The English people paid Fulton seventy-five thousand dollars for showing them what he could do in this way. Then they offered to give him a great deal more—in fact, to make him a very rich man—if he would promise never to let any other country know just how he blew vessels up. But Fulton said, 'I am an American; and if America should ever want to use my diving-boat in war, she shall have it first of all.'
[196. Fulton makes his first steamboat.]—But while Fulton was doing these things with his diving-boat, he was always thinking of the paddle-wheel scow he used to fish in when a boy. I turned those paddle-wheels by a crank, said he, but what is to hinder my putting a steam engine into such a boat, and making it turn the crank for me? that would be a steamboat. Such boats had already been tried, but, for one reason or another, they had not got on very well. Robert R. Livingston was still in France, and he helped Fulton build his first steamboat. It was put on a river there; it moved, and that was about all.
[197. Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston go to New York and build a steamboat; the trip up the Hudson River.]—But Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston both believed that a steamboat could be built that would go, and that would keep going. So they went to New York and built one there.
| FULTON'S STEAMER LEAVING NEW YORK FOR ALBANY. |
In the summer of 1807 a great crowd gathered to see the boat start on her voyage up the Hudson River. They joked and laughed as crowds will at anything new. They called Fulton a fool and Livingston another. But when Fulton, standing on the deck of his steamboat, waved his hand, and the wheels began to turn, and the vessel began to move up the river, then the crowd became silent with astonishment. Now it was Fulton's turn to laugh, and in such a case the man who laughs last has a right to laugh the loudest.
Up the river Fulton kept going. He passed the Palisades;[5] he passed the Highlands;[6] still he kept on, and at last he reached Albany, a hundred and fifty miles above New York.
Nobody before had ever seen such a sight as that boat moving up the river without the help of oars or sails; but from that time people saw it every day. When Fulton got back to New York in his steamboat, everybody wanted to shake hands with him—the crowd, instead of shouting fool, now whispered among themselves, He's a great man—a very great man, indeed.
5 See map in paragraph [55].
6 See map in paragraph [55].
[198. The first steamboat in the west; the Great Shake.]—Four years later Fulton built a steamboat for the west. In the autumn of 1811 it started from Pittsburg[7] to go down the Ohio River, and then down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The people of the west had never seen a steamboat before, and when the Indians saw the smoke puffing out, they called it the "Big Fire Canoe."