The frigate made a second experimental trip, on the 11th of September, with her armament and stores on board, her draught of water being eleven feet. She changed her course by reversing the motion of her wheels. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, and performed manœuvres around the United States frigate Java. The machinery was not affected in the slightest degree by the detonation of her guns. Her average speed was five and a half miles an hour,—Fulton having contracted to obtain three miles an hour only. The city of New York now felt itself invulnerable; but the cessation of hostilities, which occurred soon after, precluded the necessity of employing her as a means of defence. It is probable that such a contrivance, even in the present advanced state of naval warfare, would be found useful in protecting the mouths of harbors,—not as a frigate, but as a floating battery or movable fortress. The fact that this vessel was built by Fulton makes him the father not only of steam-navigation, but of the steam-navies of the world as well. We shall have occasion to chronicle at intervals, as we progress in our record, the successive steps of improvement in the science, till we arrive at the era of steam floating palaces upon American rivers, of steam pleasure-yachts owned by American merchants, of commercial steam-leviathans, American and English, bearing the names of continents and oceans, and of the peerless steam-frigate to which we have already alluded,—"a noble ship with a noble name, bound, in 1857, upon the noblest of missions."
The history of the first ocean-steamer is very incompletely and unsatisfactorily told in the annals of the time. The following is the substance of all that has been preserved of the first transatlantic steam-voyage on record:
The Savannah, a steamer of three hundred and fifty tons, intended to ply between New York and Liverpool, under the command of Captain Moses Rodgers, was launched at New York on the 22d of August, 1818. She made a preliminary voyage to the city whose name she bore, in April, 1819, where she arrived in seven days, after a very boisterous passage. She was several times compelled to take in her wheels—having machinery for the purpose—and rely upon her sails, which was done with all the promptitude and safety anticipated. This trial trip left no doubt that she would successfully accomplish the object for which she was built. She left Savannah for Liverpool soon after, and the New York newspapers of the second week in June announced that she had been spoken at sea, all well. In the log-book of the Pluto, which arrived soon after at Baltimore from Bremen, occurred the following passage:
THE SAVANNAH: THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER.
"June 2.—Clear weather and smooth sea: lat. 42°, long. 59°, spoke and passed the elegant steamship Savannah, eight days out from Savannah to St. Petersburg by way of Liverpool. She passed us at the rate of nine or ten knots; and the captain informed us she worked remarkably well, and the greatest compliment we could bestow was to give her three cheers, as the happiest effort of mechanical genius that ever appeared on the Western ocean. She returned the compliment."
Niles' New York Register of the 21st of August contains the following paragraph in italics at the head of its column of foreign news:—"The steamship Savannah, Captain Moses Rodgers,—the first that ever crossed the Atlantic,—arrived at Liverpool in twenty-five days from Savannah, all well, to the great astonishment of the people of that place. She worked her engine eighteen days." The next record of her movements is that she sailed in August for St. Petersburg, passing Elsinore on the 13th, and that the British "wisely supposed her visit to be somehow connected with the ambitious views of the United States." She arrived back at Savannah in November, in fifty days from St. Petersburg viâ Copenhagen and Arendal in Norway, all well, and, in the language of Captain Rodgers, "with neither a screw, bolt, or a rope-yarn parted, though she encountered a very heavy gale in the North Sea." She left Savannah for Washington on the 4th of December, losing her boats and anchors off Cape Hatteras.
It is a singular fact, and one not creditable to the English, that many of their works treating of inventions and the progress of the arts and sciences entirely overlook this voyage out and back of the Savannah, and uniformly make the British steamers Sirius and Great Western the pioneers, in 1837, in the great work of ocean steam-navigation. The authors of these works err either through design or ignorance, and in either case display a marked unfitness for their vocation. Were they to consult the London and Liverpool newspapers of the time, they would find ample record of the accomplishment of a steam-voyage nearly twenty years before the period to which they assign it. We have said enough, however, to prove that the first steam-vessel that crossed the ocean was built in New York, and that Moses Rodgers, her captain, was an American citizen. When we arrive at the year in which the two British steamers inaugurated steam commercial intercourse between the hemispheres, we shall record it, with due acknowledgment of its importance; but we repeat the assertion that, as the first river-steamer was the Clermont, the first Atlantic steamer was the Savannah: both one and the other were built in New York.