ld the record of fourteen days
and six hours. It remained for the Dreadnought, Captain Samuel Samuels,
in 1859, to set the mark for packet ships to Liverpool at thirteen days
and eight hours.

Meanwhile the era of the matchless clipper had arrived and it was one of
these ships which achieved the fastest Atlantic passage ever made by a
vessel under sail. The James Baines was built for English owners to be
used in the Australian trade. She was a full clipper of 2515 tons, twice
the size of the ablest packets, and was praised as "the most perfect
sailing ship that ever entered the river Mersey." Bound out from Boston
to Liverpool, she anchored after twelve days and six hours at sea.

There was no lucky chance in this extraordinary voyage, for this clipper
was the work of the greatest American builder, Donald McKay, who at the
same time designed the Lightning for the same owners. This clipper,
sent across the Atlantic on her maiden trip, left in her foaming wake a
twenty-four hour run which no steamer had even approached and which
was not equaled by the fastest express steamers until twenty-five years
later when the greyhound Arizona ran eighteen knots in one hour on her
trial trip. This is a rather startling statement when one reflects
that the Arizona of the Guion line seems to a generation still living
a modern steamer and record-holder. It is even more impressive when
coupled with the fact that, of the innumerable passenger steamers
traversing the seas today, only a few are capable of a speed of more
than eighteen knots.

This clipper Lightning did her 436 sea miles in one day, or eighteen and
a half knots, better than twenty land miles an hour, and this is how the
surpassing feat was entered in her log, or official journal: "March 1.
Wind south. Strong gales; bore away for the North Channel, carrying away
the foretopsail and lost jib; hove the log several times and found the
ship going through the water at the rate of 18 to 18 1/2 knots; lee rail
under water and rigging slack. Distance run in twenty-four hours, 436
miles." The passage was remarkably fast, thirteen days and nineteen and
a half hours from Boston Light, but the spectacular feature was this
day's work. It is a fitting memorial of the Yankee clipper, and, save
only a cathedral, the loveliest, noblest fabric ever wrought by man's
handiwork.

The clipper, however, was a stranger in the Atlantic and her chosen
courses were elsewhere. The records made by th