OXNARD : Students Learn About Clipper

Students at McAuliffe School in Oxnard learned about life on a clipper ship this week as docents from the Channel Islands Maritime Museum sang sea chanteys and shared the contents of a sea chest.

Nancy Hodge’s class of fourth- and fifth-graders had been preparing for the lecture by reading a few chapters of Richard Henry Dana’s classic “Two Years Before the Mast.” The docents’ work, funded by a $2,000 grant from the Achilles Levy Foundation, made reality out of Dana’s descriptions of life at sea on a clipper ship.

Today, the students will visit the Maritime Museum. With their classroom studies and the docents’ visit, the students will have a better understanding of the era of the clipper ship, from the 1830s to the 1860s before the steam ship forced the graceful vessels into decline.

Docent Jean Harris, a trustee of the Oxnard Elementary School District, told students that the clipper ship was considered the most beautiful and the fastest for its time, cutting the time around Cape Horn by half, allowing men and materials to race to the California gold fields.

“It was about three-quarters of a football field, 250 to 290 feet long, and the masts were 10 to 14 stories high,” Harris told the youngsters. “The clipper ship held a lot of sails and that’s what made it go so fast. It was long and sleek and elegant and just knifed through the water.

“When the first clipper ship was finished, people went to the harbor to laugh at it, but they stopped laughing when it went down the ramp and just took off.”

Docents Patricia Soyster and Sylvia Stephans shared the contents of a sea chest. It contained a scupper stopper, a large piece of wood that was put in the ship’s drains to keep fresh rainwater; lanterns for port and starboard; cleats that are attached to docks to help tie up the ship; various seamen’s knots, and rope in various patterns.

Docent Barbara Born got the class moving to the rhythm of sea chanteys, with the youngsters pretending to haul the sails down in time to the music.

Student Gabriel Casas, 10, said the lecture taught him about life at sea.

“They really had a hard time on the ship,” Gabriel said. “It was not an easy job, but it seems like the men were nice to each other.”

But Gabriel said he didn’t think that he would have made it as a sailor.

“I would have gotten seasick,” he said.