Locke wanted to make the New Era another Sun, but he failed. His second hoax, “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” which purported to tell hitherto unrelated adventures of the Scottish explorer, fell down. The public knew that the New Era was edited by the author of the moon story. When the New Era died, Locke went to the Brooklyn Eagle, just founded, and he succeeded Henry C. Murphy, the proprietor and first editor, when that famous lawyer and writer was running for mayor of Brooklyn. Locke afterward was a custom-house employee. He died on Staten Island in 1871.
Squabbling with his former friend Locke over hotel service was no such sport for Day as tilting at the owner of the Herald. The Sun attacked Bennett in the fall of 1836 for his attitude toward the Hamblin benefit. Thomas Sowerby Hamblin was made bankrupt by the Bowery Theatre fire on September 22, for the great fires of the previous December had ruined practically all the fire-insurance companies of New York, and there was not a policy on the theatre which this English actor-manager, with James H. Hackett, had made the leading playhouse of America. Hamblin did not like Bennett’s articles and the Sun thus noted the result of them:
Alas, poor Bennett! He seems destined to be flogged into immortal fame, and become the common buffet-block of all mankind. Mr. Hamblin paid him a complimentary visit last evening [November 17] in his editorial closet and lathered him all into lumps and blotches, although the living lie was surrounded by his minions and had a brace of loaded pistols lying on his desk when the outraged visitor first laid hands on him.
When the Sun’s advertising business had increased until its income from that source was more than two hundred dollars a day, it bought two new presses of the Napier type from Robert Hoe, at a cost of seven thousand dollars. These enabled Mr. Day to run off thirty-two hundred papers an hour on each press. On the 2nd of January, 1837, the size of the Sun was slightly increased, about an inch being added to the length and width of each of its four pages.
In February, 1837, the price of flour rose from the normal of about $5.50 a barrel to double that amount. The Sun declared that the increase was not natural, but rather the result of a combination—a suspicion which seems to have been shared by a large number of citizens. The bread riots of February 13 and later were the result of an agitation for lower prices.
The Journal of Commerce denounced the Sun as an inciter of the riots, and suggested that the grand jury should direct its attention toward Mr. Day. The Sun not only refused to recede from its stand, but suggested that the foreman of the grand jury, the famous Philip Hone, had himself incited a riot—the riot against the Abolitionists, July 11, 1834—which had a less worthy purpose than the Sun’s stand on the matter of flour prices. The Sun was virtuously indignant, even more than it had been a short time before, when the Transcript charged the Sun’s circulation man, Mr. Young, with biting two of the Transcript’s carriers!
The beginning of regular transatlantic steamship service did not find in the Sun a completely joyous welcome—thanks, perhaps, to the temperament of Lieutenant Hosken, R.N. He was an officer of the Great Western, a side-wheeler of no less than thirteen hundred and forty tons, with paddles twenty-eight feet in diameter. This new ship, built at Bristol, and a marvel of its time, reached New York, April 23, 1838, after a passage of only sixteen days! The Sirius, another new vessel, got in a few hours ahead of the Great Western, after a voyage of eighteen days. The Sun said of this double event:
Of the conduct of the officers in command of the Great Western, we regret that we are compelled by reports to place it in no very favorable contrast with the gentlemanly demeanor of the officers of the Sirius. Every attention has been paid her, citizens have turned out to welcome her arrival, she was saluted by the battery on Ellis’s Island, et cetera, et cetera, and thousands of other demonstrations of courtesy were made, which proved only throwing pearls before swine. A news boat was ordered to keep off or be run down, and the hails of that boat and others were answered through a speaking-trumpet in a manner which would have done toward the savage of Nootka Sound, but is not exactly the style in which to meet the courtesies of members of a community upon which the line of packets depends in a large part for success. One would have thought that all the impudence of Europe was put on board a vessel built of large tonnage expressly for its embarkation. By the time our corporation officers have run the suspender-buttons off their breeches in chase of Lieutenant Hosken, R. N., they will discover that they have been fools for their pains.
Reverse this account entirely, and it will apply to the Sirius—testimony which we are happy to make.
So the Sun was not obsequiously grateful for the arrival of a ship whose speed enabled it to announce on April 24 that Queen Victoria had issued, on the 6th, the proclamation of the details of her coronation at Westminster on June 26, and that O’Connell was taking steps to remove the civil disabilities from the Jews.