undred 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