Four of these liners began running in 1840--an event which foretold the doom of the packet fleets, though the warning was almost unheeded in New York and Boston.Four years later Enoch Train was establishing a new packet line to Liverpool with the largest, finest ships built up to that time, the Washington Irving, Anglo-American, Ocean Monarch, Anglo-Saxon, and Daniel Webster.Other prominent shipping houses were expanding their service and were launching noble packets until 1853.Meanwhile the Cunard steamers were increasing in size and speed, and the service was no longer an experiment.
American capital now began to awaken from its dreams, and Edward K.Collins, managing owner of the Dramatic line of packets, determined to challenge the Cunarders at their own game.Aided by the Government to the extent of $385,000 a year as subsidy, he put afloat the four magnificent steamers, Atlantic, Pacific, Baltic, and Arctic, which were a day faster than the Cunarders in crossing, and reduced the voyage to nine and ten days.The Collins line, so auspiciously begun in 1850, and promising to give the United States the supremacy in steam which it had won under sail, was singularly unfortunate and short-lived.The Arctic and the Pacific were lost at sea, and Congress withdrew its financial support after five years.Deprived of this aid, Mr.
Collins was unable to keep the enterprise afloat in competition with the subsidized Cunard fleet.In this manner and with little further 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 stirring episode for the passengers to cheer in mid-ocean when the lofty pyramids of canvas swept grandly by some wallowing steamer and left her far astern, but in the fifties this gallant picture became less frequent, and a sooty banner of smoke on the horizon proclaimed the new era and the obliteration of all the rushing life and beauty of the tall ship under sail.Slow to realize and acknowledge defeat, persisting after the steamers were capturing the cabin passenger and express freight traffic, the American ship-owners could not visualize this profound transformation.
Their majestic clippers still surpassed all rivals in the East India and China trade and were racing around the Horn, making new records for speed and winning fresh nautical triumphs for the Stars and Stripes.
This reluctance to change the industrial and commercial habits of generations of American shipowners was one of several causes for the decadence which was hastened by the Civil War.For once the astute American was caught napping by his British cousin, who was swayed by no sentimental values and showed greater adaptability in adopting the iron steamer with the screw propeller as the inevitable successor of the wooden ship with arching topsails.
The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of the square-rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in her beauty, with forty nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that of the metal trough with an engine in the middle and mechanics sweating in her depths.When the Atlantic packet was compelled to abdicate, it was the beginning of the end.After all, her master was the fickle wind, for a slashing outward passage might be followed by weeks of beating home to the westward.Steadily forging ahead to the beat of her paddles or the thrash of her screw, the steamer even of that day was far more dependable than the sailing vessel.The Lightning clipper might run a hundred miles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done, but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed.Upon the heaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over again the fable of the hare and the tortoise.
Most of the famous chanteys were born in the packet service and shouted as working choruses by the tars of this Western Ocean before the chanteyman perched upon a capstan and led the refrain in the clipper trade.You will find their origin unmistakable in such 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 plantation negro, they vanished from the sea with a breed of men who, for all their faults, possessed the valor of the Viking and the fortitude of the Spartan.Outcasts ashore--which meant to them only the dance halls of Cherry Street and the grog-shops of Ratcliffe Road--they had virtues that were as great as their failings.Across the intervening years, with a pathos indefinable, 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.
