that of present existence at Java Head. All Salem had been different: he
had a certain contempt for the existence of his son William and the
latter's associates and friends. He had said that the trading now done in
ships was like dealing at a Boston store, and the merchants reminded him
of storekeepers. The old days, when a voyage was a public affair, and a
ship's manifest posted in the Custom House on which anyone might write
himself down for a varying part of the responsibility and profit, had
given place to closed capital; the passages from port to port with the
captain, as often as not, his own supercargo and a figure of importance,
had become scheduled affairs in which a master was subjected to any
countinghouse clerk with an order from the firm: the ships themselves
were fast being ruined.

He was in his room, after supper, seated momentarily on a day bed with a
covering of white Siberian fox skins, and he pronounced aloud, in a tone
of satirical contempt, the single word, "Clipper." Nearly everyone in the
shipping business seemed to have been touched by this madness for the
ridiculous ideas of an experimental Griffiths and his model of a ship
with the bows turned inside out, the greatest beam aft and a dead rise
like an inverted roof. That the _Rainbow_, the initial result of this
insanity, hadn't capsized at her launching had been due to some freak of
chance; just as her miraculous preservation through a voyage or so to
China could have been made possible only by continuously mild weather.

Even if the _Rainbow_ had been fast--her run was called ninety-two days
out to Canton and home in eighty-eight--it was absurd to suppose that
there had been the usual monsoon. And if she did come in a little ahead
of vessels built on a solid full-bodied model, why her hold had no cargo
capacity worth the name.