Black Ball Line, The

DESCRIPTION: "I served my time on the Black Ball line, To me way-ay-ay, Rio... Hurrah for the Black Ball line." "The Black Ball ships are good and true" and fast. They will lead you to a "gold mine." The listener is advised to travel to Liverpool and see the Yankees
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1914 (Sharp-EnglishFolkChanteys)
KEYWORDS: shanty sailor work
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (8 citations):
Hugill-ShantiesFromTheSevenSeas, pp. 131-133, "Hooraw for the Blackball Line" (1 text plus several fragments, 3 tunes) [AbEd, pp. 107-108]
Colcord-SongsOfAmericanSailormen, p. 53, "The Black Ball Line" (1 text, 1 tune)
Harlow-ChantyingAboardAmericanShips, pp. 105-106, "The Black Ball Line" (2 texts, 1 tune)
Sharp-EnglishFolkChanteys, XXIII, p. 26, "The Black Ball Line" (1 text, 1 tune)
Kinsey-SongsOfTheSea, pp. 51-52, "The Black Ball Line" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lomax/Lomax-AmericanBalladsAndFolkSongs, pp. 489-490, "The Black Ball Line" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, BLAKBALL*
ADDITIONAL: Captain John Robinson, "Songs of the Chantey Man," a series published July-August 1917 in the periodical _The Bellman_ (Minneapolis, MN, 1906-1919). "Blackball Line" is in Part 2, 7/21/1917.
Roud #2623
NOTES [520 words]: Stammers, p. 1, tells us that "no single company or fleet of ships was ever more famous in its own day than the Black Ball Line of Liverpool."
According to Fox, p. 3, "A group of textile importers in New York started the first [transatlantic] packet line. The main founder, Jeremiah Thompson, was an English immigrant from Yorkshire" who was 17 years old when he came to America as a representative of a family business.
Fox, p. 4, credits Thompson with the key idea behind the packets: They would sail on time whether they had a full cargo or not. This, for the first time, allowed receivers to count on passengers and cargo arriving on a fairly regular schedule. In 1817, Thompson and his associates announced regular packet service between New York and Liverpool.
Thompson's line started with four ships, "For identification they showed a large black ball on their fore topsail, at the highest point of the first mast. The 'Black Ball Line' at once earned a tight reputation for minding the calendar" (Fox, p. 4).
An interesting side effect of this was the first serious attempt to create luxury on shipboard. The packets were regular enough that the rich might travel on them just for the sake of travel -- and that meant that they had to be pampered. By 1823, Black Ball had packets with fine wooden tables, cabins with skylights, and silk curtains (Fox, p. 5).
That, one might say, was the first Black Ball Line. There as another one, that was even more famous, and more relevant to this song, which had deliberately appropriated its name (Stammers, p. 29, says "The very name of [the] Line was a piece of business piracy):
"The Black Ball Line was started in 1852 by James Baines & Co. of Liverpool as a regular packet service out to Australia, and principally to the port of Melbourne. This was at the height of the gold rush to Australia, and the new line had many competitors but, in the first instance, outshone its rivls through the record-breaking round voyage of its first large vessel -- the Marco Polo -- in 1852. It went on to enhance its reputation for speed by the purchase of four very large American clippers in the next three years, the Lightning, Champion of the Seas, James Baines and the Donald McKay. They were all built at the yard of a master shipbuilder, Donald McKay of Boston, and under the command of men like the famous ' Bully' Forbes, they made extremely fast passages out to Australia and back again" (Stammers, p.1).
(Baines and Forbes, in fact, went back even longer; In 1847, Baines had a share of the ownership of the brig Cleopatra, captained by James Nichol Fornes; Stammers, p. 66.)
It didn't last long. The Australia gold rush ended, and steamers became more efficient. The bank with which the company was associated (both as borrower and as part-owner) failed in 1866, and the Black Ball Line shut down in 1871 (with a failed revival in 1873) (Stammers, pp. 2-3). But in those few years of operation, the company had made itself famous.
There is a modern song about the Marco Polo, "Bully" Forbes, and James Baines, "Marco Polo" by Hugh Jones; DT MARCOPOL. - RBW
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File: LxA489

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