It now seems agreed that "clipper" is best regarded as simply a name for a fast merchant sailing vessel and the particular design was arrived at independently on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Aberdeen's first steam ship, Queen of Scotland, a paddle steamer with a wooden hull, was built by John Duffus and Co. in 1829 and there followed a succession of similar vessels.

[10] In the 1830s, facing competition on its route to London from paddle steamers that were faster than conventional sailing ships, the Aberdeen Line contracted with Hall's shipyard for a sailing vessel providing a better design of coastal packet boat for the London route and in 1839 the Scottish Maid became the first of a series of similar vessels described by Clark as "the highest pinnacle of the shipbuilders' art".

[note 2][16] Hall's designers realised that by having the bow and stern, angled away from vertical when above half-depth, the measured tonnage would be less for a greater load carrying capacity.

Scottish Maid was the first to have been deliberately designed to take advantage of the new law and was early in Britain to have a markedly pointed bow with the wooden beam at the very front angled forward sharply.

[13] Scottish Maid was designed and built after Alexander Hall had handed over the firm he had founded to his sons, James and William.

[17][23] She was a two-masted gaff-rigged schooner with a topsail and her carvel hull[note 4] included a single deck and boasted a female figurehead.

[note 5][26] The vessel proved to be very fast, travelling between Aberdeen and London (500 miles (800 km)) in 49 hours at an average speed of about 9 knots and competing well against steam driven paddle steamers so in 1842 Hall's built three sister ships of the same design.

[33] In February 1854 Scottish Maid carried emigrant passengers to Australia who wrote to the press praising the attention and kindness given to them by the captain.

[8][36][37] In the earliest decades of the 19th century the route between London and Leith, Edinburgh's port on Scotland's east coast, was served by single-masted cutter-rigged smacks with a large and unmanageable mainsail so that a crew of 14 might be required.

The 460-mile (740 km) voyage, for passengers, mail and cargo, took 50 hours at the very best (about 8 knots, somewhat faster than the more expensive stagecoach), 5–6 days for a swift passage, and several weeks in adverse conditions.

[44] The Aberdeen-built Thermopylae of 1868 was to compete with Cutty Sark (1869) but 1869 was the year of the last clipper, Caliph, to be built in Aberdeen because the opening of the Suez Canal made them obsolescent.

[45] In the academic journal Mariner's Mirror of 1943, Boyd Cable[note 7] published "The World's First Clipper" which awarded the accolade to Scottish Maid.

His requisite design, a pointed bow with concave bow-lines[note 5] and a stem angled steeply forward, started, in his estimation, with the Scottish Maid of 1839 and was followed in America by the Rainbow in 1845.

The Baltimore clipper Ann McKim of 1833 had, he considered, convex bow-lines[47][note 8] Provoked by Cable's jingoistic article, John Lyman[note 9] responded in 1944 with "The Scottish Maid as 'the World's First Clipper'" saying that the motivation for the Scottish vessel's hull profile was to avoid tax, not to increase speed, and that many similarly sized vessels of that era in both Europe and America had a similar shape of hull.

[53] J.Henderson reported he had inspected an original model at Hall's shipyard of a vessel with a greater stem rake than the Scottish Maid and its bow-lines were straight, not concave or convex.