“Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship”

There was a time, back when the United States was young and the robber barons were just starting to come into their own, when fortunes were made or lost importing goods from China. It was a secretive, glamorous, often brutal business- one where teas and silks and porcelains were purchased with profits from the opium trade. But the journey by sea from Canton to New York could take six agonizing months, and so the most pressing technological challenge of the day became ensuring one’s goods arrived first to market so they might fetch the highest price.

In Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship, Steven Ujifusa tells the story of a handful of cutthroat competitors who raced to build the fastest, finest, most profitable clipper ships to carry their precious cargo to American shores. They were visionary, eccentric shipbuilders, debonair captains and socially ambitious merchants with names like Forbes and Delano- men whose business interests took them from the cloistered confines of China’s expatriate communities to the sin city decadence of Gold Rush era San Francisco, and from the teeming hub of East Boston’s shipyards to the lavish sitting rooms of New York’s Hudson Valley estates.

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