Map 1. Major Atlantic Currents
V. 2. WIND VS. STEAM – A DECADE OF STRUGGLE
Early experiments – The start of the transatlantic steamship service – The origins of the North Atlantic mail contract – The early years of the Cunard Line – Competition between early transatlantic mail carriers – Wind vs. steam – the finale
Early experiments
Steam technology was transferred from land to sea in the early 19th century. The earliest commercially successful steamboat was built by Robert Fulton in 1807. His 18-horsepower engine steamer made the passage from New York to Albany in 33 hours. In Britain, the first steamboat was launched on the Clyde in 1811. In 1814 there were still only two steamboats in Britain, in 1816 there were 15, in 1825 there were 163, in 1835 there were already 538 and in 1839 as many as 840. A similar development was seen in the United States, where approximately 1,300 steamboats were built during 1808-1839.167
Steamboats replaced sailing packets in the British Post Office coastal services in the early 1820s. The mails for Ireland were carried by steamboats from Holyhead to Dublin over the Irish Sea from May 1821 and the mails for the continent from Dover to Calais from the end of the same year. The Milford station was converted to steam in 1824, though the receipts from mail and passengers were rather slight. The Bristol Chamber of Commerce bombarded the Post Office with reasons for transferring the Milford packets to the port of Bristol, which could easily become a
165 According to Cutler, the Dramatic Line's sailing dates were "eventually" fixed at the 25th from New York and the 12th from Liverpool, but this system did not work for a long time. At least from the beginning of 1838, the Dramatic Line sailed from both ports on the same day as the Black Ball Line. See Cutler (1967), 377, 380; Lloyd's List 1838, passim.
166 Ship letter from Liverpool on 17.3. and 18.3.1837 to Messrs John & Dan K. Stewart, Richmond, Virginia. (JSC); Lloyd's List 21.3.1837; 9.5.1837.
167 Peter Allington & Basil Greenhill, The First Atlantic Liners. Seamanship in the Age of Paddle Wheel, Sail and Screw (London 1997), 12.
busy packet station due to the demands of commercial activities. The Post Office ignored these demands, but added Liverpool as a new packet port on the west coast of England.168
The steam packet service from Liverpool to Dublin started in 1826.
Previously, the Liverpool letters to Ireland had gone first to Chester and from there joined the London mails on their way to Holyhead. This was rather inconvenient as the mails had to leave from Liverpool before the business day was over, and the letters were on their way for 24 hours. The direct steam ship traffic between Liverpool and Dublin reduced the time to some 12 hours. Liverpool also had a steam-powered mail service to the Isle of Man.169
Even though there were already private steamship companies serving on the coastal routes, the British Post Office ignored them and built a competing steam packet service. The reason was, according to Francis Freeling, the Secretary of the Post Office, that private owners "would have no inducement to avoid delay or irregularity, and that the safety of the mails was so important that it could not be left in private hands". Due to these investments, the annual expense for the services, which had been about £78,000 in 1817, more than doubled during the next ten years.170
A report by the Commissioners of Revenue in 1830 showed that the expenses for the first eight years of the Post Office steam packet service had amounted to over
£620,000 while the receipts were less than £243,000.171 It seemed to be a poor business for the Post Office to build steamboats and run the mail service. These figures, together with the public pressure to reduce the high postage rates,172 were among the most important reasons when the Post Office later decided to change its policy and 'outsource' the overseas mail services to private, subsidised steamship companies.
Before any transatlantic steamers became reality, steam vessels were already in use for a regular foreign mail service on shorter sea routes, such as crossing the North Sea between London and Holland or Hamburg. The steamship service shortened the trip notably compared with the horse-drawn mail coach to Harwich and crossing of the North Sea by sailing packets. The 170-year-old Harwich mail service was given up, and mails to Holland were carried by the General Steam Navigation Company. This line, founded in 1824, received its first mail contract in 1831. The
168 Robinson (1964), 120-121.
169 Robinson (1964), 121.
170 Robinson (1964), 118-122.
171 Robinson (1964), 122.
172 Roland Hill, Secretary of the Post Office, published his well-known pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability in 1837. Hill's calculations about the benefits of reducing the high inland postage rates to a uniform one penny rate caused a furious debate in public and in the Parliament. The uniform inland rate was introduced in 1840, together with the first prepaid postage stamp in the world, the Penny Black, as well as the prepaid stationery covers, known as Mulready covers according to their designer. These inventions supported the decision to adopt the one penny postage, as the stamps and stationery covers could be bought in quantities before use, and prepaid letters were easier and quicker to handle in the Post Office. See Robinson (1948), 258-320; Gavin Fryer & Clive Akerman (ed.), The Reform of the Post Office in the Victorian Era, Vol. 1 (London 2000), 79-139. For the pamphlet, see Fryer & Akerman, 1-46. For the parliamentary debate, see the Reports of the Select Committee on Postage in BPP, Transport and Communications, Posts and Telegraphs, 1 and 2, passim.
steam packets would depart regularly from London for Rotterdam and Hamburg, reaching Rotterdam in 28 hours and Hamburg in 54. By the mid-1830s, steam packets were leaving from London twice a week. The mails for Sweden were sent across the North Sea via Hull from 1840.173
In France, the first regular steam packet service was established on the Saône in 1826, after many fruitless attempts. In 1833 there were only 75 steamboats in France; in 1835 there were 100; and in 1838 still only 160. The French started their Mediterranean mail steamship service between Marseilles and Constantinople in 1837.174
The first steamship to cross the Atlantic was the American Savannah in 1819.
Her trip from Savannah, Georgia, to Liverpool took 29 days, and the engine was used for only 100 hours of the total of 700 spent at sea. The ship had no passengers or cargo onboard during the trip, despite advertising in the local press before the voyage.
Even though the trip could be called nautically successful, the result clearly indicated that ocean-going steamships were not yet economical.175
The Royal William was another vessel which crossed the North Atlantic eastbound once. She even carried passengers on her voyage. The ship was originally built for Quebec-Halifax-Pictou traffic in 1831, but in 1833 the owners decided to send her across the Atlantic to be sold in Europe. The eastbound trip took 22 days to Cowes and 25 days to London, including all the stoppages due to a problem common for the early steamers: the fires under the boilers had to be put out for hours several times during the trip to remove the salt crystals which came from the sea water that was used for cooling.176
A few more transatlantic trips at least partly under steam were recorded during the 1820s and 1830s on the southern route: the Conde de Patmella from Liverpool via Lisbon to Brazil in 1820; the Rising Star to Valparaiso, Chile, in 1822;
and the Curaçao from Antwerp to the Dutch West Indies in 1827, after which she probably made two or three more round trips before becoming a man-of-war in Belgium in 1830. The City of Kingston sailed from London for Madeira, Barbados and Jamaica in 1837, continuing later to New York but ending up in Baltimore due to a heavy storm.177
173 Robinson (1964), 123; Moubray & Moubray, 105-106.
174 Allington & Greenhill, 12. For the early French Mediterranean service, see Raymond Salles, La Poste Maritime Française, Historique et Catalogue, Tome II, Les Paquebots de la Méditerranée de 1837 à 1935 (Limassol, Cyprus, 1992), 9-34.
175 About Savannah's trip, see Albion (1939) 314; John A. Butler, Atlantic Kingdom:
America's Contest with Cunard in the Age of Sail and Steam (Washington D.C. 2001), 41-44;
Arnold Kludas, Record Breakers of the North Atlantic. Blue Riband Liners 1838-1952 (London 2000), 33-36; Staff, 63; and Tyler, 1-17.
176 Lawrence Babcock, Spanning the Atlantic. A History of the Cunard Line (New York 1931), 24-29; Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 51-52; Kludas, 35-36; Robinson (1964), 125-126; David Tyler, Steam Conquers the Atlantic (New York 1939), 25-27.
177 Albion (1939), 316; Allington & Greenhill, 14; Babcock, 24; Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 45-46;
Stuart Nicol, Macqueen's Legacy. A History of the Royal Mail Line, vol. 1 (Gloucestershire, 2001), 31; Robinson (1964), 125; Tyler, 22-23. Some transatlantic voyages were obviously made also by the Royal Navy at least partly under steam. See Allington & Greenhill, 14;
Tyler, 23-25.
The start of the transatlantic steamship service
A discussion about the possibility of making a westbound voyage across the North Atlantic by steamship continued in Britain throughout the 1830s. It was asserted by sceptics that the boiler would be completely clogged by using sea water for such a long time, the vessel could not carry enough coal for a trip of over 3,000 nautical miles while still leaving enough room for passengers, crew, freight and stores, and the necessary fuel, when loaded, would destroy the trim of the vessel. The Atlantic crossing might be done only if the shortest possible distance between the two continents was used, from the west coast of Ireland to Halifax.178
The famous race between the steamers Sirius and Great Western from Britain to New York in April 1838 was finally the start of a commercial transatlantic steamship service. The Sirius was a wooden paddle steamer of 700 tons and a substitute for the British and American Steam Navigation Company's (B&A) British Queen, a much larger vessel designed for regular North Atlantic service. The launching of the British Queen was delayed by several months due to the bankruptcy of the company that should have delivered the engines, and the B&A decided to charter the Sirius for a transatlantic journey to save the honour of the company, as they had already announced the commencement of this traffic.179
According to Stephen Fox, the voyage of the Sirius was "just a headless, dangerous publicity stunt, a desperate gambit by sore losers, and hardly worth the historical attention it had received ever since".180 Even so, the "publicity stunt" was very successful, as the amount of attention paid to it shows. This was not the first time, and would not be the last time, that shipping companies took risks in the North Atlantic for publicity and reputation – and not all cases had a happy ending.
The rival Great Western was a much larger and more efficient ship of 1,340 tons. She was owned by the Great Western Steamship Company and was built together with the Great Western Railway, which was opened in its full length between London and Bristol in 1841. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the well-known chief engineer, was responsible for both these projects.181
In April 1838 both steamers were ready for their first Atlantic crossing. Due to damage caused by a fire in her engine, the Great Western did not sail from Bristol as scheduled. She finally left on 8 April, four days after the Sirius, which departed from Cork, Ireland, on 4 April. The Great Western was so much faster that she arrived in New York on 23 April, only a few hours after the Sirius’s wildly celebrated arrival.182 The Sirius brought with her 94 passengers but the Great Western only seven, while 50 others had cancelled their bookings when they heard about the engine fire and the beaching on a sand bank on the way to Bristol. On the way back, people crowded onto the faster and larger vessel, and the Great Western carried home 68
178 Robinson (1964), 126; Tyler, 39-41. Both refer to Dr. Dionysius Lardner's article in Edinburgh Review of April 1837.
179 Kludas, 36-37; E. Le Roy Pond, Junius Smith: A Biography of the Father of the Atlantic Liner (New York, 1927), 100.
180 Stephen Fox, The Ocean Railway (London 2003), 78. – Bernard Edwards describes the risks of the Sirius voyage in The Grey Widow Maker. The true stories of twenty-four disasters at sea (London 1995), 27-33.
181 For its origins, see e.g. Pond, 98; Robinson (1964), 127; Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 60; Butler, 45. For the Great Western Railway, see Vaughan, 178-192.
182 A comparison of the ships' logs has been published by Tyler, 384-387.
passengers.183
Both steamers were equipped with an important innovation made in 1834, a circulating freshwater cooling system that eliminated any need for stoppages to scrape the caked salt from the boiler's interior.184 The Great Western took 600 tons of coal when departing from Bristol, and still had 155 tons onboard upon arrival, having burnt an average of 29 tons of coal per day.185 The Sirius ran short of coal and was forced to burn wooden fittings and a good deal of resin to keep her engines going. On the eastbound voyage she had to make an extra call at Falmouth for coal, and it was from there that her mails were forwarded by land to the recipients.186
Both ships carried mail onboard. These letters are known as the first transatlantic steamship letters in postal historical collections. There are no records of the number of letters carried on the ships' westbound journeys, but on the way back the Sirius carried some 17,000 and the Great Western some 20,000 letters.187 According to a newspaper columnist of the Albion in New York on 5 May, 1838, no charge was taken for the mails. The loss of profit this caused for the Sirius owners was calculated at up to $4,000 – or £1,000 – a sum that would have paid for a large part of the costs of the voyage. According to the paper, the letter bags would have been more profitable for the company than the 28 cabin passengers carried.188
According to Tyler, the Sirius brought with her some Liverpool newspapers of 3 April and Cork newspapers of 4 April, while the Great Western brought London newspapers of 6 April and one from Bristol of 7 April. An employee of the New York Courier & Enquirer found the Great Western's mails on arrival and managed to get off with the newspapers and mail bags. The Courier's editors kept them for several hours, went through the contents and published a special foreign news edition.
The other newspapers were greatly annoyed, and so was the British Minister in Washington, whose mail was thus delayed.189
Although somewhat unplanned, this was the start of the regular steamship mail and passenger service between Britain and New York. As a mail carrier, the Great Western took letters westward at ship letter rates. From New York the rate was the same as on the American sailing packets, 25 cents each, and her captain received 2d from the British Post Office for each single letter he landed at Bristol.190
The Sirius made only two round trips across the Atlantic, and then returned to coastal service. The Great Western made more than 40 North Atlantic round trips during 1838-1846, and was then sold to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company for the British – West Indian service. In 1855, she was used as a troop carrier in the
183 Bonsor (1975), vol.1., 60-61; Kludas, 37; Nicholas Fogg, The Voyages of the Great Britain. Life at Sea in the World's First Liner (Wilts, Great Britain, 2002), 9; Staff, 68.
184 Butler, 45-46; Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 55.
185 Allington-Greenhill, 9.
186 The story about the Sirius coal varies in different sources. See Albion (1939), 318; Butler, 46; Babcock, 32; Tabeart, 16; and Pond, 113; Robinson (1964), 127; Tyler, 58-59, 384-386.
187 Pond, 113; Staff, 68; Robinson (1964), 127.
188 Staff, 155. – Philatelic studies support this statement. A letter from Baltimore dated 28.4.1838 to the Frederick Huth & Co. banking house in London, handstamped on 29.4.1838 in Baltimore and on 30.4.1838 in New York, carried by the Sirius on her first homeward voyage, has a "PAID" hand stamp and a rate marking which have both been struck out, and just the 5s British postage rate has been charged from the recipient. (SRLC)
189 Tyler, 56.
190 Robinson, 128; Staff, 155-156.
Crimean War, and in 1856 was finally sold to be scrapped.191
The Sirius and the Great Western were soon followed by other transatlantic pioneers. The Royal William of the City of Dublin Steam Packet Co. entered the traffic in July 1838 and the Liverpool of the Transatlantic Steam Ship Co. in October 1838. The British and American Steam Navigation Company’s British Queen, which had chartered the Sirius for the first Atlantic voyage, entered the traffic in July 1839.192
In 1838-1839, these five steamers made 26 transatlantic round trips in total.
While the average westbound trip of the American sailing packets between Liverpool and New York took 34.3 days during 1833-1847,193 the average trip by the pioneering steamers was made in 17.7 days during 1838-1839 – in about half of the time.194
Despite the good start and great publicity, several of the pioneering steamers appeared to be non-profitable and they had to be taken out of service after a few trips.
The Royal William ended her last voyage in February 1839. The British Queen was also short-lived in this service, primarily due to the financial problems caused to the company by the loss of its new flagship the President, which sailed from New York for Liverpool in March 1841 with 136 people onboard and was never heard of again.195 The only long-lived pioneering steamer in the North Atlantic service was the Great Western.
The Great Western was clearly the fastest of all the pioneering steamers. She made her westbound trips in 15.8 days on average in 1838-1842, and in 16.4 days in 1843-1846. Her eastbound trips took 13.7 days on average in 1838-1842, and 14.8 days in 1843-1846.196
It has been argued that steamships offered "a huge advantage of independence from the wind" and that they maintained a regular schedule regardless of the weather.197 Even if this was very much true compared with the sailing ships, the pioneering steamship traffic was not regular in the sense of line service. The Great Western sailed from both ports at about seven-week intervals, staying approximately
191 Tabeart (1997), 16-19; Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 60-66.
192 Tabeart (1997), 16-17. The Royal William should not to be confused with the earlier Canadian namesake.
193 Albion (1938), 317.
194 Calculated from the sailing lists of Tabeart (1997), 17.
195 Tabeart (1997), 18. For the loss of the President, see e.g. Pond, 210-222; Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 56-58; Staff, 77-78; Robinson (1964), 129-131; Butler, 46-47; Albion (1939), 320;
Fox 99-101. – The shipowning company B&A announced to their shareholders in December 1841 that the total receipts for the nine voyages of the British Queen had been £82,000 and the total expenses less than £71,000. This would have meant an average profit of over £1,200 per voyage, compared with £1,350 of the ill-fated President. Bonsor notes that the figures most probably did not take into account interest charges, depreciation, insurance or management expenses, which turned the profit into a substantial loss and forced the company into liquidation. Bonsor (1975), vol. 1, 58. In 1837, the company's prospectus had optimistically estimated that the profits of the British Queen would be over £4,500 per round trip or about £27,000 for a whole year. See Tyler, 44.
196 See sailing lists of Tabeart (1997), 19. – The Great Western changed her home port from Bristol to Liverpool in 1843, but this was not the reason for the longer trips during the later period. The vessel was able to make 13-day voyages from New York to both ports in 1842 when she sailed a triangle while testing the port of Liverpool.
197 E.g. Kludas, 38; Talbot, 133; Pond; 1-3; Babcock, 80.
ten days at port, on average.198 The duration of the trip was still unpredictable, even if the journeys were generally faster than by the sailing packets. Winds and streams
ten days at port, on average.198 The duration of the trip was still unpredictable, even if the journeys were generally faster than by the sailing packets. Winds and streams