I leave my readers to mentally compare a passenger's life on the "Red Jacket"--with its spirit of sport and adventure, its romance, its daily happenings, and its hardships--with the luxury on such a ship as the "Aquitania" or "Olympic" with all their attractions of a first-class hotel, bridge parties, dancing, and entertainment of every kind, regardless of weather--with everything, in fact, but that spirit of adventure which appeals so strongly to the imagination of the Britisher, and which, after all, has built up his character and made him the doughty man he is either on land or at sea. CHAPTER VIII THE "QUEEN OF THE AVON" A REMINISCENCE OF 1858 The old-fashioned sailing-ship was handicapped by her inability to contend successfully with strong head winds. After the continuance of a succession of north-west gales the river Mersey and our docks became crowded and congested with outward bound ships waiting for a shift of wind to enable them to get away, and when this took place the river was a wonderful sight. I remember, as a boy, standing on the shore at Seaforth and counting over three hundred sailing vessels of all sorts and sizes working their way out to sea on the ebb tide between the Rock Light and the Formby Light ship, and interspersed among them were also a number of sailing-ships towing out to sea. This crowd of shipping was not only very picturesque, with their divers rigs and tanned sails, but was interesting, as it contained many types of vessel now extinct. The "brig," square-rigged on both masts, was a good-looking, weatherly craft; the "billie boy," carrying a square sail forward and a jigger aft; the sloop, which did most of our coasting work, had a big square-cut mainsail and jib; and the old Dutch galliot, with her bluff bows and paint of many colours; all these have now practically disappeared. The most trying winds, however, were the easterly gales, which prevailed in November and December, and also in the spring. With easterly gales blowing I have known Liverpool to be a closed port for weeks together, few or no vessels entering it; and more than once this blockade of our port by easterly gales had a serious effect upon our stocks of cotton and produce. The inward-bound fleet was caught in the chops of the Channel, and was there detained until the wind changed. It is of such an experience I wish to write.