USS Jamestown under sail, c.1890. In the spring of 1847, as the Carolan family was preparing to leave their ancestral homeland for the United States, USS Jamestown was arriving in Ireland on a humanitarian mission commanded by merchant sea captain Robert B. Forbes. With donations organized by the New England Relief Committee, the ship carried desperately needed food and supplies to alleviate the suffering of those devastated by the potato blight. 36
Robert Bowne Minturn of Grinnell & Minturn, owners of the Patrick Henry and later the extreme clipper Flying Cloud. As an example, in late January 1840, the Patrick Henry arrived ahead of schedule and beat the competition to deliver the news from the continent for eager American readers. The Morning Herald (New York), on the front page of its February 1st edition, reported: “The foreign news given today is highly important. Yesterday afternoon, about half past three, we received it at this
office being a full hour before any of the Wall Street papers had theirs—and by five o’clock we issued an Extra, to gratify the immense crowd that surrounded our office. One of our clippers left town at 10 o’clock, and boarded the Patrick Henry outside the bar at about one o’clock.” The news was advertised in large type as “Ten Days Later From England—Highly Important” and included articles about war preparations by Russia, Queen Victoria’s marriage that month, and a speech by France’s King Louis-Philippe. The speedy dissemination of information made capital move faster, directly affecting world trade. In 1840, the Patrick Henry was among twenty sailing packet ships on the New York-Liverpool run. Sailing ship packet captains began taking more risks as steamships were coming into service and were becoming more competitive. Even as packets’ size grew markedly in the 1850s, their service speed did not, and they lost “their hold on the first-class business— mail, fine freight and cabin passengers” because punctuality was no longer something they could claim against their competition. THE MAKING OF A NATION According to Basil Lubbock in his 1925 book, The Western Ocean Packets, by their “sheer virility and heroic energy, superb
naval history and heritage command, us navy
COMMERCE AND JOURNALISM Receiving information as quickly as possible—about trade, markets, or business partnerships, or political, government or military news—was of urgent importance to nineteenth-century commerce. Businesses made special arrangements to beat their competitors. Sailing vessels, especially ships involved in the packet trade, emerged as the primary means of transporting information of the era, and, as such, contributed significantly to development to the field of journalism as well.
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Anne (1846–). The family had left its ancestral home about three miles southwest of Kells, County Meath, near Light Town, where the population in adjacent Drumbaragh plummeted 67 percent after the Great Hunger. The following spring, the Patrick Henry’s owner, Robert Bowne Minturn, took his family and servants aboard to embark on a grand tour of Europe and was later publicly shamed by a fellow shipping magnate: “Our friends, Grinnell, Minturn are heartbroken about famine,” A. A. Low wrote. “They have a house dinner to celebrate the fortune it is bringing them, and dine on terrapin, salmon, peas, asparagus, strawberries—all out of season, of course— then Mr. Grinnell gives the famine fund $360, which he had lost on a bet with [the founder of rival firm].” Minturn was reported to be worth today’s equivalent of $2.31 billion. All told, across two decades, the Patrick Henry transported more than 12,489 passengers, making at least sixty (documented) round trip crossings. One of the most profitable ships of its firm, in addition to passengers, she carried everything from specie to business mail to merchandise and newspapers.
SEA HISTORY 176, AUTUMN 2021