he War of 1812 was the dividing line between two eras of salt water
history. On the farther side lay the turbulent centuries of hazard and
bloodshed and piracy, of little ships and indomitable seamen who pursued
their voyages in the reek of gunpowder and of legalized pillage by the
stronger, and of merchant adventurers who explored new markets wherever
there was water enough to float their keels. They belonged to the rude
and lusty youth of a world which lived by the sword and which gloried
in action. Even into the early years of the nineteenth century these
mariners still sailed--Elizabethan in deed and spirit.

On the hither side of 1812 were seas unvexed by the privateer and the
freebooter. The lateen-rigged corsairs had been banished from their
lairs in the harbors of Algiers, and ships needed to show no broadsides
of cannon in the Atlantic trade. For a time they carried the
old armament among the lawless islands of the Orient and off
Spanish-American coasts where the vocation of piracy made its last
stand, but the great trade routes of the globe were peaceful highways
for the white-winged fleets of all nations. The American seamen who
had fought for the right to use the open sea were now to display their
prowess in another way and in a romance of achievement that was no less
large and thrilling.

CHAPTER VIII. THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES"

It was on the stormy Atlantic, called by sailormen the Western Ocean,
that the packet ships won the first great contest for supremacy and knew
no rivals until the coming of the age of steam made them obsolete. Their
era antedated that of the clipper and was wholly distinct. The Atlantic
packet was the earliest liner: she made regular sailings and carried
freight and passengers instead of trading on her owners' account as was
the ancient custom. Not for her the tranquillity of tropic seas and
the breath of the Pacific trades, but an almost incessant battle with
swinging surges and boisterous winds, for she was driven harder in all
weathers and seasons than any other ships that sailed. 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 h