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Fitch did not see the steamer merely facilitating river and harbor traffic, but changing the ocean world. "The Grand and Principle object must be on the Atlantick, which would soon overspread the wild forests of America with people, and make us the most opulent Empire on Earth." Few others, it would seem, shared that vi sion , and Fitch died a disappointed man after eleven years of further effort. Robert Fulton ' s North River Steamboat (known to later ages as the Clermont) made her famous five-knot run up the Hudson in 1807 employing a BoultonWatt engine imported from England. Thi s engine probabl y used steam under pressure at two or three pounds above atmosphere-so this engine was already becoming a true steam engine, depending on the push of steam under pressure, as well as the pull of a partial vacuum created by condensing steam. In Scotland, in the meantime, the small steamer Charlotte Dundas had been built in 1802 to tow barges through canals. This proved to be a valuable service, though by 1830 steam rail way engines in both Great Britain and the United States had begun to cut into canal traffic. In both countries, however, the obvious advantage of towing sailing ships through narrow waters and crowded harbors led to a rapid growth in the towboat business, beginning in 1818 in New York Harbor and 1819 in the Thames. Throughout the first half-century of successful steamer operation, the main service of the steamboat in oceanic trade remained that of towing big sailing ships in and out of port. Indeed, the existence of the steamboat made the huge sailing ships of the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century possible. Without this help, they simply couldn ' t be handled in New York ' s narrow East River or in Liverpool 's crowded Mersey or in the winding reaches of the Thames, serving London.
ropes hauled by lusty rivermen. Nicholas Roosevelt built the high-sided steamboa t New Orleans for the FultonLivingston group at Pittsburgh in 1811 and proceeded to take her downstream with hi s young wife and daughterthrough incredible difficulties, including a major earthquake that wrought havoc along the river 's sparsely settled banks. Once the boat reached the seaport city of New Orlean s, she could only get as far back upriver as Natchez, due to her heavy hull (which had stood them in good stead during the wild trip downriver!). Her weak Boulton-Watt condensing engine simply couldn ' t push her upstream against the growing downstream current above Natchez. That historic engine ended up powering a sawmill ashore.
But three years later another remarkab le person , Captain Henry Miller Shreve, gave up his keel boat and built a light riverine steamboat driven by a true steam engine with a 40-pound persquare-inch head of steam . Hi s boat rushed supplies to Andrew Jackson in time for him to fend off the British attack on New Orleans at the end of the War of I 812, then churned back upstream towing a string of keelboats. Shreve went on to pioneer steamboat navigation throughout the whole river system, opening an era when the steamboat whistle drew settlers to their inland waterfronts, and connected them to the oceanic world a thousand miles or more distant. That connection brought people, plows and axes to tame and farm the wilderness, letters and news-
PIONEER STEAMBOATS
John Fitch's ExPERIMENT, 1788
Coming of Age on America's Rivers In the United States, Fulton saw from the beginning the future of the steamboat not on the Hudson , where hi s patron Chancellor Livingston determined that they should launch the ir riverboat venture, but on the mighty MississippiOhio river system, which opened the heartland of America to navigation . Oneway flatboats , built to be scrapped for their lumber, made the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, where the Mississippi debouches into the Gulf of Mexico . Keelboats made the round trip, but only one round trip a year, working their way upriver with poles and tow SEA HISTORY 64, WINTER 1992-93
Lord Dundas's CHARLOTIE DUNDAS, 1801
Robert Fulton's NORTH RrvER, 1807 13