Only the strongest and best found ships, and the most skilful and daring seamen were fit to carry the flag across the world-long ocean courses about the storm-swept Horn, and here again America more than held her own in competition with the mariners of the old seafaring nations of Europe.
Winthrop Lippitt Marvin in his valuable work, "The American Merchant Marine,"[1] pictures this last Titanic struggle of the sea in stirring fashion—
"It was a contest of truly Olympian dignity,—of the best ships of many flags with each other and with the elements. Out through the Golden Gate there rode every year in the later seventies and the eighties, southward bound, the long lean iron models of Liverpool and Glasgow, the broader waisted, wooden New Englanders, with their fine Yankee sheer and tall, gleaming skysails, the sturdy, careful Norwegian and German ships, often launched on the Penobscot or Kennebec, and here and there a graceful Frenchman or Italian. The British were the most numerous, because the total tonnage of their merchant marine was by far the greatest. Next came the Americans. The other flags looked small by comparison. In this splendid grain trade there sailed from San Francisco for Europe in 1881-85, 761 British iron ships and 418 American wooden ships. The Americans were the largest vessels. Their average registered tonnage was 1,634 and of the fourteen ships above 2,000 tons that sailed in 1880-1, twelve flew the Stars and Stripes. The average tonnage of the British iron ships was 1,356.
"The wooden yards of Maine had seen their opportunity and built in quick succession many great ships and barks of from 1,400 to 2,400 tons, very strongly constructed on models happily combining carrying capacity with speed, loftily sparred, and clothed with the symmetrical, snow-white canvas for which Yankee sailmakers were famous the world around. These new vessels were not strictly clippers, though they were often called so. They were really medium clippers; that is, they were less racer-like and more capacious than the celebrated greyhounds of the decade before the Civil War. They could not compete with steam; their owners knew it. But they were launched in confident hope that they were adapted for the grain trade and for some other forms of long-voyage, bulky carrying, and that they could find a profitable occupation during their lifetime of fifteen or twenty years. They were just as fine ships in their way as the extreme clippers, and in all but speed they were more efficient. They were framed with oak, and ceiled and planked with the hard pine of the South. They were generously supplied with the new, approved devices in rig and equipment."
In the last years of the nineties there were many survivors of this noble fleet of American sailers still in the long voyage trade. Ships like the El Capitan, the Charmer, the A. J. Fuller, the Roanoke, and the Shenandoah, were clearing from New York for deep water ports, and South Street was a thoroughfare of sailors, redolent of tar, and familiar with the wide gossip of the seas, brought to the string pieces of the street by men from the great sailing ships.
Then the crimp still throve in his repulsive power, and the Boarding Masters' Association owned the right to parcel out, fleece and ship, the deepwater seamen of the port. The Front Street House and a score of others held the humble dunnage of the fo'c'sle sailor as security, cashed his "advance" and sent him out past the Hook with nothing but a sparse kit of dog's wool and oakum slops, a sheath knife and a donkey's breakfast.
Those were the hard days of large ships and small crews. In clipper days, a flyer like the Sovereign of the Seas carried a crew of eighty seamen, and most of them were as rated—A.B. The ship A. J. Fuller, in the year 1897, left the port of New York, for the voyage around Cape Horn to Honolulu with eighteen seamen, counting the boy and the carpenter, the Fuller being a three skysail yard ship of 1,848 tons register.
It may be interesting to compare the size and crew of the Sovereign of the Seas, as given by Captain Clark in his great book, "The Clipper Ship Era,"[2] with the dimensions and crew of the ship A. J. Fuller.
| Ship | Sovereign of the Seas | A. J. Fuller | ||
| Length | 258 ft. | 229 ft. | ||
| Beam | 44 ft. | 41.5 ft. | ||
| Draft | 23.5 ft. | 18 ft. | ||
| Register Tonnage | 2,421 tons | 1,848 tons | ||
| Crew—— | ||||
| Master | 1 | Master | 1 | |
| Mates | 4 | Mates | 2 | |
| Boatswains | 2 | Carpenters | 1 | |
| Carpenters | 2 | Able Seamen | 16 | |
| Sailmakers | 2 | Boys | 1 | |
| Able Seamen | 80 | |||
| Boys | 10 | |||
| TOTAL | 101 | TOTAL | 21 | |
This condition, of small crews and large ships, brought to the seven seas a reputation for relentless driving and manhandling that has clung to the minds of men as nothing else. The huge American ships were the hardest afloat, and that remarkable booklet, "The Red Record," compiled by the National Seamen's Union of America, in the middle nineties, carries a tale of cruelty and abuse on the high seas that must forever remain a blot upon the white escutcheon of sail.