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Show The Cutty Sark 1 A STRANGE ship flying the Portuguese flag puts into a South African port for repairs. She is the Cutty Sark, last of the famous "China clippers" remaining on the high seas. The era of the clipper ship was a bare quarter of a century. The first was launched in 1 845. I Seamships crowded the clippers out of business I and with them went most of the romance of ocean life. It is doubtful if man has ever produced a more artistic creation than the clipper ship flying before the wind with its 36,000 square feet of sails spread like the picture you remember in your school books. There was lure even in the names of those sails the Taeping. Lahloo, Jib-o-Jib and Jamie Green sails. The clippers were wooden ships and. as wood was plentiful in Amrt-ica in those days, and cheap, the small clippers permitted the United States to build up a merchant marine that in i860 totaled 2,314,520 tons. From then until the world war our merchant marine declined steadily. In 1920 the United States built and launched a ship tonnage greater than the whole American merchant fleet afloat in i860. Many of these ships could carry the Cutty Sark as cargo, but, considering conditions seventy years ago, our ancestral shipbuilders were not so slow. Our forefathers lost their merchant marine. Let us guard ours. |