“You don’t know how odd it seems of a morning,” a passenger aboard the clipper Flying Cloud wrote home, “when comfortably seated in my rocking chair on deck – when gazing over the broad ocean, to hear roosters crowing, hens cackling, turkeys gobbling, pigs grunting, and lambs bleating.” There was, she added, “an immense amount of livestock on board.” Sailors and passengers together numbered seventy-eight: “quite a village.”
It is one of the most charming details of Age of Sail history – and one almost no ship model ever shows.
Continue reading “Chickens, Pigs, and Sheep: The Livestock That Sailed on Clipper Ships”