough school, and he was not a mild man. Ashore his
personality was said to have been a most attractive one, but there is
no doubt that afloat he worked the very souls out of his sailors. The
rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however,
until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under
canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she
seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her
there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the
quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then