The Story of the American Merchant Marine

by John Randolph Spears

Leaving New York on March 28, 1819, under Captain Rogers, this ship (she was named Savannah) ran to her home port in eight days and fifteen hours, during which she used steam for forty-one and a half hours. On May 24 she sailed for Liverpool, and made the passage in twenty-seven days, during which she used steam for eighty hours. While off the coast of Ireland the crew of a revenue cutter that saw her supposed she was on fire, and made haste to go to her assistance. In a trip from Liverpool to St. Petersburg, Russia, occupying, with stops at ports on the way, thirty-three days, she was under steam ten days. She finally arrived back at Savannah on November 30, and then went to New York, where her machinery was removed and sold.

The Savannah was what would now be called an auxiliary steamer; steam was used when the wind did not serve. She failed to inaugurate steam traffic across the Atlantic chiefly because of the space occupied by fuel—wood.

Although Captain R. B. Forbes, one of the ablest seamen the nation ever produced, built an auxiliary steamer (the Massachusetts) in 1845, that made profitable voyages, and there were features of the system that make it seem very attractive for certain trades, few vessels of the class have ever been used.

The year 1819 is also memorable because of an effort to establish a line of steamers running from New York to New Orleans, with stops at Charleston, South Carolina, and Havana, Cuba, on the way. The line was maintained for five years, and then withdrawn because it could not be made to pay.

In 1819, too, a ship was put on the route between Mobile and New Orleans, but this was also a failure.

In 1822 the steamer New York began to ply between New York and Norfolk, but she was unable to compete with the sailing packets. The steamer Patent, that began making regular voyages between Boston and Maine ports in 1823, also failed to pay dividends.

Not to add details of this kind, it may be said that while fortunes were made in steamboats plying on inland waters of the United States, almost every venture made with American steamers upon the ocean during the thirty years following the Clermont's first trip on the Hudson proved unprofitable. In connection with this dismal record the story of the steamer Home, built for the trade between New York and Charleston, South Carolina, is instructive. Keeping in mind the fact that this steamer was designed to round Cape Hatteras, where the worst storms on the coast were known to rage, consider these facts: the Home was 212 feet long by 22 wide and 12 deep. She was nearly 18 times as long as she was deep, and she was built of wood, at that. The engine, which was placed near the centre, as usual, had a cylinder 56 inches in diameter, with a stroke of 9 feet, and that is to say it was enormously heavy for a hull of such proportions. A set of iron braces was provided on each side to strengthen the hull, but on the first trip they "broke loose from their sockets on deck at their forward ends, by the elastic movement of the vessel in a heavy sea," as W. C. Redfield, a New York engineer, said in describing the vessel.

Two voyages were made with no greater visible injury than the breaking, on each voyage, of the worthless braces. On November 9, 1837, as the Home was bound on her third voyage, she was overtaken by a northeast gale, and shortly after passing the Hatteras shoals, it was found that the "elastic movement" of the hull, which, according to Engineer Redfield, was "necessarily and properly manifested," had opened an uncontrollable leak. The Home was then driven on the beach, where she at once went to pieces. About a hundred lives were lost.

It is important to note here that Engineer Redfield, in writing his defence of the Home (1842), was entirely sincere. Further than that, the owners of the vessel were so confident that she was of a proper model in all respects that the only insurance they carried upon her was for a small sum to secure a creditor.

From this story, and others of the kind to be found in the records, it appears that, while American designers were then building sailing ships and inland-water steamers that were highly profitable, they were astonishingly ignorant of the requirements of a steamship for deep-sea navigation.