“At length the day arrived when the experiment was to be put into operation. To me it was a most trying and interesting occasion. I invited many friends to go on board, to witness the first successful trip. Many of them did me the favour to attend as a matter of personal respect; but it was manifest that they did it with reluctance, fearing to be the partners of my mortification, and not of my triumph.
“The moment arrived in which the word was to be given for the vessel to move. My friends were in groups on the deck. There was anxiety, mixed with fear, among them. They were silent, and sad, and weary. I read in their looks nothing but disaster; and almost repented of my efforts. The signal was given; and the boat moved on a short distance, and then stopped—and became immoveable.”
When my opponents can prove, that because Fulton’s first steam-vessel would, on its first trial, move only the “short distance” stated in the above quotation, it was, therefore, impossible to move any other vessel farther by means of steam, I may heed the clamour they raise about my proposition not being practicable through a long line of tunnel.
Until then, I can consider it only as a proof of their knowledge being on a par with the wisdom of that most learned opponent of Galileo’s theory that day and night are occasioned by the revolution of our planet on its axis, who, in answer to the query, “How then is it that the sun gets back to, and always rises in the east of a morning?” replied, that he went back by night, when nobody could see him.
In concluding, I will endeavour to guard against a circumstance that may otherwise be injurious to me, by an observation. You will perceive that the evidences which I have quoted have been in existence six or seven years. How then, it may be inquired, is it, that a method which is spoken of so highly as those evidences speak of this mode of conveyance, should have remained seven years without having been put into actual practice, or brought any nearer to that consummation than it was when those documents were written?
During the many years which elapsed between the period of Columbus’s first proposing to Ferdinand and Isabella the discovery of America, and their actually setting him afloat to do it, he sent his brother Bartholomew to England, to lay the proposition before our Seventh Henry, who, he expected, would entertain it. Henry did entertain it; and would have possessed England of the southern more firmly than she afterwards became possessed of the northern half of America, but for the misfortune which prevented Bartholomew Columbus from approaching him, till Isabella had agreed with, and dispatched Columbus himself.
“In his voyage to England,” says the historian of America, “Bartholomew Columbus had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of pirates; who, having stripped him of every thing, detained him a prisoner for several years:” reducing him to such poverty, that when released from captivity, he could in no other way obtain the means of procuring a dress fit for his appearance before the king, than by employing himself in drawing maps.
Circumstances which, morally speaking, are exactly similar to this captivity and imprisonment of Bartholomew Columbus—excepting that they failed in compelling me to sign away the patent rights, to wrest which from me they were instituted—have equally hindered and reduced me: occasioning the destruction of the tunnel which I constructed to demonstrate, practically, the truth of the proposition; and depriving me of all means of proving it, except by carrying small things on an experimental scale, instead of persons on a practical one.
As relates to myself, I have no desire to obtrude the details of the oppression and injustice practised upon me, on any one.
But with respect to the subject I advocate, I am most anxious that the whole world should know that I court the fullest inquiry, and am ready to answer every question.