The Old Merchant Marine
by Ralph D. Paine

Chapter VIII. The Packet Ships of the “Roaring Forties”

It was on the stormy Atlantic, called by sailormen the WesternOcean, that the packet ships won the first great contest forsupremacy and knew no rivals until the coming of the age of steammade them obsolete. Their era antedated that of the clipper andwas wholly distinct. The Atlantic packet was the earliest liner:she made regular sailings and carried freight and passengersinstead of trading on her owners’ account as was the ancientcustom. Not for her the tranquillity of tropic seas and thebreath of the Pacific trades, but an almost incessant battle withswinging surges and boisterous winds, for she was driven harderin all weathers and seasons than any other ships that sailed. Insuch battering service as this the lines of the clipper were tooextremely fine, her spars too tall and slender. The packet was byno means slow and if the list of her record passages was superb,it was because they were accomplished by masters who would soonerlet a sail blow away than take it in and who raced each otherevery inch of the way.

They were small ships of three hundred to five hundred tons whenthe famous Black Ball Line was started in 1816. From the firstthey were the ablest vessels that could be built, full-bodied andstoutly rigged. They were the only regular means of communicationbetween the United States and Europe and were entrusted with themails, specie, government dispatches, and the lives of eminentpersonages. Blow high, blow low, one of the Black Ball packetssailed from New York for Liverpool on the first and sixteenth ofevery month. Other lines were soon competing--the Red Star andthe Swallow Tail out of New York, and fine ships from Boston andPhiladelphia. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 thecommercial greatness of New York was assured, and her Atlanticpackets increased in size and numbers, averaging a thousand tonseach in the zenith of their glory.

England, frankly confessing herself beaten and unable to competewith such ships as these, changed her attitude from hostility toopen admiration. She surrendered the Atlantic packet trade toAmerican enterprise, and British merchantmen sought their gainsin other waters. The Navigation Laws still protected theircommerce in the Far East and they were content to jog at a moresedate gait than these weltering packets whose skippers werestriving for passages of a fortnight, with the forecastle doorsnailed fast and the crew compelled to stay on deck from SandyHook to Fastnet Rock.

No blustering, rum-drinking tarpaulin was the captain who sailedthe Independence, the Ocean Queen, or the Dreadnought but a manvery careful of his manners and his dress, who had been selectedfrom the most highly educated merchant service in the world. Hewas attentive to the comfort of his passengers and was presumedto have no other duties on deck than to give the proper orders tohis first officer and work out his daily reckoning. It was anexacting, nerve-racking ordeal, however, demanding a sleeplessvigilance, courage, and cool judgment of the first order. Thecompensations were large. As a rule, he owned a share of the shipand received a percentage of the freights and passage money. Hisrank when ashore was more exalted than can be conveyed in merewords. Any normal New York boy would sooner have been captain ofa Black Ball packet than President of the United States, and heknew 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, atrifling fraction of the American deep-water tonnage of that day,but the laurels they won were immortal. Not only did the Englishmariner doff his hat to them, but a Parliamentary committeereported in 1837 that “the American ships frequenting the portsof England are stated by several witnesses to be superior tothose of a similar class among the ships of Great Britain, thecommanders and officers being generally considered to be morecompetent as seamen and navigators and more uniformly persons ofeducation than the commanders and officers of British ships of asimilar size and class trading from England to America.”

It was no longer a rivalry with the flags of other nations but anunceasing series of contests among the packets of the severallines, and their records aroused far more popular excitement thanwhen the great steamers of this century were chipping off theminutes, at an enormous coal consumption, toward a five-daypassage. Theirs were tests of real seamanship, and there were fewdisasters. The packet captain scorned a towboat to haul him intothe stream if the wind served fair to set all plain sail as hisship lay at her wharf. Driving her stern foremost, he braced hisyards and swung her head to sea, clothing the masts with soaringcanvas amid the farewell cheers of the crowds which lined thewaterfront.

A typical match race was sailed between the Black Ball linerColumbus, Captain De Peyster, and the Sheridan, Captain Russell,of the splendid Dramatic fleet, in 1837. The stake was $10,000 aside, put up by the owners and their friends. The crews werepicked men who were promised a bonus of fifty dollars each forwinning. The ships sailed side by side in February, facing thewild winter passage, and the Columbus reached Liverpool in theremarkable time of sixteen days, two days ahead of the Sheridan.

The crack packets were never able to reel off more than twelve orfourteen knots under the most favorable conditions, but they werekept going night and day, and some of them maintained theirschedules almost with the regularity of the early steamers. TheMontezuma, the Patrick Henry, and the Southampton crossed fromNew York to Liverpool in fifteen days, and for years theIndependence held the record of fourteen days and six hours. Itremained for the Dreadnought, Captain Samuel Samuels, in 1859, toset the mark for packet ships to Liverpool at thirteen days andeight hours.

Meanwhile the era of the matchless clipper had arrived and it wasone of these ships which achieved the fastest Atlantic passageever made by a vessel under sail. The James Baines was built forEnglish owners to be used in the Australian trade. She was a fullclipper of 2515 tons, twice the size of the ablest packets, andwas praised as “the most perfect sailing ship that ever enteredthe river Mersey.” Bound out from Boston to Liverpool, sheanchored after twelve days and six hours at sea.

There was no lucky chance in this extraordinary voyage, for thisclipper was the work of the greatest American builder, DonaldMcKay, who at the same time designed the Lightning for the sameowners. This clipper, sent across the Atlantic on her maidentrip, left in her foaming wake a twenty-four hour run which nosteamer had even approached and which was not equaled by thefastest express steamers until twenty-five years later when thegreyhound Arizona ran eighteen knots in one hour on her trialtrip. This is a rather startling statement when one reflects thatthe Arizona of the Guion line seems to a generation still livinga modern steamer and record-holder. It is even more impressivewhen coupled with the fact that, of the innumerable passengersteamers traversing the seas today, only a few are capable of aspeed of more than eighteen knots.

This clipper Lightning did her 436 sea miles in one day, oreighteen and a half knots, better than twenty land miles an hour,and this is how the surpassing feat was entered in her log, orofficial journal: “March 1. Wind south. Strong gales; bore awayfor the North Channel, carrying away the foretopsail and lostjib; hove the log several times and found the ship going throughthe water at the rate of 18 to 18 1/2 knots; lee rail under waterand rigging slack. Distance run in twenty-four hours, 436 miles."The passage was remarkably fast, thirteen days and nineteen and ahalf hours from Boston Light, but the spectacular feature wasthis day’s work. It is a fitting memorial of the Yankee clipper,and, save only a cathedral, the loveliest, noblest fabric everwrought by man’s handiwork.

The clipper, however, was a stranger in the Atlantic and herchosen courses were elsewhere. The records made by the JamesBaines and the Lightning were no discredit to the stanch,unconquerable packet ships which, year in and year out, heldtheir own with the steamer lines until just before the Civil War.It was the boast of Captain Samuels that on her first voyage in1853 the Dreadnought reached Sandy Hook as the Cunarder Canada,which had left Liverpool a day ahead of her, was passing in byBoston Light. Twice she carried the latest news to Europe, andmany seasoned travelers preferred her to the mail steamers.

The masters and officers who handled these ships with suchmagnificent success were true-blue American seamen, inspired bythe finest traditions, successors of the privateersmen of 1812.The forecastles, however, were filled with English, Irish, andScandinavians. American lads shunned these ships and, in fact,the ambitious youngster of the coastwise towns began to ceasefollowing the sea almost a century ago. It is sometimes forgottenthat the period during which the best American manhood sought amaritime career lay between the Revolution and the War of 1812.Thereafter the story became more and more one of American shipsand less of American sailors, excepting on the quarter-deck.

In later years the Yankee crews were to be found in the portswhere the old customs survived, the long trading voyage, thecommunity of interest in cabin and forecastle, all friends andneighbors together, with opportunities for profit andadvancement. Such an instance was that of the Salem ship George,built at Salem in 1814 and owned by the great merchant, JosephPeabody. For twenty-two years she sailed in the East India trade,making twenty-one round voyages, with an astonishing regularitywhich would be creditable for a modern cargo tramp. Her sailorswere native-born, seldom more than twenty-one years old, and mostof them were studying navigation. Forty-five of them becameshipmasters, twenty of them chief mates, and six second mates.This reliable George was, in short, a nautical training-school ofthe best kind and any young seaman with the right stuff in himwas sure of advancement.

Seven thousand sailors signed articles in the counting-room ofJoseph Peabody and went to sea in his eighty ships which flew thehouse-flag in Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, and the ports of Europeuntil 1844. These were mostly New England boys who followed inthe footsteps of their fathers because deep-water voyages werestill “adventures” and a career was possible under a system whichwas both congenial and paternal. Brutal treatment was the rareexception. Flogging still survived in the merchant service andwas defended by captains otherwise humane, but a skipper, nomatter how short-tempered, would be unlikely to abuse a youthwhose parents might live on the same street with him and attendthe same church.

The Atlantic packets brought a different order of things, whichwas to be continued through the clipper era. Yankee sailorsshowed no love for the cold and storms of the Western Ocean inthese foaming packets which were remorselessly driven for speed.The masters therefore took what they could get. All the work ofrigging, sail-making, scraping, painting, and keeping a ship inperfect repair was done in port instead of at sea, as was thehabit in the China and California clippers, and the lore andtraining of the real deep-water sailor became superfluous. Thecrew of a packet made sail or took it in with the two-fistedmates to show them how.

From these conditions was evolved the “Liverpool packet rat,"hairy and wild and drunken, the prey of crimps and dive-keepersashore, brave and toughened to every hardship afloat, climbingaloft in his red shirt, dungaree breeches, and sea-boots, with asnow-squall whistling, the rigging sheathed with ice, and the oldship burying her bows in the thundering combers. It was thedoctrine of his officers that he could not be ruled by anythingshort of violence, and the man to tame and hammer him was the“bucko” second mate, the test of whose fitness was that he couldwhip his weight in wild cats. When he became unable to maintaindiscipline with fists and belaying-pins, he was deposed for abetter man.

Your seasoned packet rat sought the ship with a hard name bychoice. His chief ambition was to kick in the ribs or poundsenseless some invincible bucko mate. There was provocationenough on both sides. Officers had to take their ships to sea andstrain every nerve to make a safe and rapid passage with crewswhich were drunk and useless when herded aboard, half of themgreenhorns, perhaps, who could neither reef nor steer. Brutalitywas the one argument able to enforce instant obedience among menwho respected nothing else. As a class the packet sailors becamemore and more degraded because their life was intolerable todecent men. It followed therefore that the quarterdeck employedincreasing severity, and, as the officer’s authority in thisrespect was unchecked and unlimited, it was easy to mistake theharshest tyranny for wholesome discipline.

Reenforcing the bucko mate was the tradition that the sailor wasa dog, a different human species from the landsman, without lawsand usages to protect him. This was a tradition which, forcenturies, had been fostered in the naval service, and itsurvived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism eveninto the twentieth century, when an American Congress wasreluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of existenceenjoyed by the poorest laborer ashore.

It is in the nature of a paradox that the brilliant success ofthe packet ships in dominating the North Atlantic trade shouldhave been a factor in the decline of the nation’s maritimeprestige and resources. Through a period of forty years the prideand confidence in these ships, their builders, and the men whosailed them, was intense and universal. They were a superlativeproduct of the American genius, which still displayed theenergies of a maritime race. On other oceans the situation was noless gratifying. American ships were the best and cheapest in theworld. The business held the confidence of investors andcommanded an abundance of capital. It was assumed, as late as1840, that the wooden sailing ship would continue to be thesupreme type of deep-water vessel because the United Statespossessed the greatest stores of timber, the most skillfulbuilders and mechanics, and the ablest merchant navigators. Noindustry was ever more efficiently organized and conducted.American ships were most in demand and commanded the highestfreights. The tonnage in foreign trade increased to a maximum of904,476 in 1845. There was no doubt in the minds of the shrewdestmerchants and owners and builders of the time that Great Britainwould soon cease to be the mistress of the seas and must contentherself with second place.

It was not considered ominous when, in 1838, the Admiralty hadrequested proposals for a steam service to America. This demandwas prompted by the voyages of the Sirius and Great Western,wooden-hulled sidewheelers which thrashed along at ten knots’speed and crossed the Atlantic in fourteen to seventeen days.This was a much faster rate than the average time of the Yankeepackets, but America was unperturbed and showed no interest insteam. In 1839 the British Government awarded an Atlantic mailcontract, with an annual subsidy of $425,000 to Samuel Cunard andhis associates, and thereby created the most famous of theAtlantic steamship companies.

Four of these liners began running in 1840--an event whichforetold the doom of the packet fleets, though the warning wasalmost unheeded in New York and Boston. Four years later EnochTrain was establishing a new packet line to Liverpool with thelargest, finest ships built up to that time, the WashingtonIrving, Anglo-American, Ocean Monarch, Anglo-Saxon, and DanielWebster. Other prominent shipping houses were expanding theirservice and were launching noble packets until 1853. Meanwhilethe Cunard steamers were increasing in size and speed, and theservice was no longer an experiment.

American capital now began to awaken from its dreams, and EdwardK. Collins, managing owner of the Dramatic line of packets,determined to challenge the Cunarders at their own game. Aided bythe Government to the extent of $385,000 a year as subsidy, heput afloat the four magnificent steamers, Atlantic, Pacific,Baltic, and Arctic, which were a day faster than the Cunarders incrossing, and reduced the voyage to nine and ten days. TheCollins line, so auspiciously begun in 1850, and promising togive the United States the supremacy in steam which it had wonunder sail, was singularly unfortunate and short-lived. TheArctic and the Pacific were lost at sea, and Congress withdrewits financial support after five years. Deprived of this aid, Mr.Collins was unable to keep the enterprise afloat in competitionwith the subsidized Cunard fleet. In this manner and with littlefurther effort by American interests to compete for the prize,the dominion of the Atlantic passed into British hands.

The packet ships had held on too long. It had been a stirringepisode for the passengers to cheer in mid-ocean when the loftypyramids of canvas swept grandly by some wallowing steamer andleft her far astern, but in the fifties this gallant picturebecame less frequent, and a sooty banner of smoke on the horizonproclaimed the new era and the obliteration of all the rushinglife and beauty of the tall ship under sail. Slow to realize andacknowledge defeat, persisting after the steamers were capturingthe cabin passenger and express freight traffic, the Americanship-owners could not visualize this profound transformation.Their majestic clippers still surpassed all rivals in the EastIndia and China trade and were racing around the Horn, making newrecords for speed and winning fresh nautical triumphs for theStars and Stripes.

This reluctance to change the industrial and commercial habits ofgenerations of American shipowners was one of several causes forthe decadence which was hastened by the Civil War. For once theastute American was caught napping by his British cousin, who wasswayed by no sentimental values and showed greater adaptabilityin adopting the iron steamer with the screw propeller as theinevitable successor of the wooden ship with arching topsails.

The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of thesquare-rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in herbeauty, with forty nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that ofthe metal trough with an engine in the middle and mechanicssweating in her depths. When the Atlantic packet was compelled toabdicate, it was the beginning of the end. After all, her masterwas the fickle wind, for a slashing outward passage might befollowed by weeks of beating home to the westward. Steadilyforging ahead to the beat of her paddles or the thrash of herscrew, the steamer even of that day was far more dependable thanthe sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a hundredmiles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done,but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed. Upon theheaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over againthe fable of the hare and the tortoise.

Most of the famous chanteys were born in the packet service andshouted as working choruses by the tars of this Western Oceanbefore the chanteyman perched upon a capstan and led the refrainin the clipper trade. You will find their origin unmistakable insuch lines as these:

    As I was a-walking down Rotherhite Street,      ’Way, ho, blow the man down;    A pretty young creature I chanced for to meet,      Give me some time to blow the man down.    Soon we’ll be in London City,      Blow, boys, blow,    And see the gals all dressed so pretty,      Blow, my bully boys, blow.

Haunting melodies, folk-song as truly as that of the plantationnegro, they vanished from the sea with a breed of men who, forall their faults, possessed the valor of the Viking and thefortitude of the Spartan. Outcasts ashore--which meant to themonly the dance halls of Cherry Street and the grog-shops ofRatcliffe Road--they had virtues that were as great as theirfailings. Across the intervening years, with a pathosindefinable, come the lovely strains of

    Shenandoah, I’ll ne’er forget you,      Away, ye rolling river,      Till the day I die I’ll love you ever,    Ah, ha, we’re bound away.

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Old Merchant Marine
By Ralph D. Paine
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