and it was with a spirit even keener that Sampson and Tappan of
Boston offered to match their Nightingale for the same amount
against any clipper afloat, British or American.

In spite of the fact that Yankee enterprise had set the pace in
the tea trade, within a few years after 1850 England had so
successfully mastered the art of building these smaller clippers
that the honors were fairly divided. The American owners were
diverting their energies to the more lucrative trade in larger
ships sailing around the Horn to San Francisco, a long road
which, as a coastwise voyage, was forbidden 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