This bold interior door finish – the color more than the grain – is reminiscent of the color of the clipper: the swiftest sail ship ever constructed. Built for speed at the expense of the carrying capacity, those ships traversed both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from, roughly, the time of the American Revolution and up to the second half of the Nineteenth Century, when they began to be phased out gradually by steamships (some of which actually specialized in passenger travel, featuring actual cabins with actual interior doors), and finally fell into disuse after the opening of the Suez Canal.
(By the way. Lauded as one of our civilization’s grand achievements, the Canal, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, is arguably the longest industrial project in history to date. Ancient Egyptian engineers submitted design after design to the Pharaohs, who stubbornly rejected them, shutting the interior door of the palace’s great hall in their faces, even though such a canal would greatly benefit their proto-empire. Greeks talked about the possibility of constructing something navigable in that area for centuries, as Greeks do. The Romans conducted a few dozen feasibility studies – again, over the centuries – but were, somehow, distracted by other important matters every time, such as, to pick a matter at random, selecting the right type of interior doors for a politically adroit senator’s new palace. Finally, fifteen centuries later, give or take, a group of French industrialists saw the project through, and congratulated themselves by commissioning and staging, in Cairo, an opera on Egyptian themes (titled Aida) by Guiseppe Verdi, an Italian composer. Remember this next time you visit it. It’s quite a sight).
Anyway …
A clipper could cross over from Boston to Liverpool in less than two weeks, an unprecedented feat in those days. Apart from the cargo, two or more passenger cabins (featuring interior doors) would be made available to those passengers who did not mind being tossed and thrown off their hammocks and against walls when the outside conditions got serious – or were truly in a hurry.
Previously, sailing a hundred and fifty miles a day was viewed as a very good day’s run. The best clippers could travel more than four hundred miles a day.
It would typically carry extra sails, such as skysails and moonrakers on the masts and studdingsails on booms extending out from the hull. In inclement weather conditions, when the winds were too powerful and the waves too high, other ships would shorten sail and take it easy for fear of capsizing, while clippers just tore implacably on, heeling so much that their lee rails were in the water. Its masts could reach as high as a twenty-story building.
The journey was hardly ever comfortable, but invariably swift. The White Cloud, a so-called “extreme ship,” set the world’s sailing record for the fastest passage between New York and San Francisco (via Cape Horn, of course: the Panama Canal did not exist yet … what is it with our civilization’s reluctance to build canals whenever needed? … ), completing the journey in 89 days. The record stood for over a century and was only broken in 1989.
A number of clippers were used in the British-American War of 1812. Some of them were lightly armed and ready to confront the ferocious enemy, but most were used to deliver urgent messages.
The term was first applied to topsail schooners developed in the Chesapeake Bay even before the battles of Lexington and Concord. Many of those were used, unfortunately, in the Indian and Chinese opium trade, and were later joined by ones built in Great Britain.
The so called “Great Tea Race” took place in 1866, when four ships, named the Fiery Cross, the Ariel, the Taeping, and the Serica, took off from China, carrying tea to London. The race took more than three months as the ships crossed the South China Sea, barreled undaunted through the Sunda Strait of Indonesia, and on across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope of Africa, and up the Atlantic to the English Channel. The three leaders docked in London within minutes of each other.
This interior door finish is a daring one.
