Catching the Wind

The Flying Cloud was the Concorde of its day, the seagoing equivalent of the Pony Express, a technical thoroughbred that could dash up to 400 miles in a day under clouds of straining white canvas draped from the spars athwart its three masts. In 1851 and again in 1854 the sleek 229-foot clipper, built in East Boston by Donald McKay, set a mark for sailing ships that would survive into the era of space shuttles and computer chips: New York to San Francisco, around Cape Horn, in 89 days.

The record for a sailing ship was not surpassed until this past weekend when the 60-foot-long sloop Thursday’s Child sailed through the Golden Gate on its 80th day out of New York. The era of miracle-fabric sails and satellite navigation finally triumphed over canvas, sextant and Yankee commercial enterprise.

As with so many things, the California Gold Rush played a role in the development of the clipper. With its small cargo capacity, the lean clipper thrived on the speedy delivery of priority goods at premium prices--a combination that was particularly profitable on long runs like the Cape Horn route and from London and New York to China and Australia. At the time of the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, the old packet ships took 150 to 200 days to reach San Francisco. The Gold Rush triggered an epidemic of clipper construction in a race to share the profits. About 350 such craft were built to cut the San Francisco run to 110 days or less. The fastest were McKay’s.

The clippers reigned well into the age of steam, but the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave steamships a big advantage. The clippers continued to prevail primarily on extended routes where coal was not readily available.

Until last Sunday, every attempt by a modern vessel to equal the Flying Cloud’s time failed, often on the icy rocks of Cape Horn. The voyage of Thursday’s Child is impressive: Mere survival through the cape in such a craft is an achievement. Even more remarkable, however, is the fact that the Flying Cloud’s record stood for nearly a century and a half. The record is broken, perhaps, but not necessarily bettered.