In the autumn of 1817, the Thompsons and their three associates placed a notice in New York’s newspapers. ‘In order to furnish frequent and regular conveyances for GOODS and PASSENGERS,’ they announced, ‘the subscribers have undertaken to establish a line of vessels between NEW-YORK and LIVERPOOL, to sail from each place on a certain day in every month throughout the year.’ They listed the line’s first four ships: three-masted and square-rigged, and larger than average size for their time at around 110 feet long and 400 tons. The Pacific, launched in 1807 and the oldest of the four, was especially fast; earlier that year she had made a run to Liverpool in only seventeen days. ‘These ships have all been built in New-York, of the best materials,’ the owners asserted. ‘They are known to be remarkably fast sailers, and their accommodations for passengers are uncommonly extensive and commodious.’ Thompson and his partners were promising a daring combination of speed, comfort and predictability – qualities previously unknown on the North Atlantic.
The first two ships of the line sailed from New York and Liverpool in January 1818. For identification they showed a large black ball painted on their fore topsail, at the highest point of the first mast. The ‘Black Ball Line’ at once earned a tight reputation for minding the calendar. Fighting winter gales, the Pacific made a slow return trip to New York of forty-eight days; she was then unloaded and reloaded in an impossibly short six days and left for Liverpool as scheduled on the fifth of April. Later that year, the Black Ball’s Courier on leaving Liverpool met the Pacific coming in, and when approaching New York met the Black Baller Amity going out. The line added more ships, allowing two sailings a month each way. For any eastbound trip under twenty-two days or westbound run under thirty-five, Jeremiah Thompson gave the captain a new coat, with a dress for his wife. After two years, even Niles’ Weekly Register, from the rival port of Baltimore, had to concede that the Black Ball ships were running with the speed and almost the regularity of a horse-drawn mail coach. ‘Such steadiness and despatch is truly astonishing,’ said the Register, ‘and, in a former age, would have been incredible.’
Success brought competition. Atlantic packet lines started running from Philadelphia and Boston. Early in 1824, the Boston line’s Emerald caught a rare easterly gale and rode it all the way home from Liverpool in an astonishing seventeen days, a westward record for years. In New York, the Red Star and Blue Swallowtail lines competed directly with Black Ball. Other new lines ran to London and to Le Havre on the northern coast of France. The sharp rivalry among all these lines added another new concept to transatlantic travel. Ship technologies in Europe and America had been essentially static for some two hundred years; conservative builders and owners resisted innovations and kept turning out the same old models. Packet competition kicked ship design into the progressive nineteenth century. Constructed mainly in shipyards along the East River in New York, ever bigger and fancier, the new packets became the largest and finest ships yet built in America, evolving more quickly than any other type of vessel.
Black Ball set the initial pace. The Canada, 132 feet and 525 tons, was launched in March 1823. ‘We have never examined a ship which was in all respects equal to her,’ said a local newspaper. Her dining cabin offered polished mahogany tables and pillars, sofas, and plush crimson draperies. The men’s cabins, brightened by skylights of ground glass in the main deck overhead, had olive-coloured damask silk curtains. In the ladies’ cabins the curtains were fine blue silk. A year later, the Blue Swallowtail Line answered Black Ball with its own York. To the now-expected mahogany woodwork, the York added a library with a printed catalogue, redwood pillars finished in imitation bronze, and venetian blinds in the cabin doors that allowed ventilation with privacy. Cabin washstands doubled as desks. A Turkish carpet covered the floor and muffled shipboard sounds. The ladies’ lounge even featured a small piano flanked by large mirrors. ‘In the comfort and entertainment which the American ships afford,’ a Liverpool newspaper’s account of the York acknowledged, ‘…their superiority over British vessels is most conspicuous.’
While ship interiors became plusher and better equipped, the East River shipwrights puzzled over how to increase speed without losing cargo space. By slow degrees, the rounded bow and plump midship lines of the first packets gave way to faster ships with longer, thinner hulls and sharper bows and sterns. Shipwrights believed intuitively that speed also required a V-shaped hull, tapering down to a narrow keel at the bottom of the ship. These design tendencies all meant less payload and lower profits for a ship of a given length.
A solution to this tightening dilemma was discovered accidentally. In the early 1830s, Edward Knight Collins of New York started running coastal packets to New Orleans. Because the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi River required ships of shallow draught, the New Orleans packets were built with flat bottoms; speed was not deemed so important in the coastal traffic. But it turned out, to general surprise, that flat hulls did not make the ships any slower or harm their sailing qualities. A flat bottom also let a ship rest upright when grounded by a low tide.
In 1836 Collins launched his Dramatic Line of flat-bottomed packets to Liverpool, with ships named for famous theatrical figures. Flamboyant and excessive, indeed theatrical, and bold to the point of recklessness, Collins left the competition in his foaming wake. His Shakespeare was 142 feet and 747 tons; his Garrick, Sheridan and Siddons, 158 feet and 895 tons each; and the Roscius, at 168 feet, was the first New York packet to exceed 1000 tons (and to cost $100,000). Collins also moved his passenger cabins from below deck, where they were subject to nauseating bilge odours, to a long deckhouse on the main deck stretching from the stern almost to the central mainmast. Up there, the cabins got more air and light – but without making the ship top-heavy or harming her behaviour or safety. The cabins themselves were three times larger than those on the first Black Ball ships. The Dramatic Line’s food, wines and decor all set new standards of elegance. And the ships were fast. Over their first ten years, the New York packets had averaged twenty-four days out, thirty-eight days home – excellent times compared to those of previous ships. By 1839 the Collins packets, the swiftest in the trade, had cut those averages to twenty days, twelve hours and thirty days, twelve hours. Ocean travel had never before made such vaulting strides in only two decades.
An ocean voyage, in this era or any other, had to work around three endemic aspects of the experience: seasickness, danger and boredom. The worst bouts of mal de mer usually lifted after the first few days but could last longer, especially for women and in heavy seas. Any ship – in particular a sailing vessel – remained at the mercy of mighty natural forces, and on the heavily travelled North Atlantic might also collide with another ship or with an iceberg. Every day passengers had to find ways to kill time, a search that became more desperate and exhausted towards the end of the passage. ‘A sea voyage…is a sort of Purgatory under the best of circumstances,’ William Young of Halifax, Nova Scotia, wrote in his journal aboard a packet in 1839. ‘You can follow no regular employment and tho’ not sick, I am never quite well enough for study. You can’t write on account of the motion and one’s reading is uninstructive and desultory.’ Young and his fellow passengers enjoyed clean berths, attentive service, abundant food and drink, and clear sailing. ‘And yet, from a sea voyage, Good Lord deliver me.’
A packet voyage began with the captain. A safe passage depended absolutely on his skill, judgment and tenacity. He had to make the daily computations with sextant and chronometer that established the ship’s position and heading. At