"It was on the stormy Atlantic, called by sailormen the Western Ocean, that the packet ships won the first great contest for supremacy and knew no rivals until the coming of the age of steam made them obsolete.Their era antedated that of the clipper and was wholly distinct.The Atlantic packet was the earliest liner:
she made regular sailings and carried freight and passengers instead of trading on her owners' account as was the ancient custom.Not for her the tranquillity of tropic seas and the breath of the Pacific trades, but an almost incessant battle with swinging surges and boisterous winds, for she was driven harder in all weathers and seasons than any other ships that sailed.In such battering service as this the lines of the clipper were too extremely fine, her spars too tall and slender.The packet was by no means slow and if the list of her record passages was superb, it was because they were accomplished by masters who would sooner let a sail blow away than take it in and who raced each other every inch of the way.
They were small ships of three hundred to five hundred tons when the famous Black Ball Line was started in 1816.From the first they were the ablest vessels that could be built, full-bodied and stoutly rigged.They were the only regular means of communication between the United States and Europe and were entrusted with the mails, specie, government dispatches, and the lives of eminent personages.Blow high, blow low, one of the Black Ball packets sailed from New York for Liverpool on the first and sixteenth of every month.Other lines were soon competing--the Red Star and the Swallow Tail out of New York, and fine ships from Boston and Philadelphia.With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 the commercial greatness of New York was assured, and her Atlantic packets increased in size and numbers, averaging a thousand tons each in the zenith of their glory.
England, frankly confessing herself beaten and unable to compete with such ships as these, changed her attitude from hostility to open admiration.She surrendered the Atlantic packet trade to American enterprise, and British merchantmen sought their gains in other waters.The Navigation Laws still protected their commerce in the Far East and they were content to jog at a more sedate gait than these weltering packets whose skippers were striving for passages of a fortnight, with the forecastle doors nailed fast and the crew compelled to stay on deck from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Rock.
No blustering, rum-drinking tarpaulin was the captain who sailed the Independence, the Ocean Queen, or the Dreadnought but a man very careful of his manners and his dress, who had been selected from the most highly educated merchant service in the world.He was attentive to the comfort of his passengers and was presumed to have no other duties on deck than to give the proper orders to his first officer and work out his daily reckoning.It was an exacting, nerve-racking ordeal, however, demanding a sleepless vigilance, courage, and cool judgment of the first order.The compensations were large.As a rule, he owned a share of the ship and received a percentage of the freights and passage money.His rank when ashore was more exalted than can be conveyed in mere words.Any normal New York boy would sooner have been captain of a Black Ball packet than President of the United States, and he knew by heart the roaring chantey It is of a flash packet, A packet of fame.
She is bound to New York And the Dreadnought's her name.
She is bound to the west'ard Where the stormy winds blow.
Bound away to the west'ard, Good Lord, let her go.
There were never more than fifty of these ships afloat, a trifling fraction of the American deep-water tonnage of that day, but the laurels they won were immortal.Not only did the English mariner doff his hat to them, but a Parliamentary committee reported in 1837 that "the American ships frequenting the ports of England are stated by several witnesses to be superior to those of a similar class among the ships of Great Britain, the commanders and officers being generally considered to be more competent as seamen and navigators and more uniformly persons of education than the commanders and officers of British ships of a similar size and class trading from England to America."It was no longer a rivalry with the flags of other nations but an unceasing series of contests among the packets of the several lines, and their records aroused far more popular excitement than when the great steamers of this century were chipping off the minutes, at an enormous coal consumption, toward a five-day passage.Theirs were tests of real seamanship, and there were few disasters.The packet captain scorned a towboat to haul him into the stream if the wind served fair to set all plain sail as his ship lay at her wharf.Driving her stern foremost, he braced his yards and swung her head to sea, clothing the masts with soaring canvas amid the farewell cheers of the crowds which lined the waterfront.
A typical match race was sailed between the Black Ball liner Columbus, Captain De Peyster, and the Sheridan, Captain Russell, of the splendid Dramatic fleet, in 1837.The stake was $10,000 a side, put up by the owners and their friends.The crews were picked men who were promised a bonus of fifty dollars each for winning.The ships sailed side by side in February, facing the wild winter passage, and the Columbus reached Liverpool in the remarkable time of sixteen days, two days ahead of the Sheridan.
