The Ocean Railway
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard, and the revolutionary world of the great Atlantic steamships
Stephen Fox

To the memory of PHYLLIS RUTH BLAKELEY (1922-1986)

Provincial archivist for Nova Scotia

Biographer of Samuel Cunard

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN AND THE BRITANNIA

PART ONE: The Packet Ship Era, 1820-1840

1. The Sailing Packets

2. Steam on Water

PART TWO: The Era of Cunard Domination, 1840-1870

3. Ships as Enterprise: Samuel Cunard of Halifax

4. Ships as Engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

5. The Cunard Line

6. The Collins Line

7. Distinguished Failures

8. Emigration and the Inman Line

9. Life on a Steamer

PART THREE: The Era of Steamship Competition, 1870-1910

10. The White Star Line

11. Competition and Invention

12. Ships as Buildings: Two Cycles to Cunard

13. Ships as Towns: Officers, Crew, Steerage

14. Anglo-Americans

15. Germans

16. The Two Finest Cunarders

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author

P.S.

About the author

Q&A

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the book

A Critical Eye

The Routes of History

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Copyright

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Prologue The North Atlantic Ocean and the Britannia

From Liverpool, on the River Mersey, a ship bound for a port in the northeastern United States heads west eighty miles across the Irish Sea, and then – when clear of Holyhead – turns sharply south into St George’s Channel. The ship navigates carefully through St George’s, which funnels currents and storms from larger contiguous seas into a narrowing, unpredictable passage squeezed between England and Ireland. She moves southwesterly along the Irish coast, skirting the Old Head of Kinsale and other jutting headlands, to reach (but avoid) Cape Clear and the Fastnet Rocks at the bottom of Ireland. To this point the ship has gone about 300 miles since departing from Liverpool. From Cape Clear the ocean stretches out unimpeded to the western horizon and far beyond. Starting there, the great circle route to America arcs across nearly 3000 miles of the North Atlantic: one of the most varied, troublesome ocean voyages in the world.

Over its entire course, the great circle route veers gradually southwards from fifty-three to forty degrees north latitude. Giant spirals of wind and weather gust far above and perpendicular to the ocean’s surface, rotating across twenty or more degrees of latitude in counterclockwise systems that generally hit the great circle to America in the southern half of their spins. Prevailing winds in that stretch of ocean therefore come from the west and southwest, fighting any westbound ship. The weather is typically unsettled, with odd, sudden shifts in temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction. Systems collide and combine and bouncearound. Long, high, stately deepwater waves march along over hundreds of miles of ocean. On occasion, several wave components may converge momentarily, producing a rogue wave much bigger than any of its parts – up to four times the height of an average North Atlantic wave, sometimes even 100 feet high or more.

The weather, seldom agreeable, turns worse in winter. From October to March, the days are cold, short and dark, the sun low in the sky, the sea a turbulent dark grey. At mid-ocean, abrupt winter gales may quickly reach speeds of sixty-five knots, with steep waves of 40 to 60 feet and smaller combers curling out in extended cycles up to 400 feet from crest to crest. White flecks – from spindrift and foam atop the breaking waves – stand out in sharp relief against the slates of sea and sky: the natural world pared down to stark monochromes of grey and white, pretty but indifferent in its muted danger.

Towards the end of the voyage, well over 2000 miles from Liverpool – just as crews may be growing tired and irritable, with flagging attention and potential lapses in discipline, and passengers bored or restive, and food or fuel perhaps running low – the ship enters the notorious graveyard of the North Atlantic. This most hazardous sector of the great circle is encountered precisely when the ship’s company may already be stretched tight and vulnerable.

Here the winter gale season yields, with no relief, to iceberg season, which generally starts in January and then peaks from April to July. Far to the north, in the west of Greenland, glaciers flow down the coastal mountains to the sea, annually calving thousands of icebergs into the Davis Strait. The bergs float slowly southwards in the Labrador Current. At unpredictable times in the following year, the surviving remnants – about four hundred icebergs each season – reach the shipping lanes off Newfoundland. A typical splinter or castle berg weighs over 100,000 tons and stands about 150 feet high by 300 feet long, above water; in extraordinary cases both dimensions may be doubled and more. Smaller bergs, growlers, field ice and floes can pose more hidden danger to ships: lower in profile, sometimes barely above the ocean surface, they are harder to see and avoid. When a ship enters the iceberg zone, temperatures dip and the air smells different, and lookouts get edgy.

The icebergs further trouble the tumultuous Gulf Stream. The strongest of all ocean circulations, and one of the most startling, mysterious discoveries made by the early European explorers of the New World, the Gulf Stream was first charted by Benjamin Franklin in 1769. Trade winds pile up water along the continental edge of South America nearpagethe equator and send it ‘downhill’ through the quickening channel between Cuba and the Florida Keys. The stream then runs up the eastern seaboard of the United States, thirty to fifty miles wide, at two to six miles an hour. Its warm water and rapid course inhibit the growth of phytoplankton, creating a vivid swath of deep, clear, pure blue against the greener, greyer surrounding ocean. Off the North Carolina coast, it divides into smaller substreams, which loop and meander. Even so, when the Gulf Stream reaches the area south of Nova Scotia, it is still moving over 150 million cubic metres of water each second – some 10,000 times the volume of the Mississippi River.

East of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and squarely athwart the great circle route to America, the warm Gulf Stream collides with the cold Labrador Current, producing the most extreme temperature differences in any ocean. This volatile mix has vast consequences in the air and water. Some are even whimsical (icebergs spinning slowly on their vertical axes, like huge, silent, snowy carousels). Most are more serious: mists, gales, squalls, driving rain and churning waves. At its worst, the atmospheric mingling of cold Canadian air and warm, moist Gulf Stream air may generate the sudden winter hurricanes called bombs, or rapidly intensifying cyclones. An abrupt drop in atmospheric pressure at the centre of a comma-shaped cloud mass, usually in January or February, can unpredictably generate winds of hurricane force. With little warning, the bomb just explodes.

The most widespread result of this massive convergence of cold and warmth is dense, persistent fogs. Off Cape Race, at the southeastern tip of Newfoundland, from April to September at least twelve days of every month are shrouded in sea fog. At midsummer it is nearly constant. ‘These horrid fogs infest the air most part of the year,’ the English hydrographer John Purdy noted in 1817, ‘and will last eight or ten days successively, sometimes longer.’ The fogs can assume geometric, hedgelike forms, with vertical slabs at their eastern edges squared off by long, level top layers. An observer may watch a ship emerging slowly from one of these banks, revealing herself in sharply defined foot by foot, as though being dragged out of a grey cliff at the water’s edge.

In iceberg season, with visibility more crucial than ever, the Grand Banks fogs throw a dense, smothering blanket over the ice field. The wind dies down. The sea is lumpy and tumbling. Warning bells and foghorns are muffled, distorted, their direction and distance rendered unknowable. Both sight and hearing become untrustworthy. A constant condensing rain drips from the ship’s superstructure. Shapes take ongigantic, unnatural proportions. A bird may resemble a sail. Ghosts and mirages float by. Peering hopelessly through the thick white smoke, a lookout can mistake an iceberg for a ship, or ship for iceberg. The circumstances are gloomy, anxious, strange and very dangerous.

The great circle route runs along the Newfoundland coast, with its rocky headlands and variable currents driving now towards shore, then out to sea. ‘The uncertainty requires the greatest caution,’ John Purdy warned in 1817. Farther west, about a hundred miles off Nova Scotia, lurks Sable Island and its shifting shoals and sandbars. Moving steadily eastward, sometimes at a mile every four years (and therefore impossible to chart precisely), and often invisible in fog, Sable has sunk many ships. The fog can then persist all the way down the American coast to Boston and New York.

By the nineteenth century, through various accidents of history, this most dangerous sea passage had also become the most trafficked long ocean route in the world. The burgeoning imperatives of trade, empire and human migration between the hemispheres would not give way, even to the North Atlantic Ocean in winter. Some reliable means of making this roughest transatlantic crossing – in all seasons, and in reasonable speed, safety, comfort and economy – had to be devised. It posed a fundamental challenge to the newly inventive, progressive spirit of the age.

The first enduring steamship service between England and America began when the wooden paddle wheeler Britannia, of the new Cunard Line, left Liverpool for Halifax and Boston on 4 July 1840. With Samuel Cunard, founder of the line, on board, the Britannia laboured across the ocean against head winds and adverse currents. Ten days out, an iceberg was sighted in the near distance: a reminder of the North Atlantic’s perils. The ship was scheduled to depart from Liverpool a few days before the fourth, and she was therefore expected in Boston by the fourteenth. When that day passed without the Britannia, people in Boston started worrying. A steamship was supposed to make faster, more reliable ocean passages than a sailing ship; that was the whole point of adding the steam engine and paddles.

Four days went by amid swelling anxieties. Finally, at ten o’clock on the night of Saturday, the eighteenth, the Britannia glided into Boston Harbor. Despite the late hour she was greeted by fireworks and huzzahs – and a general sense of relief. She had made the passage in fourteen and a half days, just one-third of the time consumed by the most recent sailing packet from England to Boston. On Sunday, Sam Cunard received eighteen hundred invitations to dinner. ‘No event which has occurred since the commencement of the present century,’ the Reverend Ezra Gannett told his prominent congregation that morning, ‘seems to me to have involved more important consequences to this city.’

The man and his ship dominated Boston for the next two weeks. Thousands of people came to inspect the Britannia at the new Cunard wharf; Bostonians had never seen such a ship. At the time, a typical coasting steamboat was about 160 feet long and 400 tons, a typical ocean-sailing packet about 150 feet and 700 tons. (In nautical idiom, a ‘ton’ measured not weight or displacement but interior space, calculated in different ways but, in 1840, supposed to equal forty cubic feet.) The Britannia was much bigger than contemporary ship norms at 207 feet and 1156 tons, with steam power in due proportion. She had been built of African oak and yellow pine at Robert Duncan’s shipyard on the River Clyde; the celebrated Robert Napier of Glasgow had provided her 403-horsepower engine. From a distance she looked like a quite large sailing ship, dominated by three masts and sails in conventional riggings. But at midship two black-and-gold paddle boxes extended almost twelve feet out to each side, with a single smokestack just aft, painted burnt-red with a black ring at the top: a future signature of Cunard ships. The Britannia was, properly speaking, neither steamship nor sailing ship but a hybrid of the two.

Much of the main deck was left flat and clear to give the crew unobstructed room for handling sails and rigging. Deckhouses at midship provided quarters for the officers, sailors, and the ship’s cows. A raised, exposed bridge between the paddle boxes and above the deckhouses allowed the captain and his adjutants the sight lines and free access they needed to run the ship. (Years later, after paddle wheels had yielded to screw propellers for propulsion, the term ‘bridge’ remained to designate where a steamship’s officers stood and gave orders.) Aft of the mainmast, another deckhouse held the passengers’ dining saloon, the largest room on the ship at thirty-six feet by fourteen feet; it also functioned as a sitting room and assembly hall. At the stern, a raised platform gave the helmsman and his wheel a quite wet, windy place from which to steer the ship.

From the saloon, stairs descended to the gentlemen’s and ladies’ cabins and lounges. Men and women were consigned to separate sections, linked by a passage that allowed decorous contact without risking the weather up on deck. A typical ‘stateroom’ measured about twelve by six feet, tightly packed with two bunk beds, jugs and basins for washing and emergencies, a small mirror on the wall, a water carafe and glasses, a day sofa, and pegs for hanging clothes. A porthole or oil lamp provided dim light. ‘All these rooms are highly finished,’ a Bostonian noted, ‘without any attempt to dazzle with tinsel.’ The undersides of the cabin floors were covered with a thick, coarse woollen cloth intended to seal off smells and heat from the holds and engine room. Passengers – the ship had room for up to one hundred men and twenty-four women, all in a single class – shared a few water closets and had no bathing facilities at all.

The provision deck below held quarters for the engineers and firemen. They fed and tended the engine, the rhythmically beating heart of the ship. The machinery and coal bunkers at midship took up a third of the Britannia’s length, leaving relatively little space for cargo on such an enormous vessel. The firemen shovelled coal into twelve furnaces firing four boilers feeding steam to the engine. Still brand-new, the engine and its moving parts shone like burnished silver. Two cylinders, six feet in diameter, drove nineteen-foot levers to turn the paddle wheel crankshaft. At full steam the paddles, nine feet wide and twenty-eight feet in diameter, could push the ship up to almost nine knots.

To a greater degree than anything previously seen in Boston, the Britannia was a ship and a building and a machine, all at once, on the grandest and most daring scale. One dazzled observer called her ‘the consummation of human ingenuity’, no less. She seemed to vault beyond the usual construction categories, gathering them into a novel kind of manmade artefact. Large, plush and inventive, utterly modern but oddly familiar, beautiful from her soaring masts down to her gleaming engine room and yet promising such great practical significance, she left admirers in Boston mingling their superlatives. ‘She is truly a magnificent vessel, ’ the Evening Journal declared, ‘ – a floating palace.’

Three days after Samuel Cunard’s arrival, Boston threw a grand party for him attended by nearly 2000 people. The toasts were so extended, the speeches so hyperbolic even by the rhetorical standards of the time, that it seems apparent that more than just a man and his ship was being celebrated. The Cunard Line was largely a British enterprise, based in Liverpool and launched by a mail contract from the British Admiralty. The first Cunard ship was pointedly named the Britannia, and she was commanded by Captain Henry Woodruff of the Royal Navy, not a civilian. In the previous sixty-five years, Britain and America had fought two bitter wars against each other and then had engaged in constant mutual insults and fierce squabbles over Canadian independence, boundaries and fishing rights. Only a year earlier, the American state of Maine andthe Canadian province of New Brunswick had nearly started a war. Now the Cunard Line inspired new hopes for friendlier ties between mother country and wayward child. In addition, Boston by 1840 was losing its former commercial and maritime eminence to New York; but both cities had competed for the glittering prize of becoming Cunard’s American terminus, and Boston had apparently won. This coup perhaps augured a general resurgence for the city against its bumptious rival down on the Hudson. And, finally, that summer the United States was torn by an especially rancorous presidential contest, the log cabin and hard cider campaign of William Henry Harrison against the incumbent Martin Van Buren. With the Britannia on hand, at least, Boston’s feuding Whigs and Democrats might briefly unite behind a promising new venture of general benefit.

The man himself remained a mute mystery. Nobody in Boston knew Sam Cunard well; he had a few business associates there, nothing more. He didn’t talk much, and he had accepted few of those eighteen hundred dinner invitations. He was said to be an Englishman, or perhaps a Canadian, or maybe of American parentage. The city’s keenly focused interest in him derived, in part, from simple unsatisfied curiosity: Who was this man? A few sceptics remained doggedly unimpressed. ‘Mr. Cunard, a substantial, sensible Englishman, and not an Emperor, sits enthroned in state in the saloon of the Britannia,’ one doubter wrote to a local paper. ‘A proper self-respect will not warrant us in canonizing him.’ But this was only a peevish dissent, drowned out by a tidal wave of adulation and applause.

The ‘Cunard Festival’ to honour him took place at the Maverick House hotel, near the Cunard wharf in East Boston. Planned while the Britannia was still at sea, the event was staged on a scale and opulence seldom previously seen in Boston. A temporary pavilion and awning stretched 200 feet along the front of the hotel. Pennants and flags of all nations snapped in the breeze. An elliptical arch spread across the Maverick’s second storey, resting on two abutments. One of these bore the British coat of arms and the name Watt, honouring the Scottish inventor who had improved the steam engine. The other showed the American arms and the name Fulton, the Hudson River steamboat pioneer. At the centre of the arch, joining the two ancient national foes in symbol and reality, was the name Cunard in large gold letters – a premature tribute, mustered in brave hope and confidence, to the new but unproven steamship service.

On a raised platform sat the presiding officer, Josiah Quincy Jr, president of Harvard College and former mayor of Boston. To his right satSamuel Cunard, Senator Daniel Webster (the leader of Massachusetts Whigs), and other important men. To Quincy’s left sat Captain Woodruff of the Britannia, George Bancroft (the Democratic boss of Massachusetts), and others of distinction. Overlooking them, outside the pavilion itself, on the hotel’s porch and balconies and in upstairs windows, were hundreds of women dressed in their summer finery: the first time in memory that women had been invited to attend a public dinner in Boston (though not, actually, to be fed).

After a fancy meal, wines and mounds of ice cream, the extended speeches and toasts sounded the framing issues of the day. Daniel Webster, a noted orator, spoke about the rippling impacts of steam power on civilization, commerce, war and politics. George Bancroft welcomed the Cunard Line as ‘an omen of peace’, sure to usher in a new era of friendly relations, and offered a hopeful toast: ‘Old England – She renounces the ambition of ruling the seas, and effects the nobler purpose of connecting continents.’ Cigars were passed around (but quickly put away in deference to the unfamiliar feminine presence). Someone offered a song in tribute to the new line:

How timid and slow, but a few years ago,

The world hobbled on in its motion.

Old Europe seem’d far as the fixed Northern star,

On the boundless expanse of the ocean;

But tho’ it was hard–at the word of Cunard

Britannia herself is a rover.

Old England a while, that fast anchor’d Isle,

By steam is now here–half seas over.

Josiah Quincy introduced the man of the hour. ‘The enlightened foresight of Mr. Cunard, a citizen of Nova Scotia,’ he declared, ‘aided by the liberality of the British crown, has established a line of steam packets on a permanent basis.’ By advancing the interests of his own country, Cunard had incidentally conferred coveted gifts on America, and – Quincy hoped – Boston might now recover its old prosperity. The band impartially played both ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. The climactic moment had arrived.

In this speechmaking age, when events happened live, in oral discourse, any distinguished man was expected to have an easy knack for facing and holding an audience. Grand oratory was a routine tool of persuasion and power. The crowd clapped and cheered hard for Cunard,waiting in curiosity and expectation for him to speak, watching him. He was a handsome man, apparently of middle age, a bit less than average height. He had a large, round head, balding at the crown, with a fringe of grey hair turning white, and closely trimmed muttonchop whiskers in the style of the day. He looked healthy and well knit, compact and tightly wound, and quite decisive around the mouth and eyes.

Cunard stood up and started speaking, inaudibly, before the last applause subsided. The newspaper reporters seated nearby could not hear him. He said only a few more words, and then – to the surprise of everyone – sat down. Josiah Quincy, rushing into the dead air, sprang up to say that Mr Cunard had explained he was unaccustomed to public speaking and thus would make no speech, but he felt quite grateful to be so honoured, given that the real credit for the new steamship line belonged to the British government. And that was that. His odd performance concluded, the hero remained triumphantly unknown in Boston.

A few days later, in much more modest circumstances, another dinner was held for men of the Britannia. Only Captain Woodruff and a few officers had been invited to the Cunard Festival; so a group of local machinists and mechanics, described as ‘respectable’ by one newspaper, threw a small celebration for the ship’s chief engineer, Peter Kenneth, and his mates at the Stackpole House, on Milk Street near the waterfront. The innkeeper, James Ryan, provided entertainment. (No Boston Irishmen like Ryan had taken visible part in the Cunard Festival.) All the guests on hand told a story or sang a song or ventured a sentiment. They raised their own toasts to the owners and hands of the Britannia (‘Her successful voyage has proved that their capital and labor were most happily united’) and, in engineer’s vernacular, to the mother country (‘She sometimes gets the steam up a little too high, but she finds an escape pipe when she visits her daughter’). The engine men, both ashore and from below decks, added their voices to the general spirit of determined reconciliation.

After two weeks, Cunard and his ship left Boston for Halifax and Liverpool on the afternoon of I August, well loaded with eighty passengers. Spectators around the harbour were again frustrated; having arrived in night-time darkness, the Britannia departed in a daytime thick fog that left her visible only from close at hand. She picked her way slowly along the Maine coast, taking three days to Halifax, shrouded in fog the whole way. The North Atlantic was again extending its typical welcome.

‘The Atlantic to America is the worst navigation in the world,’ Sam Cunard pointed out years later, from a prudent and well-earned distance.‘The westerly winds prevail very much, and you have ice and fog to contend with.’ Despite these daunting natural obstacles, however, he had launched his Atlantic steamship line and made it run through endless crises and troubles. ‘I originated this service at a great risk,’ he claimed in pardonable pride, dropping the humble pose of the Cunard Festival in Boston, ‘and at a time when no other party could be found to undertake it.’ And the result? ‘A beautiful line of communication between the eastern and western world.’

It was all there from the start. The major themes of transatlantic steamship history, to be echoed repeatedly over the next hundred years, first appeared in the summer of 1840 during the Britannia’s maiden round trip, Liverpool to Boston and back.

The daunting North Atlantic Ocean passage between Britain and America.

To meet and perhaps subdue this most difficult natural environment: the peerless shipbuilding and marine engineering along the River Clyde, where most of the finest Atlantic liners of the nineteenth century would be designed and built.

The magical, transforming element of steam, the universal microchip of this era, and the utopian hopes of abolishing time and space it inspired.

The touchy ties among nations, especially between Britain and America, and the additional utopian hopes of international reconciliation forged by regular steamship service.

The stratifications of class and duty among the ship crews: officers and men, sailors and engineers, canvas and coal, above and below decks.

The recurring public wonder over every successive version of the newest, biggest, fastest steamship on the ocean, each likely to be described in turn as ‘a floating palace’.

And at the centre of it all, driving and organizing, the elusive figure of Samuel Cunard and the great transatlantic steamship line he founded.

PART ONE: The Packet Ship Era, 1820-1840

1. The Sailing Packets

Before steamships started crossing the North Atlantic, the best way to travel between Europe and America was by the sailing ships called packets. Built and run mainly by Americans, the packet lines introduced new concepts and comfort levels for ocean voyages. They dominated the transatlantic traffic for decades, setting key precedents for the steamships that eventually replaced them. Along with their more famous contemporaries, the whaling and clipper ships, they comprised the golden age of American sail. Of these three types, the packets lasted the longest and made the most voyages and money for their owners and crews. Yet today whalers and clippers remain drenched in popular legend, while the packets are scarcely known beyond dedicated circles of ship buffs. No packet builder ever became as famous as Donald McKay with his clippers, and no novelist ever wrote a Moby Dick about the packets. They just did their jobs quietly and well, year after year, and then passed into the historical obscurity reserved for predictable competence.

Agroup of textile importers in New York started the first packet line. The main founder, Jeremiah Thompson, was an English immigrant from Yorkshire who had come to New York aged seventeen in 1801 to join his uncle in representing the family’s woollen manufacturing business. From that base they engaged in shipping and shipowning with three local associates. These five men all lived near the waterfront at the southern tip of Manhattan. Four of them were Quakers. (Jeremiah Thompson, an active Friend, was an officer in the New York Manumission Society, dedicated to freeing slaves; but he also made a fortune by exporting raw cotton, grown in the American South by slave labour.)

Thompson had a breakthrough idea for improving ocean travel. At the time, a shipowner might advertise a ship’s day of departure, but the captain would then wait until enough cargo and passengers had been loaded, and wind and weather seemed favourable, before weighing anchor. A passenger hoping to embark might have to hang around the docks, spending money on food and lodging and wasting time, for a week or more. Thompson, dealing in volatile markets for finished imports and raw exports, wanted faster, more reliable service. He conceived the notion of a transatlantic ship ‘line’: several vessels under coordinated private management, sailing on known dates between established ports, and locked into an unchanging departure schedule for the foreseeable future.

In the autumn of 1817, the Thompsons and their three associates placed a notice in New York’s newspapers. ‘In order to furnish frequent and regular conveyances for GOODS and PASSENGERS,’ they announced, ‘the subscribers have undertaken to establish a line of vessels between NEW-YORK and LIVERPOOL, to sail from each place on a certain day in every month throughout the year.’ They listed the line’s first four ships: three-masted and square-rigged, and larger than average size for their time at around 110 feet long and 400 tons. The Pacific, launched in 1807 and the oldest of the four, was especially fast; earlier that year she had made a run to Liverpool in only seventeen days. ‘These ships have all been built in New-York, of the best materials,’ the owners asserted. ‘They are known to be remarkably fast sailers, and their accommodations for passengers are uncommonly extensive and commodious.’ Thompson and his partners were promising a daring combination of speed, comfort and predictability – qualities previously unknown on the North Atlantic.

The first two ships of the line sailed from New York and Liverpool in January 1818. For identification they showed a large black ball painted on their fore topsail, at the highest point of the first mast. The ‘Black Ball Line’ at once earned a tight reputation for minding the calendar. Fighting winter gales, the Pacific made a slow return trip to New York of forty-eight days; she was then unloaded and reloaded in an impossibly short six days and left for Liverpool as scheduled on the fifth of April. Later that year, the Black Ball’s Courier on leaving Liverpool met the Pacific coming in, and when approaching New York met the Black Baller Amity going out. The line added more ships, allowing two sailings a month each way. For any eastbound trip under twenty-two days or westbound run under thirty-five, Jeremiah Thompson gave the captain a new coat, with a dress for his wife. After two years, even Niles’ Weekly Register, from the rival port of Baltimore, had to concede that the Black Ball ships were running with the speed and almost the regularity of a horse-drawn mail coach. ‘Such steadiness and despatch is truly astonishing,’ said the Register, ‘and, in a former age, would have been incredible.’

Success brought competition. Atlantic packet lines started running from Philadelphia and Boston. Early in 1824, the Boston line’s Emerald caught a rare easterly gale and rode it all the way home from Liverpool in an astonishing seventeen days, a westward record for years. In New York, the Red Star and Blue Swallowtail lines competed directly with Black Ball. Other new lines ran to London and to Le Havre on the northern coast of France. The sharp rivalry among all these lines added another new concept to transatlantic travel. Ship technologies in Europe and America had been essentially static for some two hundred years; conservative builders and owners resisted innovations and kept turning out the same old models. Packet competition kicked ship design into the progressive nineteenth century. Constructed mainly in shipyards along the East River in New York, ever bigger and fancier, the new packets became the largest and finest ships yet built in America, evolving more quickly than any other type of vessel.

Black Ball set the initial pace. The Canada, 132 feet and 525 tons, was launched in March 1823. ‘We have never examined a ship which was in all respects equal to her,’ said a local newspaper. Her dining cabin offered polished mahogany tables and pillars, sofas, and plush crimson draperies. The men’s cabins, brightened by skylights of ground glass in the main deck overhead, had olive-coloured damask silk curtains. In the ladies’ cabins the curtains were fine blue silk. A year later, the Blue Swallowtail Line answered Black Ball with its own York. To the now-expected mahogany woodwork, the York added a library with a printed catalogue, redwood pillars finished in imitation bronze, and venetian blinds in the cabin doors that allowed ventilation with privacy. Cabin washstands doubled as desks. A Turkish carpet covered the floor and muffled shipboard sounds. The ladies’ lounge even featured a small piano flanked by large mirrors. ‘In the comfort and entertainment which the American ships afford,’ a Liverpool newspaper’s account of the York acknowledged, ‘…their superiority over British vessels is most conspicuous.’

While ship interiors became plusher and better equipped, the East River shipwrights puzzled over how to increase speed without losing cargo space. By slow degrees, the rounded bow and plump midship lines of the first packets gave way to faster ships with longer, thinner hulls and sharper bows and sterns. Shipwrights believed intuitively that speed also required a V-shaped hull, tapering down to a narrow keel at the bottom of the ship. These design tendencies all meant less payload and lower profits for a ship of a given length.

A solution to this tightening dilemma was discovered accidentally. In the early 1830s, Edward Knight Collins of New York started running coastal packets to New Orleans. Because the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi River required ships of shallow draught, the New Orleans packets were built with flat bottoms; speed was not deemed so important in the coastal traffic. But it turned out, to general surprise, that flat hulls did not make the ships any slower or harm their sailing qualities. A flat bottom also let a ship rest upright when grounded by a low tide.

In 1836 Collins launched his Dramatic Line of flat-bottomed packets to Liverpool, with ships named for famous theatrical figures. Flamboyant and excessive, indeed theatrical, and bold to the point of recklessness, Collins left the competition in his foaming wake. His Shakespeare was 142 feet and 747 tons; his Garrick, Sheridan and Siddons, 158 feet and 895 tons each; and the Roscius, at 168 feet, was the first New York packet to exceed 1000 tons (and to cost $100,000). Collins also moved his passenger cabins from below deck, where they were subject to nauseating bilge odours, to a long deckhouse on the main deck stretching from the stern almost to the central mainmast. Up there, the cabins got more air and light – but without making the ship top-heavy or harming her behaviour or safety. The cabins themselves were three times larger than those on the first Black Ball ships. The Dramatic Line’s food, wines and decor all set new standards of elegance. And the ships were fast. Over their first ten years, the New York packets had averaged twenty-four days out, thirty-eight days home – excellent times compared to those of previous ships. By 1839 the Collins packets, the swiftest in the trade, had cut those averages to twenty days, twelve hours and thirty days, twelve hours. Ocean travel had never before made such vaulting strides in only two decades.

An ocean voyage, in this era or any other, had to work around three endemic aspects of the experience: seasickness, danger and boredom. The worst bouts of mal de mer usually lifted after the first few days but could last longer, especially for women and in heavy seas. Any ship – in particular a sailing vessel – remained at the mercy of mighty natural forces, and on the heavily travelled North Atlantic might also collide with another ship or with an iceberg. Every day passengers had to find ways to kill time, a search that became more desperate and exhausted towards the end of the passage. ‘A sea voyage…is a sort of Purgatory under the best of circumstances,’ William Young of Halifax, Nova Scotia, wrote in his journal aboard a packet in 1839. ‘You can follow no regular employment and tho’ not sick, I am never quite well enough for study. You can’t write on account of the motion and one’s reading is uninstructive and desultory.’ Young and his fellow passengers enjoyed clean berths, attentive service, abundant food and drink, and clear sailing. ‘And yet, from a sea voyage, Good Lord deliver me.’

A packet voyage began with the captain. A safe passage depended absolutely on his skill, judgment and tenacity. He had to make the daily computations with sextant and chronometer that established the ship’s position and heading. At any time of day and night, he might order sailors aloft to set or take in sail. All steel and velvet, he was supposed to charm the passengers and, on occasion, bully the crew. His authority was final in all shipboard matters; yet he was ultimately just another mortal dealing with the unknowable mysteries of sailing the ocean. Every sailing ship displayed her own individual personality: what sailors called ‘ship sense’, an ineffable quality of seeming alive, even of having consciousness. Under way, each seagoing amalgam of natural materials – of wood, hemp and canvas – thrummed a unique vibration which the captain could feel tingling from the rudder to the wheel, and hear blowing overhead through the sails and rigging. The trick was to pay careful attention and work with the ship, not to dominate her. To the extent that a packet voyage responded to mere human will and intention, it came down to a captain and his ship getting along well.

Passengers would pay their one-way fares of $140 to secure a particular captain as much as for his particular ship or packet line. An especially popular commander – such as George Maxwell of the Black Ball, Nash DeCost of the Blue Swallowtail, or Nathaniel Palmer of the Dramatic – reliably attracted extra business. That meant more money for the captain himself, because he typically owned a one-eighth stake in his ship and received 5 per cent of the freight and steerage charges and 25 per cent of the cabin fares. The governments in Washington and London also paid him two cents for each American letter and two pence (four cents) for each British letter he carried. These extras brought his nominal annual salary of $360 up to as much as $5000 a year, a plush income at the time. The packets therefore drew the services of the best captains on the Atlantic.

The crews were made up of sailors from many nations of Europe and North America. The cooks and stewards were usually black Americans, ‘clever mulattoes’, according to James Fenimore Cooper, ‘who have caught the civilization of the kitchen.’ Passengers had most of their shipboard contact with the stewards, who served food, cleaned and fetched, and answered redundant questions about the weather and general course of the trip. The sailors kept to themselves, bunking in cramped quarters in the forecastle at the bow of the ship and conversing in the arcane, excluding patois of the sea. Passengers would marvel, from a distance, at the sailors’ strength and agility as they danced around the rigging in all weathers and acted variously as tailor, carpenter, cooper, stevedore, clerk and astronomer. It was easy to romanticize their often brief, dangerous lives. Captains drove the packets hard, always to the limit that sails and masts could bear, straining for speed. That meant constant action in the rigging (especially in bad weather), much bellowing and cursing, and sailors occasionally falling to their sudden deaths.

Everyone, ships and humans, remained at the indifferent mercy of the North Atlantic Ocean, in particular of the capricious wind. ‘We are pensioners of the wind,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal at sea in 1833. ‘All our prosperity, enterprize, temper come and go with the fickle air. If the wind should forget to blow we must eat our masts.’ A ship could lie becalmed in mid-ocean for a week or more, the wilted sails slapping irritatingly against the masts, the ship rising and falling helplessly on the endless swells. At the other extreme, too much wind brought its own delights. In April 1831 the President of the London Black X Line picked her way from New York through twelve straight days of cold, dense fogs and heavy, rolling seas. A fierce gale pushed waves almost up to her topmast. As the ship rolled back and forth on her bow-to-stern axis, water came over the five-foot bulwarks onto the deck, then into the cabins below. The captain, standing in water up to his knees, could not leave his post for twenty-four hours. The President limped into port after a hard passage of thirty-nine days. Other ships at journey’s end might come within tantalizing sight of land and then have to spend days tacking back and forth along the coast, held at sea by contrary winds.

A recurring drama of initiation awaited those crossing for the first time. The first few days at sea might seem deceptively tranquil. No prior experience of the ocean from the vantage point of a beach or an offshore boat could adequately prepare a neophyte for the North Atlantic in full cry. In November 1835, Fanny Appleton of Boston (the future wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) embarked on the packet Francis Depau for Le Havre. Eighteen years old, bright-eyed and curious, she dismissed the fourteen other passengers as ‘well meaning, uninteresting folks’ but liked watching the sailors and the shifting sea. Commanders often managed to find time for pretty young women on board their ships; so Captain Henry Robinson gave her a puzzling lesson in navigation and ‘shooting the sun’ with his sextant at noon to find the Depau’s position. Five days out, running before a brisk following wind, the ship dashed along at ten knots, prancing like a sea horse. ‘What a glorious exhilaration in this fine sea-air, a reckless thought-defying sense of liberty and life,’ Appleton wrote in her journal, with the joy of a cosseted young woman now perceiving a wider world. ‘The exhilaration of our speed fills us with a mad glee…we run and shout.’

The wind continued as the sea got rougher. Still bowling along at ten knots, the ship pitched and rolled and tossed. Appleton felt dizzy and exhausted, had trouble dressing, and – one week out – started longing for land. After a miserable night, she ‘wondered where the romance of the sea was found – certainly not below the deck’. She wept in despair. The steward brought tea. The constant motion and cacophony of wind, sea and shipboard sounds kept her from reading and writing. ‘Oh this eternity of noise and motion stupefying the brain, exhausting the body. Truly a shipboard life teaches one…humility: we are brought to our lowest ebb of self-respect.’ Her mood fluctuated wildly for the rest of the trip, depending on the weather. Like many sea diarists, she gradually ran short of fresh material and made briefer entries as the journey dragged on. Other passengers expressed surprise that she could still write so much about so little. ‘I am determined to prove one can write a Journal at sea,’ she vowed – and then left three straight days blank. (‘Little worth recording,’ she noted.) The ship reached Le Havre after twenty-five days, none too soon for Fanny Appleton.

Most of the cabin passengers on packets were men: British textile merchants and army officers, and American businessmen. Thrown together at close quarters amid the Anglo-American political tensions of the time, they sometimes bristled at each other. More typically, as frequent transatlantic travellers they settled amicably into the shipboard routines they had come to know well. In this quite masculine atmosphere, isolated by time and circumstances, they could dress casually and indulge at will in boyish recreations. ‘We endeavored to amuse ourselves as best we could,’ one man noted, ‘and, for the want of work, turned boys again, and went to play.’ They shot rifles at random targets in the rigging, sang songs, made bets, played cards and games, held mock courts, told jokes and stories; they drank all day long. Even the tightly buttoned Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the Black Baller New York from Liverpool in 1833, succumbed to shipboard spirits. ‘These are the amusements of wise men in this sad place,’ he decided. ‘I tipple with all my heart here. May I not?’ In midsummer 1832, the English actress Fanny Kemble, bemused and amused, watched the men on a packet in a festive Saturday-night mood of drinking, dancing, singing, and romping around on the quarterdeck at the stern. They toasted their absent wives and sweethearts, in the tradition of sailors. The captain proposed ‘The Ladies – God bless them’. (‘And the Lord deliver us!’ someone added.)

The most promisingly pleasant aspect of packet life available to all cabin passengers, drunk or sober, was the food. A housed-over longboat on deck held a three-tiered menagerie: sheep and pigs on the bottom, then ducks and geese, and hens and chickens on the top. The ship’s cow lived in another structure nearby, not happily. These animals provided fresh meat, eggs, milk and cream for the laden plates in the dining saloon. On the Black Ball’s Europe in 1833, breakfast consisted of ham, eggs, bacon, mutton cutlets, shadfish, rolls and cognac. Dinner ran to three comparable courses, good pastries, seven kinds of alcohol, and dried fruits for dessert. The long, rolling swells of the North Atlantic left many passengers unable to eat or hold down their meals; but whenever circumstances allowed, especially during the early weeks of the voyage, the food and drink were generous.

Except for the Le Havre lines, which brought over thousands of German immigrants to America, the packets carried few steerage passengers until after 1840. During the first two decades, steerage business in general was just an afterthought; if a packet didn’t fill the ‘tween-deck’s upper hold with fine freight, the ship’s carpenter would fashion temporary bunks of rough, unplaned lumber, and the steeragewould take on human cargo at twenty dollars a head. That fare paid only for the cramped bunk and a place on deck to cook. Steerage passengers had to bring their own food, pots and pans, and plates and utensils. The tightly packed steerage became a fetid horror at night and in bad weather. Two small ventilating hatches had to be closed in rain or heavy seas. The steerage air mingled a stifling bouquet of foul bilge water, rotting wood and ropes, and human sweat, vomit and excrement. At times these closed-down conditions went on for days, getting worse until the storm lifted.

Everybody, cabin and steerage passengers alike, felt better up on deck. There one could breathe fresh air and take walks, play shuffleboard, and watch the sea and the other passengers. A dampening shipboard rhythm of ennui and lassitude gradually settled onto the company. Earnest intentions of reading, writing and needlework were laid aside, and people lounged away the time. Even the most trivial daily events – meeting and (after due inquiry) identifying another ship, sighting a whale or porpoise, or discovering a stowaway – took on gripping, inordinate significance. Wagers were placed on the daily run and the date of arrival. After evening tea, the dining saloon might hold lectures, charades, rounds of whist and singing. A bold man could even venture, trolling, into the ladies’ cabin. ‘This snuggery affords tolerable convenience for a little flirtation, ’ noted the Irish actor Tyrone Power, ‘if you are lucky enough to get one up.’

On clear nights, far from the obscuring lamps of shore, and in the prevailing deprived mood of being easily diverted, passengers seized on natural light shows. The sun would fall into the western horizon, a blazing ball that slowly guttered out as though being submerged in the sea. The moon would rise, never before so distinctly. Stars filled the sky, brighter and denser than when seen from land. Whole new constellations revealed themselves to the naked eye. In every direction, the sky arched all the way down to the horizon. Shooting stars zoomed around this vast inverted bowl, and the aurora borealis looked deeper and more brilliant in its roses and purples. From the Europe in 1835, cruising along at nine knots, Anna Eliot Ticknor of Boston watched the phosphorescence tossed up by the bow. The foam at the stern glittered like diamonds. Distant waves broke and lit up. Porpoises darted around, leaving trails like seaborne comets. The sails and rigging glowed. It was all so wild and beautiful.

People stayed up late because sleeping was so difficult. After the sumptuous meals and lounges, the private sleeping quarters inevitably disappointed: small, unheated, dimly lit, and poorly ventilated. ‘About as big as that allowed to a pointer in a dog-kennel,’ the English novelist Frederick Marryat groused. ‘I thought that there was more finery than comfort.’ The berth, generously called a bed, offered thin sacking over boards and a hollow down the middle that was supposed to hold the occupant in place. Emerson’s sides grew sore from rolling back and forth. ‘Oh for a bed!’ Fanny Kemble keened. ‘A real bed! Any manner of bed, but a bed on shipboard!’ Settled down for sleep, a passenger could not miss the remarkable, unexpected variety of noises on a wooden sailing ship. The waves kept up a steady background of thumps and pulses, generating constant small motions in the seams of the hull, flexing and twisting, which caused sharp creaking sounds in the jointed woodwork of bulkheads, cabin partitions and steerage bunks. Passengers lay awake in their berths, trying not to hear. The animal barnyard overhead maintained a running, distressed commentary. The mates and sailors yelled back and forth, their footfalls thuddingly heavy at night, as they changed sails and scraped down the deck with screeching holystones. Wind whistled through the rigging. Morning could take a long time coming.

The English author and protosociologist Harriet Martineau wrote the fullest, most forgiving account of a packet voyage. In August 1834, thirty-two years old, she had just completed a popular series of short stories that improbably urged the beauties of classical economics. For over two years she had written so constantly that she could not spare time even to take a walk. With that work finally done, basking in her first great success, she booked passage for New York on the Red Star Line’s United States, 140 feet and 650 tons. Martineau looked forward to a restful month on the ocean without mail, newspapers, or intruding strangers, and then would travel around America to report on that boisterous, unmatured experiment in democracy.

She catalogued the twenty-three cabin passengers on board: a Prussian physician, a New England preacher, a Boston merchant ‘with his sprightly and showy young wife’, a high-spirited young South Carolinian returning from study in Germany, a newly married couple who kept to themselves, a Scottish army officer whose many crotchets amused the young people, an elderly widow, a Scottish lady of undisclosed age, and a young man from Yorkshire. The rest were English and American merchants, transatlantic veterans not deemed interesting enough by Martineau for detailed comment. With two or three exceptions, they all mingled congenially into a single travelling party.

The voyage began slowly, dawdling through calm days of little wind. The Americans, longing for home, became anxious. Martineau seized the welcome quiet time to think and be still. On the third day the wind freshened and the sea churned, leaving the dining saloon empty at dinner as most passengers remained seasick in their berths. The next morning, Martineau rose unsteadily but forced herself to dress and go up on deck to escape the bilious sights and activities below. Captain Nathan Holdredge took her to a seat by the rail. She looked out to sea, avoided noticing the invalids strewn around the deck, and felt better after half an hour. The wind was too strong for a large, flaring bonnet, but she tried a warm black silk cap, snugly fitted, which she recommended for any woman at sea.

An uncommon traveller, Martineau had two qualities that maintained her spirits on the ocean: a bottomless curiosity and delight in new experiences, and an absolute refusal to be discouraged by anything whatever. After six days of mostly unhelpful winds, the United States was still only three hundred miles from Liverpool; at that rate the voyage would take two months. No matter. ‘Our mode of life was very simple and quiet; to me, very delightful,’ she wrote. ‘A voyage is the most pleasant pastime I have ever known.’ After breakfast, the happiest meal of the day, she sat down to write a long article, the one major task she had set herself for the trip. The New England preacher would find her a place on deck, out of the wind and sun, and there she wrote through luncheon until two o’clock. Children from the steerage peered at the famous lady writer over her shoulder and from behind chests and casks. One particular man planted himself in front of her, arms akimbo, and stared at the point of her pen, transfixed by the mysterious act of female composition.

Finished writing for the day, she took her position at the rail and exulted in the passing scene. If she wanted to be left alone, she held a volume of Shakespeare. Otherwise someone joined her. ‘I strongly suspect,’ she later reflected, ‘that those who complain of the monotony of the ocean do not use their eyes as they do on land.’ She saw Portuguese men-of-war, flying fish, dolphins, and the web-footed birds called Mother Carey’s chickens. A sail on the horizon brought everyone over to look and exclaim. Early one morning a distant ship made signals of distress. Great flutters of excitement; ‘the faces of the gentlemen began to wear, in anticipation, an expression of manly compassion.’ Captain Holdredge took in sail and hove to. The other ship, it turned out, had only lost her longitude bearing. Holdredge shouted it out, angry over losing valuable time for such a small matter, and ordered the sails up again.

The captain, kind and patient even with repeated, unanswerable questions, could never forget his mandate for maximum speed at all times. One day Martineau noticed another ship ahead on the same westerly course. She told the captain, who took a hard look through his telescope and then barked out sharp orders to the helmsman and crew. The other ship was the Montreal of the rival Black X Line. Smaller and slower, she had left England four days before the United States. An ocean race was on. ‘Our captain left the dinner-table three times this first day of the race, and was excessively anxious throughout. It was very exciting to us all.’ In three days the United States overtook the Montreal and left her far behind, slowly falling below the eastern horizon.

Most days were clear enough for visible sunsets. Everyone, from cabin and steerage alike, gathered on deck. A few climbed up into the rigging. People grew quiet except for pointing out particular features in the clouds or sea. As the sun went under, some of the party stood on tiptoes, reaching for one last glimpse. Then the normal talk and bustle resumed as walkers promenaded the deck, thirty paces up and back.

After evening tea, Martineau avoided the convivial cabin and found a place to herself at the stern. A true writer, an onlooker by nature, she craved a safe solitude from which to watch developments. She studied the wake behind, ‘a long train of pale fire’, and the sails ahead, outlined against the sky and stars. A night fog might scud through, thick and moving fast, with occasional open spaces for the moon. Lost and engrossed, utterly content, sometimes she forgot that she was at sea. Snatches of old songs floated through her head from nowhere, and the first poems she had ever loved. ‘Such are the hours when all that one has ever known or thought that is beautiful comes back softly and mysteriously.’

She did acknowledge a few discomforts at sea: rainy days that kept everyone below in stifling air, and prolonged calms that made tempers short, provoking rude behaviour at dinner and accusations of cheating at shuffleboard. In mid-ocean, a ferocious storm lasted all night, to the disquieting sounds of breaking glass and screaming women. Towards the end of the long voyage, the dried fruits got mouldy, and the kitchen ran out of cider, ale, claret and soda water. In general, though, Martineau denied the usual purported annoyances of ocean travel. She made a list, in her methodical way, of all such claimed aggravations, along with their (to her) satisfactory remedies.

1 Seasickness. (‘An annoyance scarcely to be exaggerated while it lasts.’ No remedy.)

2 The damp, clammy feel of everything one touches. (Wear gloves, and clothes too worn to be spoiled. ‘In this latter device nearly the whole company were so accomplished that it was hard to say who excelled.’)

3 Lack of room. (Put everything away in tight, orderly fashion.)

4 The candles flare, dribble wax, and look untidy. (Avoid looking at candles; go to the stern at night, which has its own, better lights.)

5 The seats and beds are too hard. (Have patience. Try air cushions.)

6 Freshwater use is limited. (Bathe in seawater, and drink cider at dinner.)

7 The cider may run out. (Switch to other beverages.)

8 The noise of sailors scraping the deck. (Again, patience; because the deck must be scraped.)

9 The clamor overhead when the sails are shifted at night. (Go back to sleep.)

10 Sour bread. (Eat biscuits.)

11 Getting sunburned. (Don’t look in a mirror.)

Not even the North Atlantic Ocean could daunt such a temperament. (It should be noted that Martineau was partly deaf and therefore protected from the worst noises at sea.) After the restive final stretches of the passage, everyone’s spirits rose as the ship approached America. People changed into their best clothes, not seen for weeks, in preparation for landing. The United States reached New York after forty-two days: ‘a long but agreeable voyage,’ she insisted.

By the late 1830s, twenty packet ships were running from New York to Liverpool, twelve more to London, and sixteen to Le Havre. Every month, a dozen packets left New York for Europe and a dozen more arrived; an average of one ship every thirty hours, all year long, regardless of the wind and weather. The packets suffered occasional collisions and founderings at sea, but only two accidents caused any loss of life over the first two decades. The Albion of the Black Ball Line sank off Ireland in 1822, killing forty-six people, and four years later the Crisis of the Black X Line disappeared on a westbound run with her crew and about a dozen passengers. Those two disasters aside, the packets had compiled – for the time – a remarkable record of fast, safe, predictable transatlantic travel.

According to testimony from both sides of the ocean, Americans were building and running the finest sailing ships in the world. A London newspaper in 1834, after comparing the safety records of the New York packets and the British government’s mail ships, urged the Admiralty to buy American vessels. In 1836, a committee of the British Parliament inquiring into the problem of shipwrecks presented evidence that American ships were better built than their British counterparts (and thus preferred by shippers and insurance agents), and that American commanders and officers were more educated and competent and American seamen more carefully selected, more efficient, and better paid – to the point that the best British sailors were defecting to American ships. American authorities could only happily agree. Matthew Maury, an American naval officer and one of the founders of oceanography, praised the New York packets in 1839 in language of patriotic but unchallenged hyperbole: ‘For strength, safety, fleetness and beauty; and for a combination of all the requisites of a good ship, in such admirable proportions, no nation can boast of vessels, public or private, comparable to them.’

The packets became, in some measure, the victims of their own success. They had created the very notion of rapid technical improvement in transatlantic travel. Passengers came to expect bigger, faster ships every few years. The wind, however, could not be improved: it blew hard or not at all, from the east or west, but always beyond any human control. Sailing ships could only depart on a scheduled date. The time of arrival might then vary by weeks, depending on the ocean’s vagaries. Steam power extended the possibility of keeping a ship on schedule, or nearly so, at both ends of the passage. But Americans became so proficient and applauded at turning out wooden sailing ships that, as time passed, they – in complacency and inertia – kept building those ships for too long, far past their technological prime. In Great Britain, especially in Scotland, other men were about to take over the leadership of transatlantic shipbuilding.

2. Steam on Water

Steam power drove both the Industrial Revolution and the progressive nineteenth century. Of all the thousands of inventions that have created the pervasive material modernity of the past two hundred years, the steam engine was the first cause, the prime mover and sine qua non. Unlike muscle power, it never tired or slept or refused to obey. Unlike waterpower, its immediate predecessor, it ran in all seasons and weathers, always the same. Unlike the wind, it responded tractably to human will and imagination: turning on and off, modulating smoothly from the finest delicacy to greatest force, ever under responsive control. ‘It is impossible to contemplate, without a feeling of exultation, this wonder of modern art,’ the Quarterly Review of London declared in 1830. After first transforming mining, manufacturing and transportation, from those bases the steam engine eventually reached into the smallest aspects of everyday life. Seen from the distant perspective of two centuries later, the great Steam Age looks like an unbroken, triumphal march.

Seen closer at hand, the application of steam power to any given field was a messy process overflowing with false starts and repeated, redundant discoveries. The most baffling aspect of inventing a steamboat, it turned out, did not involve the engine, fuel, boiler or hull. Instead it came down to the propelling mechanism, the essential driving link between the steam engine and the water. The challenge of how to contrive a harnessing device that would let an engine power a boat forward, even against winds and tides, had no obvious, inevitable solution. Many lone tinkerers in Europe and America tried to solve the puzzle and subsided in defeat. One such inventor worked out key practical breakthroughs and even built and ran an influential steamboat; but he was overwhelmed by unrelated forces beyond his ken, became discouraged, and died broke and unappreciated. Another pioneer took the work of this inventor and others without giving credit, later lied about it, and finally perjured and embarrassed himself; but he also thereby acquired great fame and fortune, and to this day retains a thumping historical reputation as the true father of steam navigation. The story has its ironies.

The steam engine and steamboat both emerged from a visible chain of invention: a series of innovators, aware of earlier work in the field and consciously building on it, adding and subtracting and thus moving the whole process forward by small increments until the machine ran right. The final, laborious success when ultimately achieved was descended from many parents, leading to bitter quarrels and lawsuits over who should get the credit and rewards.

For thousands of years, unconnected individuals had puzzled over how to control and use the power of steam. Nothing important happened until Thomas Newcomen started a chain of invention in 1712. An ironmonger in southwestern England, Newcomen made tools for the tin miners of Cornwall. As mines were dug deeper, they were flooded with groundwater, overwhelming any manual or horse-driven pumps. Newcomen invented a steam-powered mine drainer: a large horizontal beam, pivoting at the middle, linked to a water pump at one end and a vertical piston and cylinder at the other. Steam entered the cylinder at the bottom and drove the piston upward; at the top of the stroke, cold water sprayed into the cylinder below the piston condensed the vapour back into liquid form, creating a partial vacuum which pulled the piston back down to repeat the cycle. The engine worked – but was bulky, expensive, and inefficient. ‘It takes an iron mine to build a Newcomen engine,’ the saying went, ‘and a coal mine to keep it going.’

Skip ahead to a classic moment in the history of modernity. In the winter of 1763-64, a Scottish instrument maker at Glasgow University was asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine. James Watt, then twenty-eight years old, mended the model and started pondering the general problem of steam power, especially the obvious waste and inefficiency of the Newcomen design. He tried making the boiler surface larger, and placing the fire in the middle of the water supply, and even using wooden pipes and boilers (because they would conduct and lose less heat than metal components). One Sunday early in 1765, while walking across Glasgow green, Watt finally got it: create a separate condenser so the cylinder could remain at essentially the same temperature throughout the cycle, saving time and fuel because no steam would be lost to condensation from entering a cold cylinder. ‘I can think of nothing else but this machine,’ Watt informed a friend. ‘Write me…if any part of what you have to tell me concerns the fire-engine.’

For the next crucial step, moving from inspiration to application, Watt needed help. Beset all his life by poor health and severe headaches, timid by nature and easily discouraged, Watt dealt uncertainly with the world outside his workshop. ‘Jamie is a queer lad,’ noted the wife of an associate. Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer, offered to become ‘a midwife to ease you of your burthen’, as he put it to Watt, ‘and to introduce your brat into the world.’ Boulton had more experience than Watt in the metal industry, ready access to money, and many useful contacts. Watt joined Boulton as partners in Birmingham. With a patent obtained in 1769, and later extended, they essentially controlled steamengine technology for the next three decades. Watt and Boulton formed the first and most important of the many talent-meshing teams of engineer and entrepreneur that later propelled the Industrial Revolution.

With Boulton in the background, prodding and executing, Watt made further improvements, notably a double-acting cylinder whereby steam alternately drove the piston in both directions, yielding two power strokes in each cycle. He also devised linkages and gearings to convert the piston’s in-and-out reciprocating action to a rotary motion that could power the machinery of mills and factories. ‘The people in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, are Steam Mill Mad,’ Boulton advised Watt, ‘and therefore let us be wise and take the advantage.’

Amid his great success, Watt never stopped fretting about competitors and potential patent infringers. To protect himself and his inventions from the onrushing progress of modernity, he grew defensive and started resisting improvements. He quashed innovations in his own shop (especially efforts to raise boiler pressures and efficiencies beyond a modest four pounds per square inch), refused to license others to use his refinements, and hounded anybody else who dared to build a steam engine. The exploding genie of constant, rapid technological change – which his steam engine had midwifed – finally turned and overwhelmed him. ‘I do not think that we are safe a day to an end in this enterprizing age,’ he warned Boulton in 1782. ‘One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them.…It is with the utmost difficulty I can hatch anything new.’ Beset by this immobilizing difficulty, losing his fragile nerve, he stopped trying. But his engine and its revolutionary impacts steamed ahead, gathering speed.

From the 1780s on, various lone inventors in France, Great Britain and the United States tried to create a steamboat. For the propelling device, some of these pioneers used an application of the familiar waterpower wheel, which converted a stream of water into rotary motion to run a mill or factory: instead of water moving the wheel, the process was reversed so the engine-driven paddle wheel moved the surrounding water and thus the boat. But a paddle wheel was only one of several unsatisfactory early alternatives. Other propelling mechanisms given trials included a set of vertical oars that imitated manual rowing action (by the American John Fitch, in 1786), a jet of water forcefully expelled at the stern (by another American, James Rumsey, in 1787), and palmipedes, or duck-footed paddles (by the Earl of Stanhope, in London in 1790). None of these early attempts worked very well or led to any ongoing commercial success. Their inventors tinkered in general isolation from each other, without knowing about or profiting from what their predecessors had done. Steamboats as yet lacked a chain of invention.

William Symington started such a chain through his own inventions and by their later impact on others. He was another Scotsman, born in 1764 in Lanarkshire, south of Glasgow. Educated for the ministry, he was instead caught up in the inventive currents then starting to swirl around southern Scotland. ‘My natural turn for mechanical philosophy led me to change my object,’ he recalled, ‘and to direct my studies to the exercise of the profession of a civil engineer.’ He made some improvements in the steam engine – earning the suspicion of James Watt – and crafted a model of a steam carriage for road travel. This model brought him to the attention of Patrick Miller, a retired Edinburgh banker who had devised a manually powered paddleboat.

In 1788 Miller hired Symington to build and install a steam engine in this vessel. Symington used his own design, an engine with two cylinders of four-inch diameter and eighteen-inch stroke. A second version with a larger engine had a successful trial a year later, carrying seven passengers at five miles an hour. But this success drew potential legal action by the ever-vigilant Watt for alleged patent infringement. After Miller lost interest in the experiments and withdrew his financial support, Symington dropped his steamboat efforts for a decade and made a living by building mining machinery.

The expiration of Watt’s patent in 1800 released a flood of pent-up inventive energy. Thomas, Lord Dundas of Kerse, a large shareholder in the Forth and Clyde Canal, remembered Symington’s experiments of the late 1780s. The canal, completed in 1790, stretched thirty-five miles from the River Forth near Edinburgh to the River Clyde near Glasgow, providing a water link across Scotland between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The canal’s average width of about fifty-six feet left little room for a sailing vessel to tack back and forth, so most of the barge traffic was drawn by horses along a tow path. Lord Dundas provided Symington initial seed money for a canal steamer.

In June 1801, Symington’s first new prototype ran successfully for two or three miles on the River Carron to Grangemouth. ‘The nice and effectual manner in which the machinery is applied,’ a Glasgow newspaper commented, ‘is an additional proof of the merit of Mr Symington, the engineer, and the whole plan is highly honourable to Lord Dundas.’ That autumn Symington patented his novel arrangement of a connecting rod and crank between the engine and paddle wheel shaft.

A second prototype, larger and more powerful, was named the Charlotte Dundas after the sponsor’s wife and daughter, who shared the name. The vessel was a broad-beamed towboat, fifty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide, powered by a one-cylinder engine driving a paddle wheel in a recess at the stern. The engine was built at a local foundry, the Carron Works, with a piston twenty-two inches in diameter and a four-foot stroke: an enormous increase over Symington’s first steamboat engine of 1788. His solution to the besetting early problem of paddle wheels – the dilemma that drove other pioneers to water jets and palmipedes – was to elevate the wheel quite high above the water. When a wheel was submerged to its midpoint, half in and half out of the water, much of its driving motion was wasted. A paddle entered the water in a horizontal position, slapping downward, and did no useful propelling work until it had run through almost forty-five degrees of its rotation. Only at the bottom of the cycle was it actually propelling the boat forward. On the back stroke, the process was reversed, as for the final forty-five degrees the paddle pushed largely upward until it cleared the surface. About half its energy simply thrashed the water up and down to no purpose. To avoid this waste, Symington placed the eight-bladed wheel of the Charlotte Dundas so high in the hull that only three of the paddles reached the water at once, at the bottom of the cycle, all of them working together to move the boat forward.

As Symington later told the story, in March 1802 the Charlotte Dundas took on board Lord Dundas, his son Captain George H. L. Dundas of the Royal Navy, and others, and towed two loaded vessels of seventy tons each a distance of nineteen and a half miles along the canal in six hours, against a strong head wind. ‘This experiment not only satisfied me, but every person who witnessed it, of the utility of steam navigation, ’ Symington later wrote. But the canal proprietors worried that the steamboat’s agitation and wake would harm the banks of the canal, and so rejected the plan. Lord Dundas then arranged for Symington to meet the Duke of Bridgewater, the leading canal entrepreneur in England. The duke at once ordered eight of Symington’s vessels – but he soon died, cancelling the deal. This double rejection after apparent successes left Symington too disheartened to persist. ‘This so affected me,’ he recalled, ‘that probably I did not use the energy I otherwise might have done to introduce my invention to public notice.’

This version of events has become the standard historical account, but it is wrong in certain particulars. Drawing from memory some twenty-five years later, Symington compressed two separate trials into a single event. On 4 January 1803, the Charlotte Dundas, with the two Dundases and others on board, towed a 100-ton boat from Stockingfield to Port Dundas at three miles an hour ‘amidst a very large concourse of people’, according to a newspaper report, ‘who were exceedingly well pleased with the performance.’ On 28 March 1803, the steamboat also towed two loaded vessels, a combined 130 tons, from Lock 20 on the canal to Port Dundas, eighteen and a half miles in nine hours and fifteen minutes – a speed about 40 per cent slower than Symington later remembered. For this trial he had incorporated suggestions by Captain George Dundas for how to manage the tow lines around sharp bends in the canal. The Glasgow Herald and Advertiser praised ‘the very appropriate mode in which the machinery is constructed, and the simple yet effectual manner its power is applied in giving motion to the vessel’. The newspaper also credited Lord Dundas for his generous financial support and perseverance in the ‘costly experiments’.

A few days later, the Herald and Advertiser published a testy letter from a Forth and Clyde Canal proprietor which fleshes out Symington’s later explanation of why his steamboat was banned from the canal. The letter writer pointed out that a vessel passing through one of the canal’s thirty-nine locks used a lockful of water, so a towboat plus barge consumed twice as much water (and the canal had recently been closed by low water); that the Charlotte Dundas, contrary to another report, would save no money over tow horses given her initial expense, the cost of coal, her crew, and general wear and tear; and that Symington’s earlier steamboat of 1801 could not run with any ice in the canal, and this problem had perhaps not yet been solved. After all these objections, the proprietor added, ‘It will be observed too, that the motion of the boat raises such an agitation in the water, as to injure the banks.’ In conclusion – and this probably clinched the matter – the writer regretted that Lord Dundas had been given all the public credit for funding Symington’s efforts. ‘It should have been added, that the Proprietors of the Forth and Clyde Navigation have already paid about £1700. for these experiments of this ingenious mechanic, without reaping any benefit from them, and without even getting any credit for their liberality.’

Given this bristling mixture of unmet criticisms and wounded, unappreciated generosity, and (one may assume) competitive resistance by the local owners of horses and stables, it is not surprising that Symington got no farther with the canal proprietors. Hoping for other wisps of interest in the Charlotte Dundas from somebody else, he laid her up near the canal at Bainsford. There she lingered on for almost sixty years, rotting and rusting away, a waning curiosity of the early steam age. Like James Watt, Symington was a gifted inventor saddled with a fainthearted personality, too easily deflected from his purposes. His singular misfortune was that – unlike Watt – he never found his Matthew Boulton.

Robert Fulton, the American painter and inventor, knew all the precedents in steam navigation. During twenty years spent abroad, in England and France, he studied the efforts of other steamboat pioneers and tried out his own improvements. In contrast with most of the other innovators, he was blessed with an overpowering confidence and persistence which, along with good looks and a gift for friendship, brought him the continuing support of rich, powerful patrons. Ultimately he returned to America to build and run the first commercially successful steamboat. Today most Americans consider him the principal originator of steam power on water. The process by which he achieved this reputation – and thus the reputation itself – demands a renewed examination.

For most of his two decades abroad, Fulton was preoccupied with other inventions than a steamboat. Living in France from 1797 to 1804, he devoted himself to an elaborate, quixotic, finally unworkable scheme for submarines and explosive mines, intended to revolutionize naval warfare. His intermittent interest in steamboats was revived when Robert R. Livingston arrived in Paris late in 1801 as the US minister to France. A man of enormous wealth and political influence in New York, Livingston hoped to develop a steamboat service for the Hudson River back home. Fulton had found his final, most significant patron.

During the summer of 1802, Fulton conducted a series of trials with a model boat powered by a clock spring. After considering all the propelling devices used by his predecessors, he settled on an endless chain with paddles or buckets attached to it. Resembling the tread of a modern tank or bulldozer, the chain was draped over two wheels across the side of the model, dipping into and seizing the water at the bottom of its cycle. Livingston, drawing from his own previous sallies at steamboat invention, preferred paddle wheels; but after Fulton reported on his trials with the model, arguing his case quite vehemently, Livingston was converted to the endless chain. In October 1802 the two men signed an agreement to build a large steamboat in New York, designed for the Hudson River traffic to Albany.

Now came a surprising, puzzling twist in the story. At some point that autumn, after insisting so aggressively on the superiority of his endless chain, Fulton decided to adopt paddle wheels as his propelling device. His biographers have guessed that Fulton switched to avoid infringing a French patent, granted earlier that year to an inventor named Desblancs, for a similar steamboat with an endless chain. But Fulton had learned of this patent in June, and as late as September he was nonetheless still urging his own version of an endless chain. Something else must have persuaded him to change this crucial aspect of his design.

A possible explanation was later provided by William Symington. As he told the story in the 1820s, Fulton had come to Scotland to see one of Symington’s vessels, explaining that he intended to return to America to build a steamboat, and that his project could lead to a rewarding business for Symington as the inventor. Flattered and intrigued, Symington ordered steam up in his paddle wheeler and took Fulton and others for a ride. From Lock 18 on the Forth and Clyde Canal, they went four miles west and back in one hour and twenty minutes, at an average speed of six miles an hour – ‘to the great astonishment of Mr. Fulton and the other gentlemen present’, according to Symington. Fulton asked questions, took notes, and made sketches of the steamboat. After this single encounter, Symington recalled, he never saw or heard from Fulton again.

The dating of Fulton’s visit presents problems. Symington placed it in July 1801 or July 1802. In 1801, however, France and England were at war, severely limiting travel between the two countries. Fulton would have had great difficulty in making his way from France to Scotland; at the time he was also still quite focused on his submarine and mines, to the exclusion of other interests. The Peace of Amiens in March 1802 allowed a brief lull in hostilities, easing travel restrictions. By then Fulton, with Livingston’s beckoning patronage, had turned his attention nearly full-time to inventing a steamboat. He spent the summer of 1802 at a resort in the Vosges Mountains of northeast France, too far from the English Channel for a convenient trip to Scotland. That autumn he was back in Paris, intent on his steamboat. The most probable date of Fulton’s encounter with Symington is thus the autumn of 1802, when the Charlotte Dundas was almost ready for her first major trial of January 1803. The journey from Paris took three days to London, then about sixty hours by mail coach to Glasgow. He could have made the round-trip in two weeks.

With travel again flowing between France and England, Paris was full of British tourists from whom Fulton or the widely acquainted Livingston might have heard about Symington’s boat. A trip to England was clearly on Fulton’s mind that autumn. His friend Joel Barlow, also interested in promoting a joint steamboat scheme, had recently urged Fulton to go to England ‘silent and steady… quiet and quick’ to obtain a steam engine. His formal agreement with Livingston in October also bound Fulton to go ‘immediately’ to England for the same purpose. Fulton left no surviving record of such a trip at that time. But he could have gone secretly – silent and steady, quiet and quick – on steamboat business, especially to examine the Charlotte Dundas, the most promising such experiment in the world at that time. In late September, he was conspicuously absent from a dinner party given in Paris by the painter Benjamin West. Fulton was a close friend to West, his main mentor in painting. Joel Barlow and his wife, with whom Fulton lived in a ménage à trois, did attend the dinner. If Fulton had been in Paris, he surely would have joined the party. Perhaps he was then quietly off to Scotland.

This mystery turns on hard questions about Fulton’s character. Could he have made a clandestine trip to Scotland, borrowed from Symington’s work, and later hidden the entire episode? His subsequent history of lies and deceit suggests that he might have. In 1806, for example, he claimed in writing that he had held an American steamboat patent for fourteen years, and that some $280,000 had been subscribed to build twenty of his vessels for service on the Mississippi River – none of which was even remotely true. Later, when embroiled in patent controversies, he forged a ‘copy’ of a drawing he had supposedly made in June 1802 of a Hudson River steamboat with paddle wheels, at a time when he was actually still committed to an endless chain for propulsion. He also forged a letter, which he dated to 1793, about his supposed interest in paddle wheels at that time. In 1815, shortly before his death, he was caught committing perjury with this letter. All these manipulations were intentional, self-serving lies on Fulton’s part.

Symington’s later recollections, by contrast, erred in some details, but the essence of his account of the Charlotte Dundas is verifiably true. His version of the Fulton story was also corroborated by Symington’s engine man, Robert Weir. In 1824, after the matter had become controversial, Weir signed a sworn affidavit that he had fired up the boiler of the Charlotte Dundas on the occasion of Fulton’s visit and had heard Fulton identify himself by name and nationality. After their brisk eight-mile demonstration, according to Weir, Symington had lamented the difficulty of running his steamboat through the narrow Forth and Clyde Canal, and Fulton had replied that the broad rivers of America would present no such problem. The details and certainty of Weir’s affidavit seem authentic.

Fulton’s own explanation of how he converted to paddle wheels, later given under duress, must be weighed carefully. In 1811 he asked Joel Barlow to endorse his version of certain events for a potential patent lawsuit. ‘I want your deposition as follows,’ he instructed: that in the autumn of 1802, while living at Barlow’s home in Paris, he had conducted experiments with various propelling devices, which by Christmastime had convinced him to adopt paddle wheels. ‘You will have this copied on foolscap,’ Fulton told Barlow, ‘and sware to it.’ Barlow apparently complied. It was at about this time that Fulton also forged other documents to bolster his claims of steamboat originality.

The smoking gun in this mystery is the vessels that Symington and Fulton actually produced. In January 1803 Fulton drew up the plans for his first steamboat. Overtly she did not much resemble the Charlotte Dundas. long and lean instead of short and stubby, with a different arrangement of the machinery and a distinct means of converting the engine’s reciprocating action to rotary motion. But in four crucial respects the boats may be linked. In both cases the engine’s cylinder was put in the exact centre of the hull, with the boiler behind it. Like the Charlotte Dundas, and unlike the vessel recently proposed in his agreement with Livingston, Fulton’s first steamboat was a towboat, with room on board just for the machinery, fuel and crew. Both vessels were propelled by paddle wheels: Symington’s by a single wheel at the stern, Fulton’s by two wheels attached to the sides. And – the most telling detail – Fulton’s paddle wheels were placed quite high in the boat, as in the Charlotte Dundas, so that only three paddles were under water at once, avoiding the wasted up-and-down motions of a more deeply immersed wheel.

It seems more than probable that Fulton did see the Charlotte Dundas and borrow from her design without ever acknowledging the debt. His first steamboat, built to the plans of January 1803, underwent a successful trial on the Seine later that year. Fulton eventually returned to the United States and, with Livingston’s support and a Boulton and Watt engine imported from England, made the paddle wheel steamboat later known to history as the Clermont. Her machinery and paddles closely resembled those of Fulton’s first steamboat of 1803 – and therefore may also be linked to the Charlotte Dundas. With the Clermont and her successors, Fulton ran a profitable steamboat service between Albany and New York City, marking the first sustained commercial use of steam navigation. The unfortunate Symington faded into obscurity and died penniless in 1831.

From this point on, geography largely determined the separate development of steamboats in America and Great Britain. In the United States, with its vast internal networks of inland lakes and long, broad, navigable rivers, steam navigation typically took the form of riverboats: large, fragile craft of shallow draught, driven at top speed by high-pressure boilers prone to explosion and disaster. In Britain, the characteristic steamboats were smaller and slower but safer, with low-pressure boilers, and sturdy hulls and high bulwarks designed to survive the heavier seas of coastal and ocean traffic. The future of Atlantic Ocean steamships would unfold mostly in the British Isles.

William Symington’s many frustrations had an apparent chilling effect on steamboat building in Great Britain. After he finally laid up his unwanted creation at Bainsford, nine years passed before another British steamboat was launched. The Comet, completed in the summer of 1812, became the first passenger steamer in Europe. Her planner and owner, Henry Bell, had been interested in steam navigation for over two decades. But his mercurial nature – his ‘restless volatile genius’, as a friendly biographer put it, ‘flying from one daring scheme to another’ – kept Bell pushing on to the next experiment before finishing his last one. It took him a long time to settle down and produce his first actual steamboat.

Like Watt and Symington, Bell was a Scotsman, born in 1767 near Linlithgow, west of Edinburgh. He came from a family of millwrights and was trained as a mason, millwright and shipbuilder, with early stints in Glasgow and London. (‘I was not a self-taught engineer, as some of my friends have supposed,’ he later insisted.) Settled in Glasgow, he built houses and public works and started to focus intermittently on steamboats around 1800, after Watt’s patent expired. Bell tried to interest various patrons and governments but got no favourable responses. He hung around the Carron Works when the engine and machinery of the Charlotte Dundas were being constructed, to the point even of making himself a nuisance to the workmen. Later he repeatedly inspected Symington’s boat at Bainsford.

When Bell became the owner of the Baths Hotel in the resort town of Helensburgh, on the Clyde some twenty miles west of Glasgow, he acquired the necessary practical goad that pushed him finally to build a steamboat – for bringing Glaswegian customers out to his hotel. The Clyde, as yet undredged, was then a winding, shallow stream, often filled with sandbanks. Sailing boats drawing only five feet still might be grounded for an hour or two; passengers would be obliged to run on deck from side to side, rocking the hull and loosening the keel from the sand. To reach Glasgow, at the river’s eastern and narrowest point, Bell’s steamboat for the Clyde had to be small.

In the autumn of 1811 he contracted with John Wood, a shipbuilder in Port Glasgow, for a hull forty-two and a half feet long, eleven and a half feet wide, and five and a half feet deep, and a total capacity of only twenty-five tons. John Robertson of Glasgow, a builder of textile-mill machinery, made the engine: a cylinder eleven inches in diameter, stroke of sixteen inches, and four horsepower. Four small paddle wheels hung on the boat’s sides. Her smokestack at the bow doubled as the mast for a single square sail (as on an old Viking ship). The Comet was named not to suggest her speed but in tribute to Halley’s Comet, recently visible in the night sky. Launched in July 1812, she began her Glasgow to Helensburgh to Greenock service a month later. As she puffed along the river, local boys would run down to the water’s edge, expecting or hoping to see her blow up. She made the trip three times a week in each direction, covering the twenty-six miles to Greenock reliably in four hours, sometimes under three and a half – as fast as horse-drawn travel by land, and cheaper and much more comfortable than heavy, unsprung vehicles on bad roads. Within a year, four road coaches that had been taking passengers to Greenock stopped running for lack of business.

This quick success provoked a productive steamboat competition. For some years before the Comet, Bell had worked on steam navigation designs with John Thomson, a Glasgow engineer. Thomson had made sketches of a boiler and machinery, and he expected to help Bell produce his steamboat. But Bell instead went ahead on his own, leaving Thomson angry and disappointed. He took his revenge by building a bigger, faster boat, the Elizabeth. Also constructed by John Wood, she was fifty-nine feet long by twelve feet wide, and forty tons, with a nine-horsepower engine. Her cabin included such touches of luxury as carpets and a sofa, windows with tasselled curtains and velvet cornices, and even a small shelf of books. The Elizabeth ran from Glasgow to Greenock and back every day, instead of only thrice weekly, carrying as many as one hundred passengers at speeds up to nine miles an hour, cutting steadily into Henry Bell’s business.

Over the next few years, steamboats appeared on most of the major rivers of Great Britain. Just before the first railroads, they started to speed and discipline the pace of life, ratcheting up to the predictable, rationalized clock time of the Industrial Revolution. Steamboats ran at man’s pleasure, ploughing along through adverse winds and waves, coming and going as ordered. A clock soon became a necessary instrument for doing business. ‘The merchant, knowing the time of the tide, can count to an hour, in ordinary weather, when his goods will arrive; and will not be disappointed in one case out of thirty’ Henry Bell asserted. ‘I expect in a short time to see all our ferries, and our coasting trade carried on by the aid of steam-vessels.’

In May 1815, the first long ocean passage by a steamboat in Europe tested steam’s potential for that coasting trade. The Glasgow (later renamed the Thames) had been built by John Wood a year earlier. She showed steady progress in size and power: seventy-two feet long by fifteen feet wide, sixteen horsepower, and seventy-four tons. Sold to London interests for service on the Thames, she put to sea just for delivery to her new owners, not to start a regular ocean service between Scotland and England. Under the command of George Dodd, a young architect and civil engineer, she set forth from Glasgow with an eight-man crew of a master, four sailors, and a cabin boy – and a smith and fireman for the engine.

The Glasgow ran easily down the Firth of Clyde into the narrow channel between Scotland and Ireland. Here she encountered more difficult sailing than anything normally seen on the Clyde, as the ebb tide collided with strong swells sweeping in from the North Atlantic. Unable to make progress, Captain Dodd had to seek shelter in Loch Ryan. The Glasgow ventured out again, was tossed around, and nearly wrecked on the rocky Irish coast. She stopped at Dublin for several days of rest and repairs. Naval officers came to see her, agreeing that she would probably not survive a true stormy sea and had better hug the shore. Watched by thousands of spectators ranged along her way, she left Ireland with just two brave passengers for London.

Away from the coast in the Irish Sea, she again met heavy swells. ‘The movement of the vessel differed entirely from that of one pushed by sails or oars,’ noted Isaac Weld, one of the passengers. ‘The action of the wheels upon the water on both sides, prevented rolling; the vessel floated on the summit of the waves, like a sea-bird. The most disagreeable movement took place when the waves struck the ship crossways; but here too its particular construction gave it a great advantage; for the cages which contained the wheels acted like so many buoys.’ As water flooded into the paddle box on the windward side, the compressed air exploded in an alarming report whose percussive force made the whole boat tremble. This noise exploded again, by reaction, on the other side of the Glasgow, then again, much diminished, on the first side. At this point she at least stopped rolling for a while. ‘During the rest of the voyage,’ according to Weld, ‘the vessel made what the sailors call, a dry way, that is, it danced so lightly over the waves, that it never took in one; and in all the passage we were not once wet…which could not be expected in any common ship.’

As they neared Wexford, at the southeastern corner of Ireland, the Glasgow’s thick coal smoke convinced local pilots that the approaching boat was on fire. They scrambled out to sea, expecting to save lives and perhaps seize some profitable salvage – and were surprised and disappointed that the Glasgow was just steaming along in safety. She crossed St George’s Channel to England, near Cape St David, and was again greeted by a flotilla of would-be rescuers not anticipating a smoking steamboat in those waters. Heavy seas tossed up waves so high that at times the crew of the Glasgow could not see the coast. Captain Dodd picked his way through, leaving far behind a fleet of sailing vessels trying to keep pace. They stopped for two days at Milford Haven for inspections and to scrape the saltwater scale from the boiler, a problem not encountered when sailing freshwater rivers.

Rounding Cape Cornwall into the English Channel, they encountered their highest swells yet. ‘It seemed impossible to pass,’ Weld recalled. ‘The vessel appeared to suffer… Night approached, and no harbour presented itself, except that which we had quitted, and which was already too distant.’ Captain Dodd hoisted sail, which helped steady her, and struggled against the waves for hours until reaching calmer waters. The rest of the trip was smooth and easy. At Portsmouth, tens of thousands of people came out to stand back and be amazed. The Glasgow reached the mouth of the Thames on 11 June, intact and in good order. She had covered 760 miles in a bit more than 121 hours of actual sailing time, spread over almost three weeks.

The voyage showed that a long ocean passage by steamboat was in fact feasible – though not as yet on a routine basis. The apparently insoluble limitation remained the fuel supply. The Glasgow burned two tons of coal every twenty-four hours. Coal was expensive and bulky, requiring inordinate storage space aboard ship and, therefore, frequent landfalls for refuelling. An extended ocean voyage across open water with no coaling stops was still impossible, awaiting bigger ships and the invention of better engines and boilers. It would be more than two decades before a steam vessel could cross the North Atlantic under sustained power.

Scotland produced the first British steamboats and then dominated that field ever after. By 1822, forty-eight steamers had been launched from the Clyde, more than from any other part of the country. Shipbuilders and marine engineers along the Clyde drew from well-entrenched west-of-Scotland traditions of millwrighting, iron smelting and founding, and engineering. Glasgow also lay at the western end of the geologic formation known as the Clyde Basin, rich in coal and iron deposits. All the necessary human and mineral resources were at hand. The river itself was periodically diked and deepened, allowing access all the way to Glasgow for even the newest, biggest steamships. In these burgeoning circumstances, the Napier and Elder families established durable steam shipbuilding dynasties. With an uncanny (and canny) consistency that came to resemble an orderly series of monarchical successions, these two families, their associates, and their lineal descendants in other firms would build and engine most of the notable Atlantic steamships of the nineteenth century.

David Napier, the first of this line, was born in 1790 in Dumbarton, on the Clyde about halfway between Glasgow and Greenock. The men in his family worked as blacksmiths and iron founders. He attended school briefly, acquiring a little Latin and French, but was inevitably bound for his father’s workshop. In 1803 he glimpsed his future when he saw the Charlotte Dundas at Port Dundas, near Glasgow. ‘Although then only twelve years of age,’ he recalled a half-century later, ‘having been reared among engines and machinery, I took particular notice of it.’ David went along when his father moved the family business to a foundry on Howard Street in Glasgow. At the age of twenty, after his father’s death, he took over. In another brush with British steamboat history, he built the boiler for Henry Bell’s Comet. ‘Not having been accustomed to make boilers with internal flues,’ he noted, ‘we made them first of cast iron but finding that would not do we tried our hand with malleable iron and ultimately succeeded, with the aid of a liberal supply of horse dung, in getting the boiler filled.’ (Napier never forgot that Bell had neglected to pay him for it.)

After the Glasgow’s pioneering voyage from the Clyde to the Thames, Napier set out to build a steamboat designed for regular ocean service. He studied the sailing packets that took up to a week to run from Glasgow to Belfast, the shapes of their bows and how they moved through the high swells of the Irish Sea. Under sail, the masts acted like tall levers, pushing down the forward part of the hull and demanding extra buoyancy there. Did steam propulsion therefore call for a different kind of hull? Napier tried various models in a tank of water. Eventually he decided to slice the full, rounded bow of the sailing packets into a sharper, finer wedge shape for his steamboats. The Rob Roy, the first vessel so designed, was built by his kinsman William Denny of Dumbarton in 1818. She was eighty feet long and eighty-eight tons, with a thirty-horsepower engine by Napier. Under Napier’s own command – he would try his hand at anything – she ran from Dublin to Greenock in an unprecedented twenty-six hours. For two years the Rob Roy gave reliable service between Greenock and Belfast, then was transferred to the English Channel to run between Dover and Calais.

Over the next few years Napier built progressively larger vessels, up to the 240-ton, 70-horsepower Superb and the 350-ton, 100-horsepower Majestic, for other packet lines to Dublin and Liverpool. These ocean steamers were bigger, stronger, and more powerful than anything else yet built in Great Britain. Their success meant that steamboats were starting to evolve into steamships – though still, for the time being, with the old masts and sails and wooden hulls. ‘I was the first that successfully established steam packets in the open sea,’ Napier claimed in 1822, when obliged to brag by competing claims on behalf of Boulton and Watt. ‘The Superb is now plying the third year between Greenock and Liverpool, and not a single article of her machinery has ever given way, although she has been out in the worst of weather… The truth is, I have made nearly double the number of engines for boats going to sea that Mr. Watt has, and their machinery has not in a single instance been so far deranged as to prevent them from making their passage in a reasonable time.’

As engineer, shipowner, packet entrepreneur and sometime ship captain, Napier was forever popping with ideas and inventions. He pushed the evolving steamship forms to their limits, skirting and sometimes exceeding those vague boundaries at which novelty became dangerous. For all his mechanical brilliance, he lacked a sense of due restraint and proportion. He charged ahead like a dashing cavalry regiment, leaving to humbler foot soldiers the grubby tasks of mopping up and administering details. In time he yielded the leadership of Clyde steamship engineering to his cousin Robert, who was less inventive and dazzling but more patient and meticulous and, ultimately, more sound and substantial.

Robert Napier was born in Dumbarton in 1791 with, as he liked to say, a hammer in his hand, the son and grandson of blacksmiths. Of Robert and his three brothers, one became a minister while the others followed family tradition into smithing and millwrighting. At the Dumbarton grammar school, Robert received a liberal education, supplemented by outside lessons in mechanical drawing which gave him a lifelong taste for fine paintings and beautiful objects. His father groomed him for college, but Robert preferred to apprentice in the family workshop. He excelled at ornamental ironwork, fashioning metal into art. In his spare time he made tools and guns, and practised drawing. At twenty he took off for Edinburgh, armed with an allowance of five pounds from his father and a certificate of good character from the minister of his parish. Soon he was back to work briefly for his father and then left home for good, this time to Glasgow. His artistic side may have craved the heady intellectual ferment of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment, but he was an engineer at heart, at home on the Clyde.

Bankrolled by fifty pounds from his father, in 1815 he bought the tools and goodwill of a small blacksmith shop. By making millwheels and tools for tinsmiths, he prospered enough to marry his first cousin Isabella Napier three years later. The marriage brought him into closer contact with her brother, cousin David. Restless as ever, in 1821 David let Robert take over his business at Camlachie Foundry, at the east end of the Gallowgate. Robert made iron pipes for the Glasgow Water Company, which had just started pumping from the Clyde, and then his first steam engine, for a spinning factory in Dundee.

In 1823, thirty-two years old, Robert Napier found his métier by making his first marine engine. It was installed in the Leven, built by James Lang of Dumbarton for the river traffic between that town and Glasgow. Napier was crucially assisted, with the Leven and for the next four decades, by his recently hired works manager, David Elder, who had come from a family of millwrights near Edinburgh. For the Leven’s engine, Elder made various refinements in the air pump, condenser and slide valves. He was using the rudimentary machine tools of the day, which were powered by a central steam engine linked to overhead belts and pulleys. At Camlachie Foundry these devices ran just a few turning lathes (the small pulleys and belts were forever slipping), a horizontal boring mill, and a smaller vertical boring machine. From these modest beginnings, Elder gradually improved his tools, products and men. The veteran millwrights of the time would not work to the tolerances he demanded, so he preferred to hire cartwrights and house carpenters instead, transferring their fine woodworking skills to the new problems of metal fabrication. ‘He was a man of great natural force of character,’ it was said of David Elder, ‘and maintained his opinions with considerable vigour.’

The Leven’s steadfast performance brought the firm other marine contracts. For the United Kingdom of 1826 – the biggest, fastest British steam vessel yet at 175 feet and 560 tons – they put an engine of 200 horsepower in the ship built by Robert Steele of Greenock. In 1828 they moved to a larger site in Glasgow, the soon-famous Vulcan Foundry on Washington Street, near the river. They added heavy new machine tools for making even more powerful engines. Robert Napier and David Elder became, by general reputation, the best engineers on the Clyde.

Any new steam-powered shipping company would routinely seek Napier’s advice and active participation; his approval could mark the difference between success and failure. In the workshop, Elder continued his ongoing technical improvements and trained several generations of the top Clyde engineers, including his distinguished son John. Eventually Napier acquired his own shipbuilding yard as well, at Govan on the south bank of the Clyde, and applied the firm’s exacting standards to every aspect of producing a steamship. One of his most loyal and long-term customers would be Samuel Cunard.

As Henry Bell had insisted about himself, these pioneers of Clyde steamboat building – from William Symington to Robert Napier – were not just self-taught engineers who worked simply by untutored intuition. They typically had mentors and family backgrounds in their fields. But most of their education did take place outside school, and the best of them then engaged in a continuous process of self-education all through their working lives. Immersed in such a bold new undertaking, they had to contrive their own patterns. They ‘read Nature’s laws in their own fashion’, the Scottish naval architect Robert Mansel remarked after the younger Robert Steele’s death in 1879. ‘Admittedly they knew little or no Latin or Greek, and, on the whole, were decidedly averse to talking and talkers.’ Diligent and laconic in the Scots manner, they left terse, incomplete surviving records of what they did, and nothing whatever about their private thoughts and feelings. Any curiosity about such intimacies would have puzzled them. They poured themselves into their steamboats and steam engines – which also have not survived, except for a few stray shards. Entering their world now requires an act of imagination, with casual leaps over yawning gaps in the historical evidence.

So wedded to the progressive nineteenth century, their work helped change the world within their lifetimes. Whatever they may have thought about this grand transformation has been lost to history, except for off-hand hints. Robert Napier’s fine mansion at Shandon on the Gareloch preserved a lingering trace of the old world within its opulent outer walls. The house was built in successive additions around the original modest cottage. A visitor in 1855 marvelled at the many beautiful paintings and art objects in the plush outer rooms. David Elder, a music lover, had made his boss a waterpowered pump for the pipe organ in the main gallery. Napier, sixty-four years old in 1855, liked to show the treasures from his lifetime of collecting. At the core of the mansion, happy to remain behind in one of the old cottage’s small rooms, sat his wife, Isabella Napier Napier. ‘A very simple and unaffected Scotch woman,’ the visitor surmised. The mother of seven children, five still living, she sat spinning by the fireplace, moving steadily to a rhythm older than steam on water. The great Steam Age roared on, around and past her.

PART TWO: The Era of Cunard Domination, 1840-1870

3. Ships as Enterprise: Samuel Cunard of Halifax

The Samuel Cunard who appeared so mysteriously in Boston on his Britannia in 1840 had come from a tumultuous family history of upheaval and dislocation, of religious and political persecution, and then of neglect and alcoholism in his parents’ generation. In the absence of much given structure, he had attained a preternatural early maturity on his own. He essentially invented himself and then took on necessary paternal roles for his younger siblings. Having emerged from such an uncertain background, he might reasonably have wanted a safe future based on some dependable job that provided a secure living. Instead he dealt in ocean ships and shipments, with all their endemic risks and uncertainties. Cunard would spend his working life worrying about cargoes and profits, captains and crews, and an occasional overdue vessel plying the pitiless North Atlantic Ocean. ‘Those who have the charge of ships,’ he wrote in old age, ‘are never free from anxiety.’

Sam Cunard was descended from a group of German Quakers who came to America in 1683. His great-great-grandfather, Thones Kunders, lived in the German town of Crefeld, on the lower Rhine River near the Dutch border. Kunders and his family were religious dissenters, first as Mennonites, then Quakers, at odds with local established church authorities. William Penn granted the Crefeld Friends about 18,000 acres in his Quaker haven of Pennsylvania. They sailed away from intolerance in July 1683, thirteen men with their families, thirty-three people in all: among the minority of immigrants to America who came not for economic opportunity but for reasons of conscience, to worship as they wished. The pilgrims from Crefeld landed in Philadelphia after a voyage of seventy-four days.

They settled an area to be known as Germantown, later incorporated into greater Philadelphia. For three years, until they put up a meetinghouse, the Crefeld Friends worshipped at the home of Thones Kunders. He worked as a textile dyer, his trade in the old country, and was appointed one of the local burgesses by William Penn. Kunders died in 1729, ‘an hospitable, well-disposed man, of an inoffensive life and good character’. At some point he had Americanized his name to Dennis Conrad. In 1710 his sixth child, Henry, married the daughter of another Crefeld colonist. They bought a farm of 220 acres in Montgomery County and had six sons, who later spelled their last name four ways. (With the trail thus obscured, the family line has puzzled genealogists.) Henry’s son Samuel took the name Cunrad. In turn, Samuel’s son Abraham, born in 1754, later switched two letters and came up with Cunard, where the matter finally rested.

According to an oral tradition passed down within the family, Thones Kunders and his sons were ploughing a field one day when they turned up a bag of gold coins – perhaps a pirate’s loot, brought ashore and buried but never recovered. This windfall helped establish the family in America. The story, if true, marks the first hint of what afterwards was called ‘Cunard luck’ or the ‘luck of Cunards’. Four generations later, Sam Cunard’s good fortune in his ever-dangerous shipping business was sometimes ascribed – especially by frustrated competitors – not to alertness or hard work but to his unfair, unearned, uncanny luck.

The American Revolution, however, brought the family nothing but bad luck. As Quakers, the descendants of Thones Kunders could not support the revolutionary cause. The Quaker peace testimony prohibited any violent opposition to governments. Pennsylvania Friends felt no great loyalty to British authority; their pacifism simply made all wars untenable. The local rebels, mainly Presbyterians, took their opportunity to cut into the power of the more established Quakers. This complex internecine conflict, fuelled by both religion and politics, became quite bitter. The rebels would place candles in their windows at night to celebrate American victories; Quaker windows without candles might be broken. Friends who declined to join public fast days might have their businesses attached or lose blankets and horses to rebel army requisitions. Soldiers could be billeted in Quaker homes. Quakers could be fined for refusing muster duty or an oath of allegiance to the rebels. Some, like Abraham Cunard’s cousin Robert Cunard, were convicted of treason and had their property confiscated.

During the war, and especially after the final American victory, many Quakers (including Abraham Cunard) left for the Loyalist stronghold of New York. When New York in turn fell to the rebels, much of its swelling Loyalist community was banished to the British outpost of Nova Scotia. An elite group of Loyalists petitioned British colonial authorities for land grants and other privileges in their new Canadian home. Abraham Cunard joined a less well-connected group of nine hundred others bound for Nova Scotia in asking for their own considerations. ‘Chagrined as your Memorialists are at the manner in which the late Contest has been terminated,’ they declared, ‘and disappointed as they find themselves in being left to the lenity of their Enemys…your Memorialists humbly implore redress from your Excellency and that enquiry may be made into their respective Losses Services Situations and Sufferings.’ Cunard sailed to Nova Scotia with a flotilla of Loyalists in the spring of 1783. Exactly one hundred years after his ancestors had come to America for religious freedom, political and religious strife now forced him to leave home for another new land in a wilderness.

Perched at the southeastern edge of Canada, technically a peninsula but actually more like an island, Nova Scotia in 1783 was a raw frontier territory. It had been lightly settled by immigrants from England, Scotland and Germany, and by Americans from nearby New England states. During the war it became a bristling garrison for British army and navy forces, who dominated the principal town of Halifax. The newly arrived Loyalists, lured by favourable reports, were generally disheartened by what they found. ‘All our golden promises have vanished,’ said one Loyalist. ‘We were taught to believe this place was not barren and foggy, as had been represented, but we find it ten times worse.…It is the most inhospitable climate that ever mortal set foot on. The winter is of insupportable length and coldness, only a few spots fit to cultivate, and the land is covered with a cold, spongy moss, instead of grass, and the entire country is wrapt in the gloom of perpetual fog.’ Yet Nova Scotia was the most accessible place from New York still under British rule, closer than the West Indies or the Canadian interior, with rich fishery and timber resources and, at Halifax, one of the finest natural harbours in North America. By the end of 1783 some 20,000 Loyalist refugees had arrived, more than doubling the local population.

In these circumstances of widespread chaos and hardship, of overcrowding, high prices, and temporary shacks, Abraham Cunard found and married a wife. Margaret Murphy was the daughter of Irish immigrants who had settled in South Carolina just before the war; her father joined the British forces and saw action in Georgia. The Murphys fled to Nova Scotia after the evacuation of Charleston in 1782. Abraham and Margaret were married on 22 June 1783; he was twenty-nine, she twenty-five. It was an odd match. The Murphys were Irish Catholics, had owned slaves in South Carolina, and did not share the pacifism, anti-slavery convictions, or abstemious habits of Quakers. This difficult marriage produced ten children over the next two decades. Samuel, the second child and oldest boy, was born on 21 November 1787, and named for his paternal grandfather.

Most of the Pennsylvania Loyalists settled in the new town of Shelburne, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia. Abraham Cunard – perhaps because of his rather heterodox marriage – instead went up to Halifax. The harbour town, less than forty years old, had been laid out on the slope of a steep hill that offered some protection from the northwest winter wind. Cunard found work as a foreman carpenter in the army’s timberyard at the docks. The Cunards lived near the water on Brunswick Street in the north end, a German section known as Dutchtown. Abraham and Margaret compromised their ancestral religious differences by joining an Anglican church. On his own time, Abraham bought vacant property and built houses for sale, turning good profits. He prospered enough to pay eight hundred pounds in cash, a substantial sum, for two waterfront land parcels in 1796 and 1798. He was also granted 1000 acres of timberland in northern Nova Scotia. At the yard he was promoted to master carpenter, earning nine shillings a day. As far as most outsiders could tell, the Cunards were doing well.

In private, the family was contending with an ongoing crisis caused by Margaret’s uncontrolled drinking. Years later, people told stories of her lying in the streets of Halifax, dead drunk, while her children went barefoot and sold produce from the family garden for a few coins. Abraham’s response is not known; his extended working hours, between his timberyard job and the houses he was building to sell, might have functioned as a refuge from his wife’s alcoholism – or perhaps a contributing factor to it. What seems clear is that Sam, as the oldest boy, had to assume early responsibilities. After a few years of grammar school, he started working for pay, wasting no time. Driving the cows home at night, he walked along knitting a bag to hold his money. He ran errands, picked dandelions and sold them at market, and purchased fish, potatoes and other goods at the wharves to sell door to door. At age fourteen he proudly bought a broadcloth suit, his first, with his own money.

Children from an alcoholic home may respond in wildly varying ways. In Sam Cunard’s case, he clamped a lifelong tight discipline on his emotions and pleasures. For a family of partly Quaker heritage, trying to make its way in a new and strange place, Margaret’s drinking was a shameful secret. But it could not really be kept hidden in a small town isolated by geography and circumstances. Gossips knew and talked about it. From this background, it seems, Sam developed his enduring habit of keeping himself under cover, of not giving public speeches or revealing much even in private letters. His own habits were notably ascetic; he associated heavy drinking with failure and embarrassment. When he later made such bald statements as ‘I have never known an industrious sober man who has not succeeded’, he was referring obliquely to his mother’s losing struggle with rum.

From boyhood Sam toiled as a merchant, buying goods and selling them at a profit. He lacked the education for a professional career, like law or medicine, and had no taste for government or military positions, the other main avenues available to ambitious boys in Halifax. Living in a harbour town dominated by its waterfront commerce, he naturally turned to ships and shipping as the main medium for his business activities. On a typical working day he was up early and down to the docks, looking for deals, and finding them often enough to believe that his chosen field would reward hard effort and concentration. “Tis true that the merchant does not always succeed,’ Cunard later reflected, ‘ – but with patient industry he generally does – there is one thing certain that no one succeeds without application and close attention to the business he is intended for.’

He worked under his father, then with him, and quickly moved beyond him.

Abraham got him his first real job, as a clerk in the naval dockyard’s engineer department, and next arranged for him to spend a few years down in Boston, working in a shipbroker’s office and learning that business. By the age of twenty-one, in 1809, Sam had returned to Halifax and talked his father into founding the firm of A. Cunard & Son, ship agents and general merchants in the West Indian trade. On his own he also bought two parcels of wilderness land in the lightly settled northern reaches of Nova Scotia, a total of 5000 acres – the first of many distant land speculations he would try for their potential rents, timber or minerals.

The prolonged Napoleonic wars and, in particular, the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States brought flush times to Halifax. It became the main staging area and supply depot for British army and navy forces in America. At the same time, it continued doing business with those New England states that opposed the conflict. Within three months of the American declaration of war, Sam Cunard was granted a licence to import certain goods from the states: flour, meal, corn, pitch, tar and turpentine, all of them in turn useful for the naval war against the United States. Halifax seized the fortunate (if unprincipled) opportunity to supply both belligerents against each other. Privateering and smuggling also flourished, as captured ships and cargoes were auctioned off at low prices. ‘As all around me are smuggling,’ one Nova Scotian decided, ‘I am beginning to smuggle too.’ Tobacco, soap and candles could be hidden in hogsheads and puncheons of codfish and then unpacked in a back room, out of sight. The Cunards probably joined in this lucrative, illicit, barely policed ™ the profits were hard to resist. By the end of the war they were buying and selling not just cargoes but the ships themselves.

The windfalls of war made Sam rich enough to take a wife. On 4 February 1815, at the age of twenty-seven he married Susan Duffus, seven years his junior. She was the daughter of a dry goods merchant and tailor who had come to Halifax from Scotland as a young man. Sam settled his bride in a fine new house at 21 Brunswick Street, adjacent to the home of his parents. His changed circumstances, upwardly striving and soon to include children, pushed Sam into taking a definite step, both merciful and ruthless, about his poor, sodden mother.

In late June 1815, with Susan three months pregnant, he bought farmland out in Hants County, at Pleasant Valley. He had a house built (a better home than most in that area, including a butler’s pantry and a central chimney with four fireplaces) and sent his mother to live there, near some of her Murphy relatives. Perhaps, with their first child soon to arrive, Sam and Susan did not want the addled grandmother right next door, visiting and possibly endangering the baby. Sam added more land to the property a few weeks after his son Edward was born. According to the local folklore that persisted in Hants County even into the 1950s, Margaret Cunard was dispatched in order to control her rum supply and to limit social embarrassments in Halifax. She was, significantly, banished without her husband – but with, it seems, his willing assent. Abraham kept working as a master carpenter at the timberyard, too far from Pleasant Valley for commuting fifty miles a day on horseback. After Margaret died in 1821, he finally retired in his late sixties and went out to live alone in her house.

As this crisp transaction made clear, Sam in his late twenties was functioning as the head of the entire family. The firm of A. Cunard & Son really consisted of the son. Sam also assumed responsibility for the education of his three youngest brothers. He sent Henry and Thomas, eleven and ten years old, to a private school in Pictou, Nova Scotia. ‘If you think it best, I have no objection to Henry & Thomas learning Latin,’ he wrote to the schoolmaster, Thomas McCulloch, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland. ‘The only reason I have for not requesting you to teach them Latin, namely that they are intended for business and that a plain English education answers the purpose. You will say that I have very contracted ideas and I must allow it. I shall feel much obliged if you will have the kindness to supply the little wants of the boys from time to time, they will require as the winter approaches worsted socks, and strong shoes which can be had at Pictou better than here.’

Sam was not satisfied with the educational progress of his brother John, fifteen years old, so McCulloch was given another charge. ‘The masters under whose care he has been heretofore,’ Sam explained, ‘have paid but little attention to his improvement and what he learnt at school he has forgot within the last year.…I wish him taught what I requested you to teach the other boys, and I hope within one year (the time I propose leaving him with you) that he will have made considerable improvement. ’ Sam’s uncertain grasp of grammar and punctuation at times revealed the limits of his own education; he often neglected to end sentences with full stops and to start sentences with capital letters, and his spelling could be erratic. But he wanted more schooling for his brothers, despite his businesslike doubts about the real value of learning Latin, and was willing to pay for a privilege he himself had not enjoyed.

Halifax in these years had a population of about 15,000. Seen from the water, it looked like a giant rectangle laid sideways on the slope of a hill: six major streets running parallel to the harbour, intersected at right angles by ten smaller cross streets. Two miles long by a half mile wide, Halifax was capped by a fortress called Citadel Hill and a prominent tower displaying the town clock. Ships, docks and warehouses were ranged thickly along the waterfront. Only Water Street, closest to the harbour, was paved; the other streets were often muddy or dusty, and buried in deep snow from December to March. These conditions, along with the steepness of the hill, made carriages impractical. People got about on foot or horseback. The houses, built to no particular pattern, were mostly wooden, of one storey, and unpainted.

High society was divided between a small gentry class and a massive military presence. The old settlers and the Loyalists, initially at odds, by now had intermarried and merged their interests. The Loyalists had brought money, energy, and a new assertiveness to the small town. The oligarchy that dominated Halifax consisted essentially of the children of those Loyalists. Allegiances to the mother country still ran deep, in both politics and culture. Newcomers were struck by the pervading Englishness of the place. ‘Nova Scotia approaches nearer, in most respects, to the customs and ideas most approved in England, than any other part of America,’ one British visitor noted. ‘The style of living, hours of entertainment, fashions, manners, are all English. Dress is fully as much attended to as in London.’

This Anglophilia was reinforced by British military power. Halifax was both a naval station and garrison town, its streets filled with soldiers and sailors. Three regiments lived in barracks on the north and south sides of Citadel Hill. Brunswick Street, running between the barracks, was littered with well-patronized grog shops, gambling dens and whorehouses. (The Cunards lived in a better section of Brunswick Street.) Returning to barracks at night, drunk and frisky, the soldiers and sailors would pick fights with each other and commit small vandalisms. Native Haligonians prudently stayed indoors, out of their way, at such times.

Military officers and the local oligarchy mingled at the Ionic-columned Province Building in the centre of town, in the middle of a square enclosed by an iron railing. It was easily the most impressive structure in Halifax, 140 feet long by 70 feet wide by 45 feet high, built to last of locally quarried ironstone. Here met the meshed institutions of Nova Scotian government. The English monarch appointed a governor for the province, who appointed a Council which could amend or reject any bill passed by the Assembly, which was elected by male Nova Scotians who owned houses or land. The Council also designated sheriffs, coroners and school commissioners and could review some judicial decisions. Occasional democratic pressures from below were, as yet, easily stifled.

In sum: Halifax was a small but quite diverse place, from the deliberating chambers of the Province Building to the nearby dives along Brunswick Street. For a young man on the make like Sam Cunard, it had some of the fluidity of a frontier town, unformed and open to enterprising newcomers. But political power was mostly appointive, beyond any popular control; individual leaders of the oligarchy, in general, came from more privileged backgrounds than Cunard’s. Henry H. Cogswell, Richard J. Uniacke and Thomas Chandler Haliburton were college-educated lawyers. Joseph Howe, the crusading editor of the Halifax Novascotian, was the son of a postmaster general and king’s printer. The father of the three Bliss brothers was a Harvard graduate who served as attorney general and chief justice of New Brunswick; the Blisses would pepper their letters with French aphorisms and Greek quotations, in the original Greek. The two Young brothers were literate, well-educated lawyers and politicians from Scotland. Moving in such civilized, professional company, Cunard must at times have felt intimidated and culturally inadequate.

His career nonetheless flourished. Just after the war, he obtained his first royal mail contract: a foreshadowing of his later transatlantic steamship line. Given his command of ships and shipping, and useful contacts among the military authorities in Halifax, he was chosen to carry the mail between Boston, Halifax, and St John’s, Newfoundland; occasionally his sailing packets also took letters all the way to Bermuda. The steady performance of his mail ships, year after year, gave him a reliable reputation with British authorities that would help clinch subsequent dealings. ‘I have always found the Government very liberal and reasonable, ’ he said later, ‘where the Contractor has endeavoured to fulfill his engagement I have never met with the least difficulty.’

After Abraham Cunard’s death early in 1824, Sam changed the name of his firm to Samuel Cunard & Company. The new name reflected the long-established reality. Sam took his brothers Edward and Joseph into the firm; his oldest brother, William, had recently died in a shipwreck. On formal occasions Sam now called himself Samuel Cunard, Esquire. The Cunard brothers built an imposing office and warehouse on Water Street, on one of the waterfront plots their father had bought back in the 1790s: a four-storey stone fortress that stretched 110 feet along the street, with a large arched doorway in the middle giving secured access to the wharves. From this solid base, the family engaged in shipping, shipowning, shipbuilding, whaling, timber, iron and coal mining, landowning, property management and banking. Most of these enterprises succeeded, but ships were always at the base of everything else.

In 1825 Samuel Cunard obtained another crucial connection to British imperial power. The quite English province of Nova Scotia thirsted for real tea, which at the time was produced only in China. Lacking a consistent supply of the genuine article, people had to resort to peppermint, cloves, or aniseed – all deemed poor substitutes. Cunard sailed to London to petition the controlling East India Company for his own tea agency. ‘Our pretensions are grounded upon our long residence in the Provinces,’ he wrote in one of his run-on sentences, ‘and a thorough knowledge of the Trade and People, we possess every convenience in Fireproof Warehouses and means to effect the intended object, we are ready to give such security in London…and should you think proper to appoint us to the Agency and management of the proposed Consignments and future business of the Hon. Company you may rely upon our zeal and attention thereto and we shall be happy to give such information’ – and so on. The besieged company granted him the agency.

The first tea ship arrived in Halifax a year later, smelling like a gigantic teapot, with 6517 chests from Canton. Customers snapped them up in a public sale at the Cunard warehouse. For the next thirty-five years, quarterly tea auctions were held there, typically with Sam as the auctioneer. The East India commissions became his most reliable source of income; at times he would use the gross revenues, in the short term, to finance other enterprises and then later remit the balances due. Cunard’s coveted tea shipments also strengthened his ascending position in the Halifax oligarchy.

The principal merchants in town persuaded him, briefly, to stand for political office. In the spring of 1826 he agreed to run for an Assembly seat. On the day appointed for the candidates to declare their intentions at an Assembly session, he met with his committee in the morning. Everything seemed in order. He would even make a rare public address. In the Assembly chamber, he stood up, faced the audience, and took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘I also had intended to have said a few words from the Hustings,’ he said, reading, ‘but recent considerations have induced me to alter my views.…I did not come forward to offer myself at the present Election of my own accord, but at the written request of the Merchants, and other respectable inhabitants. I had no ambitious views to gratify, no objects to attain, the good of the country was the sole consideration which induced me to assent to their request.’ And with that he withdrew his candidacy and sat down, having told no one in advance of his change of mind.

However startling to his supporters, this performance was quite in character. He invariably kept his own counsel, trusting and confiding in nobody outside his family. (‘I have always been in the habit,’ he once said, ‘of looking after my own business.’) A politician would have to make regular speeches, a prospect that quite terrified him. Aside from his inherent shyness in front of an audience, public speaking and thinking on his feet could expose the awkward gaps in his education and the real limits of his verbal powers. ‘His conduct is strange and has done him no good,’ noted the Halifax attorney William Blowers Bliss, as flabbergasted as anyone. Though Cunard had offered an implausible explanation, Bliss astutely guessed his actual reason for pulling out: ‘I believe the real cause to have been that he grew nervous and frightened and timidity got the better of his judgment.’

Cunard let his guard down, and relaxed, only at home. After the difficulties of his own childhood, and the inevitable uncertainties of a career in ships, and the watchful complexities of picking his way through the Halifax elite, he found a safe haven within his own expanding family circle. Sam and Susan had nine children in thirteen years. But Susan died in February 1828, at the age of thirty-two, a few days after the birth of her last child. A newspaper notice of her death – the main fragment of historical evidence about her – offered more than the usual conventional pieties: ‘Those only who witnessed how intimately blended, in her Character, were the mild unassuming virtues of domestic life, with an amiable disposition, sound judgement and religious principle, can appreciate the loss that has been sustained by an attached husband, a numerous family of young children, and a large connection of relatives and friends.’

Sam was forty years old when she died. At the time, it was not uncommon for a woman to die from the complications of childbirth, often after having had many babies. The widower then usually married again and produced more children, especially if he commanded the wealth to support a second family. Sam never remarried; he remained permanently ‘attached’ to his dead wife. Susan’s mother took over the raising of her grandchildren. Sam sent his two sons, Edward and William, to King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia, the favoured school for scions of the Halifax oligarchy. Eventually Edward, called Ned, became his father’s closest business confidant, the only associate he truly trusted with his private plans and ambitions. He travelled with his older daughters, who presided over his homes. His family circle maintained a high wall between himself and the outside world. (On his own deathbed, thirty-seven years after Susan’s death, Sam would doze and wake up to speak about many things. At one point, with his sons on hand, he awoke with tears in his eyes. ‘I have been dreaming about your dear mother,’ he said. ‘And a good woman she was.’)

In the early 1830s, Cunard took part in his first steamship venture, the Royal William, which became the first steam-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic from Canada to England. By its limited success and ultimate failure, this undertaking helped prepare him for his transatlantic steamship line.

The principal coastal ship traffic in eastern Canada ran northeasterly from Halifax, around the tip of Cape Breton Island, northwesterly through the Gulf of St Lawrence (perhaps stopping at Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick), and then southwesterly down the St Lawrence River to Quebec City and Montreal. It was an exceptionally dangerous course: whipped by strong, fickle winds and currents, studded with islands and land protrusions, and littered with ice and fog for much of the year. The river froze solid during the long winter. The run between Halifax and Quebec exacted a terrible annual toll in lost ships and men. Under sail, depending on the weather, the trip could take up to five weeks.

The Assembly of Lower Canada, which included Quebec, took steps towards adding steam power to the St Lawrence in the spring of 1825. For expertise they inevitably turned to the River Clyde in Scotland. Charles Wood of Port Glasgow (the son of John Wood, who had built Henry Bell’s Comet and other notable early steamboats) suggested a vessel of 500 tons and 100 horsepower, to cost between £10,000 and £12,000, and capable of running from Halifax to Quebec in a week or less. The Lower Canadian legislature offered a subsidy of £1500; the Assembly of Nova Scotia added another £750. In London, an ambitious prospectus was issued to raise £50,000 for the Halifax and Quebec Steam Boat Company. But the scheme attracted no additional support on either side of the Atlantic and went nowhere. ‘It does seem a stain upon our enterprise, ’ said the Novascotian newspaper of Halifax, ‘that upon the harbours or estuaries of this Province we have yet received no advantage from the most gigantic improvement of modern times – navigation by steam.’

Sam Cunard was always cautious about new ship technologies. In his trips to England and down the American coast, he had seen steamboats and acquired some sense of the current state of the art. He was characteristically waiting for others to make the initial mistakes. In the autumn of 1829 some men in Pictou, Nova Scotia, tried to interest him in a steamboat scheme. ‘We are entirely unacquainted with the cost of a Steam Boat,’ Cunard told them, ‘& should not like to embark in a business of which we are quite ignorant & must therefore decline taking any part in the one you propose getting up.’ But just a few months later, a local steam ferry of thirty horsepower started running from Halifax across the bay to Dartmouth. After overcoming initial problems caused by salt water in her boilers, the ferry gave quick, reliable service. Cunard could watch her puffing back and forth every day, through any wind and weather, and count the additional paying customers she attracted. He began to see possibilities in steam on water.

Early in 1830, the Assembly of Lower Canada doubled its steam offer to £3000, and the Nova Scotian legislature again added its &pound;750. In Halifax, Cunard formed a committee to solicit stockholders in the renewed steamboat company. At a meeting in March he adroitly manoeuvred himself into local leadership of the undertaking. Flourishing a list of 169 people who had promised to buy shares, he proposed a resolution that each subscriber – whether for £500 or £25 – would have just one vote in the proceedings, ‘thus depriving the intelligent and enterprising merchant,’ one high roller later objected, ‘of the proper control over his large advances and placing it at the disposal of a number of small shareholders, in most instances entirely unacquainted with the nature of the business.’ After his resolution passed, the seventy-six subscribers on hand, mostly small investors, elected Cunard as Halifax agent for the steamboat company, granting him the power of general management and control of funds.

Awkwardly balanced between directors in Halifax and Quebec, the company proceeded to build a steamship. The contract went to George Black, a shipbuilder in Quebec City, and his merchant associate John Saxton Campbell. The designer and construction foreman was James Goudie, a local boy who had been sent to Scotland in his mid-teens to apprentice under a Clyde shipbuilder, William Simmons of Greenock. As an assistant foreman to Simmons, Goudie had worked on four steamboats similar to the one he now laid out in Quebec. He had brought the plans back from Scotland in the summer of 1830. ‘As I had the drawings and the form of the ship, at that time a novelty in construction,’ Goudie later recalled, ‘it devolved upon me to lay off and expand the draft to its full dimensions on the floor of the loft, where I made several alterations in the lines as improvements. Mr. Black, though the builder and contractor, was in duty bound to follow my instructions, as I understood it.’ When the keel was laid in September, young Goudie was still three months shy of his twenty-first birthday.

The Royal William, named after the reigning king of England, was a large steamship for the time, 160 feet long and 44 feet wide overall, with three masts in a schooner rig. The upper strakes of the hull were flared out to contain and protect the paddle wheels, perhaps with the St Lawrence River’s ice in mind; this bulging gave the vessel an inflated gross capacity of 1370 tons. After being launched in the spring of 1831, she was towed down to Montreal and fitted with a two-cylinder engine of 200 horsepower by Bennet and Henderson. (John Bennet, that firm’s senior partner, had apprenticed at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham.) The crankshafts were forged by Robert Napier at his Camlachie works in Glasgow. Goudie, Black, Campbell and Bennet were all of Scots background. The boat’s designs came from Scotland, as did her crankshafts. Previous accounts have neglected this point: the Royal William was actually a Scottish steamship, built and financed in Canada.

In August she left Quebec on her maiden voyage, carrying twenty cabin passengers (who paid six pounds, five shillings apiece, including meals and a berth), seventy in steerage, some freight, and 120 tons of coal. After stopping in New Brunswick, she reached Halifax in six and a half days from Quebec. ‘Her beautiful fast sailing appearance,’ noted the Acadian Recorder, ‘the powerful and graceful manner in which her paddles served to pace along, and the admirable command which her helmsman had over her, afforded a triumphant specimen of what steam ships are.’ Sam Cunard visited her repeatedly, and no doubt proudly, asking questions and taking notes about her speed, coal consumption and sailing qualities. The Royal William made two more round-trips that year before ice closed the river. The proprietors thought about sending her to England for the winter, to ply a coastal route there and earn back more of their investments, but instead she was laid up at Quebec.

She finished her first season amid anaemic receipts, and complaints about excessive charges for passengers and freight that scared business away. ‘While at this port thousands of barrels, and scores of passengers, have been landing from Quebec and Halifax,’ a New Brunswick newspaper asked, ‘why has the Royal William been passing our wharves in want of both: as if by the splashing of her paddles, and the smoke of her furnace, she could forever bedim the vigilant eye of an interested public.’ At the start of the 1832 season, the Royal William offered sharply reduced rates in order to draw more customers – but then ran into a cholera epidemic. She made only one trip to Halifax that year, was quarantined, and returned to Quebec after almost two months.

Over the winter, her disappointed owners fell to angry squabbling among themselves. The Quebec stockholders accused Sam Cunard of claiming too large a fee for his services and of not working in harmony with the company. Cunard in turn charged the Quebec authorities with mistreating the Royal William during the previous season. ‘She was neglected in the Winter,’ he maintained, ‘and the frost burst the Pipes & otherwise injured the Machinery by which means a great expense was incurred and the sailing of the Boat delayed until the 15th June whereas she should have made two or three trips before that period – this might have been guarded against by a little care on the part of the committee and having an agent in pay they can have no excuse for the neglect.’ The company was foundering in red ink and feuding leadership. The cholera epidemic of 1832, blamed ever since for the collapse of the enterprise, had merely delivered the final, mortal blow.

In the spring of 1833 the Royal William was sold at a sheriff’s auction in Montreal for £5000 – some £11,000 less than her initial cost only two years earlier. Her new owners tried a coastal voyage down to Boston and back, and then sent her off to England to be sold again. No steamship had ever tried to cross the North Atlantic from Canada to Europe; it was a voyage now conceived in financial desperation. She left Nova Scotia on 18 August 1833, with just seven bold passengers, 324 tons of coal, and a cargo of six spars, one box, one trunk, some produce, household furniture, a box of stuffed birds and a harp.

It was a perilous trip. ‘We were very deeply laden with coal,’ the captain, John McDougall, said later, ‘deeper in fact than I would ever attempt crossing the Atlantic with her again.’ On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a gale knocked off the top of the foremast and disabled one of the engine’s cylinders. For a time they seemed to be sinking. But they ploughed ahead on the remaining cylinder, stopping the engine every fourth day to spend twenty-four hours cleaning seawater deposits from the leaky boilers. They proceeded under sail when the engine was down. After nineteen days they limped into Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, for repairs and a cosmetic paint job. They went on to London, where the Royal William was sold for £10,000 to the Portuguese government.

From this whole unlucky episode, Sam Cunard could draw two conclusions. Steamship technology did not, as yet, allow for routine, safe, profitable passages across the Atlantic – or even, for that matter, between Halifax and Quebec. And if he ever got involved in another steamship venture, he would need to run his own show, without having to clear his decisions through ranks of meddling associates. The Royal William experience ultimately reinforced his carefully guarded, self-contained ways.

The failure of his first steamship did Cunard no immediate harm in Halifax; the blame could be shifted elsewhere. Now entering middle age, he was reaching the peak of his local career. In the autumn of 1830, the governor of Nova Scotia had appointed him to the Council, the twelve-man body that served as the upper chamber of the Assembly. His appointment symbolized inclusion at the highest level of the Halifax elite. ‘We sincerely hope that the same liberal and expansive views which have distinguished Mr. Cunard as a merchant,’ Joe Howe declared in his Novascotian, ‘may be observable in his legislative character. He is wealthy and influential – he need fear no man, nor follow blindly any body of men; and we trust that he will not disappoint the hopes which many entertain.’ He served on the Council for ten years, often displeasing the reformers.

On a social and cultural level, the entrenched Halifax oligarchs still saw him as slightly alien, not quite a peer. In 1831 the lawyer Lewis Bliss urged his brother Henry, who lived in London, to welcome Cunard on his next trip to England. Lewis admitted he did not know Cunard intimately, having dined at his home only once. ‘I think he may be called a gentlemanly man,’ Bliss ventured, ‘– very polished he cannot be expected to be having I believe received rather a scanty education, and moved for the early part of his life not so much in the higher circles now thrown open to him.’ Yet Bliss guessed that Cunard owned, in whole or part, more than thirty ships, and probably cleared £2000 a year from his East India Company tea agency alone: the kind of wealth and imperial connections that could almost compensate for an ungentlemanly background. ‘He is the most liberal as well as the most extensively engaged in business of all our Merchants,’ wrote Bliss. ‘He certainly is mild & pleasant in his manners – of an apparently equal temper, and possesses a gentle and not inharmonious voice – in short I look on him as a very good kind of man, and if not very pleasant & agreeable very far from the reverse.’ Furthermore, Cunard’s steady rise from humble origins to heady eminence had not caused any rude behaviour. ‘He may be said to be modest – free from pride & affectation, and I think ambition, or if ambitious, not manifesting it in his conduct at all turns & on all occasions.’

Though his careful manners concealed it, he in fact remained ferociously ambitious. During the 1830s he became a resident director of the Bank of British North America, served as the local agent of the London-based General Mining Association (in charge of coal mines in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island), and bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of timber and rental land on Prince Edward Island – all before the most ambitious act of his life. The Royal William did not entirely kill his interest in steam navigation, as he ran more modest steamboats in the local coastal traffic. At times he took extravagant risks, skirting financial ruin by moving fluid capital from one enterprise to launch yet another. Most of his undertakings, though, were apparently protected by the famous Cunard luck. On one occasion late in 1832, Haligonians waited anxiously for another overdue vessel to arrive. ‘As it is one of Cunard’s ships,’ William Blowers Bliss mused, ‘I suppose she will get in at last, he is too lucky to lose her unless she be well insured.’

It was not only luck, of course. Nor, as far as Cunard was concerned, was it the guiding hand of Providence. In his letters he would make passing religious references. ‘If it should please God that we should all live to see the next year,’ he might write, ‘…if I should be spared I hope I may yet be useful to our concern.’ But this was just obeisance to an expected form, perhaps inserted simply to please a pious correspondent. Cunard had no real religious convictions. On his deathbed, when his son Ned suggested the attention of a clergyman, Sam declared ‘that he did not feel and admit and believe’ – a dying confession that told the stark if unwanted truth.

What he really believed in was himself, the hard, driving, ruthless, tireless engine at the core of his being. Over his lifetime, he lived out the story so beloved by minor novelists of the nineteenth century: the poor boy from the provinces who worked hard, curbed his vices, hoped for the best and took optimistic chances, came to the big city and made his deserving way, and finally seized the most coveted material rewards his society offered. He bridged several distinct eras, from a late-eighteenth-century colonial frontier to high Victorian London. Across these steadily more progressive times, Cunard was a quite modern personality, focused intensely and narrowly on the ongoing prosperity of his enterprises. He prudently adopted new technologies when they seemed useful, measuring his success by profits and numbers that he could see and weigh and count. He trusted nothing but his immediate family and his own unquenchable ambitions.

4. Ships as Engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The dream of starting a transatlantic steamship line depended in equal measure on enterprise and engineering, or money and machinery. Engineering had to come first. Once it seemed that engines, boilers and ships had been improved enough to bear the overpowering demands of the North Atlantic Ocean, moneyed investors might come forth to launch the enterprise. Almost nothing in history is truly inevitable; any major event or turning point could have turned out quite differently if shaded by other twists of luck or contingency. But given the ongoing progress in steamship technology, the swelling commercial and political pressures for faster, surer links between Europe and America, and many interested parties on both sides of the ocean ready to invest in any plausible scheme, transatlantic steam seemed virtually certain. The only lingering questions were how soon and by whom. ‘Indeed, all things considered, ’ said the Mechanics’ Magazine of London in 1837, ‘the strangest thing about the matter is, that the object should not have been effected many years ago.’

Ocean steamships became the largest, most complicated machines yet devised. As such, they drew on engineering developments in many different fields. British engineering in general was now approaching its nineteenth-century zenith, a dazzling peak moment of practical imagination, commercial success and global impact. British engineers were, for the time being, the best in the world. They had started the first Industrial Revolution and then provided the models for its cloning in Europe and North America. Great Britain was producing far more coal, iron, machinery and technological optimism than any other country. The earliest successful Atlantic steamships could not have come from anywhere else.

Engineering as an exact science was barely a century old. It had originated in France, before the advent of the steam engine, as a real-world application of the Age of Reason. The term ‘engineer’ traditionally meant someone who built only war machines and fortifications; ‘civil engineering’ thus came to mean similar pursuits carried out in peacetime. Influenced by then-current philosophical emphases on rationalist modes of thought, French engineers adapted new ideals of mathematical precision, measurability and experimentation to their practical building tasks. Such pioneers as Pierre Bouguer and Charles Augustin Coulomb invented the fields of structural analysis, applied mechanics and hydraulics. The first engineering schools appeared in eighteenth-century France and long remained the most exacting such institutions in the world.

In Great Britain, engineering at the outset was more intuitive and direct, neither assisted nor impeded by much conscious philosophical baggage. The first British civil engineers – John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, John Rennie – mainly worked with the traditional materials of wood, stone and masonry to build improved roads, bridges and harbours. In particular, they constructed canals, the prevailing transportation fad during the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. A canal, a water medium, had to remain as level as possible throughout its course. That meant rearranging the natural environment to an unprecedented degree: building up embankments, running high viaducts across valleys, bridging rivers, cutting down the smaller hills, and tunnelling through larger ones. The Sapperton Tunnel on the Thames and Severn Canal, finished in 1789, was over two miles long – an amazing feat at the time. Humans were imposing their will on nature as never before, for all to see, and by their success were encouraged to entertain yet more Promethean ambitions for themselves. As civil engineering matured, it shed its original honest-workman’s aura, became a more socially acceptable career, and professionalized itself. The Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818, mainly by canal men. ‘Civil Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man,’ explained an ICE leader. ‘The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic.’

The next generation of British engineers typically adopted newer building materials and power, especially iron, coal and steam engines. The line between the two groups was not quite that stark; Telford and Rennie, from the first generation, had used cast iron in their bridges as early as the 1790s. The real demarcation came down to function. The founding civil engineers built objects that did not move. The later mechanical engineers, as they were called, built machines that snorted and clanked across the landscape. One was best known for canals and bridges, the other for railways and steam power. Many individuals continued to work at every type of engineering. But with the narrowing of newer specializations, and the relentless deepening of requisite knowledge in any given field, the civils and mechanicals diverged ever more sharply, sometimes feuding with each other. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, started in 1846 by railway men, gave this hardening division an organized boundary.

Most of the early British engineers, both civil and mechanical, came from Scotland and northern England. Telford and Rennie were Scotsmen who learned their crafts in Edinburgh, then migrated south to find work. Henry Maudslay, a noted steam engine builder and inventor of machine tools, was from a Lancashire family outside Liverpool. He grew up in his father’s carpentry shop but preferred working with iron, so he switched to blacksmithing. Wielding his hammer, file and chisel, he was a true artist, deft and inventive, utterly in his element. He moved to London and opened a workshop that became famous for its marine steam engines and general excellence. James Nasmyth, one of his many apprentices who went on to notable engineering careers, fondly recalled his first impression of Maudslay’s shop at Lambeth in 1829: ‘the beautiful machine tools, the silent smooth whirl of the machinery, the active movements of the men, the excellent quality of the work in progress, and the admirable order and management that pervaded the whole establishment.’ Maudslay stressed simplicity and economy to his assistants, demonstrating the lesson by turning a rough piece of metal into a smooth, plane surface with just a few precise strokes of his file.

Civil and mechanical engineers jointly created their most significant early achievement, the steam railway. Mining operations had already produced the first small steam locomotives and had demonstrated the unmatchable rolling efficiency of iron wheels on iron tracks. Because the earliest railway locomotives lacked much pulling or braking power, the right-of-way had to avoid steep hills; that meant borrowing from the canal builders’ levelling techniques for tunnels, viaducts, embankments and cuttings. Mail coaches and coastal steamboat lines had shown the advantages of providing public transportation on set timetables at fixed fees. All these separate strands came together in tracks and trains. Because the Industrial Revolution had arrived so early in Britain, it happened there long before the railway – a sequence not repeated anywhere else. The iron horse then exploded on a society already well industrialized, quickly transforming everyday life in ways that steam-powered mines, mills and factories had not touched.

George Stephenson, the seminal British railway pioneer, was an illiterate engine mechanic born near Newcastle. He always spoke with a thick Northumbrian accent barely intelligible to southerners. After a delayed education, Stephenson built the initial two railways in England, the Stockton and Darlington (1825) and the Liverpool and Manchester (1830), designing the locomotives and rolling stock as well as laying down the track and its associated structures. The Liverpool and Manchester, the first line to run between major cities, was expected mainly to carry freight such as coal, cotton and timber between the port on the Mersey and the booming inland factory city. But passengers came forth in surprising numbers, so Stephenson started offering them fast trains on a regular schedule.

What the customers were buying was speed, achieved with a smoothness and consistency previously unknown. It seemed extraordinary that a businessman could leave Liverpool in the morning, travel thirty-three miles and spend his long workday in Manchester, and still return home by that night in reasonable fettle. A mail coach might average only about ten quite jostling miles an hour. A fast horse and rider at full gallop could reach up to forty miles an hour, but only in brief spurts, and with an exhausting clatter and commotion. Railway engines would match a galloping horse and maintain that speed serenely for hours, chuffing along in a steady rhythm with no apparent strain.

In the summer of 1830, the actress Fanny Kemble – fresh from her first great triumphs on the London stage – took an excited ride on a Liverpool and Manchester locomotive, with Stephenson himself driving. She felt inclined to pat the small iron horse, which consisted of just a boiler, stove, engine and gleaming steel pistons, a platform, bench, coals and a barrel of water. ‘How strange it seemed,’ she noted, ‘to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace.’ No horse, no sail; how did it move? They glided easily through cuttings, across bridges and a viaduct, along raised embankments, and over a swamp. Stephenson described the construction of his locomotive, which Kemble thought she understood (‘His way of explaining himself is peculiar, but very striking’). After taking on more water, he let out the throttle, pushing the engine to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour. Sensing the dramatic moment, Kemble stood up, took off her bonnet, and drank it in. The onrushing air pushed against her, forcing her eyelids down. It felt like flying, so fast and yet so smooth and free. ‘When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet, strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear.’

Fanny Kemble’s joyful initiation into railbound flight symbolized a turning point in material history. The triumphs of engineering now hooked the nineteenth century on an ongoing expectation of constant, unsatisfied acceleration: speed and progress, reaching into every area of life, ever faster, and regardless of the dangers. ‘Verily is ours the age for invention,’ said the Illustrated London News in 1842. It was in many ways a Faustian contract, balanced uncertainly between gains and losses. Critics of modernity such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris played a steady minor-keyed threnody in the background as Victorian progress boomed inexorably along. A few dissenting engineers did express timid misgivings about such headlong haste, and about the harrowing, infernal landscape of the Black Country of coal and iron mines in the industrial Midlands. But most practitioners, civils and mechanicals alike, shrugged off such criticisms. ‘If we would credit these imbecile philosophers, the introduction of every machine is an injury rather than a benefit,’ one engineer bristled. ‘There can be no greater fallacy than this.’

Most engineers apparently believed their work would improve humankind – lightening its labour, speeding and easing travel, making life more comfortable and abundant. In any case, they devoted themselves to engineering for the more basic reason that they so enjoyed their craft. Engineers worked very hard, to the point in many cases of wearing themselves out at a premature age. R. A. Buchanan, the eminent historian of Victorian engineering, has suggested that they toiled such long hours mainly because they preferred it to any other possible activity. They didn’t socialize much, avoided religious and political strifes, and lived simply and quietly. In 1838 a young railway engineer, Daniel Gooch, made an expected appearance at a dinner party thrown by his boss’s family – but quickly escaped. ‘I believe I did succeed in getting as far as the staircase,’ he scolded himself in his diary, ‘and left it disgusted with London parties, making a note in my memorandum-book never to go to another.’

Nestled into their workshops, pondering some engineering puzzle of agreeable difficulty, they found their truest happiness in making up a brand-new world. Henry Maudslay took obvious, extravagant pleasure in manipulating his tools, loving the work for its own sake as much as for its applied uses. It called on all the keenest faculties of mind, eye and hand. To plan their projects, engineers made careful drawings and crafted detailed models. ‘Drawing is the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words,’ James Nasmyth insisted. ‘The language of the tongue is often used to disguise our thoughts, whereas the language of the pencil is clear and explicit.’ Fondling their raw materials on a workbench, shaping and pounding and drilling, the engineers absorbed cues and knowledge directly through their fingertips. Inspiration flowed from the head and eyes out through the hands to the work, and then back again, in a seamless, tactile circuit of material creation. At their peaks, they felt the exultation of artists.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a prime inventive force behind the three most innovative ocean steamships built before 1870. Yet he spent most of his career on other projects ashore; he was not a naval architect or shipbuilder or any sort of marine engineer. As a landlubber, prone to seasickness, he never even took a major ocean voyage until the last year of his life. His steamships seem still more imposing as the off-hand products of a very busy engineer usually focused in other directions. During his lifetime of great fame and achievement, brunel was often called a genius for the crunching power, range and originality of his mind. More successfully than any of his contemporaries, he straddled the widening split between civil and mechanical engineering, resisting the modernist specializing trend. He deplored ‘the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority’, as he put it, ‘this tendency to legislate and to rule, which is the “fashion” of the day’ No strict categories or conventions could ever contain him.

He made his first reputation as the engineer to the Great Western Railway. brunel surveyed its route – a winding course that ran 117 miles west from London to the port city of Bristol – and then planned every detail of its construction, from the locomotives and rolling stock down to the lamp-posts and stations. ‘No one can fill up the details,’ he explained. ‘I am obliged to do all myself.’ He made lavish use of all the canal builders’ methods for remaking a resistant landscape, so levelling the grade that the line was known as ‘brunel’s billiard table’. The Box Tunnel east of Bath ran for 1.8 miles through an insurmountable hill, much of it solid rock. The digging and blasting on this single project engaged up to 4000 workmen and 300 horses at a time, consumed a weekly ton of gunpowder and ton of candles, and killed nearly 100 men in five years. On completion it was the longest railway tunnel in the world. (The rising sun is said to shine clear through the tunnel on one day of the year, 9 April, brunel’s birthday. Given the usual spring weather in southwest England, this intriguing legend can seldom be tested, which may explain its survival.)

Queen Victoria chose the Great Western for her first trip by railway. In June 1842, returning to London from a sojourn at Windsor Castle, she and Prince Albert boarded a special train at Slough. The royal party, in six carriages, was greeted at the station by the Great Western’s top brass, and brunel personally took charge of the locomotive. The train reached Paddington Station in twenty-five fast minutes. Victoria and Albert alighted on a crimson carpet that stretched across the platform, and were cheered by crowds at the station and along the avenue outside. ‘Free from dust and crowd and heat,’ the queen noted of her railway baptism, ‘and I am quite charmed with it.’ A year later, Albert flew from Bristol to London in just over two hours, averaging a breathtaking fifty-seven miles an hour. Nothing could have better advertised the Great Western Railway – and its chief engineer.

brunel became a celebrity, an engineering superstar at a time when the public works of engineers were remaking everyday life in large, visible ways and sparking the popular imagination as never before. ‘Even to shake hands with one so remarkable,’ an acquaintance later wrote of meeting brunel, ‘was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime.’ He loved any spotlight, courting it and capering in it, presenting himself in dramatic ways. He was a small man, about five feet four inches tall, with an olive complexion and blazing dark eyes under a strong brow. He moved about quickly under clouds of cigar smoke, vital and vigorous, gesturing expansively with his hands as he spoke. brunel worked killing hours, even by engineering standards, but maintained a boyishly playful disposition, fond of jokes and pranks. Regardless of any contrary fashions, he wore a tall, cylindrical silk hat everywhere, even in his own travelling carriage. He explained, perhaps seriously, that it would protect his head from any blow by collapsing before the skull was struck. ‘It is at once warm and airy,’ he elaborated, ‘and you cannot improve upon it.’ (It also made him look taller.)

The extent of his fame was revealed in the spring of 1843 when, performing a coin trick for the children of a friend, he accidentally swallowed a half sovereign. It settled in his windpipe, causing pain in the chest and fits of coughing, and could not be dislodged. brunel designed an apparatus for holding himself upside down, hoping that gravity would help expel the coin. He was inverted and tapped on the back, causing such convulsive coughing that the experiment was abandoned. Sir Benjamin Brodie, a prominent physiologist and surgeon, was summoned. He performed a tracheotomy and poked around with his forceps, but without success. Newspapers issued regular bulletins. Even the august Times, which liked to define serious news coverage, kept its readers well informed. ‘Mr. brunel passed a quiet night,’ The Times reported. Four days later: ‘He was able on Thursday to take a small quantity of fish.’ And three days more: ‘Mr. brunel is going on favourably.’ At last, after almost six weeks, he was again turned upside down, with the incision in his windpipe kept open. Hit gently between the shoulder blades, brunel coughed twice, and the coin dropped from his mouth. The Times published a detailed final report (‘And thus, under Providence, a most valuable life has been preserved’).

Over his career, brunel contrived great triumphs and equally great failures. Everything about him was exaggerated; he vividly displayed both the strengths and deficiencies of genius. He reasonably believed that he knew more, across a wider range of engineering fields, than almost anybody he encountered. Among railway men, only Robert Stephenson, the accomplished son of George Stephenson, was greeted as a peer. ‘Stephenson is decidedly the only man in the profession that I feel disposed to meet as my equal, or superior, perhaps,’ brunel noted. ‘He has a truly mechanical head.’ Anyone else was expected to defer to brunel’s authority. His unorthodox mind and dead-sure tenacity pushed him through any obstacles into bold, original achievements – and also made him a quite difficult associate and boss. It was generally best not to resist or disagree with him. ‘Admit him to be absolute,’ one colleague noticed, ‘and he was not only reasonable, but kind. Hint to him that you had rights, and he was inexorable.’

As an engineer, he most valued ‘usefulness’, he insisted, ‘that characteristic of which we are most proud, and for which we have the vanity to think we are peculiarly distinguished.’ But ‘usefulness’ to brunel meant deploying the newest, strongest materials and methods, as called for by the most extravagant engineering standards available. The Great Western was the fastest, most solidly built railway of its time, but also the most expensive at £6.5 million, well over twice brunel’s initial estimate. He characteristically would brush aside budgets and spiralling expenses, preferring not to think about money, wanting only to be left free to do his finest work – thereby distressing his helpless financial associates, endangering and sometimes wrecking the whole enterprise. ‘He was the very Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends,’ a harsh contemporary estimate in the Quarterly Review concluded. ‘He seemed to love difficulties so much that he not infrequently chose the most difficult manner of overcoming them. Whatever was fullest of engineering perils had the greatest charms for him. That which was easy was comparatively uninteresting.’ Despite his declared focus on usefulness, he was actually the purest of engineers: a demanding, relentless artist intent on finding the most elegant solution regardless of costs or circumstances.

None of his debacles ever impeded his uncanny ability to get jobs and attract new investors. He caught and embodied the relentless engineering optimism of his time. ‘The most useful and valuable experience is that derived from failures and not from successes,’ he once wrote. ‘But what cannot be done?’ When testifying before a board of directors or a committee of Parliament, he was a formidable advocate: overflowing with esoteric knowledge, diplomatic yet seemingly candid, speaking tersely to the point, and charming and witty when that seemed appropriate. He could usually persuade even the most sceptical listeners. He disliked writing and thought he had no talent for it, but his memoranda piled up compelling arguments by steady accretion. brunel was also a facile, accurate draughtsman, decorating his workbooks with fine small drawings tossed off for the apparent fun of it, and if necessary he could go to his workshop and make a skilful model of a design in wood or iron. With his command of speaking, writing, drawing and modelling, he had the rare capacity to explain himself with clarity and eloquence in four modes and three dimensions – a key to his overwhelming powers of persuasion.

Today brunel remains the only British engineer of his era with an enduring popular reputation. In Great Britain he is virtually a folk hero. Some of his notable engineering works have survived as reminders of his wide-ranging inventiveness. The Great Western Railway still runs across many of his bridges and through the Box Tunnel. At one end of the line, his station at Bristol Temple Meads still stands, though now reduced to a humble car park. At the other end, his Paddington Station in London encloses tracks and platforms in a space 700 feet long and 240 feet wide, under a vaulting roof of wrought-iron arched ribs covered with glass and corrugated iron. The Royal Albert Bridge, his greatest feat of bridge building, crosses the River Tamar near Plymouth in two spans of 455 feet each, an artful blend of arch and suspension techniques. With its approaches added, the Royal Albert traverses a total of almost 2200 feet. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, over the dramatically deep Avon gorge, was finished to his designs as a posthumous memorial. The Great Britain, his second ocean steamship, was improbably salvaged after a long, chequered career and was brought home to Bristol to be reconstructed and opened to the public.

Other brunel traces help keep his name alive. The reputations of historical figures often depend on the written footprints they happened to leave behind; brunel’s private papers and manuscripts, amounting to at least twenty-seven thick letterbooks and many other files, are housed at the University of Bristol and at the Public Record Office in Kew. Other brunel letters are scattered in a dozen archives across Great Britain. One of the fullest research troves available for any Victorian engineer, these materials allow historians an uncommonly rich record of his life. At Westminster Abbey, a brunel window in the south aisle memorializes him. A brunel statue stands on the Thames Embankment in London, looking upriver towards the Charing Cross site of his Hungerford pedestrian bridge, now long gone. At Paddington Station, another statue has him sitting down, looking thoughtful, holding his tall silk hat in one hand and a notebook in the other. In Bristol, a third statue presents him standing up, a jaunty hand in his waistband, gazing off towards the river and his preserved Great Britain steamship.

Brunel’s biography recapitulates the history of engineering in his time, from its French origins to its ultimate mid-Victorian feats in iron and steam. His father, Marc Isambard brunel, came from a family of tenant farmers in northern France, halfway between Paris and Rouen. Over his father’s opposition, Marc decided to be an engineer and spent six years in the French navy. Came the Revolution, and his Royalist sympathies exiled him to America, then to England, where he married an Englishwoman and settled into a picaresque engineering career. He always dressed and carried himself like a gentleman from the ancien régime, with its antiquated manners and costume. Once, in a British court proceeding, he was asked if he was a foreigner. ‘Yes, I am a Norman,’ he replied, ‘and Normandy is a country from whence your oldest nobility derive their titles.’

Marc brunel met Henry Maudslay in 1799, two years after Maudslay had opened his own machinist’s workshop. Their complementary skills meshed well: the French-trained engineer explaining his concepts, the skilled British mechanic bringing them down to ground and to practical execution. brunel and Maudslay worked on projects together for the next twenty years. At the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, under the supervision of the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham they devised steam-powered machinery for making the wooden blocks (pulleys) used in great numbers by sailing ships, turning out a cheaper, more consistent product than by the old hand methods. From this first success, brunel went on to inventions for sawing and bending wood, making shoes and boots, and improving marine steam engines and steamboat paddle wheels. He never quite regained the early heights of his novel blockmaking machinery. Abstracted and absentminded, he would lose umbrellas and take the wrong coach, ending up somewhere out in the country. A financial innocent, at one point he spent three months in a debtors’ prison.

Marc’s greatest work was his son, Isambard, born at Portsmouth in 1806. The boy resembled his father in appearance – small, a large head, dark complexion and eyes – and in his apparently innate knack for drawing and machinery. Isambard grew up in Chelsea, swimming in the Thames and meeting a stream of famous visitors at home. He found his métier at the Maudslay workshop: ‘your firm,’ as he later wrote to the Maudslays, ‘with which all my early recollections of engineering are so closely connected and in whose manufactory I probably acquired all my early knowledge of mechanics.’ Sent off to school near Brighton, he wrote home that he had been making boats, thus injuring his hands, and asked for his father’s eighty-foot tape measure. He spent two years in Paris, studying maths and the French language, and apprenticing under a famous maker of chronometers and scientific instruments. Denied entrance to the elite Ecole Polytechnique because of his foreign birth, he returned to England in 1822 and went to work for his father.

Still a teenager, he had already accumulated a range of education and experience – from Marc, Henry Maudslay, and in France – that few British engineers of his generation could match. Bilingual, bicultural, he displayed a precocious sense of engineering theory and practice. His intellectual gifts were obvious. Marc fully recognized them and pushed his son onward. As Isambard’s career took flight, his immersion in real engineering projects eventually crowded out his more theoretical French background. ‘One sadly loses the habit of mathematical reasoning,’ he noted. He became very much an Englishman, speaking with no French accent, and ever wary of continental tendencies. Later he advised a young man to spurn any writings by French engineers. ‘Take them for abstract science,’ he suggested, ‘and study their statics dynamics geometry etc etc to your heart’s content – but never even read any of their works on mechanics any more than you would search their modern authors for religious principles. A few hours spent in a blacksmith’s and wheelwright’s shop will teach you more practical mechanics – read English books for practice. There is little enough to learn in them but you will not have to unlearn that little.’

In 1825 the brunels embarked on a daring, unprecedented project to build a 1200-foot carriage tunnel under the Thames. Nobody had ever run a tunnel beneath a navigable, tidal river. The watery riverbed overhead consisted of unpredictable mixtures of clay, sand, gravel and mud, and was constantly disrupted by tides and river traffic. For these daunting conditions, Marc invented a novel construction shield. It resembled a giant bookshelf, three men high and twelve men across. Each man stood in a separate compartment, digging with pick and shovel; as the ground was excavated, the shield was screwed forward; bricklayers came in behind and shored up the tunnel. The work inched along, beset by leaking water and lighting and ventilation problems. At times the men stood in black water up to their knees.

After a year of difficulties, Marc took sick and told Isambard, twenty years old, to take over. The response of the brawny workmen to their new boss – so young, small, and French-educated to boot – may be imagined. Given all the circumstances, he managed well enough. At one point, with water leaking into the tunnel again, he did not get to bed for five straight nights. ‘No one has stood out like him!’ Marc wrote in his diary. Two hard years into the project, the river broke through from overhead in a gushing flood. Isambard descended on a rope to rescue a workman. For three weeks he could not plug the holes. Marc was harshly criticized by the authoritative Mechanics’ Magazine of London for not accepting advice or taking responsibility for his crucial mistakes. The leaks were finally sealed and work resumed, but in a changed climate of watchful outside scepticism.

Isambard sought refuge in an extraordinary private journal, the most candid and searching self-appraisals he ever committed to paper. He recorded the details of his daily life, the tunnel work, sleeping five hours a night, and stray thoughts about girls. At twenty-one, despite his adult responsibilities in the tunnel, he was between adolescence and grownup-ness. Still under construction, he took an unsparing look at himself. ‘My self-conceit and love of glory or rather approbation vie with each other which shall govern me,’ he wrote. ‘I often do the most silly, useless things to appear to advantage… My self-conceit renders me domineering, intolerant, nay, even quarrelsome with those who do not flatter.…I am always building castles in the air, what time I waste.’ Yet that self-conceit had quite adequate cause; he fully appreciated his own special talents and sought fame and reputation. ‘My ambition, or whatever it may be called (it is not the mere wish to be rich) is rather extensive.’ So probably he should never marry. ‘For one whose ambition is to distinguish himself in the eye of the public, such freedom is almost indispensable.’ Or maybe he should. ‘Yet, in sickness and disappointment, how delightful to have a companion whose sympathy one is sure of possessing.’ In this journal, he is less the engineering wunderkind, more any young man in baffled turmoil about his future.

In January 1828 water again broke into the tunnel, more seriously this time. Six men were killed. Isambard was knocked down, suffered internal injuries, and barely escaped alive. It took him over three months to heal. The Mechanics’ Magazine, no fan of the brunels, praised his coolness under pressure and brave concern for his men. But investors had lost confidence in the project, still only half completed. Work was stopped and the tunnel sealed. ‘Tunnel is now, I think, dead,’ Isambard later wrote in his diary. ‘This is the first time I have felt able to cry… However, nil desperandum [never despair] has always been my motto – we may succeed yet.’

At the time, he felt crushed by such a public defeat. The halting of the Thames Tunnel project did, however, free brunel from an endless, risky, dreadful burden – and from his father’s orbit – to pursue other work on his own. In Bristol, his designs for docks and the Clifton Suspension Bridge brought him to the attention of men involved in starting the Great Western Railway. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-six, he was entering the most successful decade of his career. (The Thames Tunnel project was later resumed, but without brunel fils. It opened in 1843 just for pedestrians, not carriages, and ultimately became part of the London Underground.)

In step with the general progression from civil to mechanical engineering, brunel’s attention moved from tunnels to railways. He took his first trip late in 1831, on the Liverpool and Manchester. The carriage shook too much for easy writing. ‘The time is not far off,’ he decided, ‘when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 miles an hour – let me try.’ He got his chance with the Great Western, the longest railway yet conceived in Great Britain. Appointed its engineer in the spring of 1833, he threw himself into this new work with all the energy of a good engineer at play. He spent long days on horseback surveying and plotting its route, placating resistant landowners along the way, and stayed up late writing letters and reports. Against the advice of most railway men, he convinced his board to accept a broad gauge of seven feet, more than two feet wider than the tracks of existing lines: a bold departure, ultimately proven wrongheaded, but early evidence of brunel’s forceful persuasive gifts.

For two years he was too busy even to scribble in his diary. The day after Christmas in 1835, he finally sat down and took stock. ‘The most eventful part of my life…emerging from obscurity,’ he wrote. ‘What a change – The Railway now is in progress. I am thus Engineer to the finest work in England…and it’s not this alone but everything I have been engaged in has been successful.’ (He was perhaps repressing any memories of the Thames Tunnel.) ‘And this at the age of 29 – Faith not so young as I always fancy tho’ really can hardly believe it when I think of it.…I don’t like it – it can’t last – bad weather must soon come.’ He moved into plusher quarters at 18 Duke Street in the Westminster area of London, with easy access to the corridors of influence at Parliament and Whitehall. It remained brunel’s home and office for the rest of his life. Resolving his earlier doubts about possible marital intrusions on those boundless ambitions, in July 1836 he took a trophy wife, a fabled beauty named Mary Horsley whom he had known and intermittently courted for five years.

Marriage and, later, fatherhood did not affect his usual work habits. During the first four months after his wedding, he made decisions about the brick-arched Maidenhead Bridge over the Thames, the Box Tunnel, the tile drains along the track, the heating and welding of iron bars, the sinking of bridge arches and the proper way of laying bricks, the ordering of four locomotives, the size of engine valves relative to piston area, the question of allowing Great Western work on Sundays, and the cheapest wood for posts. It was brunel’s line, all down the line. He installed his own methods for putting down the roadbed and securing the rails, served as architect for every station along the way, and even picked the names for the first locomotives. ‘It is an understood thing,’ he wrote to one of his men, ‘that all under me are subject to immediate dismissal at my pleasure.’

brunel’s control of every aspect of the Great Western made him the culprit when anything went wrong. As construction took longer and longer, and costs more than doubled, directors in London and Liverpool started having doubts about their young engineer. ‘The Box Tunnel is operating a good deal against the Great Western,’ noted George H. Gibbs, a London director. ‘Connecting it with the name of brunel, the difficulties of the Thames Tunnel are not unlikely to come into people’s mind.’ The first section of the line, from London to Maidenhead, was opened to passengers in June 1838. When trains did not run as fast or as smoothly as expected, brunel recommended reballasting the roadbed, replacing springs in the cars, and improving the locomotives. As the trading price of Great Western stock kept falling, shareholders in Liverpool moved to dismiss brunel. Even George Gibbs, who usually defended him, felt torn. ‘With all his talent,’ Gibbs wrote of brunel, ‘he has shown himself deficient…in arranging his work in his own mind so as to enable him to proceed with it rapidly, economically and surely. There have been too many mistakes, too much of doing and undoing.’

Under fire, for a brief time brunel felt shattered, even unable to work. His creation, so subject to costly revisions, was mockingly called the Great Experimental Railway. Gibbs had a blunt conversation with him; brunel promised to cooperate and retained the support of Gibbs and his faction. At a tense showdown during a meeting of the directors, brunel was again persuasive, defending himself with an even temper and compelling effect. The Liverpool contingent was outvoted, and brunel proceeded to finish the Great Western. Upon completion, it was acclaimed as the fastest, most strongly built railway in the world, and its engineer’s characteristic problems along the way were forgotten.

Brunel’s first steamship began with a famous jest in October 1835. At a Great Western directors meeting in London, someone objected to the unprecedented length of the line, planned to run all the way to Bristol through many expensive tunnels at the western end. Rising to the challenge and topping it, brunel replied with what he apparently meant as a joke: ‘Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat to go from Bristol to New York?’ A director from Bristol, an engineer turned sugar refiner named Thomas R. Guppy, took the riposte seriously. He and brunel talked it over that night. brunel had almost no prior experience with steam on water, but he recognized few boundaries to his engineering skills. He brought in an acquaintance, a semi-retired Royal Navy officer named Christopher Claxton, whom he knew from his earlier work for the Bristol docks. The three men started an informal steamship committee.

Claxton and William Patterson, a local shipbuilder, toured the main steam ports of Great Britain and sailed on every coastal and channel steamboat line. ‘Great improvements are being gradually introduced,’ they reported in January, ‘more particularly observable in the Clyde than elsewhere.’ For crossing the ocean, they recommended a much larger steamship than any yet built. They invoked a common principle, well known to shipbuilders of the time: that a vessel’s resistance as it moved through the water did not increase in direct proportion to its tonnage. As a measure of interior space, tonnage was computed from three dimensions. Resistance was then estimated from just two dimensions, the width and depth of the hull. Thus tonnage increased as the cube of the dimensions, resistance only as the square of them. A much larger ocean ship could therefore include the necessary space for coals and machinery, well beyond the capacity of a conventional ship, without requiring intolerable increases in power and fuel consumption to maintain adequate speed. Claxton and Patterson estimated that a steamship of 1200 tons and 300 horsepower, loaded with 580 tons of coal, would average between six and nine knots and cross the Atlantic in less than twenty days to the west, and just thirteen days to the east: roughly half the average voyages by sail.

The Great Western Steam Ship Company first planned to build two ships of that size, then decided on a single larger vessel of 1400 tons and 400 horsepower. Patterson – ‘known as a man open to conviction,’ according to Claxton, ‘and not prejudiced in favour of either quaint or old-fashioned notions in ship-building’ – would build her in Bristol. As managing director of the new company, Claxton looked after day-to-day operations. The building committee of brunel, Guppy, Claxton and Patterson met about once a week, whenever railway business brought brunel to Bristol. In general, on this committee Patterson took charge of the ship, brunel of the engine. ‘Mr. Patterson drew the lines,’ Claxton later recalled; ‘Mr. brunel, Mr. Guppy, and myself, often sat over them; Mr. Patterson got instructions and made his own calculations accurately; Mr. brunel made his also often by my side.’ Over the next two years, they planned and built the largest steamship yet, the first designed for regular crossings of the North Atlantic.

They were racing against a competing group in London organized by Junius Smith, an expatriate American businessman. His British and American Steam Navigation Company drew investors from both sides of the ocean. This final sprint to steam across the Atlantic came down to three separate but overlapping rivalries: Britain against America, Bristol against London, and the Clyde against the Thames (or the North against the South). Subtly complicated and multiply crosshatched, the contest was played out amid fierce regional loyalties for rich stakes of prestige and fortune.

The crucial technical questions involved engines and boilers. The two leading British builders of marine steam engines were Robert Napier of Glasgow and Maudslay, Sons and Field of London. (Clyde and Thames.) After Marc brunel’s old friend Henry Maudslay died in 1831, the firm had passed on to his sons, Thomas and Joseph, and in particular to Joshua Field, a skilled engineer and manager. ‘No vessel ever had a sufficient power yet,’ Field had declared in 1822. ‘There is a limit, but that limit has never yet reached its fullest extent.’ As horsepowers kept on growing, the upper border was continuously extended. Progress already seemed infinite. By the 1830s, both Napier and Field were intrigued by the potential honour of powering the first true Atlantic steamship. ‘I have not the smallest doubt upon my own mind,’ Napier wrote in 1833, ‘but that in a very short time it will be one of the best and most lucrative businesses in the country.’ ‘The distance is limited,’ Field added a few years later, ‘only by the quantity of coal she can carry.’

By then both Scottish and English engineers had settled on the side-lever engine as the best mechanism for an ocean steamship. Derived from Watt’s old overhead beam engine, it placed the main weight of the power source at the bottom of the ship, lowering its centre of gravity to limit rolling and pitching in heavy seas. A vertical engine cylinder drove a horizontal beam pivoted in the middle, with tandem connecting rods at its ends running downward to side levers, which drove a crank on the paddle shaft to turn the paddles. It was complicated and inefficient, moving massive weights up and down, with each stroke coming to a dead stop and then reversing. The bulky rods and levers added weight and took up precious cargo space. But the various parts were easily accessible and well balanced, minimizing friction and strain and needing less lubrication than other engine types. The piston’s long stroke made full use of steam in the cylinder. Confined to the ship’s closed hold, it was protected from foul weather and did not interfere with sailors moving about on the deck. Napier changed the framing from cast to wrought iron, making it lighter and stronger. The side-lever engine was considered exceptionally rugged and reliable, important qualities for crossing 3000 miles of ocean.

The earliest marine boilers were kettle types, simply a drum of water heated by an external fire. Around 1830, Maudslay and others introduced a variation on the locomotive boiler, featuring an internal furnace that expelled its exhaust gases through long, narrow flues, making fuller use of the heat to produce more steam. But steamship boilers remained primitive and inconsistent, box-shaped and riddled with fragile seams. Each engine builder made his own boilers, using construction methods and metals of unpredictable quality. No one as yet dared push a seagoing boiler beyond a modest pressure of about five pounds per square inch. Lower pressure held down horsepower and made the engine use more coal, which limited the ship’s range and cargo capacity. More than any other technical factor, the state of boiler technology was keeping steamships off the Atlantic.

Several steamers had already crossed the ocean, but not under continuous power or as part of a regularly scheduled service. The American vessel Savannah went from the United States to England in 1819, steaming only for about eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day passage. Over the next fourteen years, at least five other steamships made an Atlantic crossing, down to the Scottish-Canadian Royal William in 1833, Samuel Cunard’s first venture into steam navigation. None of these ships could carry enough fuel to steam all the way. In any case, the salt water’s scaly deposits in the boilers had to be blown off or laboriously chipped out with hammer and chisel at frequent intervals; that meant stopping the engine for up to a day and proceeding under sail until the puny boilers could be cleaned, refilled, and get up steam again.

One possible solution to these fuel and boiler limitations was to reduce the route across the ocean. The shortest great circle course between Europe and North America ran just 1900 miles between Valentia, at the southwestern tip of Ireland, to St John’s, Newfoundland. The run from there to Halifax brought the total to 2400 miles. In 1824 a group in London under Maurice Fitzgerald, the knight of Kerry – an Irish statesman and member of Parliament – launched the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company to carry traffic from London to Valentia to Halifax to New York. The company included Alexander Nimmo, a government civil engineer who was building piers and harbours along the Irish coast, and other men of influence. They planned steamships of 1000 tons, almost twice the size of any vessel then afloat. In the autumn of 1825, American newspapers declared it ‘almost certain’ that the service would start in the following spring. But it never did. In these years, just before the railway, the journey by coach and steamboat from London to Valentia took fifty hours, and forty hours from Liverpool. The whole trip would have demanded at least four changes of conveyance, with the usual uncertainties of baggage and schedules, to reach New York. It was much easier just to take one of the swift sailing packet lines the whole way from London or Liverpool. The Valentia company disappeared, though the general idea was periodically revived.

Junius Smith’s protracted crusade for an Atlantic steamship line began with an interminable fifty-four-day sailing voyage from England to New York in the autumn of 1832. He was then fifty-two years old, a Connecticut Yankee and Yale graduate who had lived in London since 1805, prospering as a merchant. Dawdling across the Atlantic for almost two months, Smith had plenty of time to ponder an alternative means of ocean travel. In his innocence of steamship technology, he conceived a line of four steaming packets, to cost £30,000 each and make the hard westbound run from Portsmouth to New York in just twelve or thirteen days. ‘I shall not relinquish this project,’ he vowed, ‘unless I find it absolutely impracticable.’ For two years, nobody he contacted in London or New York expressed any flicker of interest. Smith kept trying, virtually alone. ‘The patience and labor of forming a company in London is beyond all that you can imagine,’ he wrote to an associate in New York. ‘It is the worst place in the whole world to bring out a new thing, the best when it is done… All the old sailing interest of course is against me.’

The project became credible when Smith extended his search for supporters to northern England. Macgregor Laird, from a Scottish shipbuilding family that had moved down to Liverpool, became the secretary of Smith’s projected company. He brought acutely needed technical expertise and steamship contacts to the enterprise. They planned four ships of 1200 tons and 300 horsepower, to make the trip from London (and now Liverpool as well) to New York in fifteen days on average. After The Times announced the scheme in November 1835, over £1 million in stock was subscribed – though not actually paid up – in a few weeks. Many English investors, scenting any reasonable plan, were ready for transatlantic steam. ‘Job’s patience is much celebrated,’ Smith remarked, ‘but I don’t think that he ever undertook…to establish a steam company.’

Meantime brunel and his Bristol associates were getting ready to build their own Atlantic steamship, the Great Western, starting out a few months behind Smith and Laird. brunel decided on the size of the engine and picked its builder. He went through the motions of a careful search, taking tenders from three firms. But given his family’s intimate ties to Maudslay over four decades, the five years that Thomas Guppy had spent there as a young engineer, the company’s long experience in making powerful marine engines, and Joshua Field’s eminence as an engineer, the contract could have gone nowhere else. The Maudslay firm agreed to build a two-cylinder side-lever engine of 400 horsepower. For this special project, with its high and public stakes, Field designed a system of engine cams that improved steam economy – useful for the broad Atlantic – and invented new, more efficient double-storey boilers. brunel occasionally dropped by the Maudslay works at Lambeth, checking on the engine’s progress, and he mediated squabbles between Claxton and the firm’s management about bills and payments. ‘There are but few good Engine builders,’ he reminded Claxton, ‘and it will not be prudent to quarrel with the principal one.’

brunel’s role in the ship herself has been exaggerated. He came to the project with no shipbuilding experience and throughout its construction was intensely preoccupied with the Great Western Railway. Claxton and Patterson, the real ship men, had already recommended a very large vessel, and Patterson designed the hull and fittings with just occasional advice from the others. brunel, drawing on his knowledge of bridge stresses and bracings, did recommend adding to the ship’s longitudinal strength with extra iron bolts and trusses. (A longer ship, so the logic went, would need additional strength when suspended from the bow and stern between two high ocean waves.) brunel wanted to make the ship 400 to 500 tons larger, but Patterson doubted her stability at that size, so she was kept to 1320 tons. brunel and Guppy, his fellow landlubber, urged fitting larger cabin windows at the stern for more light and air, as in drawing-room windows ashore. Claxton ‘took the liberty of reminding them’, he recalled, ‘that there was water outside which was sometimes very uneven in its surface, and unlike the generality of lawns; and strange as it may appear, Mr. Patterson, their builder, agreed.’ brunel played a vital part in creating the Great Western, but no more than Claxton, Patterson and Field did. Most accounts ever since have slighted their contributions in favour of their more famous colleague.

In London and Liverpool, the rival steamship project of Junius Smith was splintering into sniping factions. Instead of four ships at once, they had pulled back and decided to build a single enormous vessel of 1800 tons. As an apparent compromise, the construction of the British Queen was split between the Thames and the Clyde. The shipbuilding contract went to the London firm of Curling and Young. Macgregor Laird wanted his friend and fellow Scotsman Robert Napier to make the engine, but Napier’s bid of £20,000 was rejected, presumably by the London faction – a fatal error. Another Clyde engine builder, Claude Girdwood of Greenock, got the job instead at a lesser price. ‘The steamer is going forward in all its branches,’ Smith noted in March 1837. ‘I look back with amazement and see how I was guided by Providence in this thing.’ A few months later, though, Girdwood went bankrupt, and no other builder would complete his unfinished engine. In August, Napier – no doubt with a certain grim satisfaction – agreed to build another engine, of 420 horsepower, for £21,000: more than his spurned offer of a year earlier. This long delay let the Great Western company pull ahead in the race to steam across the Atlantic.

By the spring of 1838, after more than two years of planning and building, the Great Western was ready. At that moment she was, as designed, the biggest and most up-to-date steamship in the world. Most of the technical improvements came from Joshua Field. His version of a spray condenser, which converted some of the engine’s used steam back into fresh water, limited scale deposits enough to let the boilers fire continuously across the ocean. Along with his innovative engine cams and double-storey boilers, Field had addressed the besetting inefficiency of paddle wheels: the pointless thrashings up and down as the paddles entered and left the water. Borrowing from the geometric figure of the cycloid (the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line), Field added three staggered boards to each paddle, stepped in from the circumference towards the hub so that each section entered the water at the same place in immediate succession. This ‘cycloidal wheel’ was supposed to reduce both the initial downward slap of a paddle on the water and the heaving motion at the other end of the immersion, as it allowed the paddle to clear and shed the water more smoothly. From boilers to paddles, the Great Western was engineered specifically for service on the North Atlantic.

The overall dimensions of her wooden hull, 236 feet long and 35 feet wide, didn’t make her look much different from other large ships of the day. ‘Her size, when seen by herself, does not appear so great as it really is,’ one visitor noticed, ‘and it is only when on board, or seen alongside other vessels, whose size is known, that her magnitude is appreciated.’ The black-painted hull of the Great Western presented a flaring clipper bow with a figurehead of Neptune holding a gilded trident. The deck was dominated by four low masts, one looming black smokestack, and two elevated bridges that linked the paddle boxes. A double wheel on a circular platform at the stern allowed two (or more) sailors to muscle her rudder and steer the vessel. Three structures on the deck enclosed a forecabin 46 feet long, the top of the engine room at midship, and the 75-foot main saloon at the rear, the showplace of the ship.

The saloon offered a seagoing opulence and high-ceilinged airiness matched, at the time, only by Edward Knight Collins’s Dramatic Line of American sailing packets. The ornamental work was contracted out to Frederick Crace of Wigmore Street and the Messrs Jackson of Rathbone Place, two noted London decorating firms. In early Victorian style, they festooned the saloon with columns that imitated palm trees and large pier glasses that suggested Dresden china, and they painted the walls and ceiling in warm, delicate colours with gold highlights. Edward Thomas Parris, the historical painter to the queen, contributed door panels five feet high that presented vignettes across a carnival of cultures: rural scenery and farming, music, interior views and landscapes, sports and amusements, and the arts and sciences, all in the rococo manner of Louis XV. The main staircase, to the cabins below, had a bronzed and gilded ornamental railing, with woodwork painted in imitation oak. The small cabins accommodated up to 128 passengers and twenty servants. Regardless of brunel’s relative share in her creation, the Great Western had emerged as a recognizable brunel product: made of the finest materials and newest engineering, extravagant and original, truly the Great Western Railway at sea. (One impressed observer inevitably called her a ‘floating palace’.)

Engined and finished in London, on 31 March she left Blackwall for Bristol, whence she would embark on her maiden voyage to New York. She steamed in large majesty down the Thames to the English Channel, the engine pumping easily with contained power, black coal smoke pouring from the stack. brunel and Claxton were aboard, watching and approving. Everything seemed in fine order on this shakedown cruise – until a serious fire broke out in the engine room. The felt insulation around the boilers, installed to improve steam efficiencies and keep the room temperature tolerable for the stokers, had ignited from the heat of the pipes, and the fire was quickly spread by oil paint and gas to the wooden beams and deck overhead. The flames licked as high as the top of the smokestack, holding back attempts to reach into the engine room. Claxton took a leather hose down to the fore-hatch and from there poured water on the fire. brunel started down to help him, lost his footing on the burned rung of a ladder, fell heavily on top of Claxton, and lay unconscious, facedown in a puddle of water. (It recalled his accident in the Thames Tunnel ten years earlier: nearly killed by his own engineering project.) Claxton saved his life by breaking his fall, pulling him out of the puddle, and calling for a rope. brunel was hauled up on deck, suffering from a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg.

The fire burned on. The commander, Lieutenant James Hosken of the Royal Navy, thought about running out the lifeboats and taking off passengers, but he instead beached the Great Western on a flat riverbank, where she sat upright on her bottom. Men finally broke through the deck into the engine room and put out the flames. Refloated on the next high tide, surprisingly undamaged except for the burned felt and some charred wood, the ship proceeded to Bristol. After three days, brunel felt well enough to dictate a long letter to Claxton about the generally satisfactory performance of the ship and her engine, hardly mentioning his injuries. ‘I hope the Vessel will be a long way on her Voyage to New York,’ he wrote, ‘before I could be in a state to go onboard again.’

The fire must have pleased Junius Smith. Nursing an exalted opinion of his own historical significance, he liked to call himself ‘the father of Atlantic steam navigation’. Smith believed that he alone owned the very concept of a transatlantic steamship. He had started his company before the Bristol group got under way, and now, with the long-delayed British Queen not even launched yet, he could not bear in frustration and defeat to let the Great Western beat him across the ocean. So Smith and Macgregor Laird chartered the Sirius, a well-regarded channel steamer of only 700 tons, loaded her down with fuel, and sent her on a risky, shortened passage to New York from Cork, on the southern coast of Ireland. (Starting from Cork knocked a day’s sailing off the course to America from Bristol.) The voyage of the Sirius was just a heedless, dangerous publicity stunt, a desperate gambit by sore losers, and hardly worth the historical attention it has received ever since.

The Great Western left Bristol for New York as scheduled on 8 April, four days behind the Sirius. The first Atlantic steamship race, contrived and unequal, was under way. brunel had provided Hosken with an engraved Mercator-projection chart of his great circle route, marked with bearings and soundings, to help keep the ship on the fastest course. The Great Western carried only seven passengers at thirty-five guineas (about thirty-seven pounds) apiece; fifty additional passengers had intended to go but were scared away by the fire. These seven brave pioneers in transatlantic steaming were amply serviced by fifty-seven crew members, including twenty-four seamen above deck and fifteen sweating coal stokers below. During the entire voyage, the engine was only stopped three times, briefly, for minor adjustments and to take soundings on the Newfoundland Banks. That meant little rest for the stokers. They struggled to bring coal by basket and wheelbarrow from holds at the bow and stern, where the ship’s pitching and rolling motions were exaggerated. The stokers complained; Captain Hosken warned them to obey the chief engineer. Without enough coal, the boilers were barely maintaining adequate steam pressure. The stokers were pushed harder and promised extra pay. One exhausted stoker named Crooks got drunk and unruly, which inspired him to try to throw the captain overboard. For this egregious lapse of discipline, Crooks was restrained and tied up. The other stokers stopped working until he was released: not a near-mutiny by real sailors but a hint of proletarian industrial unrest transferred from land to the unfamiliar regimen of a seaborne boiler room.

Up on deck, the more experienced passengers noticed differences from life on a sailing packet. Morning conversations brought fewer fretful speculations about the wind and weather; the wind hardly mattered now. Instead the novel, somewhat frightening steam engine dominated everything on board. Nobody had ever crossed the ocean in the relentless presence of so audible, tangible a machine. All day and night it hissed and clanked, smoked and steamed, heating the deck from below so that tar bubbled up between the seams, sticky and persistent. The smoke and smuts blew around unpredictably, blackening clothes and alighting on hair. The engine lubricants, derived from animal fats with low combustion points, burned and smelled pervasively like a constant, enormous kitchen fire, a bilious irritant to anyone fighting seasickness or confined to a cabin below. The sea atmosphere, usually clean and bracing, felt cooked and greasy. Some people worried about being blown up by the overworked boilers or getting suddenly forced out of bed with no time to get dressed.

The machine was working, though, with the strong and steady rhythm of a heartbeat, practically without stopping, all the way across the ocean. A new era was finally at hand. ‘How this glorious steamer wallops, and gallops, and flounders along!’ wrote a passenger on the Great Western. ‘She goes it like mad. Its motion is unlike that of any living thing I know; puffing like a porpoise, breasting the waves like a sea-horse, and at times skimming the surface like a bird. It possesses the joint powers of the tenants of the air, land, and water, and is superior to them all.’ As the days passed, the ship clicked off daily runs never before achieved on a westward crossing. A new speed record seemed easily in reach.

The Sirius, nearly out of fuel, reached New York on 23 April. The Great Western came in only twelve hours later after a voyage of fifteen and a half days, the fastest crossing ever from England to America. Of her initial 660 tons of coal, she had 203 tons left in her bunkers – a reassuring margin of safety, for prospective customers, in the most doubted, uncertain aspect of transatlantic steam. The Great Western took sixty-six passengers on her trip back to Bristol. After losing almost £4000 on her first passage out and home, she made four more round-trips that year, turning small profits and lowering her own records in both directions. Already, at this early point, ocean travellers had begun to accept the modernist bargain of steam dangers and discomforts in exchange for consistent, unprecedented speed. In September the Great Western carried 131 passengers to New York and had to refuse 30 more for lack of space. This passage took sixteen days, nine hours – almost one day slower than her maiden, but still two weeks faster than a crack sailing packet.

The Great Western puffed back and forth across the ocean while the British Queen inched along towards completion. It was a surprising reversal of expected form, Bristol over London, the fading western port over the burgeoning urban colossus; so London, seeking an explanation, blamed Glasgow. During the spring and summer of 1839, partisans of the Thames and the Clyde engaged in a ferocious public debate about the practical wisdom of sending the British Queen north for her machinery. ‘Here we have a magnificent vessel dragged from the Thames to Glasgow, at great risk and expense, in search of engines,’ wrote a man from Cheapside in London. ‘All the world, except the sapient gentlemen connected with the “British Queen” are perfectly aware that London-made steam-engines (like most London-made goods) are decidedly the best… Our good friends, the Scotch, proverbially know how to pass off certain inferior birds “as swans”.’ In rebuttal, Robert Napier’s friends pointed out that he had been obliged to replace and reinforce much of the carpentry work installed by the British Queen’s southern shipwrights. Napier also had to lower the keelsons (heavy bracing timbers that ran parallel to the keel) by about six inches just to fit his taller machinery into the engine room. ‘The people in the North,’ said one rebutter, ‘…consider the London-built ships very light and flimsy; in proof of which, amongst many other improvements made in the British Queen at Port Glasgow, it was deemed absolutely necessary to strengthen her with several additional iron knees. It is notorious that steam and other ships can be built and fitted out, decorated, and finished, as expeditiously on the Clyde as on any other river in the world.’

These arguments drew on ancient, bitter rivalries between Glasgow and London, Scotland and England, North and South. British political and commercial power was centred in London, to the continuous irritation of the provinces. But Scotland could still claim a better educational system and an older, more eminent engineering tradition than the Thames – and the famous Scottish thrift. Clydeside builders paid lower wages and enjoyed closer, cheaper access to coal and iron than Londoners, which meant they could build steam engines less expensively. That introduced another element to the public debates: ‘the avarice or parsimoniousness of steam-boat companies,’ as one Clyde defender put it, ‘who, finding that their orders can generally be more cheaply executed by Scotch engineers than London ones, run to them, and instead of being liberal in their dealings, screw them down to contracts, not consistent either with good materials or workmanship.’ Such sharp practices, so this explanation ran, left Clyde engineers the unhappy choice of losing highstandard business or producing shoddy work at cut rates that harmed their reputations as engine builders.

The contest between the Great Western and the British Queen, overtly a race to dominate Atlantic steam, became an acrid showdown between the two main centres of British shipbuilding and marine engineering. With a lucrative market for transatlantic steamers just opening up, the outcome could have a decisive impact on the steam futures of London and Glasgow. ‘If our Scotch friends would puff their work less, and perform more, it would be more creditable to them,’ a shipping official in London suggested. After all, shipboard explosions of Glasgow boilers had caused far more deaths than accidents on London vessels; but perhaps – came the reply – that was just because the Clyde had produced so many more steamships than the Thames. ‘Let any one travel by the Thames river steamers,’ wrote a Scots enthusiast, ‘and then go and take a trip by the fleet, strong, and beautifully-built Clyde boats, and then say without prejudice which he prefers… No engineers in the world are more ably qualified for the just, cautious, and accurate execution or manufacture of marine steam-engines, than are the Scotch.’

Provincial rhetorics aside, the real-world proof of the matter lay in the ships themselves. The British Queen did replace her rival as the biggest, highest-powered steamship in the world: 275 feet long, 1863 tons, and an engine jacked up beyond its contracted size to 500 horsepower. Robert Napier sent the ship down to the Thames for final fittings before her maiden voyage; his cousin David Napier, who had moved to London, gave her a suspicious inspection. ‘They unfortunately let one of the boilers get dry while coming round, either carelessly or willingly,’ David informed Robert, hinting at possible Thamesian sabotage, ‘which has given the Cockneys another handle against Scotch engineers.’ The British Queen at last left for New York on 12 July 1839 (fifteen months after the Great Western’s maiden). Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird went along as her most interested passengers. Also aboard, and quite interested himself, was Samuel Cunard of Halifax, returning home from business in England, and by this time quite intent on developing his own steamers across the Atlantic.

Laird’s unpublished diary of the voyage, recently discovered and donated to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, is a doleful litany of worries and discomforts. As the ship’s main designer, he felt the burden of responsibility for her performance. At midsummer the weather should have been as favourable as the westward run ever allowed. Instead the British Queen fought unusually strong opposing winds and currents, and Laird – famous for an earlier African river expedition, but normally an armchair sailor – spent most of the trip miserably seasick. For days he could eat nothing but brown biscuit; he envied the nine or ten women who lay supine in the ladies’ cabin, quaffing six expensive bottles of champagne a day to relieve their queasiness. Hopefully overestimating the ship’s speed, a proud father ever blind to his offspring’s limitations, Laird kept losing bets on the daily run. ‘Summer passage indeed!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s hard, very hard upon me – there she goes, pitch and toss! Talk of her being large! She is a plaything on the ocean.’

Seven days out, they were still not halfway across. ‘I’ll get nervous if we don’t go faster homewards, the only comfort I have is that the ship answers [her rudder] beautifully and is as easy as any slipper, all on board are loud in her praise.’ Even the large complement of paying passengers did not please him. Laird rather disapproved of the ship’s diverse company, which included Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Russians and Poles, about 120 people in all, eating and jabbering loudly in strange tongues at dinner. Miserable, lonesome, and ever worried about his ship, Laird longed for home and dry land. ‘It being my duty I came, but certainly if I could get my living in any other way, than being connected with these passenger steamers, I would most thankfully do it. I am never well, thoroughly well on board ship – I don’t care for the talk and society of people I care nothing about and who care as little for me.’ In the final days, a more favourable wind helped the ship cruise at eleven knots. The British Queen reached New York after fourteen and a half days, excellent time by sailing standards but twenty-four hours worse than the Great Western’s latest record. ‘The public will look at the time only,’ Laird knew, ‘and not to all the circumstances of the voyage.’

A fairer test came at once, as both Atlantic steamships left New York for home on the first of August. The Great Western carried 59 passengers, the British Queen 103. Sailing at the same time, by similar routes, they encountered essentially identical winds and currents; no differing ‘circumstances’ would console the loser. This first true transatlantic steamship race, between the only two vessels yet designed and built for the North Atlantic trade, was keenly followed on both sides of the ocean. After a head start of forty-five minutes, the Great Western steadily lengthened her lead for most of the voyage. On the last two days, though, the British Queen— still breaking in her machinery – closed the gap rapidly and reached Portsmouth only about two hours after the Great Western came into Bristol on 14 August. The British Queen did set a new elapsed round-trip record of thirty-two days, twelve hours. Engineers from both the Thames and Clyde could find reasons to preen themselves.

Later voyages, however, proved that Smith and Laird had built a larger but slower vessel. ‘The British Queen was a fine ship,’ noted Sam Cunard, who was paying close attention, ‘but she had not power sufficient. ’ During the 1839 season, in three round-trips she averaged seventeen days, eight hours to New York and sixteen days, fourteen hours home. (The latter figure was skewed by an extended December voyage, hobbled by machinery breakdowns, of twenty-two days, twelve hours.) The Great Western in six round-trips beat her rival’s averages by twenty hours out and three days, five hours home. With a higher ratio of horsepower to tonnage, she showed more effective power against the wind, better sailing qualities with it, and the durability necessary for regular ocean crossing. ‘Is it not reasonable to conclude,’ offered a Londoner, ‘that the engineers of the Thames must be vastly superior to those of the Clyde?’

In the entrepreneurial contest over building and managing an Atlantic steamship, brunel and Bristol had beaten Smith and London. In the engineering battle of the rivals for transatlantic engine-building supremacy, the Thames had won the first round. Across this combined arena of enterprise and engineering, Glasgow – the founder and still centre of British steam navigation – had not much to brag about, as yet.

5. The Cunard Line

Samuel Cunard had a plan. He characteristically discussed it with nobody outside his family. Only his son Ned, now twenty-three years old and an active partner in the Cunard enterprises, knew what his father was up to. During his annual trips to England, Sam had observed the first efforts at transatlantic steam. Taking their measure, he thought he could do better. In January 1839 he boarded a sailing packet to England and embarked on his greatest gamble. As an outsider, he felt no hobbling allegiance to Bristol or London or Glasgow. Well connected to some British power brokers, yet with no loyalties or commitments to any steam builders, Cunard moved around quietly, asking questions and making judgments. ‘Altho I am a colonist,’ he later explained, ‘I have many friends in this country.’ The silent colonial attracted little attention; the real transatlantic action seemed to rest in other, more famous hands. Stealthy and independent, he found the right men for his ships and cut the deal of his life. Cunard got his boats built and running – and stole the game away from its earlier players. ‘The plan was entirely my own,’ he said later, ‘and the public have had the advantage of it.’

Cunard went to England early in 1839 because the British government had declared its intention to subsidize steam navigation between England and America, not to carry passengers or cargo (except incidentally) but mainly to transport the mail, that most essential tool of commerce and empire. The Great Western, by her five routine round-trip voyages in 1838, had shown the possibilities of regular transatlantic steam. Her performance highlighted the many inadequacies of the British Admiralty’s sail-powered mail boats, the ten-gun brigs that ran monthly and unpredictably between Falmouth and North America. In November 1838, rushing to catch up, the Admiralty invited hasty bids from British contractors to provide a monthly steamer mail service between England and Halifax, stipulating ships of at least 300 horsepower. The bids were due in only a month, and the service was to start by April – a schedule so tight that it restricted the field to existing vessels already built for other purposes.

At the time, the Great Western Steam Ship Company maintained a virtual monopoly on transatlantic steam. It had far outclassed the few competing ships, and Junius Smith’s overdue British Queen would not finally be ready until the following summer. Holding all the cards, the Bristol company proceeded to overplay its hand with the government. On 13 December, two days before the deadline, Christopher Claxton wrote to Charles Wood of the Admiralty that his company was interested but needed much more time. The last voyage of the Great Western, with a slow winter passage of nineteen days to New York, had shown (said Claxton) the need for specially constructed mail ships of 1200 tons and 450 horsepower, slightly smaller but more powerful than the Great Western. Claxton offered to build three such ships within eighteen to twenty-four months, and then to carry the mail once a month in each direction, for £45,000 annually under a seven-year contract.

The government wanted action in four months, not two years. The Great Western company ignored that urgency and rewrote the terms of the tender: in effect, instructing the Admiralty about the realities of steam on the North Atlantic. The company’s correcting tone may have annoyed the Admiralty (which believed it had some knowledge of steamships and oceans), and it compounded an earlier, related offence by Thomas Guppy. In the autumn of 1837, at a scientific meeting in Liverpool, Guppy – a founder and director of the Great Western company – had sharply criticized the Royal Navy’s steamship designs. ‘Many of the government vessels are of very bad forms; their power and size greatly disproportioned, ’ Guppy declared. ‘Whoever had seen the fine private steamers belonging to the ports of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol, and had then gone to view the government ones in Woolwich basin, must have been astonished at the extraordinary forms there collected; it would be well if a glass case could be constructed over the basin, to procure those curiosities of practical science, as exercised in our naval building yards.’ (The audience laughed at this sally.) Guppy did not just doubt the government ships; he mocked and made jokes of them. His remarks were published in the Nautical Magazine of London, which was carefully read at the Admiralty. And now his company had doubled the insult by turning the government’s urgent mail tender inside out. The Admiralty, no surprise, rejected the Great Western proposal on 10 January.

On that same day, across the ocean, the Halifax Novascotian printed its first announcement of the original Admiralty tender. (This delay of two months itself argued for adding steam power to the Atlantic mail.) In its headlong rush towards steam, the Admiralty was not allowing enough time for any proposals from the colonies. Sam Cunard nonetheless caught the next sailing packet from Halifax to England, unaware of recent developments. He did not yet know about the Great Western offer, its rejection by the government, or the expired deadline for other bids. He had only his own secret plan.

It was not, as it happened, the best time for Cunard to embark on a grand, risky new venture. The British economic crash of 1837 was still lingering over the country, tightening money markets, headed towards a major industrial depression. Cunard was himself overextended at home. George Renny Young, an influential lawyer and politician in Halifax, had drawn Cunard into a grandiose scheme to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres on Prince Edward Island. It brought him a touchy alliance with the Young family, leaders among the local oligarchs. (Agnes Renny Young, the family matriarch, warned her son George about Cunard’s ‘immense’ power: ‘People fear him so much that they keep quiet and submit. He never was friendly to our family and will give you a blow where he can.’) Sam took a one-third interest in the land company and soon fought with George Young over the appointment of a company attorney. Young wanted his brother Charles, and Sam favoured his son-in-law James Horsfield Peters, who had married his eldest daughter, Mary. Family loyalties, always a tugging allegiance for Cunard, quickly poisoned the venture. ‘You seem afraid that I intend making a family party of this,’ Cunard wrote to Young in August 1838. ‘I trust I am sufficiently well known in this community to be believed when I assert that I had no intention of taking advantage.…I must now decline any further correspondence on the subject.’ After Cunard pulled rank, James Peters got the job as attorney, but Young nursed the grievance. The quarrel was only resolved when Cunard bought out Young’s shares in the spring of 1839. That left Sam, at this crucial moment, heavily mortgaged and cash-poor for investing in any major new enterprise. (Young and his family became enemies with long memories and later found a damaging chance to strike back at the Cunards.)

What, then, was nonetheless drawing Cunard towards transatlantic steam? Fifty-one years old, still in his prime, he remained as active and ambitious as ever. After his long career in ships and shipping, and (since the Royal William) in steam vessels as well, he had in some ways outgrown Halifax and craved a larger arena. An Atlantic steamship line was a logical extension of his lifework. He knew from weary experience the limitations of the British government’s mail packets; he had been enduring their slow, precarious service for almost two decades. (On a trip to England in 1831, Cunard had fallen on a packet’s deck and broken his arm.) To compete with the fast New York packet lines, the government brigs had been redesigned for more speed. But that made the ships less stable and too prone to foundering at sea. ‘Almost every year, two hundred or three hundred people were lost in the mail packets, and at last they got the designation of “coffins”,’ Cunard said later. ‘I came home in those ships very frequently, and of course felt the danger and discomfort of coming in them, and I have lost a very great many friends in them.’ In January 1839, even as Cunard was crossing to England, that month’s westbound Falmouth packet sailed away and just disappeared. ‘I lost five or six intimate friends,’ Cunard recalled of that vanished ship. ‘They were never heard of.’ This latest packet disaster invested his mission with an immediate, sharper edge and made its own human case for adding steam’s protecting power to the ocean mail.

Along with these personal motives, in a larger sense Cunard was acting from patriotic or nationalist incentives. Given his American parentage and his years of business dealings down the coast of New England to New York, he had strong ties to some Yankee ports and individuals. Yet his family had, after all, been forced into unwanted exile by the American victors in the Revolution. He typically regarded his American commercial associates with a goading mixture of fear and respect; over his entire career, nothing else so motivated him as competing with Americans and striking back at them. The New York packet lines, faster and more reliable, had taken most of the transatlantic mail away from the Admiralty’s ships. At a time of strained relations between the two countries, British mail depended largely on American vessels: a galling vulnerability that in part explained the Admiralty’s sudden sprint towards steam. As a Canadian, British subject, and descendant of American Loyalists, Cunard inevitably savoured the prospect of taking the mail back from the aggressive Yankees.

Arrived in London, he took lodgings at a Piccadilly hotel and worked from a desk at the General Mining Association’s office in nearby Ludgate Hill. His GMA connections, his two decades of carrying the mail between Boston, Halifax and St John’s, Newfoundland, and his thriving agency for the East India Company’s tea trade in eastern Canada all eased his way through Whitehall and financial offices in the City. He also carried a useful letter of introduction from Sir Colin Campbell, the royally appointed lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. ‘I have always found him one of the firmest supporters of the measures of the Government,’ Campbell had written, ‘and his being one of the principal Bankers and Merchants and Agent of the General Mining Association, and also Commissioner of Light Houses, gives him a great deal of influence in this community.’

Cunard’s plan was simple and audacious: instead of a monthly mail service, he intended to run enough ships to maintain a weekly service across the ocean and thus cut more deeply, directly into the frequent sailings of the New York packets. He had taken the Admiralty’s tender and quadrupled it. Within days of his arrival in London, he was meeting with Charles Wood at the Admiralty and Francis T. Baring at the Treasury. ‘I submitted that by going once a week the whole of the letters would be taken by our steamers, and the American packet ships that had previously carried the letters would cease to carry them,’ Cunard explained later. Wood and Baring ‘entertained my plan; and they took a great deal of pains…spent many hours at different times in going through the calculations and routes with me.’ The three parties eventually split the difference between Cunard’s plan and the Admiralty tender by settling on a mail service to run twice a month at the outset.

Cunard’s formal proposal on 11 February committed to paper what they had already thrashed out in conversation. ‘I hereby offer to furnish Steam Boats of not less than three hundred Horse power,’ he wrote, ‘to convey the mails from a port in England to Halifax and back twice in each month.’ In addition, he would provide steamboats of half that power for carrying the mail between Halifax and Boston, connecting his service to the United States but saving the extra two hundred miles to continue to New York. ‘Should any improvements in Steam Navigation be made,’ he added, with a nod to the onrushing pace of technical progress, ‘…which the Lords of the Admiralty may consider as essential to the Service, I do bind myself to make such alterations and improvements as their Lords may direct.’ For these forty-eight annual transatlantic voyages he asked £55,000 a year. (The Great Western company had wanted £45,000 for twenty-four trips.) The Admiralty and Treasury moved quickly. Within two weeks of the formal proposal, long before any public announcement, word was passing around London’s political and financial circles that Samuel Cunard of Halifax had the contract.

Not quite; Cunard had skipped the thorny guesswork, which had so undone Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird, of predicting how soon his vessels would be built and available. To strengthen his case with the government, Cunard needed signed contracts for constructing his ships and engines. Still very much on his own, he appraised the feuding centres of British marine engineering. Because the Great Western company was already operating out of Bristol, and Smith and Laird out of London and Liverpool, Cunard’s search naturally drifted north to Glasgow. James C. Melvill, secretary to the East India Company, recommended the Glaswegians Robert Napier and John Wood, who had recently built the swift steamship Berenice for his company’s trade with India. In late February, two weeks after his successful proposal to the Admiralty, Cunard asked an intermediary in Glasgow to see what Napier and Wood would charge for one or two steamships of 800 tons and 300 horsepower, to be built and ready for sea in only twelve months. ‘I shall want these vessels to be of the very best description,’ he emphasized, ‘and to pass a thorough inspection and examination of the Admiralty. I want a plain and comfortable boat, but not the least unnecessary expense for show. I prefer plain work in the cabin, and it saves a large amount in the cost.’ Napier was at once quite interested, so Cunard went up to Glasgow to see him.

It is no hyperbole to say that their meeting in early March 1839 set the course of the Cunard Line for at least its first quarter-century. Napier had just finished his enormous engine for the British Queen, after embarrassing delays and relentless criticism from engineers on the Thames. He therefore welcomed another shot at building an Atlantic steamship engine. Cunard, still so unknown to most British commercial circles, needed Napier’s technical expertise and his reputation along the Clyde for shrewd business dealings. The two men were about the same age – Napier was four years younger – and of similar personalities: terse, contained, not given to public displays or extravagant statements, immersed in work, and sheltered by their families to unusual degrees. Each could recognize and (mostly) trust the other. Napier even brought Cunard home to meet his wife and children. Entrepreneur and engineer, the two formed a variation on those symbiotic partnerships that had driven the Industrial Revolution: a kind of Boulton and Watt for ocean steamships.

In Glasgow, Napier took Cunard to see his famous Vulcan Foundry and its redoubtable works manager, David Elder. The foundry sprawled across a large quadrangle on Washington Street, near the river. A sign at the gate advised, ‘No admittance except on business’, and the din and pace of work inside showed that Napier and Elder meant it. Operations were broken down into four specialized areas. In the casting house, furnaces melted raw metal to be poured into sand moulds in a pit. Some of the castings were quite large, up to a twenty-four-ton bedplate for a marine engine. This sector was relatively quiet, unlike the open area where boilers and funnels were pounded together. The steady, arhythmic jangling of hammers on rivets, iron meeting iron, pealed forth the raggedy music of the Industrial Age. It took 10,000 rivets to make an average boiler, each driven home by repeated metallic blows, all day long. The smithery joined the heat of the casting house to the hammered cacophony of the boilermakers: sweaty, muscular blacksmiths toiling over their anvils and forge fires, turning rough metal into finer pieces, with a small steam engine puffing away to force air into the forge fires. The engineering shops, the largest department, held various specialized lathes and boring and planing machines, all driven by steam-powered beltings overhead, to shape and finish to exact tolerances the cylinders, pistons, wheels, and smaller parts of a steam engine. Seven hundred men worked long days at the Vulcan, six days a week. When the noise stopped at closing time, the silence itself was deafening. Sam Cunard could only have been impressed.

As Napier and Cunard got down to the details, the size of the ships kept increasing, a process that would continue through months of revised contracts. They at first agreed on three ships, 200 feet long and 960 tons, of 375 horsepower, to cost £32,000 each. (A ship this size was still only half the tonnage of the British Queen.) Napier would build the engines, and his shipbuilding associate John Wood would provide the vessels, all by the spring of 1840. ‘He appears from the little I have seen of him to be a straight-forward business man,’ Napier noted of Cunard. ‘From the frank off-hand manner in which he contracted with me, I have given him the vessels cheap, and I am certain they will be good and very strong ships.’

Cunard returned to London, brought his first Napier contract over to the Admiralty and Treasury, and found them ‘highly pleased’. Reporting this news to Napier, Cunard invoked the regional engineering rivalries, then raging, to warn and inspire Napier to his best efforts and punctuality. ‘You have no idea of the prejudice of some of our English Builders,’ Cunard wrote, guileless in his guile. ‘I have had several offers from Liverpool and this place and when I have replied that I have contracted in Scotland they invariably say “You will neither have substantial work or completed in time.” The Admiralty agree with me in opinion the Boats will be as good as if built in this Country and I have assured them that you will keep to time.’ (An oblique reference to the British Queen and her delays.) Someone else had told him that Thames engines would use less coal per horsepower, but Cunard assured the man he was mistaken and pointedly reported the exchange to Napier: ‘The Admiralty cautioned me on this head therefore take good care that you bear me out in my assertions. ’ Cunard also pressed Napier and Wood to start building his ships (‘How is Mr Wood progressing – tell him I will be down upon him some of these mornings when he may not expect me’).

‘I am sorry that some of the British tradesmen should indulge in speaking ill of their competitors in Scotland,’ replied Napier, not surprised. ‘I shall not say more than court comparison of my work with any other in the kingdom.’ The two men, so new to each other, were still forming crucial first impressions by poking around and testing the other, gradually settling into what became the most important working relationship of their lives. Cunard sent along reports of the latest patented steam innovations; Napier, playing his expected engineering role, passed sceptical judgments and reassured the entrepreneur. ‘I was quite prepared for your being beset with all the schemers of every description in the country,’ he advised Cunard. ‘Every solid and known improvement that I am made acquainted with shall be adopted by me, but no patent plans.’

For his part, Cunard was having serious money problems. He still had no signed contract with the government. The first Napier deal was just with Cunard: he alone had to come up with a binder of £5000 and the first instalment of £5000 more. At the same time, precisely the wrong time, his falling out with George Renny Young forced him to find about £14,000 to complete his purchase of the Young family’s interest in the Prince Edward Island land company. Juggling the two enterprises, Cunard was caught without enough cash in England. When Napier took his first note from Cunard to the bank, it was accepted only after a suspicious delay and objections. Napier was surprised and dismayed. ‘The truth is,’ Napier warned Cunard, ‘had I not been completely satisfied beforehand from other trustworthy sources of your undoubted respectability and highly honourable character, my confidence in you would have been shaken.’

If this early crisis had turned a certain way, it could have killed the whole enterprise at the outset. Instead it turned another way and gave the scheme a wider, more secure base, transformed it, and set up the leadership structure that would run the Cunard Line for decades. Napier, now less sure of his new partner, felt obliged to protect his own local reputation for sound dealings. Stepping back, he went around Cunard and confided in Robert Rodger, the Glasgow banker who had doubted Cunard’s credit. ‘I have no wish to put you to the least trouble or inconvenience on my account,’ he assured Rodger. ‘The transaction with Mr Cunard is of such a magnitude that I must not have the least risk of trouble or anxiety about the money part of it.’ The two Glaswegians, acting in their respective self-interests, came up with a protective local solution. They invited other investors into the scheme to provide the cash cushion that was manifestly beyond Cunard’s overstretched resources.

As part of this manoeuvre, they also brought in local experts at running a steamship line, George Burns and the brothers David and Charles Mac Iver. Former rivals, for almost a decade these three men had together been operating profitable coastal steam packets between Glasgow and Liverpool. If Burns and the Mac Ivers were involved, Napier urged Cunard, ‘the vessels would be well and honestly managed, and save much trouble to all concerned and make money.’ Furthermore, though contrary to his usual practice, given their participation Napier might himself take ‘a small interest’ in the venture: a rippling expression of confidence sure to lure other investors in Glasgow. ‘I have several offers but am bound to no one,’ Cunard replied to Napier. ‘I should much like to have you and your friends with me.’ Within a few days, Napier and Burns found their partners (mainly interested businessmen in Glasgow), thus delivering the venture from the uncertainties of Cunard’s own money and – most significantly – binding its future to the Clyde. ‘I want to shew the Americans what can be done in Glasgow,’ Cunard reminded Napier, turning several screws, ‘and that neither Bristol or London boats can beat them.’

From that point, the pieces all fell into place quickly. In June 1839 Cunard, Burns and David Mac Iver signed the final revised contract with the Admiralty for the mail service. It called for four steamships of 400 horsepower, 206 feet long, and 1120 tons, sailing twice each month between Liverpool and Halifax, and then Halifax and Boston, for the government’s payment of £60,000 a year for seven years. (The designation of Liverpool, headquarters of the Mac Ivers’ coastal packets, reflected the transatlantic enterprise’s new ownership structure.) The first ships were to be ready for sea by May 1840. Napier would build the engines, and to meet the soon-looming deadline the ships’ construction was parcelled out to four different Clyde shipbuilders. (‘I dare say I get a good deal of credit for it, but I am not entitled to it,’ Cunard later said of his first steamships. ‘Any credit that there may be in fixing upon the vessels of proper size and proper power is entirely due to Mr. Napier, for I have not the science myself; he gave me the dimensions.’)

In the final partnership agreement, Cunard took the largest portion at £55,000. James Donaldson, the leading cotton broker in Glasgow, took the next biggest piece at £16,000, followed by eight others at £11,600. Napier threw in £6100, Burns £5500, and the Mac Ivers £4000 each. In all, thirty-three investors from Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester provided a total working capital of £270,000. Napier had brokered the whole deal and henceforth was deeply involved, in effect working for himself as both the engine builder and a part owner. Cunard remained the central figure, the founder and ultimate boss. ‘I had the whole interest for some time in the original contract,’ he later explained. ‘But circumstances turned up which made it necessary that I should part with some portion, and I did; but I have still the management.’ The official name was the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. From the start, it was known more simply as Cunard’s line or the Cunard Line.

The first four ships of the line were, as Cunard had directed, plain and comfortable, with no unnecessary expense for show. The keels were laid almost simultaneously within a small circle of shipbuilders along the Clyde. John Wood crafted and built the Acadia, the pattern for the others. His brother Charles Wood built the Caledonia; Robert Steele, the Columbia; and Robert Duncan, the Britannia. (The names of the ships made careful, portioned reference to Nova Scotia, Scotland, the United States and Great Britain, the four places that had launched and would then sustain the Cunard Line.) The ships had essentially identical dimensions, varying only in slight particulars: 207 feet long, 34 feet wide, and about 1150 tons. John Wood was well known for the grace and comely proportions of his wooden hulls. ‘Remarkable for the great refinement of his taste,’ the naval architect John Scott Russell, a noted contemporary, later said of Wood. ‘He was a consummate artist in shipbuilding, and every line was as studied and beautiful as fine art could make it.’ The Cunard ships were austere beauties, sleek and black, with just a few ornamental touches of gold and red in the paddle boxes and smokestack.

As expressions of steamship technology, they started a durable Cunard tradition of summarizing recent progress in the field and adding only small, careful improvements: advancing the art but not by any risky grand leaps. They embodied the habitual technological caution – ships as enterprise, not as engineering – of their two main creators. Sam Cunard had crossed on both the Great Western and British Queen, and Robert Napier knew the latter ship well from providing her engine. Traces of these transatlantic predecessors showed up in the Cunard vessels. They were lavishly trussed and bolted, like the Great Western, with (for example) ‘two strong bilge-pieces in the engine room’, as Napier’s contract with Cunard made explicit, ‘similar to what is in the “British Queen” steam ship and well bolted.’ To avoid the Great Western’s initial difficulties over retrieving coal from distant holds at the bow and stern, the Cunard ships carried their fuel in midship compartments lining the sides of the vessels, from which the coal simply descended by gravity to trapdoors near the furnaces. Ambient heat from the Great Western’s boilers had made nearby areas feel and smell uncomfortably cooked; so the Cunard ships included a thick, coarse woollen cloth underneath the cabin floors and on bulkheads around the engine rooms ‘secured by beams and knees’, the contract specified, ‘so arranged that a space can be left for air courses to ventilate and carry off the heated air and gases.’ The cycloidal Great Western paddle wheels devised by Joshua Field had not worked well; Napier gave the Cunard ships conventional paddles.

Designed to carry mail, not cargo, they were smaller than the Great Western and British Queen— but a bit faster, with slightly higher ratios of horsepower to tonnage. Napier’s newest engines squeezed more power from less fuel by almost doubling the Great Western’s boiler steam pressure, from five to nine pounds per square inch, which helped reduce average coal consumption from forty-four to thirty-eight tons a day. Within a year of the Britannia’s maiden voyage to Boston in July 1840, the Cunard ships had beaten the Great Western’s Atlantic records in both directions, achieving peak average speeds of almost ten knots out and eleven knots home, and cutting the best eastbound passage to just under ten days. Over the first two years, as a fleet they averaged thirteen days, six hours to Halifax and eleven days, five hours to Liverpool. The overmatched Great Western company, competing on its own with just one steamship against four newer, faster vessels backed by the authority and prestige of the government’s mail contract, began to lose passengers and profits to the Cunard Line.

Charles Dickens, impressed by what he had heard, took the Britannia to Boston in January 1842. His description of the voyage, soon published in his travel book American Notes, became the most famous – indeed notorious – account of a nineteenth-century transatlantic steamship trip. Dickens, about to turn thirty, had already achieved great success with the Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other novels. He went to tour America as a literary celebrity and was expecting an ocean passage that conformed with his status. At the Cunard agent’s office in London he had seen imaginatively embellished lithographs of the Britannia’s interiors. When he boarded ship, the actual accommodations caused his first disappointment. The main saloon, the grandest room on the ship, turned out to be ‘a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands’. The overhead racks for glassware ‘hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather’. Grimmer surprises awaited Dickens below. The ‘state-room’ specially reserved for Dickens and his wife was, alas, an ‘utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box’. It inspired another funereal reference: the bunk beds by their narrow dimensions and thin mattresses reminded Dickens of coffins, a most unfortunate association at the start of a long ocean voyage.

Once under way, he retreated during daylight hours to the ladies’ cabin, less noisy and smelly than the main saloon. The stewardess dispensed many tactful services and told ‘piously fraudulent’ stories of previous winter passages, always calm and pleasant. Everybody worried about the stability of their stomachs; at dinner, Dickens noticed the most coveted seats were those closest to the door. Afterwards he stayed out on deck till midnight, afraid to go below. Despite his frettings, he looked around and sensed the powerful mysteries of an oceangoing ship at night: ‘The gloom through which the great black mass holds its direct and certain course; the rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; the broad, white, glistening track that follows in the vessel’s wake; the men on the look-out forward, who would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars…the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain.’

Finally, too cold to avoid it any longer, Dickens took to his dubious berth. With hatches and portholes closed down for the night, he could fully savour ‘that extraordinary compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold’. All the woodwork creaked. The stateroom rose and fell with the waves. The night eventually passed. For the next two days, through fair winds and good weather, Dickens mostly stayed in bed, ate hard biscuits, and drank cold brandy and water in a resolute, hopeless effort to avoid sliding over from mere seagoing discomfort into full-blown seasickness.

Teetering on this agonizing edge – nauseous or not? – Dickens fell over hard when the third morning brought a winter gale worthy of the North Atlantic. He awoke to his wife’s screams. Objects were floating on the seawater that now covered the stateroom floor. The room pitched and tossed, seemingly standing on its head. ‘Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say “Thank Heaven!” she wrongs again.’ The ship ran on like a creature with broken knees, as it leaped and dived and somersaulted in jarring sequences and combinations. Dickens hailed a passing steward and asked what was the matter. ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir,’ came the reply, understated and unperturbed, ‘and a head wind.’ It continued for four days and nights of relentless motion and noise: wind, sea and rain, howling in concert; the heavy footfalls of sailors rushing about and shouting hoarsely to each other; high waves pounding over the gunwales and gurgling out through the scuppers, after landing on the wooden deck with the deep, ponderous sound of thunder heard within a confined space; blank, endless nights as the ship rolled to one side, dipping her masts, and then to the other side, and even seemed to stop dead in the water, staggering as though stunned, before ploughing onward. ‘All is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree… Only a dream can call it up again in all its fury, rage, and passion.’

The storm blew out, but the weather remained dark and cold. Settling into a determined daily routine, Dickens and his party would gather in the ladies’ cabin shortly before noon. Captain Hewitt, recently transferred to the Britannia and always in good humour, would drop by and predict better weather. (‘The weather is always going to improve tomorrow, at sea.’) At one o’clock a bell rang and the stewardess brought baked potatoes, roasted apples, and plates of cold ham, pig’s face, and salted beef. At last free of seasickness, and seeking any possible diversion, they ate with hearty appetites and dawdled over the task as long as they could. They read, dozed, and chatted away the afternoon, passing around and chewing over the few available wisps of shipboard gossip: one passenger has lost heavily at gambling, fourteen pounds in fact, and drinks a bottle of champagne a day though he is only a clerk; the head engineer has never seen such awful weather; the cook was found drunk and severely punished; all the stewards have fallen downstairs, and some are sorely injured; the cabins are all leaking. The dinner bell rang at five, announcing more potatoes (boiled this time), various meats (perhaps roast pig if one of the ship’s swine had been butchered), flowing wine and brandy, and rather mouldy apples, grapes and oranges for dessert. Then a game of whist, with the tricks placed securely in pockets instead of on the ever-agitated table, and an insistently cheerful good night from the captain.

Approaching Halifax on the fifteenth night, with a bright moon and calm sea, the local pilot – who was supposed to know the harbour so well – managed to run the Britannia aground on a mud bank. Everybody rushed up on deck. The engine, ‘which had been clanking and blasting in our ears incessantly for so many days,’ stopped suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving a dead stillness. Some of the sailors took off their shoes and jackets and made ready to jump overboard and swim ashore. (This did not inspire confidence among the passengers.) Distress rockets were fired into the night sky, to no point. In the general confusion and near-panic, Captain Hewitt remained calm and in command. The next high tide floated them free. After briefly stopping in Halifax, the Britannia took Dickens on to Boston. Wary of enduring another steamship voyage, when his American tour was over he caught a New York sailing packet home to England.

It was a gripping story, slightly exaggerated to improve the telling. The fame of its author and the popularity of American Notes ensured the Dickens account a wide, enduring audience – and a cautionary influence on uncounted potential Atlantic travellers. As a piece of historical evidence, though, it remains tendentious and limited, not trustworthy as a generalization about Cunard ships. Dickens described a westward passage in January: the more difficult direction for crossing the Atlantic, at the coldest, wildest time of year. The Britannia then steamed through an especially ferocious winter storm, the roughest on the North Atlantic in a long time. Its attendant miseries properly belonged to the indifferent ocean and could not be blamed on the particular ship and crew. The Britannia ran aground near Halifax because of mistakes by the local pilot, not the Cunard Line. Many of the problems on the voyage were not the steamship line’s fault. And, in general, Dickens had nothing to compare the voyage to because he had never been at sea before. As a transatlantic innocent, he had too readily believed – or so he implied – those alluring promotional lithographs at the Cunard agent’s office. His unrealistic expectations collided hard with the actual experience; he felt betrayed and vengeful, perhaps even embarrassed by his initial naïveté, and then took his overstated public revenge in print. (The book sold well but drew generally displeased, unconvinced reviews. ‘Sneers, vituperations, caustic sarcasms…a spirit of entire bad taste,’ said the Illustrated London News. This reviewer doubted in particular Dickens’s account of his trials on the Britannia: ‘Of course this is the mere nonsense of book-making exaggeration, written to kill time and tickle the reader.’)

A more balanced report on the first Cunard steamships required testimony from someone who had already crossed the North Atlantic by sailing ship and so could compare the passages. Fanny Appleton of Boston took the Columbia to Liverpool in May 1841, five and a half years after her tedious voyage to Le Havre by sailing packet (see pages 8-9). ‘Tho’ I miss of course the beautiful shiftings and exhilaration of a sailing vessel,’ she noted soon after the Columbia left Boston, ‘yet we bound over the waves with no little dignity and grace.’ Constant shipboard noises on the packet had kept her from reading and writing; her first surprise on the Cunard ship was the prevailing near-silences compared to what she had found on various sailing ships and American steamboats. ‘One thing excites my unbounded admiration – the marvellous quiet. There is none of the constant bawling of orders (the Capt’s are given sotto voce to a certain little “Mr. Finley” who, like a familiar, is ever at his elbow) nor racket of ropes, nor rushing about of sailors, nor even some creaking of masts as in a packet; neither the monotonous plunge of the engine as in our steamers. There is a slight trembling of course but not a sound from the machinery… The only sounds are the bells every hour, the bugle to summon us to meals, the slight sighing of the valves.’ Napier’s machinery was barely audible – and invisible as well, unlike the engines on American steamers, concealed below decks and propelling the ship into an ‘easy majestic motion’.

Eight days later, five days from Liverpool, Appleton was still surprised and pleased. ‘This steaming is all play-sailing compared to packet experience,’ she decided, ‘and the big Atlantic itself seems vastly shrunken and dwarfed to me now that we are rushing across it so comfortably, so independant of its head winds, so little wrenched from our equilibrium by its uneasy tossings and tumblings. I little thought I could prefer a steamer but so it is. We have no excuse for grumbling at anything.’ The passengers behaved well, not too numerous or drunk or talkative. Captain Charles H. E. Judkins, meticulously attentive to every detail, took a southerly course to avoid icebergs. (They still passed a group of ten icebergs about a mile away; the largest – eighty feet high and a quartermile long, greenish in the crevices and snowy at the top – resembled a ghostly steamship at that distance.) The Columbia’s food was bountiful and varied; the shipboard games, dances and concerts were all diverting. ‘Instead of finding a steam-ship a floating Pandemonium as I expected, it certainly puts packets to shame for comfort and luxury and slides me over the Atlantic’ Appleton was not even bored; ‘I feel almost sorry to quit the ship we are having such amusing times.’ They reached Liverpool in just half the duration of her packet voyage to Le Havre in 1835.

Appleton’s account carried its own bias. Instead of westbound in January, like Dickens, she was eastbound in May, through gentle weather. Her father and uncle, Nathan and William Appleton, were business associates of Sam Cunard’s in Boston, and when she went ashore in Halifax she was lavishly entertained by the Cunard family. Still, her description seems more believable than Dickens’s because their motives for writing were so different. He, a famous fiction writer, wanted to spin a good yarn for publication and to sell books, with the more dramatically harrowing details the better. She wrote her version in private, unpublished letters to her father and to her best friend, with no evident purpose except to report honestly on what she had found. (In general, the more confidential the historical source, the more truthful.) Both had brought unmet expectations to the voyage; he was then disappointed and terrified, she unexpectedly pleased. Revising themselves in opposite directions, they gave their accounts quite different tones. Where they disagreed on specific matters of fact – such as the engine’s constant noise level – Appleton had no reason to exaggerate, and Dickens did. So Fanny Appleton probably got it right.

The steamship President was the last chance for Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird. Designed by Laird with an almost desperate

audacity, built by Curling and Young in London, and engined by Fawcett and Preston in Liverpool, she marked new transatlantic extremes in size, power and luxury. At 2360 tons she was a third larger than the British Queen and twice the size of the Cunard ships. The first liner with three decks, she afforded passengers an open-air promenade on the spar deck in fine weather and a sheltered turn on the main deck below. An elaborate carved figurehead of George Washington thrust forward from the bow; the projecting stern included other carvings and large plate-glass windows. The engine room, with its ornamented pillars and arches and polished iron and brasswork, reminded visitors of a handsome Gothic chapel: a modernist shrine to steam power. The hull was divided into watertight compartments, like earlier ships designed by Laird, ‘so that the springing of a leak would be attended with comparatively little danger,’ it was explained, ‘and would be readily overcome.’

The opulent interior furnishings hardly hinted at the Smith line’s ongoing financial straits. The main saloon, some eighty feet long and thirty-four feet wide, was finished in a Tudor Gothic style of delicate colours and grained oak. Its four tables and embossed crimson velvet sofas could accommodate up to one hundred diners at once. A wide corridor with even plusher decorations ran from the saloon to staterooms at the stern. Ten oil paintings, executed on canvas to imitate old tapestries, depicted scenes from the life of Christopher Columbus. The corridor was said to resemble a picture gallery, or the upper storey of a first-class hotel. In flashing these historic references and touches of landed luxury, the President’s living quarters were intended to mask a passenger’s sense of crossing the ocean on the latest, yet-unproven steamship.

The money lavished on decorations might better have been applied to the engine. At 540 horsepower it was the most powerful on the ocean; but only a bit more so than the engine of the much smaller British Queen, which was itself underhorsed compared to the Great Western and the Cunard ships. That left the President a much lower ratio of horsepower to tonnage than any of the competing vessels. Some sceptics doubted the President’s stability, suspecting that the third deck might make her top-heavy and too prone to rolling on the North Atlantic’s mountainous swells. She was also shorter and broader than the British Queen, not a likely design for great speed. An undeniably impressive sight, the President was more notable for her cosmetic features than her basic engineering.

She turned out to be a big, gaudy turkey, and a steady disappointment to her owners. Her first two captains were blamed for slow passages and quickly relieved of duty. The President’s lumbering maiden run in the summer of 1840 took sixteen and a half days in each direction. Her second trip home was worse: fighting a heavy gale from the east, in four days from New York she managed only three hundred miles. At that rate she would run out of coal before reaching Liverpool, so she turned around and limped back to New York. Amply coaled up, and with fair winds, she finally arrived at the Mersey on 28 November, ten days overdue: a cause of great relief and rejoicing, since nobody in England knew that she had earlier been forced back to New York. (‘What on earth or water,’ Isambard brunel had asked in passing, ‘is the President about.’) Laid up for two months through the worst winter weather, and refitted at Plymouth after just two voyages across the ocean, she took three weeks to reach New York in February, her slowest time yet.

The President left New York for home on 11 March 1841, with about 110 passengers and crew. She was sailing low in the water because of heavy cargo and full coal bunkers. Stormy seas on previous voyages had weakened and twisted the wooden hull, perhaps fracturing the engine frame. (According to an oral tradition later passed down in the Laird family, shortly after her departure two people – the Smith line’s New York agent and the brother of her latest captain, Richard Roberts – had the same dream on the same night. They saw the President with a confused crowd on her deck and Captain Roberts on the bridge, giving orders. Then the ship suddenly, unaccountably disappeared.)

She steamed into a screeching winter storm. Towards the end of the second day, another ship’s captain sighted the President labouring through a dangerous area between the Nantucket Shoals and George’s Bank, where the Gulf Stream collides with shallow soundings, sometimes generating starkly vertical waves as high as a five-storey house. The other ship’s captain saw the President rising on top of an enormous swell, pitching and struggling violently. Then he lost sight of her. The captain later guessed that she was shipping heavy seas, perhaps to the point of snuffing her boiler fires and leaving her powerless in the storm.

Once again the President was late to Liverpool. Her belated but eventual appearance in the previous November restrained, for a time, the usual worries about an overdue ship. After a month The Times noted her tardiness amid stray rumours that she had been sighted here or there, or hit an iceberg, or come into Bermuda, or run ashore in Newfoundland, or suffered a mutiny, or fallen in with pirates. The line’s London office was besieged by friends and relatives of the missing, hoping for any trace of encouraging news. The late-ship deathwatch stretched on for another month, tighter and more hopeless as time passed to no definite resolution. Queen Victoria, on leaving Buckingham Palace for Windsor Castle, asked that a special messenger be sent to her with any news of the overdue ship. When Fanny Appleton sighted a large iceberg from the Columbia in May, she declared it the ghost of the President. ‘I do not altogether give up the President as lost,’ Junius Smith wrote on 14 May, trying to convince himself, ‘and yet I fear there is but slight ground for hope.’

The President had simply disappeared into the North Atlantic, taking 110 people down with her. It was the first transatlantic steamship disaster – and not the last time that the newest, biggest ship on the ocean would steam into a catastrophe.

The competition was dropping away, yet the Cunard Line was going broke. To get his contract, Sam Cunard had offered the government much better terms than the Great Western company’s – impossible terms, it turned out. Even before his ships started running, Cunard asked the Admiralty to halve his winter sailings to once a month. ‘At the time I entered into the Contract,’ he explained, ‘steam boats had not crossed during the Winter and I was therefore quite ignorant of the risk and danger I had to encounter indeed I was very hasty in making the arrangement.…In the Winter Season there is not much commercial interest, and no passengers and once a month may, I hope be considered by their Lordships sufficient to cross during the inclement Season of the year – I have not only to contend with the storms on this Coast and on the Atlantic but with the severe Winter weather on the coast of Halifax and Boston… These vessels have cost me nearly double the sum I originally expected and I find my Contract is by no means a favorable one, but I am determined to fulfill my engagements.’ The Admiralty agreed to a monthly schedule from November to February but cut £4000 from Cunard’s already-inadequate annual subsidy.

Back in the optimistic spring of 1839, Cunard when haggling with Napier had guessed that his line would run at an annual profit of almost £41,000. No doubt this figure was inflated to entice Napier and his Glasgow investors; but Cunard surely did not expect to operate at a loss. Over its first nine months, the Cunard Line ran £15,355 in the red. When added to his money problems at home, these losses threatened Cunard with financial ruin. He thought about asking the government for a more generous contract but then decided not even to make the request and perhaps to give up the whole, leaky enterprise.

At this bleak moment in the spring of 1841, his partner David Mac Iver replied to a gloomy letter from Cunard with a reassuring blend of caution and optimism. ‘The day must have been cold, I think, or the subject has had a chilling effect over your spirits,’ Mac Iver wrote. ‘It is incumbent on us as shrewd Merchants to have our eyes ever open to the dark side of our doings – there is so much of show, and of the imaginary, in the money matters of steamers… Our own doings, up till now, I rate the experimental; and not sound evidence of our true position or prospects. We have paid, like all beginners in new trades of magnitude, thro costly experience, and are now arrived at that point where we must turn this experience to profit.’ Their ships could not carry much cargo, Mac Iver noted, and only attracted such freight in the summertime. So their only way of increasing revenues was to raise fares; Mac Iver suggested new rates of thirty pounds from Boston and forty pounds, nineteen shillings from Liverpool. Drawing from his years of running a steamship line, and knowing the implacable cycles of that business, he counselled patience: wait for better times.

Cunard, having operated ships for three decades, got the point. He, Mac Iver and George Burns met in London to gather their ammunition. Cunard took the grim statistics of their initial operations over to Whitehall, urging that the contract be doubled to £120,000 a year. The Treasury, not persuaded, asked to see the line’s books; Cunard assented ‘with pleasure’. After the Treasury’s own inquiry and report, the government granted a new contract raising the annual subsidy to £80,000, with the added stipulation that the Cunard Line build a fifth steamship. ‘It would have been wrong to let so important a line drop for want of the necessary support,’ a Glasgow newspaper reported. ‘We have, moreover, reason to know that the Government complimented the contractors, not only for having acted up to the terms of the previous contract, but also for having far exceeded them.’

The new contract of 1841, much less than he wanted, did not ease Sam Cunard’s own financial crisis. He had risked his fortune to start the transatlantic line on terms soon revealed to be disastrous. He was the founder and leader, the man who handled those delicate negotiations with the government. In a humbling act that must have embarrassed him, he had to ask his Cunard Line partners for a personal loan. In September 1841 he borrowed £15,000 from them, offering some of his own shares as security, and promising repayment with interest in two years. By the end of the year, Cunard had spent the entire loan on various debts.

Aside from a depressed general cycle in shipping and shipbuilding, Cunard was saddled with wayward investments at home, especially the Prince Edward Island land company. The Young family, his associates-turned-enemies in that venture, were not friendly to Cunard. (At a London party in 1839, William Young and Cunard were dismayed to run into each other. ‘Sam and I exchanged very distant bows,’ Young noted in his diary.) As Cunard’s money crisis got tighter and more desperate, William and George Young – by a suspicious coincidence – turned up as the attorneys for his more anxious creditors. ‘They have been at different times employed by persons in England,’ Sam objected, ‘and they have resorted to every means in their power to injure me by arresting me and heaping costs upon me. You cannot imagine anything more unfeeling than their proceedings – they hesitate at no act if it will put a few pounds into their pocket.’

The Youngs were only seeking revenge. Cunard, fighting for his very survival, was equally ruthless, scratching for money anywhere he could find it. In Nova Scotia, he sold the house and land in Hants County where he had sent his late mother to spend her last days. He mortgaged his wharves and warehouses in Halifax. The Bank of Nova Scotia suspended a rule to loan him £45,000. All his enterprises were squeezed hard. As the largest landlord on Prince Edward Island, he had his agent (his son-in-law James Peters) extract every possible penny of rent from the immigrant tenants. One of them, a bard from the Isle of Raasay named MacLean, took refuge in a mournful song. Translated from the Gaelic:

We left there

and came out here

thinking we would receive consideration,

and that the rent would not be so exacting.

But Peters is oppressing us,

and, if he doesn’t die,

we must leave this place

and Cunard, himself a beast.

The beast had become the quarry. In the spring of 1842, he admitted to debts of £130,000 and mortgaged property worth £47,000, against claimed (and probably exaggerated) assets of £257,000. A Liverpool bank, trying to present a writ for £2000 against him, sent a sheriff’s officer to the chambers of Cunard’s lawyer in London; the lawyer hid Cunard in an adjoining room, and he escaped the process. A short while later, Cunard quietly scurried up to Liverpool and arranged another flight. He hid overnight in a cottage on the river below Eastham. Several writ servers, suspecting his intentions, waited for Cunard on one of his steamships until the last minute before departure. When they were finally sent ashore, the steamer weighed anchor and started out to sea. Cunard came alongside in a small boat; his ship slowed down and picked him up. The eminent founder and leader of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company stole furtively home to Halifax.

From that nadir, Cunard slowly recovered his fortunes. In 1843 he and his partners again asked the Admiralty for more money, claiming a loss in the previous year of almost £26,400. The Admiralty allowed them an additional £10,000 annually. Through all of Cunard’s own troubles, his ships steamed across the ocean ‘with regularity almost unexpected and wholly unsurpassed’, as a New York newspaper grudgingly admitted. As competing steamships receded from the Atlantic, the Cunard Line gained an essential monopoly and could raise its fares with impunity, up to forty-one pounds by 1846 for passage from Liverpool. His stock dividends and commissions gradually paid off Cunard’s loan to his partners. The shipping business in general cycled upwards again, and the Cunard Line started turning profits and paying more consistent dividends to stockholders. Sam Cunard’s financial crisis lifted.

The Cunard Line steamed towards solvency on its unmatched reputation for safety and order. That reputation – so coveted by passengers venturing forth on the dreaded North Atlantic – began with the first sailings in 1840. John Quincy Adams, a former president of the United States, and a man whose life was typically an exercise in rigid discipline and organization, took the Acadia from Boston to Halifax in September 1840. Adams approved of the captain, the food, the crockery and glassware, the cleanliness, and the neat finish to the iron, brass and woodwork. The Acadia was an uncommonly tight ship, Adams confided to his diary: ‘There is great order and discipline.’ Those qualities were associated with the Cunard Line ever after. Over the years, other Atlantic steamship lines would run ships that were bigger, faster, more luxurious, or with better service. Cunard ships retained their own unique, dominating cachet: they got you there alive.

No steamship line could entirely escape the North Atlantic’s rigours; Cunard always had its share of accidents. In the first eight years, Cunard ships ran aground at least nine times in dense fogs off Ireland and the Canadian and American coasts, and at least twice collided with smaller vessels, sinking them and killing eight of their crewmen. (Other collisions may have happened at night and gone unnoticed, at least officially, by the Cunarder.) Charles Dickens’s frightening experience on the Britannia was not so unusual. The most serious grounding was by the Columbia in July 1843. She had left Boston in a thick fog, picking her way carefully along the New England coast, and was pulled off course by an unusually swift current. Given the fog, the captain could not shoot the sun and take his bearings. Early in the afternoon, while running nearly full speed at ten knots, the Columbia struck a notorious reef called the Devil’s Limb, 11/2 offshore and about 150 miles southwest of Halifax. Despite desperate efforts, she could not be budged. A boat came out from a nearby island and plucked off the crew and all eighty-five passengers before the ship, buffeted by chopping waves, broke up and sank – the first Cunard steamship lost at sea.

The most remarkable aspect of these first eleven Cunard accidents is that nobody on the Cunard ship involved was killed. In fact, for the first seventy-five years of the line’s history no passenger in its North Atlantic traffic ever died from a shipwreck. Meantime all the other transatlantic steamship lines suffered terrible disasters, one after the other, typically causing hundreds of deaths each time. Only the Cunard Line escaped. Perhaps this was just Cunard luck again, over and over. Or perhaps it was how the line was run.

In the division of labour among the three founding partners, Sam Cunard with his sons Ned and William supervised the line’s offices in Canada and America, and Sam on his frequent trips to England represented the enterprise to the government. In Glasgow, George Burns looked after the construction and repair of the Cunard vessels by Robert Napier and various Clydeside shipbuilders. In Liverpool, David Mac Iver (and, after his death in 1845, his brother Charles) saw to the day-to-day management of the ships, keeping the captains and crews up to rigorous standards, making sure the vessels were well supplied and repaired and precisely on schedule both going and coming. These lines of authority at times became mingled; any one of the three founders might briefly take up any role, and major decisions emerged from polite, muted exchanges among all of them, with Cunard usually functioning as the first among equals.

If the safety record has a single overriding explanation, it was the Mac Ivers. Only twenty-eight years old in 1840, Charles stood at the top of the Cunard Line leadership for over forty years, even longer than Sam Cunard or George Burns. Nobody ever laboured harder, more persistently or effectively, to keep the line in its usual position of transatlantic supremacy. Almost every day, he went down to the Cunard wharves on the Mersey, watching and measuring, taking notes and giving orders. Quick and decisive, at times imperious, he had absolute confidence in his own judgments and opinions, seemingly never retreating from them once expressed. ‘Up to the last moment,’ a long-time Liverpool associate said later, ‘he will persist with all the energy of his nature in a course which his reason is gradually convincing him against his will to be erroneous…though even then he by some ingenious process satisfies himself and thinks he convinces others that he is not giving way at all.’

The Mac Iver brothers were sons of a Greenock sea captain who was washed overboard in 1812 in the Bay of Biscay. As a young man, Charles spent some time in the American port of Charleston, South Carolina, but he soon came home and joined David in their coastal steamship enterprises. In about 1833 he had an experience that, as he told the story, confirmed his core insistence on relentless standards and inspections for oceangoing vessels. He booked passage on a particular sailing ship because he knew the captain. Off the Azores they ran into a powerful gale that lasted twelve hours. The ship, nearly sunk, was damaged and obviously unsound. ‘When you go home you had better throw up command of this vessel,’ Mac Iver told the captain, ‘or you will lose your life.’ The captain did leave her, but her owners – in their ignorance or greed – sent her out again under another commander. She disappeared with all hands. Any reasonable inspection, Mac Iver concluded, ‘would have prevented that ship from going to sea.’

When the Cunard Line got under way, the Mac Ivers issued and enforced stringent regulations for their captains and crews. The two primary goals for the enterprise, speed and safety, were to some degree contradictory; to favour one could undermine the other. The Mac Ivers impartially emphasized both. ‘It will be obvious to you,’ they instructed the commanders of the Cunard ships in 1840, ‘that it is of first importance…that she attains a Character for speed and safety. We trust to your vigilance for this – good steering, good lookouts, taking advantage of every slant of wind, and precautions against fire, are principal elements. ’ At the start of the voyage, the ship was heavily loaded with coal, and the paddles were deeply immersed, not working at peak efficiency. As coal was consumed and the hull rose in the water, the boilers could be fully fired up and the engine pushed harder. But coal use was to be carefully monitored and recorded, along with other supplies in the engine room. Only stokers and trimmers were to carry coal from bunkers to boilers; the sailors up on deck, a separate breed, were not expected to help out.

The Mac Ivers established other rules for the passengers and stewards. ‘A cheerful acquiescence is expected in the following Regulations and Suggestions,’ they explained in 1840, ‘which, if in any instance at variance with the opinions, habits, or inclinations of the few, are framed with a regard to the comfort of the whole.’ The staterooms were to be swept and carpets taken out and shaken every morning after breakfast. As soon as passengers left their rooms in the morning, their bedding was turned over, beds were made, wash basins cleaned, and slops emptied. Bed linen was changed on the eighth day, and boots and shoes cleaned overnight and returned to the rooms every morning at eight o’clock. Two towels were provided for each passenger and changed every other day, or more often if requested. The wine and spirits bar, always a favourite part of any ocean voyage, closed for the night at eleven but reopened quite early, at six the next morning. Lights went out in the saloons at half past eleven, in the staterooms at midnight, with no exceptions allowed for late readers.

Other Atlantic steamship lines had similar rules. The difference, it seems, is that the Cunard Line extracted routine obedience to its regulations. In January 1847, Charles Mac Iver found that the officers’ mess in a recent transatlantic voyage had committed ‘wanton and extravagant waste of the Company’s victualling stores’, as he put it, and had subverted specific rules ‘which have for their object general comfort and good order’. Unable to discover the particular culprits, Mac Iver sent his prescribed bill of fare to all officers of the mess. ‘I shall be very happy to receive the resignation of any one who is not satisfied with it,’ he warned. ‘No man in this concern has had it in his power to say in truth that he has been otherwise than well treated, but wherever I find a set of men rating themselves only by what they can stow away in their bellies, I have prima facie evidence that they are not the men for the British & North American Royal Mail Service… Specific and known orders shall never be infringed with impunity or trampled upon.’ Was that sufficiently clear? (‘Mac Iver’s letters quite discompose one,’ an associate explained; ‘you must talk over the matter with him to understand what a fine fellow he is.’)

As time passed, Mac Iver’s directives became even more definite and specific. His orders to commanders in 1848 ran to eighteen handwritten pages. Each ship was to leave port with enough food and water for thirty days in summer and forty days in winter (though a typical passage took less than half that time). If a very long trip depleted the coal supply, the captain was to put aside enough fuel to run the engine for twenty-four hours and then proceed under sail alone until land was sighted; then the boilers would be fired so the ship could reach port under power. Furthermore: Keep the ship clean to control vermin. ‘Ventilate, Ventilate. ’ Only safely locked lanterns, no open flames, were allowed in the spirits room. No tobacco smoking was permitted anywhere below decks. ‘Want of cleanliness in the water closets is a constant cause of complaint, we shall be glad if you can take any measures to remedy this.’ Every Sunday at sea, the captain must limit unnecessary work and read aloud the Church of England service in the main saloon. Invite a passenger to read from a book of short sermons provided by the line. ‘If this does not meet with a favorable response, do not press it. Let your crew retire.’ Don’t be too friendly with any particular set of passengers, or make or permit generalizations about any national tendencies; Americans and perhaps Englishmen can be quite sensitive about such matters. ‘Card Playing on the part of the Captains on board ship has been the cause of so much dissatisfaction and trouble, that it cannot be longer tolerated.’ Nor should the captain allow card playing or gambling in his private quarters, or in the officers’ mess, or by any officers.

Year after year, voyage after voyage, life on a Cunard ship expressed the flinty personality of Charles Mac Iver. He resisted luxuries and any fancy touches in the food or furnishings or decorations. He most valued safe predictability: always the same procedures and standards, unchanged unless for a very compelling reason. When accidents at sea happened, the captain and crew followed a precise, well-practised drill, and so maintained order. The line’s amazing safety record was no coincidence. Behind it, sustaining it, was Mac Iver standing at the dock every day, getting ready to inspect another Cunard ship and her personnel, missing and excusing nothing. ‘The highest court to which you could bring me,’ he once told a parliamentary commission, ‘would be my own conscience.’

For Sam Cunard himself, the responsibility and success of his transatlantic steamship line made him a transatlantic citizen. He and his children were spending longer periods in England, bringing traces of English culture home to Halifax and setting themselves apart from their neighbours. When Fanny Appleton visited the Cunards in 1841, she noticed ‘the luxury of Mr. Cunard’s house contrasting with the shabbiness of the town’. One of Cunard’s six daughters presided at the meals, ‘a very elegant girl of pale complexion, regular features, very black hair and a fine figure who has been to London and did the honors of lunch and Dinner with quite a distingué air.’ Though Appleton was dressed only in her sailing costume, she was persuaded to stay for dinner, at which the Cunard daughters, ‘a l’Anglaise, arrayed themselves in full dress.’ At table the Cunard girls talked about parties and balls with a determined gaiety; it reminded Appleton of scenes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. ‘It all has the strangest Anglo-American aspect,’ she decided. ‘A tedious provincial life they must have of it.’ Eventually all the Cunard daughters but one married English army officers and left Halifax permanently.

For their father, the break was more difficult. ‘I have been backwards and forwards occasionally to England,’ he said in 1847, ‘but Halifax is my home.’ His wife and one of his children were buried there. His extensive business operations were still based in Nova Scotia, and – apparently for sentimental reasons – he held on to his local post as a commissioner of lighthouses despite his frequent absences. But his hometown was not keeping pace with the nineteenth century. ‘What a slow place it is!’ exclaimed an American visitor in the 1850s. An English tourist at about the same time chided ‘the lassitude and want of enterprise of the Nova-Scotians’, who seemed to be lagging behind other Canadians; ‘the Nova-Scotians appear to have expunged the word progress from their dictionary. ’ Cunard was a modern personality, permanently moored only to his family. He wanted the snap and zoom of modernity. His steamship line, steadily reducing and taming the unruly North Atlantic, imposing human will on nature, embodied the progressive faith of the age. As he shuttled back and forth across the ocean on his ships, he was increasingly drawn away from his fading colonial homeland and towards the ever-beckoning, up-to-date future that he found in commercial England.

He leased a country estate in Edmonton, eight miles north of London Bridge. Its seventy-four acres included a park, gardens, stables, and a greenhouse with grape vines and lemon trees. The house had plenty of room for visiting children and grandchildren. Playing a country squire, he developed interests in horticulture and joined the Royal Geographic Society. The prestige of his ties to the government and – in particular – the burgeoning fame of his eponymous steamship line eased his way into the higher reaches of London society, despite his usual reticent behaviour in public. The actress Fanny Kemble later remembered him as a ‘shy, silent, rather rustic gentleman’ at a party given by the celebrated hostess and writer Caroline Sheridan Norton. A major merchant prince, the man who had bridged the ocean, Sam Cunard still presented himself as an untalkative, unpolished colonial.

The success of his Cunard Line drove out its predecessors. Junius Smith’s enterprise went under soon after the President disappeared. The Great Western company’s profits peaked in 1839, before the maiden voyage of the Britannia, then declined in each of the next three years of competing with Cunard. In a last effort to save his company, in 1846 Christopher Claxton tried to pick off part of the Cunard mail contract. ‘We are quite aware of the excellent way in which Mr. Cunard performs the work,’ Claxton testified to a committee of Parliament; ‘no one knows it better than we do; we do not want to injure Mr. Cunard, but we want something to be done for ourselves.’ The government, well satisfied with the mail service, stuck with Cunard. A year later the Great Western, the first Atlantic steamship, was sold into service in the West Indies and South American trade. For the time being, the Cunard Line had transatlantic steam to itself.

6. The Collins Line

The Cunard monopoly was soon challenged. Other nations with transatlantic commercial and political interests wanted their own steamships, without having to depend on the British mail line – no matter how excellent its service. ‘So far, we have been most fortunate in not having any formidable opposition,’ Sam Cunard wrote to his partner Charles Mac Iver in May 1847, ‘but for the future we must expect it. I do not apprehend any serious injury from the French – their Ships were built for Men of war and will be strong and heavy and not fast. The American ships will be different. They will introduce all our improvements, together with their own. We shall also have national prejudices to contend with, so that every attention will be required to meet them.’ The son of American exiles took special notice, as always, of any American competition. ‘It will behove us,’ he urged Mac Iver, ‘to think of any measures that may be considered improvements as the Americans will be alive to every thing.’

Cunard truly feared the American threat, but it also handed him a forceful argument for persuading the British government to subsidize new steamships, bigger and faster, for the Cunard Line. Since the original foursome of the Britannia and her sisters, two ships had already been added: the Hibernia in 1843 (to satisfy the revised mail contract of 1841) and the Cambria in late 1844 (to replace the Columbia after she ran onto a rock and sank in a Nova Scotia fog). The two new ships – 220 feet long, 1354 tons, and 472 horsepower – were slightly larger, more powerful versions of the original four. After the usual shakedown crossings, to let their engines and bearings settle into working order, they set new transatlantic records of nine days, twenty hours, thirty minutes out to Boston and eight days, twenty-two hours, forty-four minutes back to Liverpool, reaching an average speed home of almost twelve knots.

As passenger environments, the Hibernia and Cambria continued the Cunard practice of austere comfort, emphasis on austere. The main saloon, again placed towards the rear of the main deck, was longer and wider than on the earlier ships, with room for two long tables that could seat up to one hundred diners. The oak beams in the white ceiling included gilt mouldings, an atypical touch of plush. Adorning the walls, landscapes painted on slate offered vistas of Glasgow harbour, Liverpool, Halifax, Boston, and – suggesting the line’s future – New York. Sofas along the outer walls of the saloon passed daylight through their open bases, from windows overlooking the main deck, down to cabins on the deck below. The roof of the saloon allowed passengers a promenade, protected by a strong brass rail, that was safely out of the sailors’ way as they moved around the deck, working the billowy spread of canvas. Below the saloon, the gentlemen’s sitting room was painted imitation marble and wainscot; the counterpart for women had large sofas covered by thick, silky velvet. Towards the bow, other quarters could accommodate male passengers and servants in less comfort. (The servants’ steerage had a separate entrance.) Fully loaded, the ships could each carry 155 passengers, 130 tons of light goods, and the all-important, enabling mail.

Like the lost Columbia, the Hibernia and Cambria were engined by Robert Napier and built by Robert Steele. Napier, an original investor in the Cunard Line and one of its most trusted advisers, got its engine contracts automatically as long as he wanted them. The continued confidence in Steele, on the other hand, suggests that Cunard and his managing partners did not blame the loss of the Columbia on any defect in the ship herself. In fact, Steele would later go on to build six of the next seven Cunard Atlantic liners as well. His shipbuilding skills and standards must be granted major credit, along with the watchful Mac Ivers, for establishing the Cunard Line’s enduring reputation of safe reliability.

The two Robert Steeles, father and son, had been building wooden steam vessels since the early 1820s. Their shipyard at Greenock, near the confluence of the river with the Firth of Clyde, gave them easy access to the sea and wider, deeper water for launching large ships than places farther upriver, towards Glasgow. The senior Steele first collaborated with David Napier in 1821 to produce the Eclipse, of 140 tons and sixty horsepower, for the trade between Glasgow and Belfast. Only five years later, Steele and Robert Napier built the United Kingdom, four times the size of the Eclipse and the largest British steamboat yet. The father then retired, and his son, thirty-five years old, took over and continued to work with Napier. These ties exemplify the stability and family connections that became defining hallmarks of Clydeside shipbuilding. Such a situation might easily have led to complacency, technological inbreeding and shoddy, dangerous work. But it didn’t; instead, ‘Steele-built’ became a synonym for high levels of shipbuilding design, materials and workmanship. The younger Robert Steele, ‘in his silent, unobtrusive way,’ as a colleague put it, continued to improve his craft – and kept the exacting Cunard partners satisfied.

Early in 1846, Sam Cunard, at home in Halifax, heard that the US Congress had granted a group of New Yorkers an annual subsidy of $400,000 to start a steamship mail service between New York and England. The news struck him in two sensitive spots: American competition, and his long-nurtured plans to start running his own ships to New York, the booming centre of maritime commerce in the United States. Cunard rushed over to London and started negotiating with men at the Admiralty and Treasury. ‘I came to England to point out to the Government that an American line was about being got up, and I wished to prevent that,’ he explained. ‘I saw that the American Government were giving encouragement to a mail line which would interfere very much with me, and would interfere equally with the [British] Government; I was satisfied that it would deprive the Government of half the postage, and deprive me of half the passengers.’ As Cunard made his case, he melded his self-interest with the national interest, presenting both as equally jeopardized by the American thrust.

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