rs were soon afloat, somewhat different in model from the
Yankee ships, but very fast and able, and racing them in the tea trade
until the Civil War. With them it was often nip and tuck, as in the
contest between the English Lord of the Isles and the American clipper
bark Maury in 1856. The prize was a premium of one pound per ton for
the first ship to reach London with tea of the new crop. The Lord of
the Isles finished loading and sailed four days ahead of the Maury, and
after thirteen thousand miles of ocean they passed Gravesend within ten
minutes of each other. The British skipper, having the smartest tug
and getting his ship first into dock, won the honors. In a similar race
between the American Sea Serpent and the English Crest of the Wave, both
ships arrived off the Isle of Wight on the same day. It was a notable
fact that the Lord of the Isles was the first tea clipper built of iron
at a date when the use of this stubborn material was not yet thought of
by the men who constructed the splendid wooden ships of America.

For the peculiar requirements of the tea trade, English maritime talent
was quick to perfect a clipper type which, smaller than the great Yankee
skysail-yarder, was nevertheless most admirable for its beauty and
performance. On both sides of the Atlantic partizans hotly championed
their respective fleets. In 1852 the American Navigation Club, organized
by Boston merchants and owners, challenged the shipbuilders of Great
Britain to race from a port in England to a port in China and return,
for a stake of $50,000 a side, ships to be not under eight hundred nor
over twelve hundred tons American register. The challenge was aimed at
the Stornaway and the Chrysolite, the two clippers that were known to be
the fastest ships under the British flag. Though this sporting defiance
caused lively discussion, nothing came of it, 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