Dickens said the steamer Britannia "throbbed like a strong giant that has just received the breath of life." papers to keep in touch with the wider world, and books to educate their children and keep their culture alive. Driven by the urgent need for this kind of communication, steamboating flourished in the young American republic. As early as 1819, the year the first steamship crossed the Atlantic, there were 100 steamboats in American waters. A count taken a year later showed only 43 steamboats, by contrast, in the more industrially advanced British Isles. An examp le reported by the Franklin, Missouri Intelligencer, hundreds of miles inland, shows why. On 30 April 1821 , it reported the arrival from St. Louis of the "large and elegant Steam Boat Washington, Captain Shreve." The 220-mile trip had taken just six days-"againsta stream the most rapid, perhaps , in the world ." The Intelligencer went on to cite the normal time for this journey by keel boat as "from twenty to thirty days." An enterprising American, Moses Rogers took the first steamboat across the Atlantic, the immortal Savannah, in 1819. She carried no cargo and had to sail more than she could steam, but the impact of her arrival on the far side of the ocean and her tour through the Baltic to St. Petersburg was considerable. As her historian Frank 0. Braynard has pointed out, she showed that a heavy , ocean-going ship cou ld be steamed at sea, and that nightmare visions of fire breaking out in the wooden hull , or engines toppling over if the ship hit rough going were just that-chimera dissipated in the broad daylight of the workaday world. But another twenty years' progress in engineering was needed before regular steam service opened across the Atlantic. The Savannah's engine was removed after her return to the US, and she worked the rest of her days as a sai ling ship. The implications of the new motive power for naval warfare would have been evident, one would think, but navies were slow to move on them. Fulton, who had demonstrated mines and submarines to the French and English, was charged with installing defenses for New York Harbor in the War of 1812-which is said to be one reason the British used their overwhelming naval power to attack Washington rather than New York. His most impressive harbor defense weapon , however, was completed only in July 1815 , five months after Fulton's untimely death and after the end of the war. Thi s was a steam frigate which 14
made seven knots, carrying an armamentofheavy guns behind wooden walls five feet thick, with an internal paddlewheel well sheltered from gunfire. This remarkable vessel, named at first Demologos, or " Voice of the People," and later Fulton ! , was put to purely ceremonial use and had her guns and engines removed after three years. She lived out her days as a stationary guardship until a careless watchman ignited the powder kept aboard for saluting purposes and blew her up. Although Fulton felt that hi s contributions to naval warfare were more significant than his steamboats splashing up the rivers and waddling out along the coasts, it was the steamboats that changed history by speeding the settling and development of North America. And the ocean-going steamship, as Fitch had presciently asserted, was to have a tremendous impact on history by bringing people to our shores in the first place. Mastering the North Atlantic The beginnings were slow, and they were predominantly British, as befitted the world's most advanced industrial nation and leading sea power. Steamships began crossing the English and Tri sh channels, feeding their greedy engines with abundant cheap coal for these short runs. By 1837 there was a line to Oporto, Lisbon, Gibraltar and round into the Mediterranean to Malaga on Spain 's Mediterranean coast. The primitive steamers were operated at a loss until they secured a government mail contract or subsidy of ÂŁ29,000 a year. In 1840 the service was extended the length of the Mediterranean to Alexandria, for an increased subsidy of ÂŁ34,000 a year$170,000, in those days. This led to the formation of the Pacific & Oriental Steam Navigation Company, which went on to extend its service into the Indian Ocean, from Suez to India, and later to Penang and Singapore in Malaysia, and the British colony of Hong Kong in China. Reasons of empire thus led to the financing of this first great oceanic steamer route. Other lines were subsidized on the West Coast of South America and to Havana; and most important, the Admiralty invited tenders for an Atlantic mail contract in 1838, the year the Great Western opened regular liner service to New York. The award of ÂŁ55,000 ($275,000) yearly went to a syndicate headed by the Nova Scotian Samuel Cunard, however, and in 1840 he placed four steamers in service to Boston. They
maintained an average of 13 days westbound, 11 eastbound with the push of generally fair winds. The sailing packets on the Liverpool run had averaged 36 days on the westward pas sage, 24 eastbound in the preceding decade. (And Junius Smith, the American steam pioneer who sponsored the voyage of the Sirius, the ship that just beat Brunel 's Great Western to New York in 1838, had made a 54-day passage to New York under sail in 1832, which lead him to get a steamer to do the crossing in 15 days!) The noveli st Charles Dickens, who took passage westbound in Cunard's Britannia in January 1842, soon afterthe service began, reported that on getting under way the vessel " throbbed like a strong giant that has just received the breath of life." On the whole, he claimed he preferred the easier eastbound passage home in an American sailing packet. The throbbing that made such an impress ion on Dickens was a problem in the wooden steamers. The great weight and thumping of the engines, with their enormous low pressure cylinders, 6 feet in diameter in the Britannia's case, induced leaks and shortened the vessels' lives. The omnipresent dirt from the smokestack and the ri sk of fire, were other disadvantages noted by that fine sailorman William McFee, who observed that the officers on the amidship bridge between the paddle boxes "might, with a following wind, be smothered in soot from the funnel. " And the officers, brought up in sail , had to contend with a new class of seamen brought into being to serve the giant engines: "The black gang, dumping ashes every watch, made life hideous with their banging and clashing of buckets, and the fine ash blew across the decks and into the cabins." But the complaints that accompanied the shift to steam service on the North Atlantic run were largely "blowing smoke." The steamers took over the North Atlantic packet trade because they were faster and kept more reliable schedules than any sailing ship could. Through the 1820s and '30s this trade had been dominated by smart Yankee packets, Black Ballers and others. With the advent of steam, John Bull resumed his accustomed dominance on this the most important ocean trade route in the world. And as the next vital step was taken, the development of iron hulls to withstand the beat of the engines and above all to permit the large size that would make for more efficient operation, the SEA HISTORY 64, WINTER 1992-93