"Liverpool Blackballer"?`

[Michael McKernan]

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>Subject:      "Liverpool Blackballer"?`
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>What is a "Liverpool Blackballer"?
>
>"The staircase and passage-way [of the American Consulate] were often
>thronged, of a morning, with a set of beggary and piratical-looking
>scoundrels, (I do no wrong to my own countrymen in styling them so,
>for not one in twenty was a genuine American,) purporting to belong
>to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool
>Blackballers and the scum of every maritime nation on earth; such
>being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation
>of the world with England."
>
>Hawthorne, "Our Old Home", 1863 (MS).


A ship of the Liverpool-ported Black Ball Line of transAtlantic packets, or
in this case, a sailor from one of those ships.



Michael McKernan