This is a very good-humored view of the matter. It is not probable that latter-day travellers would be content to put up with narrow rooms, smoking lamps, low ceilings, and plain edibles, all of which are now entirely changed. The traveller to-day demands more than comfort and safety. Travelling is in the main itself a luxury, and as more and more Americans have found themselves with sufficient means to indulge in it, they have demanded more and more luxurious surroundings and appointments. It is in response to this demand and the growth of the traffic, that within the last few years there has been placed upon the transatlantic lines a fleet of steamships that surpass in every respect anything that the world has seen.
For several years the Cunard line enjoyed what was substantially a monopoly of the steam carrying trade between England and America, although individual vessels made trips back and forth at irregular intervals, and various and unsuccessful attempts were made to establish a regular service. The first enterprise of this kind that originated in the United States was the Ocean Steam Navigation Company. In 1847 this corporation undertook to carry the American mails between New York and Bremen twice a month. The Government paid $200,000 a year for this service, and the vessels touched at Cowes, Isle of Wight, on each trip. Two steamships were built for this line, the Washington and Herman. When the contract with the Government expired both were withdrawn and the project was abandoned. About the same time C. H. Marshall & Co., proprietors of the Black Ball line of packet-ships, built a steamship, the United States, to supplement their transatlantic business, but the venture proved to be unprofitable. Then came the New York & Havre Steam Navigation Company. This line was also subsidized by the Government for carrying the United States mails between New York, Southampton, and Havre, fortnightly, at $150,000 annually. The two steamships built for this purpose were wrecked, and two others were chartered in order to carry out the mail contract, until the Fulton and the Arago, two new steamships built for the line, were ready for service in 1856.
The Steamer’s Barber-Shop.
The most important American rival which foreign corporations have encountered in transatlantic steam navigation was the famous Collins line. Mr. E. K. Collins had grown up in the freight and passenger business between New York and Liverpool, and in 1847 he began to interest New York merchants in a plan to establish a new steamship line. Two years later a company which he had organized launched four vessels—the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Baltic. They were liberally subsidized; the Government paying to the company $858,000 yearly for carrying the mails; conditions imposed being that the vessels should make twenty-six voyages every year, and that the passage from port to port should be better in point of time than that made by the Cunarders. The Collins line met the conditions successfully; its vessels making westward trips that averaged eleven days, ten hours, and twenty-one minutes, as compared with twelve days, nineteen hours, and twenty-six minutes by the British steamships. The vessels of the Collins line cost upward of $700,000 each. This was a great deal of money to put into a steamship in those days, and as the largest of the fleet was considerably smaller than the smallest of the steamships that now ply between New York and European ports, there was naturally a good percentage of cost in the appointments for the comfort of the passengers. Many features that have since come to be regarded as indispensable on board ship were introduced by the Collins vessels. Among them none attracted more comment when the Atlantic arrived at Liverpool, at the end of her first voyage, May 10, 1849, than the barber-shop. English visitors to the vessel, as she lay at anchor in the Mersey, saw for the first time the comfortable chair, with its movable head-rest and foot-rest, in which Americans are accustomed to recline while undergoing shaving. Another novelty was a smoking-room in a house on the after-part of the deck. In the predecessors of the Atlantic smokers had to get on as well as might be in an uninviting covered hatchway known as the “fiddley.” The Collins line vessels had not only a dining-room sixty feet long by twenty feet broad, but had a general saloon sixty-seven feet by twenty feet. These were divided by the steward’s pantry. Rose, satin, and olive woods figured prominently in the decorations; there were rich carpets, marble-topped tables, expensively upholstered chairs and sofas; a profusion of mirrors; all the panels and the saloon windows were ornamented with coats-of-arms and other designs emblematic of American freedom; all of which made, according to an English writer, a “general effect of chasteness and a certain kind of solidity.”
The Collins line obtained its share of a steadily increasing passenger traffic between the Old and New Worlds. It carried freight at from $30 to $40 a ton; it had the advantage of an immense subsidy; but to all intents and purposes the corporation was bankrupt at the end of six years. It cost too much to maintain the high rate of speed required by the Government. Moreover, two vessels were lost; the Arctic, which went down after a collision with a French steamer off Cape Race, in September, 1854, when two hundred and twenty-two of the two hundred and sixty-eight people on board were drowned; and the Pacific, which was never heard from after she left Liverpool on June 23, 1856.
Almost simultaneously with the inauguration of the Collins line another candidate for ocean business appeared, bringing with it two innovations of great importance to all travellers. This was the Liverpool, New York, & Philadelphia Steamship Company, better known, even in its own offices, as the Inman line. It was the original plan of this company to establish a line between Liverpool and Philadelphia, and for several years, beginning in 1850, no calls were made at New York. The Inman Company was successful in securing a contract from the British and Canadian Governments for carrying the mails via Halifax, and was the successor to the Cunard line on that route; the company then settled down, with a comfortable mail contract, to carrying passengers, freight, and mail between Liverpool and New York, calling at Queenstown on every trip.
More Comfortable on Deck.