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| San Francisco Call, 07-May-1895 |
The Old Massachusetts Ship America, the Fastest on the Seas.
WINDS EVER FAIR FOR HER
A Voyage of Eighty-eight Days Between San Francisco and Liverpool.
The clipper ship America, Captain Harding, came in from Nanaimo last Friday with 4157 tons of coal, making her usual quick passage.
For twenty years the famous vessel has been slipping her graceful self over the ocean with greater ease and more speed than any other vessel on the seas. She was built in Quincy, Mass., in 1874 and is
of 2054.93 gross tons register, though she will carry twice that number. She is 232:8 feet long, 43:1 feet beam and 19:3 in depth.
Notwithstanding her ample beam amidships, she is very sharp forward, which accounts for her ability to sail in any breeze. Some fifteen years ago she made her remarkable trip from this port to Liverpool in eighty-eight days, beating the usual fast sailing time just twenty-two days.
Nor did she stop her speedy work at that, for she has since sailed it in ninety three days. She is one of the strangely lucky ships, and the winds always blow fair for her. Her hull is one of the most graceful ever shaped. She formerly carried skysails, but her masts were afterward shortened down to royals. When launched she was fitted with "built" lower masts, as all the larger-sparred Eastern vessels are, there being no sticks big enough on the Atlantic seaboard. But the fore and mizzen being old and weak, were replaced on this coast with whole timbers.
After a score of years' service, the America is as sound as when she slid from her New England ways, and twenty more years will probably see her speeding over the seas, a solid Yankee clipper, one of the school of craft that has made the merchant marine of the great Republic famous the world around.
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