Such a ship as the _Hotspur_, well manned, well navigated, would go round the Cape and land her forty passengers in Calcutta within three months. They would come aboard at Gravesend with their own cabin furniture, but included in the fare was an ample supply of liquor. Often the charge for a stern cabin for a man and wife would be £300 from Calcutta to England, and the ship would have also probably 500 troops aboard, or a total of 600 souls. The decks would be encumbered with sheep, hay, potatoes, bananas, hen-coops, and yet if any disaster had occurred there was accommodation in the boats for not more than about 100. Whall, who served in these ships for ten years, never once saw a Blackwaller heave-to in a heavy gale. But that was because they were well found and so well manned under the best commanders. In those days the sailor ashore loved his grog too much, and when he left the ship at the end of a voyage with probably £40 on him, he would proceed to get drunk, then perhaps some one in the East End would drug him, and finally, when he awoke up next day he would find himself without so much as a penny. But at sea he was the best fellow in the world, well-disciplined, able to go aloft in the heaviest weather to hand or reef a sail and lay out on a yard. He was an expert at the wheel or with the lead or marlin-spike, and a captain knew that his men could be relied upon from the moment the ship left Gravesend. It was thus that such ships as _Flying Cloud_, _Sovereign of the Seas_, _James Baines_ and _Marco Polo_ could on occasions reel off their eighteen knots, or 420 knots in the twenty-four hours. In fact during the ’fifties the sailing ships could make passages as fast as any mail steamer afloat. Every one who has had command of vessels and men realises how important is the spirit of emulation and the pride of ship and service. Whall, the son of a rector, remarked that all who served in these ships looked down on the officers of the Liverpool contemporary sailing ships as being less polished and wearing no uniform, though he admitted they were perhaps smarter sailormen than the Blackwallers. In his memoirs _My Life at Sea_, that experienced mercantile officer, Commander W. C. Crutchley, R.N.R., says of a certain renowned clipper ship: “The officers and men of that craft considered themselves very superior beings to those who had not the good fortune to sail under the blue St. Andrew’s Cross; but they, in their turn, were looked down upon by the men sailing in the ships of Green, Dunbar, Wigram and Smith. In those days it would have required a very careful M.C. to give the varying grades of the Merchant Services their due order of preference.”