to foreign vessels under the navigation laws. After the Civil War the
fastest tea clippers flew the British flag and into the seventies they
survived the competition of steam, racing among themselves for the
premiums awarded to the quickest dispatch. No more of these beautiful
vessels were launched after 1869, and one by one they vanished into
other trades, overtaken by the same fate which had befallen the Atlantic
packet and conquered by the cargo steamers which filed through the Suez
Canal.

Until 1848 San Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post,
a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected
hides--vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast--or a whaler
called for wood and water. During the year preceding the frenzied
migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark
and one brig, sailed in through the Golden Gate. In the twelve months
following, 775 vessels cleared from Atlantic ports for San Francisco,
besides the rush from other countries, and nearly fifty thousand
passengers scrambled ashore to dig for gold. Crews deserted their
ships, leaving them unable to go to sea again for lack of men, and in
consequence a hundred of them were used as storehouses, hotels, and
hospitals, or else rotted at their moorings. Sailors by hundreds jumped
from the forecastle without waiting to stow the sails or receive their
wages. Though offered as much as two hundred dollars a month to sign
again, they jeered at the notion. Of this great fleet at San Francisco
in 1849, it was a lucky ship that ever left the harbor again.

It seemed as if the whole world were bound to California and almost
overnight there was created the wildest, most extravagant demand for
transportation known to history. A clipper costing $70,000 could pay for
herself in one voyage, with freights at sixty dollars a ton. This gold
stampede might last but a little while. To take instant advantage of it
was the thing. The fastest ships, and as many of them as could be built,
would skim the cream of it. This explains the brief and illustrious era
of the California clipper, one hundred and sixty of which were launched
from 1850 to 1854. The shipyards of New York and Boston were crowded
with them, and they graced the keel blocks of the historic old ports
of New England--Medford, Mystic, Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland,
Rockland, and Bath--wherever the timber and the shipwrights could be
assembled.

Until tha