ABSTRACT
The qualities required for success are practical knowledge of shipping, iniatitive, readiness to take risks, and a watchful eye on working expenses, rather than the financial acumen and power of organization required in liner management. One of the most significant of these changes, the replacement of the "constant trader" of the eighteenth century by regular liner services, had already made substantial headway before the competition of steam had become generally effective in the world's carrying trade. The Black Bailers and other Yankee Packets in the first half of the nineteenth century were true ancestors of the trans-Atlantic liners of to-day. The China Tea Clippers were mostly owned in twos and threes, for the total tonnage in the trade was never very large; but the pick of the Indian trade was carried in the big fleets of the great Blackwall firms.
