During bad weather the fifty saloon passengers and 600 steerage were kept below and the atmosphere was stifling. There was none of the comfort or luxury of a modern steamship, and the clipper was heeling over in a way that would alarm many travellers to-day. But at last, after sixty-four days, the _Red Jacket_ had made Port Philip Heads, and so a record voyage to Australia. Those were the days when travelling by sea was romantic and not as monotonous as a railway journey. With the captain cracking-on to make a fast trip, with sails carrying away, spars and gear as well, there was always some sport, some adventure. Between 1850 and the following ten years Prince’s Dock, Liverpool, was crowded with fine clippers raising their lofty masts and crossing their great spars. And those were the days of wonderful feats of seamanship. Sir William Forwood says that he remembers seeing the 600-ton Brocklebank sailing ship _Martaban_ come sailing into George’s Dock Basin under all canvas. Her halyards were then let go and sails clewed up so smartly that the ship, as she passed the pierhead, was able to throw a line on shore and make fast. Could you beat this for seamanlike skill and discipline? [Illustration: [_Photo, Henry Hughes & Son, Ltd._ SPARS AND STAYS. Looking for’ard along the decks of a sailing ship.] But it is with the celebrated China tea-clippers from about 1860 onwards that this skill reached such heights of proficiency. British shipowners no longer found it necessary to have their clippers built in America, and the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854, together with the enterprise learnt in a hard school, as the result of competition, enabled British shipping to go ahead. The California boom, which had produced America’s finest clippers, was dead. The great quantities of American timber would soon be not wanted for shipbuilding, now that iron was coming in and steam was replacing sails. But that which gave the final character to the American Mercantile Marine was the outbreak of civil war in 1861 between the North and South. From that it never recovered until the new efforts, begun in 1917, to rebuild a service that had been such a keen competitor during the clipper-ship period. In the meantime, during the ’sixties and onwards, the British Mercantile Marine, by the enterprise of the shipowners, the assistance of legislation, the protection of the British Navy, the scientific progress of shipbuilders and engineers, and by the skill and endurance of its officers and crews, regained its supremacy after a stiff fight, and opened up new trade routes in all parts of the world. And this not merely in regard to the big lines, but especially in respect of the tramp steamers going out with coal and bringing back all sorts of essential produce.