for when she's gone there'll be no more like her. " McKay's ultimate sa iling ship, the four-masted Great Republic, of 4,555 tons, was towed to New York from her East Boston yard by the tug R. B. Forbes at the end of 1853. She caught fire in her South Street slip on 26 December, to be rebuilt on a more modest scale at 3,357 tons (see "Marine Art," p. 26 for more of her story). As the trail of the clipper ships died out on the world's waters, and slower, more burdensome sailing sh ips took up the cheaper cargoes left to them by the advance of steam-powered ships, legends began to grow and multiply about the clippers. People knew they were an extraordinary creation in their time-why else did we suddenly find names like James Monroe succeeded by
ship-a run where no steamship could yet function effectively. In the decades that followed, steamboats went on to establish service in sheltered bays and so unds, while sail continued to carry alm ost everything in salt water, with the exception of the occasional trip by steamer down the coast from New York and a few forays across the Atlantic. In these early decades of steam navigation it could be said that the most important use of steam in the oceanic trades was in the tugs that helped the sailing vessels, ever growing in size, in and out of port. The big packet ships, soon reaching up to 2,000 tons, needed this assistance in narrow quarters and benefited from being towed in or out of harbor Herald ofthe Morning, Chariot ofFame, against head winds-though skipNeptune's Car, Flying Cloud, Comet, or pers continued to take pride in clearYoung America? ing under sail when they could, as The steamship, linked up Around 1850 there grew up a sense demonstrated by Captain James with the steam railway ashore, that Americans were no longer on the Barker who sailed the Tusita!a out of rim of Europe's wheel, but at the center her Hoboken pier (across the Hudson would radically alter the of our own, a sense expressed in AmeriRiver from Manhattan) in the late nature offirst-class traffics on can letters through writers like the es1920s. sayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the But as the 1840s progressed, the the Cape Horn run, changing novelist Herman Melville, a sense also British engineer Isambard Kingdom not just the speed ofadvance expressed, architectural historians tell Brunel built serious ocean-going but the actual routes followed, us, in the style of buildings ashore. The steamships to complete his Great American clipper perhaps most vividly Western Railway, which took peopl e saving thousands ofmiles of expressed this sea change. from London to the West Co untry ocean travel. The Times of London, having deports of Bristol and Liverpool. There scribed the new American clipper Orithey were to embark aboard wooden sailing ships dependent on the vagarenta! when she came into London in 1850, got a sense in this ship of something more than a speedy ies of wind and weather. Brunel found this absurd. His iron steam vehicle, commenting editorially: "A giant across the ocean has railway would be continued across the Atlantic in iron steamships been unshackled." of large size and great reliability. His first vessel, named Great But the reign of the fast sailing ship in ocean trades had in fact Western for the railway, was a wooden paddlewheeler, which only a few years to run in the face of the inexorable advance of the crossed in 1838 just behind her rival Sirius, an Irish sea packet ocean-going steamship. The steamship, linked up with the steam chartered by Americans. Brunel's next entry was more formidable, the great iron ship railway ashore, would radically alter the nature of first-class traffics on the Cape Horn run, changing not just the speed of advance but Great Britain of 1842, propeller-driven and including such innothe actual routes fo llowed, saving thousands of miles of ocean vations as a double bottom, a balance rudder and, perhaps most important, a 3,433-ton iron hull, large enough to make her an travel. Steam Comes Thumping Along eco nomical carrier despite her primitive engines . She was indeed The growth of steam navigation proceeded steadi ly, fo llowing the a great ship-twice as large as the largest sailing ship that had been first co mmercially successful passenger run from New York to built up till then and finely-shaped. James Gordon Bennett said Albany in Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat (popularly of the clipper Sea Witch that he had not seen bows so sharp in known as the "Clermont") in 1808. By 1812 the Hudson had a South Street since the visit of the Great Britain a few years earlier! By the 1850s, Webb and others were building big, wooden dozen steamers plying its waters. They changed the dynamics of passage on the Hudson and helped to rush shipwrights from New paddlewheel steamers for the Collins Line of transAtlantic packYork C ity's East River shipyards to the north woods to build the ets, magnificent vessels that competed successfully (with a sizable flotillas which won the vital battles of Lake Erie and Lake Cham- subs idy) aga inst the British C unard liners that had established plain in the War of 1812. These last-minute American victories regular North Atlantic service in the 1840s. The loss at sea of two defeated the heavy British counter-thrusts that had been mounted of these big wooden paddlers led to the closing down of the lineafter America's failed attempt to "liberate" Canada by force. but not to the end of wooden steamers. Fulton and other steamboat pioneers knew well, however, that It was a New York sailing house prominent in the Cape Horn the great use of steam would be opening the American interior trade to San Francisco and China, our friends at Howland & through the Mississippi-Ohio River system, and there toward the Aspinwall, that opened the steam service that took the cream of the end of the War of 1812, a steamboat played a viral role in rushing Cape Horn trade from sailing ships. They had Webb build them reinforcements and munitions to repel the British attack on New the 1,057-ton, wooden paddle-steamer California in 1848, a 200Orleans. This attack was mounted after peace had been signed, foot vessel driven at a stately but constant pace by a 250due to the time it took to get word across the Atlantic by sailing horsepower engine. She was built to fulfill a postal contract as part
SEA HISTORY 88, SPRING 1999
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