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