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 a