Steamships and their story

by E. Keble Chatterton

To North America, with its fine long rivers, the steamboat has been, as Fulton in his foresight prophesied it would be, a highly useful institution. To the European mind the vast possibilities of the mighty Mississippi come as a shock when fully realised. To quote the very first sentence in one of the most popular books which that most popular writer, Mark Twain, ever wrote, “The Mississippi is well worth reading about”; so, also, we might add, are its steamboats, but in our limited space we can only barely indicate some of their essential features. [The illustration facing page 258] shows a couple of these, the Natchez and the Eclipse, racing against each other along this great river by the light of the moon at midnight. The first thing that strikes the attention is the enormous height to which the decks of these steamboats are raised. The pilot-house is higher still, and will be recognised as about midway between the water-line and the top of the long, lanky funnels. Even to Mark Twain the height seemed to be terrific. “When I stood in her pilot-house,” says the author of “Life on the Mississippi,” “I was so far above the water that I seemed to be perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little Paul Jones a large craft. When I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel.... The boiler deck—i.e. the second storey of the boat, so to speak—was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deck-hands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers.”

[The accompanying picture], which is taken from a lithograph printed in 1855, shows two of the finest contemporary Mississippi steamboats. The Eclipse was propelled by a high-pressure engine with a single cylinder, the paddle-wheels being 40 feet wide. Her two boilers were placed forward about 3½ feet above the deck, having internal return tubes, such as we discussed at an earlier stage. The waste gases returned through the tubes and escaped through the funnels, which rose 50 feet above the hurricane deck. This ship only drew 5 feet, and measured 360 feet long and 42 feet wide, whilst the hull was 8 feet deep. For fuel, rosin and pitch pine as well as coal were used. Mark Twain has left us some details of the keenness with which these and similar Mississippi steamboats used to race.

“In the olden times,” he wrote, “whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiriting to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public always had the idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case.... No engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the ‘doctor,’ and shut off the water supply from the boilers. In the ‘flush times’ of steam-boating, a race between two notorious fleet steamers was an event of vast importance.... Every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water, was removed.... When the Eclipse and the A. L. Shotwell ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the Eclipse’s chimneys and that for one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things.”

In 1870 the Natchez ran from New Orleans to Natchez, a distance of 268 miles, in seventeen days seventeen hours. The most famous race of all, and one that created national interest, was that in the year 1870, between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez, from New Orleans to St. Louis, a distance of 1,218 miles. The former covered the journey in three days eighteen hours fourteen minutes, the latter in three days twenty-one hours fifty-eight minutes, but the officers of the Natchez claimed seven hours for having had to stop through fog, and repairs to the machinery.

But let us pass further North. The Hudson has, since the time of Fulton, been famous for its steam-craft, and the impetus which necessarily followed after the success of the Clermont, and her successors, has not yet ceased to exist. As representative of the Hudson River type of boats in vogue during the ’sixties, the model of the steamer Empire [facing page 258] is not without interest, since it shows, the half-way transition between the Clermont and the ultra-modern built-up ship as in [the illustration facing page 262]. Like her other sisters, the Empire, it will be seen, has a very light draught, and a characteristic feature of the development of the North American passenger side-wheel steamer is here to be noted in embryo, and as pushed to its furthest limits, in the case of the Commonwealth. I am calling attention to the manner in which the American custom extends the steamship’s sponsons or “guards” (as they are called). In a British paddle-wheel steamer, such as one finds employed on passenger or tug service, the sponsons are quite short. (This can easily be seen by reference to the Dromedary [opposite page 240].) But the American fashion is to allow these not to end suddenly, but gradually fine off at bow and stern so that the deck is carried well out-board. Forward is the pilot house, the passenger accommodation being provided in the centre of the “guard” deck and upper deck. The length of this vessel was 336 feet, whilst the breadth of the hull proper was 28 feet, though including “guards” 61 feet. In many of the Hudson steamers the strange sight is still seen of the use of the old walking-beam which penetrates through the top of the deck. As we have already discussed this elsewhere, it is scarcely necessary here to refer to it further, but [the sectional model illustrated opposite this page] will show quite clearly this principle.

THE “COMMONWEALTH.”

BEAM ENGINE OF AN AMERICAN RIVER STEAMER.

From the Sectional Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum.