"Liverpool Blackballer"?`

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Black Ball Line was and is an American shipping line that was well known in the 19th C. for the reliability of its merchant and passenger fleet.

The name alludes to the large, solid black disk displayed on the fore-topsails of Black Ball ships so they could be recognized from a distance.  A "Liverpool" Blackballer to me suggests a Liverpool seaman, of which there were many, employed by the Line.

A sea shanty from the 1880s or before conmtains lines such as,

"Once there was a Black Ball ship...That fourteen knots an hour could clip.

"Black Ball ships are good and true....They're the ships for me and you."

(Note the authentic if now despised usage "knots an hour.")
Michael McKernan <mckernan at LOCALNET.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Michael McKernan
Subject: Re: "Liverpool Blackballer"?`
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
>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


---------------------------------
 Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.