Excerpt from Some Ships of the Clipper Ship Era, Their Builders, Owners, and Captains: A Glance at an Interesting Phase of the American Merchant Marine So Far as It Relates to Boston

To find the beginning of the clipper ships, one must turn to the War of 1812, when certain swift privateers, modelled after the French lugger; were built in Baltimore, and took the name Baltimore clippers. The building of the opium clippers, from 1832 to 1851, for Robert Bennett Forbes and John Murray Forbes and Russell Co., to control the Opium trade between India and Canton, was another step toward ships modelled like clippers. One of these, the Antelope, was so swift and such a good sailer that, under Captain Philip Dumaresq, she was said to be the only square-rigged vessel that could beat up the Formosa Channel against the north-east monsoon. English competition led in 1851 to the building of the famous clipper schooners Minna and Brenda - 300 tons each, with yacht like lines and clouds of canvas - that were very swift and carried large crews, and were well armed to meet the Chinese pirates, whose vessels swarmed the China seas. These two schooners were built for John M. Forbes and others by George Raynes, of Ports mouth, and earned large sums before steamers drove them from the seas.

Few of these early clippers were over 200 tons. The Ann mckim, of 493 tons burden and 143 feet long, built in 1832 at Baltimore, represented the first effort to reproduce the large clipper-like lines of the small vessels in the lines of larger ones. She was beautifully fitted, and, as she was engaged in the China trade, carried guns for protection against pirates. Eventually, she fell into the hands of Howland Aspinwall, ship-owners of New York, and led them in 1843 to embody in the Rainbow.

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