Henry Eckford also planned the steamer Robert Fulton, which in 1822 made the first successful steam voyage from New York to New Orleans, and thence to Havana, in which trade she was afterwards engaged regularly. The Robert Fulton then passed into the possession of the Brazilian naval authorities, who turned her into a sailing ship and she became the fastest warsloop in the Brazilian navy.
The Firefly was the first steamer to get round Point Judith, on the Rhode Island shore, and reach Newport from New York. This was May 26, 1817, and the voyage lasted twenty-eight hours. The sailing packets on the route, as usual, resented her incursion, and when the wind was favourable they usually outsailed her. The competition grew so great between the steamer and the sailers that the latter made the typical American sporting proposal not to charge passengers for the voyage between New York and Newport if they did not reach port before the steamer.
Although the size of the American river steamers had been steadily increasing, there had not been a great acceleration in the matter of speed. Even at the time of Fulton’s death few, if any, American river steamers exceeded an average of seven miles an hour for the trip.
Robert Livingston Stevens, son of John Stevens, built about that time (1813) the Philadelphia, which attained an average speed of eight miles. Speed was a question to which he devoted considerable attention, for he realised its importance, and nearly every vessel he turned out was an improvement upon its predecessor. The inventions and improvements which he introduced inaugurated a new era of steamboat construction. Of the fate which overtook some of these early vessels, it may be noted that the Clermont died of premature old age, the Car of Neptune was broken up, the Paragon went to the bottom, and the Hope, the Perseverance, the Firefly, and the Richmond were broken up.
The “Philadelphia.” Built 1826.
According to evidence given before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1817 by Mr. Seth Hunt of Louisiana, there were then ten steam vessels running between New York and Albany, two between New York and Connecticut ports, four or five between New York and New Jersey ports, besides ferryboats on the Hudson and East Rivers. There were also steamers on the Delaware, between Philadelphia and Trenton, Newcastle, and Wilmington; also steamers from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, which crossed the estuary of the Chesapeake. Steamers had been to New London and New Hartford. The Powhatan steamer of New York was three days exposed to a gale in the open sea, after which it arrived at Norfolk, Virginia, and thence steamed up the James River to Richmond. At that time, according to this witness, there were on the Mississippi two steamers, the Etna and Vesuvius, which were each of 450 tons, carried 280 tons of merchandise, 100 passengers, and 700 bales of cotton.
Towards the middle of the last century numbers of steamboats were placed on the coastal and river services from New York. The Fulton ferryboats Union and William Cutting were both built in 1827; and in the following year the De Witt Clinton was built in Albany for the passenger service between New York and Albany; she was 571 tons gross, more than any of her contemporaries. A notable vessel, then the fastest steamboat ever built, was the Lexington, which began to run in 1835 between Providence and New York. As the railway companies were formed about the same time, the competition between the steamboat companies and the railways was lively and fares were reduced with American thoroughness. The Narragansett arrived at Providence in October 1836. She was fitted with a 300-horse-power horizontal engine, which was too heavy for her, for on her trial trip she rolled over with the directors of the company and their guests on board. Fortunately no lives were lost. In 1838, the John W. Richmond appeared as the rival of the Lexington and there were many exciting races between the two, but two years later the Richmond was sold for employment elsewhere. The Lexington was burnt in 1840, and the Richmond met with a similar fate three years later. The Fall River Line was established in 1847 and has maintained the service to the present day.
All these steamers were built of wood, and as they increased in size they developed a marked tendency to “sag,” that is, drop in the middle, or to “hog,” that is, drop at the ends. This tendency was overcome by an ingenious system of stump-masts and strutts, and iron ties, invented by Colonel Stevens. There are various methods of applying these stiffeners, and the peculiar framework of wooden arches and stump-masts which appears on so many American river steamers is due to the necessity of employing one or other of these systems for strengthening purposes. In some of the later vessels (as in the De Witt Clinton) these ties are put into the framework of the superstructure.
In construction, the development of American steamers on inland waters since Fulton’s time has proceeded on entirely different lines from those which marked the progress of river navigation in Great Britain. American river steamers were designed not only to cope with the traffic in narrower and shallower places, but to carry whatever was necessary in deeper waters, and at the same time get through the more difficult places somehow. The great distances to be travelled on the American rivers rendered necessary the provision of vessels carrying large quantities of cargo and extensive accommodation for passengers, whilst the bars occurring at intervals in the beds of the rivers made it compulsory that the vessels should be of light draught. The construction of English river steamers, on the other hand, has been conditioned by the comparative narrowness of the English rivers and the lowness of the many bridges which span them.