Page:The Clipper Ship Era.djvu/160

122 reef-earing, with their Black Ball caps, red shirts, and trousers stowed in the legs of their sea boots along with their cotton hooks and sheath knives, a snow squall whistling about their ears, the rigging a mass of ice, and the old packet jumping into the big Atlantic seas up to her knightheads. These ruffians did not much care for India and China voyages, but preferred to navigate between the dance-halls of Cherry Street and the grog-shops of Waterloo Road and Ratcliffe Highway. As has often been said, they worked like horses at sea and spent their money like asses ashore.

When the California clippers came out, these packet rats, as they came to be called aboard the deep-water ships—men who had never before had the slightest idea of crossing the equator if they could help it,—were suddenly possessed with the desire to get to the California gold mines. They, with other adventurers and blacklegs of the vilest sort, who were not sailors but who shipped as able seamen for the same reason, partly composed the crews of the clipper ships. The packet rats were tough, roustabout sailormen and difficult to handle, so that it was sometimes a toss-up whether they or the captain and officers would have charge of the ship; yet to see these fellows laying out on an eighty-foot main-yard in a whistling gale off Cape Horn, fisting hold of a big No. 1 Colt's cotton canvas mainsail, heavy and stiff with sleet and snow, bellying, slatting, and thundering in the gear, and then to hear the wild, cheery shouts of these rugged, brawny sailormen, amid the fury of the storm, as inch by inch they fought on till the last double gasket was