Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World's Fastest Clipper Ship

by Steven Ujifusa

Washington Irving, America’s first professional author, was one of them. He had gained international fame as the creator of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. He moaned that New York, founded in 1625 as the dignified old Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam, was now being overrun by the crassly commercial, money-grubbing Yankees: “a long-sided, raw-boned, hardy race of whoreson whalers, woodcutters, fishermen, and pedlers [sic], and strapping corn-fed wenches; who by their united efforts tended marvelously toward populating those notable tracts of country called Nantucket, Piscataway [New Jersey], and Cape Cod.”2 To Irving, the Old Dutch families, whose wealth came from large feudal tracts of farmland in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, meant gentry and good manners. Irving coined a name for this aloof and insular elite: Knickerbockers. He also came up with a lasting nickname for New York: Gotham.