Regularly Scheduled International Shipping Was Pioneered in New York City

A brief history of the Black Ball Line

Everything about the world had to be invented, no matter how run-of-the-mill it might seem today. And that includes the logistical innovation of leaving at a posted time with ocean freight! As it grew into a commercial hub throughout the nineteenth century, New York City pioneered logistical and information transmission techniques we take for granted today.

What follows is a brief excerpt from Gotham about the shipping company that led the charge for scheduled international shipping, the Black Ball Line. As with everything new, like the subway or New York City itself, people were skeptical of the novel method (emphasis added):

One snowy day in January 1818, a small crowd gathered at the East River docks. Notices in local newspapers had promised that at an appointed date every month the new Black Ball Line would dispatch one of its four ships to Liverpool. “The regularity of their times of sailing, and the excellent condition in which they deliver their cargoes,” it was said, “will make them very desirable opportunities for the conveyance of goods.”

This innovation, the brainchild of Jeremiah Thompson, a transplanted English merchant, met with considerable skepticism. Traditionally, ships sailed only when their holds were full, and only in reasonably fair weather, so people turned out on the appointed day to see if the firm would make good. Despite the snow squall and a light cargo of passengers, mail, and fine freight, the square-rigged James Monroe weighed anchor precisely as St. Paul’s clock struck ten. It reached Liverpool twenty-five days later. Battling in the opposite direction through westerly winter gales, its sister ship took forty-nine days to make New York.

The Black Ball’s punctuality impressed Manchester magnates, who, with their capital tied up in plants and labor, could ill afford cotton shortages. It also attracted competitors. An eccentric Connecticut whaling captain named Preserved Fish and his cousin-partner Joseph Grinnell shifted from hawking New Bedford whale oil to running the Swallowtail line. Others followed, and within two decades fifty-two packets would be traveling regularly from New York to Liverpool and Le Havre, an average of three sailings weekly, with an average transit time of thirty-nine days.

The Black Ball Line and scheduled departures also led to an early version of a now standard market phenomenon: their services were only available to the wealthy at first, and then as physical and market innovation continued, they became more and more widely available. This facilitated New York City’s rapid immigrant influx:

The packets also carried human cargoes. At first, the lines sought only wealthy passengers; those with more limited means had to find a captain willing to take them in “steerage”—between decks, near the rudder. In 1815, however, Belfast merchants started a full-time passenger trade, and after 1820 merchants in Liverpool began buying space on New York-bound packets, into which they stuffed the maximum number of immigrants (an art they had perfected in the slave trade). The result was that as more and more people left for the United States, more and more of them followed existing trade routes to New York. Between 1820 and 1832 the number of immigrants entering the port rose from thirty-eight hundred to some thirty thousand; in 1837 it swelled to nearly sixty thousand—almost 75 percent of the national total. Fed by this stream of humanity as well as internal migration, Manhattan’s population climbed from 124,000 in 1820 to 166,000 in 1825 and 197,000 in 1830. By 1835 it exceeded 270,000. No other place in the country was growing so fast.

A note on “packet ships”

A packet ship gets its name from mail packets, which these medium-sized ships originally carried. They then expanded to carry passengers and other freight. Here’s a standard example of a packet advertisement in the post-Black Ball era of scheduled departures:

Image source

The excerpts presented here can be found in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999), pp. 433–434.