unable to go to sea again for lack of men, and in consequence a
hundred of them were used as storehouses, hotels, and hospitals,
or else rotted at their moorings. Sailors by hundreds jumped from
the forecastle without waiting to stow the sails or receive their
wages. Though offered as much as two hundred dollars a month to
sign again, they jeered at the notion. Of this great fleet at San
Francisco in 1849, it was a lucky ship that ever left the harbor
again.

It seemed as if the whole world were bound to California and
almost overnight there was created the wildest, most extravagant
demand for transportation known to history. A clipper costing
$70,000 could pay for herself in one voyage, with freights at
sixty dollars a ton. This gold stampede might last but a little
while. To take instant advantage of it was the thing. The fastest
ships, and as many of them as could be built, would skim the
cream of it. This explains the brief and illustrious era of the
California clipper, one hundred and sixty of which were launched
from 1850 to 1854. The shipyards of New York and Boston were
crowded with them, and they graced the keel blocks of the
historic old ports of New England--Medford, Mystic, Newburyport,
Portsmouth, Portland, Rockland, and Bath--wherever the timber and
the shipwrights could be assembled.

Until that time there had been few ships afloat as large as a
thousand tons. These were of a new type, rapidly increased to
fifteen hundred, two thousand tons, and over. They presented new
and difficult problems in spars and rigging able to withstand the
strain of immense areas of canvas which climbed two hundred feet
to the skysail pole and which, with lower studdingsails set,