In such battering service as this the lines of the clipper were too extremely fine, her spars too tall and slender.

The packet was by no means slow and if the list of her record passages was superb, it was because they were accomplished by masters who would sooner let a sail blow away than take it in and who raced each other 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.