In consequence of our news-boat arrangements we receive our papers more than an hour earlier than any other paper in this city. On the arrival of the Liverpool [July 1, 1839], we proceeded to issue an extra, which will reach Albany with the news twelve hours before it will be published in the regular editions of their evening papers, and twenty-four hours ahead of the morning papers.
The Sun had woodcuts made of all the leading ships, and these, with their curly waves, lit up a page wonderfully, if not beautifully. When the British Queen arrived on July 28, 1839, there was a half-page picture of her. She was the finest ship that had ever been built in Great Britain, with her total length of two hundred and seventy-five feet—less than one-third as much as some of the modern giants—and her paddle-wheels with a diameter of thirty-one feet. Small wonder that the Sun favoured New York with a Sunday paper in honour of the event, and that the Monday sale, with the same feature, was forty-nine thousand. Quoth the Sun:
Who will wonder, after this, that the lazy, lumbering lazaroni of Wall Street stick up their noses at us?
In January, 1840, when the packet-ships United States and England arrived together, the Sun gave the story a front-page display, and actually used full-faced type for the subheads of the article.
A tragedy is recalled in one paragraph of the Sun’s account of the arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841:
Up to the closing of the mail from Liverpool to London on the 7th, the steamer President had not arrived.
The President never arrived, and her fate is one of the secrets of the sea. She sailed from New York on March 11, 1841, with thirty-one passengers, including Tyrone Power, the Irish actor, who had just concluded his second American tour. It is conjectured that the President sank during the great gale that sprang up her second night out.
In getting news from various parts of the United States, the Sun took a leaf from the book of Colonel Webb and other journalists who had used the horse express. In January, 1841, on the occasion of Governor William H. Seward’s message to the Legislature, the Sun beat the town. The Legislature received the message at 11 A.M. on January 5:
An express arriving exclusively for the Sun then started, it being one o’clock, and at six this morning reached our office, thus enabling us to repeat the triumph achieved by us last year over the whole combined press of New York, large and small. It is but just to say that our express was brought on by the horses of the Red Bird Line with unparalleled expedition, in spite of wind, hail, and rain.
Nowadays a Governor’s message is in the newspaper-offices days before it is sent to the Legislature, and there, treated in the confidence that is never betrayed by a decent newspaper, it is prepared for printing, so that it may be on the street five minutes after it is delivered, if its importance warrants. In the old days the message, borne by relays of horse vehicles down the snow-covered post-road from Albany to New York, was more important to the newspapers than the messages of this period appear to be. With newspapers, as with humans, that which is easy to get loses value.