“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.
A floating farmyard
Clipper voyages were long. The Flying Cloud is famous for two 89-day passages from New York to San Francisco, but she also made runs of 115 and 123 days. Refrigeration did not exist. For passengers and officers to eat fresh meat, the meat had to come aboard alive.
And it came aboard in quantity. The writer Charles Warren Stoddard, who sailed on the Flying Cloud as a boy in 1857, recorded the ship’s livestock: “17 pigs; 12 dozen hens and roosters; 3 turkeys; 1 gobbler; a cockatoo and a wildcat.” The fresh results showed up at the table – one Fourth of July at sea featured roast turkey and chicken with oyster sauce, roast pig, boiled ham, and champagne and Madeira “in abundance.” A crewman interviewed decades later remembered it too: “There were plenty of live sheep, chickens, ducks and pigs aboard.”
Where did they all live?
Sometimes the animals simply had the run of the deck. More often they were penned. The surviving clipper Cutty Sark has a pig pen built into part of her forecastle and clearly visible chicken coops; the whaler Charles W. Morgan carries a chicken coop tucked aft of her try works. Builder’s models tell a similar story – the Boucher models of the Flying Cloud show livestock pens sited over the forward hatch. It made practical sense to keep pigs and chickens above deck: the smell, frankly, was reason enough.
The modeler’s blind spot
Here is the catch for anyone building one of these ships. Despite all this documentation, livestock pens and chicken coops almost never appear on model plans. Of the many sets of Flying Cloud plans in circulation, only one revised set shows a livestock pen at all. So the modeler who wants this detail has to do what the best modelers always do: go to the primary sources, study the surviving ships and museum models, and work it out.
That is exactly the kind of detail that separates a competent model from a memorable one. A clipper deck with a coop of chickens and a pen of sheep is not just more accurate – it tells a story, and it invites the viewer aboard.
Build it yourself
Scott Bradner’s full article shows you how to build accurate, period-correct livestock pens and chicken coops – with construction photos and dimensions – in the May/June 2026 issue of Ships in Scale. Subscribe to print + digital for $44.95/year at http://www.shipsinscale.com.