The Story of the American Merchant Marine

by John Randolph Spears

While turning, now, to the story of the evolution of British steamships, it will be worth while to recall first what has already been said about the environment that developed the character of the American sailor. From the day when the men of Massachusetts Bay built ships and launched forth in them to catch fish and trade with foreign countries, until such men as Palmer, Samuels, and Waterman made marvellous speed with whatever form of ship they happened to command, the whole environment of the American seafaring population had served to develop excellence in handling ships of the sail.

With this fact in mind, note that steamers made an extraordinary change in the conditions of transportation by ships. These conditions were so far removed from the old that a portrait-painter who had never learned any of the arts of the sea designed the first commercially successful steamer in the United States. The keeper of a bathhouse performed a similar service for the British public. When steam navigation had become an assured success, the splendid skill of the sailor of the sail was no longer needed. The man at the throttle usurped the place of the man on the weather yard-arm, and this is true in spite of the curious and absurd fact that even now the captains of steamships do not reach the bridge by way of the stokehole.

Then recall the fact that while the United States had produced excellent sailors of the sail, there was such a dearth of mechanics in Fulton's day that he was obliged to import the Clermont's engine from England; and Stevens, though he built his own engines, was obliged to train men to work in iron before he could do so. The British had been building efficient engines for twenty years before Fulton bought his. In every application of steam power, the British were that much in advance of the Americans.

As Day points out in his History of Commerce, inventors living in the United States, as well as in other countries, went to England to perfect their inventions, because of the superior facilities afforded in British machine shops; and this was done as late as 1836—even later. Some of the best machinery invented in the United States, in the period under consideration, was first put in use in Great Britain.

The fact that abundant supplies of coal were to be had at low price in Great Britain is not to be overlooked in connection with this argument. With the consequent great progress in factory industries, the time was close at hand when all England was to become "a free port" for all the world, as well as a place for working up the raw materials of all other countries.

Still another important fact is this, that the American capitalists who began to invest in steamships at an early day, found immense stretches of inland waters upon which to develop the carrying trade, while the inland waters of Great Britain were of insignificant extent, and the capitalists there were soon engaged in the coasting trade where the waters were by no means pacific. In 1818 the Rob Roy was put on the route between Glasgow and Belfast, and a little later she was sent to ply between Dover and Calais. In 1822 a line was established between Liverpool and Glasgow, and this was followed in 1826 by a line plying between Edinburgh and London. These last ships were 160 feet long and were provided with engines of 200 horse-power; they were regarded as such marvellous ships that people came from all parts of the kingdom to look at them. And it is to be noted that all the coasters so far mentioned were provided with a form of engine (the side lever) which was efficient for deep-water service.

Following the success of the Glasgow line, other lines were established to various ports of Europe, including one to Bordeaux, the ships of which had to cross the stormy Bay of Biscay and traverse a route 1600 miles long. All of this is to emphasize the fact that while the steamship men of the United States were making records upon the Hudson and other inland waters, those of Great Britain were engaged almost exclusively upon waters with a rending power little, if any, less than that of the Atlantic. The environments of the men engaged in steamboat traffic in the two countries were so different that widely different classes of ships, engines, and engineers were developed. The British had been navigating the Bay of Biscay with success for several years before the Americans put the Home upon the route around Cape Hatteras.

And yet it was an American that first stirred up the British to embark in the transatlantic steamer trade—Dr. Junius Smith, who graduated from Yale in 1802, and then went to London as representative of some American merchants. The success of the British coasters led Smith to believe that transatlantic steamers would prove successful, and in 1832 he came to the United States to look into the matter more fully.

"My friends in New York make no doubt of the practicability nor of the success of such an undertaking," he wrote to a director of the London and Edinburgh Steam Packet Company, "and have assured me that they will build two steam vessels suited to the object in view," provided English capitalists would build two more for use in the same line. Mr. Smith's letter was written to invite the directors of the company to join in the enterprise, and to charter to him one of their steamers for a demonstration trip, to New York. The directors replied with a cold refusal. Smith, however, tried elsewhere, and when his plans were presented in the newspapers, the professional humorists gave much attention to the "Yankee" innovator. In 1836 a noted scientist of the period, Dr. Lardner, in a lecture at Liverpool, declared that any effort to make direct passages from New York to Liverpool would prove "perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making the direct voyage from New York or Liverpool to the moon."

When this lecture was reported in the papers, a number of steamship men showed by arguments drawn from the experience of the coasters that Lardner was wrong, but even with their assistance Smith made two vain efforts to organize a company. But in July, 1836, when the books were again opened, enough shares were taken to enable the company to build a good ship which in time proved successful. But because there were long delays in getting this vessel afloat, Smith's company chartered the steamer Sirius, a packet plying between London and Cork, for a voyage to New York.