Steamships and their story

by E. Keble Chatterton

For this we must thank the coming of the liner.

It was that memorable year of 1838 that set all this going. Impressed by the obvious advantages which the steamship now showed for speed and reliability, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, to whose care was then entrusted the arrangement of postal contracts, saw that those ancient “coffin brigs” were doomed. Their lordships forthwith issued circulars inviting tenders for the carrying of the American mails by steamers. It happened that one of these circulars fell into the hands of Samuel Cunard, a prominent merchant of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He had been anything but disconnected with shipping, for he was the owner of a number of sailing ships trading between Boston, Newfoundland and Bermuda, and was agent at Halifax for the East India Company, who in their time owned some of the very finest sailing fleets that ever put to sea. And this Samuel Cunard had been one of the shareholders of that first Royal William which crossed in 1833 from Pictou, Nova Scotia, to the Isle of Wight. A man of energy and enterprise, he had already realised that a line of steamers connecting the two continents ought to become something real, and he had sufficient foresight to see that this was an opportunity which does not occur many times in a generation.

Having made up his mind, after reading this circular, the next thing was to find the money. In Halifax it was not possible to raise the required capital, so he crossed forthwith to London. But London is not always ahead of the provinces, and the wealthy merchants declined to show their financial interest in the scheme. Therefore, armed with a letter of introduction from the secretary of the East India Company, Mr. Cunard travelled north to Glasgow, to Mr. Robert Napier, whose name we have already mentioned as a great Clyde shipbuilder and engineer. Napier promised to give him all the assistance possible, and introduced him to Mr. George Burns, and the latter, in turn, to Mr. David MacIver. Both had an expert knowledge of the shipping business, and to a Scotch shrewdness united wide experience and ability to look ahead. As a result, within a few days the necessary capital of £270,000 had been subscribed, and an offer was made to the Admiralty for the conveyance of Her Majesty’s mails once a fortnight between Liverpool and Halifax and Boston. But the owners of the Great Western, with a ship all ready for the work, were not going to let so fine a chance slip by without an effort. They, too, competed for the privilege, though eventually the organisation with which Cunard was connected was considered to have made the more favourable tender. This was accepted by the Government, and a contract for seven years was signed. The three enterprisers went to their posts—Cunard to London, Burns to Glasgow, and MacIver to Liverpool, but before matters had taken a final shape the Government required that the service was to be carried on by four ships instead of three, that fixed dates of sailings should be adhered to, and in consideration of all this a subsidy was eventually granted to the steamship owners of the sum of £81,000 per year. The corporation which we now know as the Cunard Company was then called the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, and they proceeded to get in hand the building of those first four steamers of which the Mauretania and Lusitania to-day are the lineal descendants. These four, then, were respectively the Britannia, the Acadia, the Caledonia, and the Columbia. They were all built of wood, all propelled by paddle-wheels, specially adapted for the transport of troops and stores in the event of war, with an indicated horse-power of 740, accommodation for 115 cabin passengers, a cargo capacity of 225 tons, while their dimensions and tonnage differed but slightly the one ship from the other. Their speed averaged 8½ knots per hour on a coal consumption of thirty-eight tons a day, the engines in each case being not unnaturally made by that Robert Napier who had by his introduction done so much to bring the formation of this company to a practical conclusion. These vessels were built on the Clyde by four different builders in the year 1840, but the Britannia was the first that was ready for service, her measurements being 207 feet long, 34 feet 4 inches wide, and 22 feet 6 inches deep, with a tonnage of 1,154.

Before we go on to outline the marvellous growth which has been seen under the Cunard Company’s flag, whose history is practically a history of the Atlantic liner, varied here and there by the happenings which other rival companies have brought about, it is both curious and amusing to append the following letter, which has only quite recently been made public, and which will surprise many of those who here read it. It is evidence of the remarkable speed at which events may happen, and men’s minds adapt themselves to newer conditions. Although Samuel Cunard was part owner of the first Royal William in 1833, and already three years earlier had thought over the idea of starting a line of Atlantic steamers, yet it will be seen that towards the end of 1829 he was not favourably inclined to the project. Having in mind all that the Cunard Company has done towards the inauguration of the liner, her continuous improvements, her safety and her efficiency, it is instructive to read the reply which was sent at this time to Messrs. Ross and Primrose, of Pictou, Nova Scotia, who had written to Cunard and Company in regard to steamship establishment:—

“Dear Sirs,—We have received your letter of the 22nd inst. We are entirely unacquainted with the cost of a steamboat, and would not like to embark in a business of which we are quite ignorant. Must, therefore, decline taking any part in the one you propose getting up.—We remain, yours, etc.

S. Cunard and Company.

“Halifax, October 28th, 1829.”

The above letter is now in the possession of Mr. John M. Ross, of Pictou.

But to return to the first sailing of the new company: the Britannia started the mail service in no conventional manner. Not merely was she to throw time-honoured custom to the winds by carrying the mails by the help of steam, but she dealt another blow to sailor-conservatism by setting forth on her maiden voyage on a Friday, which also happened to be the fourth of July, a day commemorative of another kind of Independence. Of course, the old-fashioned prophesied that so flagrant a disregard for superstition would spell disaster; but somehow the Britannia managed to arrive quite safely at Boston, on July 18th, 1840, after a voyage of just eight hours beyond a fortnight, though she had touched at Halifax after eleven days, four hours. The citizens of Boston celebrated the event with banqueting and wild enthusiasm as the forging—shall we not say?—of the first of those stronger links which were to bind the two countries more closely and more securely together. Four years later, one bitter February, when this same Britannia was hemmed in, icebound in Boston harbour, the same enthusiasts liberated her by cutting a canal seven miles long and a hundred feet wide through the ice, and this entirely at their own expense.

[Facing page 102] will be seen an illustration of a model of this Britannia. Old paintings show her rigged as a barque, with a couple of ship’s boats in davits on either side, and another hung over the stern in a manner that will be familiar to those readers who have seen the American sailing schooners, and some of the Norwegian craft. The space for boilers and engines still causes that long gap between the fore- and main-mast that we mentioned earlier. The square stern, the old-fashioned bows, and her lines generally, show that this first Atlantic liner was hardly a thing of beauty, if even she is to be remembered for ever as the first of a new series. Her paddle-wheels were 28 feet in diameter, and had 21 floats, which measured 8 feet by 2.8 feet. The mean draught of this little ship was 16.8 feet. Her engines were of the side-lever type, of course, the making of which Napier understood so well. Steam was generated in four boilers with twelve furnaces, and there were two cylinders. As we have already dealt with the working of these engines we need do little more than ask the reader to turn to [the next page], where he will find a sectional model of an engine very similar to that which was installed in these first four Cunard liners. The non-technical reader will find this some considerable help in following our previous references to engines of this type, and the section of the cylinder at the extreme left-hand of the picture will be found illustrative of the working of the piston inside the cylinder. As we are writing the story of the steamship, and not a history of engineering, we need not digress from our historical continuity, and we can now pass on to two other steamers built in 1841, for the Royal Mail Company. In the illustration [facing this page] will be seen the Teviot and Clyde respectively, the former being of 1,793 tons, the latter of 1,371 tons.