In the first half of the nineteenth century America rose to great commercial importance thanks to her fleets of fine sailing vessels. Speed rather than strength in their ships was the aim of American ship-builders, to gain which they built boats proportionately longer and narrower than ever constructed before for ocean traffic. The culminating type of wooden sailing ship was represented by the "Baltimore clippers," in which the length was five, and even six, times the beam, with light rigging and improved mechanical devices for handling it, whereby the amount of manual labor was greatly lessened. One of these ships, the _Great Republic_, built in 1853, was over three hundred feet long, and 3,400 tons register. She was a four-masted vessel, fitted with double topsails, with a spread of canvas about 4,500 square yards. The modern descendant of the wooden clipper ship is the schooner with from four to six masts. Some of these vessels exceed the older boats in size and carrying capacity, if not in speed. Perhaps the largest schooner ever constructed is the _Wyoming_, which was completed at Bath, Maine, early in the year 1910. This vessel is 329 feet long and 50 feet broad. It has a carrying capacity of 6,000 tons. The construction of such a vessel at so recent a period suggests that the day of the sailing ship is by no means over notwithstanding that a full century has elapsed since the coming of the steamboat. Here, as so often elsewhere in the history of progress, it has happened that the full development of a type has not been reached until the ultimate doom of that type, except for special purposes, had been irrevocably sealed. Ever since the full development of the steamboat in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the sailing ship has seemed almost an anachronism; and yet, in point of fact, the steamship did not at once outrival its more primitive forerunner. Even in the matter of speed, the sailing ship more than held its own for a generation or so after the steamship had been placed in commission. In 1851 the American clipper _Flying Cloud_ made 427 knots in twenty-four hours; and _The Sovereign of the Seas_ bettered this by averaging over eighteen miles an hour for twenty-four consecutive hours. The Atlantic record for sailing vessels is usually said to have been made in 1862 by the clipper ship _Dreadnought_ in a passage between Queenstown and New York, the time of which is stated as nine days and seventeen hours. It should be remarked, however, that the authenticity of this extraordinary performance has been challenged.