At the same time enterprising publishers, without Barnum’s solicitation and much to his advantage, were publishing brochures on the life of Jenny Lind, in all of which her virtues were exaggerated and her powers over-rated. Her portraits were in every shop window. Jenny Lind songsters, Jenny Lind Musical Monthlies, and Jenny Lind Annuals were announced for sale six months before her arrival. A few days before she landed in New York the _Morning Courier and Enquirer_ told its anxious readers that “she possesses a greater combination of greater excellence than all who have gone before her, and ... she adds to these a divine purity and grace peculiarly her own.... Her method is fertile, her manner fervid, her execution finished to the last possible degree, and her powers as an actress remarkable.... It seems to be admitted, in fact, that she approaches as nearly to perfection in her art as can be expected of a human being unaided by magic power.” These and other advance ecstasies concerning Jenny Lind’s voice, before she had sung a note, worked up newspaper readers to a high pitch of anticipatory delight. Jenny Lind was to appear, as Barnum later expressed it, “in the presence of a jury already excited to enthusiasm in her behalf.” II Every berth was occupied in the _Atlantic_, which was known as the “Jenny Lind Boat,” Americans in Europe being eager to return home as her traveling companions. Accounts of her very last moments in England, her visit to Queen Victoria to bid farewell, the enthusiasm of the Liverpool mobs, were published in the newspapers here before her arrival, and they all came, as the _Morning Courier and Enquirer_ naïvely said, from “a source likely to be well informed.” On August 21, 1850, she sailed from Liverpool, and the steamer _Atlantic_ was due in New York on September 1. In eleven days and two hours the “Jenny Lind Boat” made the passage from Liverpool to New York, and on each of those days there was an item of excitement in almost every New York newspaper about the divine creature who was honoring America with her presence. On Sunday, September 1, 1850, the _Atlantic_ was sighted. Even the elements were in favor of Barnum; the boat arrived on a holiday from work, and almost all New York tried to welcome Jenny Lind to the city. Barnum went aboard the ship with the health officer, Dr. Doane, at noon Sunday, and with a large bouquet of flowers tucked into his white waistcoat, climbed hurriedly up the ladder to greet his prima donna. But he had been anticipated, for Mr. Collins, owner of the line of “leviathans” of which the _Atlantic_ was one, had already reached the steamer with a bouquet three times larger than Barnum’s.