The Golden Gate Before the Bridge
And the end of the era of Clipper Ships
My father bought these three prints from a photographer in San Francisco for $1 each in the 1930s, during the depression. They are printed on linen.
The above shows a clipper ship coming in through the Golden Gate.
The Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937, so it was before then. You can see Fort Pont at the left, which was completed in 1861:
“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began work on Fort Point in 1853. Plans specified that the lowest tier of artillery be as close as possible to water level so cannonballs could ricochet across the water's surface to hit enemy ships at the water-line.… The structure featured seven-foot-thick walls and multi-tiered casemated construction… It was sited to defend the maximum amount of harbor area. While there were more than 30 such forts on the East Coast, Fort Point was the only one on the West Coast.”
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Point_National_Historic_Site
(Fort Point is now a museum, open on Friday through Sunday, 10AM-5PM. which I heartily recommend. A great place to take visitors to San Francisco. And if the surf is up, you’ll see surfers riding waves under the bridge.)
Above: clipper ship sailing past Seal Rocks at the north end of Ocean Beach, San Francisco.
“The boom years of the clipper era began in 1843 in response to a growing demand for faster delivery of tea from China and continued with the demand for swift passage to gold fields in California and Australia beginning in 1848 and 1851, respectively. The era ended with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.”
The Flying Cloud was a clipper ship that set the world's sailing record for the fastest passage between New York and San Francisco — 89 days 8 hours. The ship held this record for over 130 years, from 1854 to 1989.
Donald McKay's Sovereign of the Seas reported the highest speed ever achieved by a sailing ship of the era, 22 knots (41 km/h), made while running her easting down to Australia in 1854. … Eleven other instances are reported of a ship's logging 18 knots (33 km/h) or over. Ten of these were recorded by American clippers. Besides the breath-taking 465-nautical-mile (861 km) day's run of the Champion of the Seas, 13 other cases are known of a ship's sailing over 400 nautical miles (740 km) in 24 hours. With few exceptions, though, all the port-to-port sailing records are held by the American clippers. The 24-hour record of the Champion of the Seas, set in 1854, was not broken until 1984 (by a multihull), or 2001 (by another monohull).[28]
It looks as if the ship shown in these photos has 6 sails in front (mainsails/foresails?), so this isn’t The Flying Cloud, the Sovereign of the Seas, or the Champion of the Seas, all of which appear to have 5 forward sails.
“In the early days of the California Gold Rush, it took more than 200 days for a ship to travel from New York to San Francisco, a voyage of more than 16,000 miles, but clipper ships quickly cut that time in half. (The ship) Surprise had set a record of 91 days, 21 hours on March 19 , 1851, but Flying Cloud caused a sensation later that year, cutting a week off the record, and beating the three month barrier. Three years later, in 1854, she sailed the passage faster yet, setting a record that lasted for 135 years.”
In 1869, when the Suez Canal opened, it gave steamships an England-to-China route about 3,000 nautical miles (5,600 km; 3,500 mi) shorter than that taken by sailing ships round the Cape of Good Hope — and that was the end of these swift, graceful, beautiful ladies of the sea.
This post made my native Bay Area spirit happy. Such stunning photographs of the vistas I know by heart, through the eyes of someone who lived a century ago. They are the same, and yet not … Wooden ships on the water, very free.
this is such a beautiful post! I wish my dad could have seen it, as someone who took the ferry across the gate to chauffeur in Mill Valley, and loved the tall ships!