Captain Hal Winslow commands the fastest sailing ship ever built in America, The Yankee Clipper. Her radical design is built to challenge England's supremacy at sea. In China, a race is arranged with The Lord Of The Isles, Brittania's finest vessel and the fastest ship in the world. The stakes are high. The two vessels will sail from Foo Chow harbor, and the first to reach Boston wins China's exclusive tea trade, worth an unimaginable fortune to the victorious country.

.Lavishly produced by Cecil B. DeMille, The Yankee Clipper features a very young, handsome William Boyd, who stars alongside Elinor Fair, to whom he was married at the time. Boyd gained fame for his starring role as Hopalong Cassidy starting in 1935. He went on to reprise the part in 65 more productions in the years to follow. His star rose again and he became extremely wealthy buying the rights to all his feature films, then shrewdly marketing them to television stations, hungry for Western fare in the early 1950s.

This silent film follows the race between two ships and the attempt at proving to an Englishwoman that her fiance is a villainous blackguard. All the action actually takes place on a clipper ship.