Not only America but Europe has good cause to be grateful to these valiant little packet ships, with their self-reliant captains, heavy-fisted mates and hard-bitten crews. Thus the author in the preface shows the need for keeping their memory green, and he has taken to this task with the warm enthusiasm already so well known to lovers of the sea. In Part I the author gives a brilliant treatise on the lines that served the Atlantic Ferry in the first half of the nineteenth century, their smart passages and their "hard citizen " officers. Dreadnought, New World, Daniel Webster and many other Atlantic cracks are dealt with in Mr Lubbock's enthusiastic style. Part II teerns with romance. What finer thrill than the story of Captain Samuels and the "Bloody Forty", the most notorious gang of packet-rats" out of Liverpool. Abstract logs, voyages, specifications, Donald McKay-built ships, and best Atlantic passages are in the Appendices.