The Independence measured only 734 tons. She was built in New York in 1834.
In the course of the packet period five other liners made passages to Liverpool in fourteen days or less—the Montezuma, the Patrick Henry, the Southampton, the St. Andrew, and the Dreadnought. Under Captain Samuel Samuels the Dreadnought was the most famous of them all. She ran in the St. George's line—A. Taylor & Co. Samuels was born in Philadelphia, on March 14, 1823. He ran away to sea when eleven years old, and at twenty-one, after a venturesome career, was placed in command of a ship called the Angelique. In 1853 the Dreadnought (1413 tons) was built especially for him, and as he told the writer she was a ship of "medium full lines." And yet in her first voyage to Liverpool and back[[7]] she reached Sandy Hook just as the Cunard steamer Canada, which had left Liverpool one day ahead of her, was arriving at Boston.
On Saturday, February 9, 1856, the Liverpool Chronicle, under the head lines "Important from America. Five days later—Arrival of the Dreadnought," said:—
"The clipper Dreadnought, Captain Samuels, ... arrived here this forenoon from New York after a rapid passage of fourteen days and eight hours."
By courtesy of Harper's Magazine
It took three years to beat that passage, but in 1859 Samuels drove her from Sandy Hook to Rock Light, Liverpool, 3000 miles, in 13 days and 8 hours. And in 1860 he ran from Sandy Hook to Queenstown, a distance of 2760 miles, in 9 days and 17 hours, a record never equalled either before or since.
"She was on the rim of a cyclone, most of the time," said the captain in describing the passage to the writer. The sailors of the day called her the "Wild Boat of the Atlantic," and some unremembered forecastle bard wrote a song of nine stanzas about her, of which the first was:—
"It is of a flash packet,