"The wooden yards of Maine had seen their opportunity and built in quick succession many great ships and barks of from 1,400 to 2,400 tons, very strongly constructed on models happily combining carrying capacity with speed, loftily sparred, and clothed with the symmetrical, snow-white canvas for which Yankee sailmakers were famous the world around. These new vessels were not strictly clippers, though they were often called so. They were really medium clippers; that is, they were less racer-like and more capacious than the celebrated greyhounds of the decade before the Civil War. They could not compete with steam; their owners knew it. But they were launched in confident hope that they were adapted for the grain trade and for some other forms of long-voyage, bulky carrying, and that they could find a profitable occupation during their lifetime of fifteen or twenty years. They were just as fine ships in their way as the extreme clippers, and in all but speed they were more efficient. They were framed with oak, and ceiled and planked with the hard pine of the South. They were generously supplied with the new, approved devices in rig and equipment." In the last years of the nineties there were many survivors of this noble fleet of American sailers still in the long voyage trade. Ships like the _El Capitan_, the _Charmer_, the _A. J. Fuller_, the _Roanoke_, and the _Shenandoah_, were clearing from New York for deep water ports, and South Street was a thoroughfare of sailors, redolent of tar, and familiar with the wide gossip of the seas, brought to the string pieces of the street by men from the great sailing ships. Then the crimp still throve in his repulsive power, and the Boarding Masters' Association owned the right to parcel out, fleece and ship, the deepwater seamen of the port. The Front Street House and a score of others held the humble dunnage of the fo'c'sle sailor as security, _cashed_ his "advance" and sent him out past the Hook with nothing but a sparse kit of dog's wool and oakum slops, a sheath knife and a donkey's breakfast. Those were the hard days of _large_ ships and _small_ crews. In clipper days, a flyer like the _Sovereign of the Seas_ carried a crew of _eighty_ seamen, and most of them were as rated--A.B. The ship _A. J. Fuller_, in the year 1897, left the port of New York, for the voyage around Cape Horn to Honolulu with _eighteen_ seamen, counting the boy and the carpenter, the _Fuller_ being a three skysail yard ship of 1,848 tons register. It may be interesting to compare the size and crew of the _Sovereign of the Seas_, as given by Captain Clark in his great book, "The Clipper Ship Era,"[2] with the dimensions and crew of the ship _A. J. Fuller_. _Ship_ Sovereign of the Seas A. J. Fuller