Passengers would pay their one-way fares of $140 to secure a particular captain as much as for his particular ship or packet line. An especially popular commander – such as George Maxwell of the Black Ball, Nash DeCost of the Blue Swallowtail, or Nathaniel Palmer of the Dramatic – reliably attracted extra business. That meant more money for the captain himself, because he typically owned a one-eighth stake in his ship and received 5 per cent of the freight and steerage charges and 25 per cent of the cabin fares. The governments in Washington and London also paid him two cents for each American letter and two pence (four cents) for each British letter he carried. These extras brought his nominal annual salary of $360 up to as much as $5000 a year, a plush income at the time. The packets therefore drew the services of the best captains on the Atlantic.
The crews were made up of sailors from many nations of Europe and North America. The cooks and stewards were usually black Americans, ‘clever mulattoes’, according to James Fenimore Cooper, ‘who have caught the civilization of the kitchen.’ Passengers had most of their shipboard contact with the stewards, who served food, cleaned and fetched, and answered redundant questions about the weather and general course of the trip. The sailors kept to themselves, bunking in cramped quarters in the forecastle at the bow of the ship and conversing in the arcane, excluding patois of the sea. Passengers would marvel, from a distance, at the sailors’ strength and agility as they danced around the rigging in all weathers and acted variously as tailor, carpenter, cooper, stevedore, clerk and astronomer. It was easy to romanticize their often brief, dangerous lives. Captains drove the packets hard, always to the limit that sails and masts could bear, straining for speed. That meant constant action in the rigging (especially in bad weather), much bellowing and cursing, and sailors occasionally falling to their sudden deaths.
Everyone, ships and humans, remained at the indifferent mercy of the North Atlantic Ocean, in particular of the capricious wind. ‘We are pensioners of the wind,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal at sea in 1833. ‘All our prosperity, enterprize, temper come and go with the fickle air. If the wind should forget to blow we must eat our masts.’ A ship could lie becalmed in mid-ocean for a week or more, the wilted sails slapping irritatingly against the masts, the ship rising and falling helplessly on the endless swells. At the other extreme, too much wind brought its own delights. In April 1831 the President of the London Black X Line picked her way from New York through twelve straight days of cold, dense fogs and heavy, rolling seas. A fierce gale pushed waves almost up to her topmast. As the ship rolled back and forth on her bow-to-stern axis, water came over the five-foot bulwarks onto the deck, then into the cabins below. The captain, standing in water up to his knees, could not leave his post for twenty-four hours. The President limped into port after a hard passage of thirty-nine days. Other ships at journey’s end might come within tantalizing sight of land and then have to spend days tacking back and forth along the coast, held at sea by contrary winds.
A recurring drama of initiation awaited those crossing for the first time. The first few days at sea might seem deceptively tranquil. No prior experience of the ocean from the vantage point of a beach or an offshore boat could adequately prepare a neophyte for the North Atlantic in full cry. In November 1835, Fanny Appleton of Boston (the future wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) embarked on the packet Francis Depau for Le Havre. Eighteen years old, bright-eyed and curious, she dismissed the fourteen other passengers as ‘well meaning, uninteresting folks’ but liked watching the sailors and the shifting sea. Commanders often managed to find time for pretty young women on board their ships; so Captain Henry Robinson gave her a puzzling lesson in navigation and ‘shooting the sun’ with his sextant at noon to find the Depau’s position. Five days out, running before a brisk following wind, the ship dashed along at ten knots, prancing like a sea horse. ‘What a glorious exhilaration in this fine sea-air, a reckless thought-defying sense of liberty and life,’ Appleton wrote in her journal, with the joy of a cosseted young woman now perceiving a wider world. ‘The exhilaration of our speed fills us with a mad glee…we run and shout.’
The wind continued as the sea got rougher. Still bowling along at ten knots, the ship pitched and rolled and tossed. Appleton felt dizzy and exhausted, had trouble dressing, and – one week out – started longing for land. After a miserable night, she ‘wondered where the romance of the sea was found – certainly not below the deck’. She wept in despair. The steward brought tea. The constant motion and cacophony of wind, sea and shipboard sounds kept her from reading and writing. ‘Oh this eternity of noise and motion stupefying the brain, exhausting the body. Truly a shipboard life teaches one…humility: we are brought to our lowest ebb of self-respect.’ Her mood fluctuated wildly for the rest of the trip, depending on the weather. Like many sea diarists, she gradually ran short of fresh material and made briefer entries as the journey dragged on. Other passengers expressed surprise that she could still write so much about so little. ‘I am determined to prove one can write a Journal at sea,’ she vowed – and then left three straight days blank. (‘Little worth recording,’ she noted.) The ship reached Le Havre after twenty-five days, none too soon for Fanny Appleton.
Most of the cabin passengers on packets were men: British textile merchants and army officers, and American businessmen. Thrown together at close quarters amid the Anglo-American political tensions of the time, they sometimes bristled at each other. More typically, as frequent transatlantic travellers they settled amicably into the shipboard routines they had come to know well. In this quite masculine atmosphere, isolated by time and circumstances, they could dress casually and indulge at will in boyish recreations. ‘We endeavored to amuse ourselves as best we could,’ one man noted, ‘and, for the want of work, turned boys again, and went to play.’ They shot rifles at random targets in the rigging, sang songs, made bets, played cards and games, held mock courts, told jokes and stories; they drank all day long. Even the tightly buttoned Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the Black Baller New York from Liverpool in 1833, succumbed to shipboard spirits. ‘These are the amusements of wise men in this sad place,’ he decided. ‘I tipple with all my heart here. May I not?’ In midsummer 1832, the English actress Fanny Kemble, bemused and amused, watched the men on a packet in a festive Saturday-night mood of drinking, dancing, singing, and romping around on the quarterdeck at the stern. They toasted their absent wives and sweethearts, in the tradition of sailors. The captain proposed ‘The Ladies – God bless them’. (‘And the Lord deliver us!’ someone added.)
The most promisingly pleasant aspect of packet life available to all cabin passengers, drunk or sober, was the food. A housed-over longboat on deck held a three-tiered menagerie: sheep and pigs on the bottom, then ducks and geese, and hens and chickens on the top. The ship’s cow lived in another structure nearby, not happily. These animals provided fresh meat, eggs, milk and cream for the laden plates in the dining saloon. On the Black Ball’s Europe in 1833, breakfast consisted of ham, eggs, bacon, mutton cutlets, shadfish, rolls and cognac. Dinner ran to three comparable courses, good pastries, seven kinds of alcohol, and dried fruits for dessert. The long, rolling swells of the North Atlantic left