He "Was Never the Same Again by John Laurence Busch n Thursday, 30 July 1807, Mo ses Ro gers was read y to go. His vessel, the sloop Lydia, fin ally h ad a full hold, and it was time to get underway. So, Moses walked into the C ustom H ouse in New London, Co nnecticut, to submit his cargo manifest and clear his vessel fo r departure.
Moses Rogers
Moses had been the mas ter of the Lydia since April of that year, hauling cargoes between New London, New Yo rk C ity, and H ar tfo rd, Connecticut, which, despite its distance from the coas t, was a busy port in its own right, thanks to the broad and deep Connecticut River. The Lydia was well -sui ted for the work, meas uring som e fi fty feet on deck and just over sixteen fee t in breadth. At nearl y fo rty-six tons burthen, the three-year-old Lydia was the largest vessel Moses had ever commanded , but still small enough to navigate in coastal wa terways. At some twenty-eight years of age, Captain Rogers had been running coastal sailing vessels since the turn of the century and had gained enough experience and contacts to consistently procure cargoes fo r his short voyages along the coast of New Yo rk and southern New England. On this particular trip, he was hauling a hold full of sugar to New York C ity, carried in for ty-two barrels and for ty hogsheads. Setting sail from the wharves of New Lo ndon , Moses and hi s lone crewman
SEA HISTORY 134 SPRING 2011
steered the sloop o ut the mouth of the Tham es River and into Long Island Sound, the blue highway that links the pons of Connecticut with Go tham. Moses knew this body of water better than any other and could typically make the trip to New York in a day or less. At the far western end of the Sound, Moses and the Lydia entered the swirling currents of H ell Gate, which served then , as it does now, as the po rtal between Long Island Sound and New York's East River. Once safely through, they headed due south and foll owed the swiftly fl.owing river, with M anhattan to starboard and Williamsburg to larboard. Just before they reached the wharves alo ng South Street, Moses and the Lydia passed a section of M anha ttan's sho relin e called C orlea rs Hook, where the banks jutted out into the river and m ost of the m ajor shipyards were located. Tied up to a wharf at one of those shipyards could be seen a most curiouslooking craft. It had what looked like two thin watermill wheels attached to either side of its hull abo ut a third of the way back from the bow, and between them, rising straight up from the deck, was a tall, black tubular stack. To the uninformed observer, this cumbersom e contraption had to be the strangest looking vessel afl.oat. But to those in the kn ow, it had a name; it was called a
Typical nineteenthcentury cargo sloop
hardly a new idea. Plenty of people, Fulton among them, had tried to build these "steamboats" before, but nobody could get o ne to work beyond a few experimental runs-or let alone in a way that m ade them commercially viable. From these early trials, most observers concluded that while the steamboat was certainly an interes ting experiment, never would one be built to any practical purpose. Stearn engines were simply too heavy and their motion too violent to allow for their safe installation within a wooden hull.
"sreamboaL"
This vessel was the creation of inventor Robert Fulton . H e had spent many years living abroad, mostly in Britain and France, where he had experimented with many different innovations. Upo n returning to his homeland the previous D ecember, Ful ton had declared that he and his fin ancial partner, Chancellor Robert R. Livi ngsto n, were going to build a new kind of vessel. It would be a boat that moved th ro ugh the water by m eans of paddlewheels mounted on either side of the hull , turned by power generated from a steam engine. The hull had been built by well-known shipbuilder Charles Brownne of New Yo rk, and the engine imported from the leading manufactu rer of such machinery, Boul to n, Ware & Company ofBirmingharn, England, which also had sent over a mechanic to help Fulton assemble it properly. Steam propulsion fo r watercraft was
Robert Fulton
Even so, Fulton announced that his new vessel, the North River Steam Boat (later known as the Clerm ont) , would not only work as an experiment, but operate a regular passenger service along the North (or Hudson) Ri ver, between New York C ity and the state capital of Albany. Such a bold promise led th e skeptics, and there we re many, to offer their own name for this new contraptio n: "Fulton's Folly."
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