The climactic years of sail were spectacular all along the line. In addition to devising transatlantic vessels which for a time held their own with steam, American designers and traders brought out the Cape Horn clippers, the inexpressibly beautiful ships that set unimaginable speed records and captured men’s imaginations as no other form of transportation has ever done. The clippers were highly uneconomic, as cargo carriers, and they flowered only during a brief time when special conditions prevailed in two or three long-distance trade routes, but while they lasted they were something special.

Many people have written about them, in the century since they disappeared forever, but the classic is still Mr. Cutler’s Greyhounds of the Sea , originally issued in 1930 and brought out now as a companion volume to Queens of the Western Ocean . It covers some of the same ground that is covered in the more recent book, but it centers most of its attention on the flyers which briefly crowded the British out of the China tea trade, cut a month or more off the ordinary time between New York and San Francisco, and raised the general prestige of the American merchant ship to the highest point it ever reached.

Mr. Cutler emphasizes a point worth remembering. The greatest of the clippers were only in part a matter of successful design. The design was there, to be sure, and the business of shaping a hull so that the wind could take it through the water with great speed was understood perfectly by such men as John W. Griffiths, Donald McKay, and William H. Webb. But the skipper was equally important, if not a little more so. The clippers had to be driven to the very limit of their capacity by men who understood seamanship down to its last obscure footnote. They needed expert handling precisely as a racing automobile needs it; and they got it from sea captains who had been trained in the packets, in the down-Easters, in the cotton carriers, and the China traders. As Mr. Cutler remarks, such sailors as Robert Waterman and Nathaniel B. Palmer would have made a fair clipper-ship era all by themselves regardless of the vessels they commanded. They and a few more like them were men who knew, by instinct and by hard experience, precisely how to drive a ship to the outer margin of safety without ever going beyond it. It is probable that no men ever lived who understood sailing better than they did.

Greyhounds of the Sea , by Carl C. Cutler, with a foreword by Charles Francis Adams. United States Naval Institute. 592 pp. $12.50.

It was the gold-rush era in California that really brought the clipper ship to its peak. Just when the old mania for making fast passages had produced incomparable ships and men who knew how to handle them,