[66] “The American Mercantile Marine,” by W. L. Marvin.
The “Adriatic” (Collins Line, 1857).
The Pacific, a sister ship to the Arctic, was the next of the Collins liners to succumb to the perils of the sea. She sailed from Liverpool for New York in January 1856 and never reached her destination, and not a trace of her has been discovered to reveal her fate. The loss of these two splendid steamers within two years seriously crippled the Collins organisation.
Mr. Collins, to replace the Arctic, ordered the fifth steamer which was stipulated for in the contract with the United States Government at the time the line was started. This steamer, the Adriatic, like the other four vessels of the line, was in excess of the American Government’s requirements, and was larger, speedier, and even more luxuriously fitted than any of her four predecessors. She was built by George Steers at New York and launched in April 1855. She was 355 feet in length, 50 feet beam, and 33 feet deep, with a gross tonnage of 4144 tons. Her cost was £240,000. It was hoped that this splendid vessel would retrieve the falling fortunes of the Collins Line, but in the following month a bitter attack was made in Congress upon the policy under which the line had been granted Government aid, and in consequence of this attack the subsidy to the line was reduced. The mail pay to the Collins Line was lessened by the withdrawal of the 473,000 dollars added in 1852; and the original subsidy of 385,000 dollars, or considerably less than half the amount on which Collins had been relying, was now to be paid to the company. This was further reduced to 346,000 dollars, and in 1858 the subsidy was withdrawn altogether. The line ceased operations at once. The Adriatic made one trip to Liverpool and, after lying idle there for some time, passed into the hands of the promoters of the Galway Line.
An equally unfortunate enterprise was the attempt to establish a line between Galway and America.
The project of connecting the west coast of Ireland with Newfoundland by a line of fast steamers has always had its attractions for those who are seeking to cut down the ocean voyage to a minimum, but so far as the passengers are concerned, the prospect of a long land journey from St. John’s or Halifax to New York has always militated against the scheme. There are also the no less serious drawbacks of a trip across the Irish Sea to Dublin or other Irish port, continued by a railway journey to Galway before finally embarking on the ocean voyage. For the conveyance of mails this might be the fastest possible route, but until the Government adopt the exceedingly unlikely course of subsidising a line of mail packets for this purpose, the Galway-Newfoundland route has no prospect of becoming a serious factor in the North Atlantic traffic.
The first proposal to use Galway was made in 1851, when some of the Irish railway authorities and an American named Wagstaff visited the port, and in June of that year sent the steamer Viceroy to New York via Halifax. She was a wooden cross-channel boat and not suited for the work, and nothing more was done in the matter until 1857, when the project was revived by a Manchester man named Lever. Two steamers, the Indian Empire and Propeller, were chartered for the enterprise and sailed for New York via Halifax in the next year. In the autumn of that year, the Newfoundland Government contracted with the promoters of the line to carry the mails monthly from Galway to St. John’s, and a service of six steamers was to be established. The British Government and the company entered into a contract whereby the company was to carry the mails from Galway to Portland (Maine), and to Boston and New York. Four steamers were ordered but were not up to the requirements of the postal authorities in respect to speed, and one or two were not perfectly seaworthy, and the effort to maintain the service with chartered steamers not being satisfactory—only the last of the Collins liners, the Adriatic, which had been purchased, being able to run to stipulated time—the company, after a series of misfortunes which probably constitutes a record, went into liquidation, and the mail contract was cancelled, after resulting in a heavy financial loss to every one who had anything to do with it.
CHAPTER VII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF STEAM AUXILIARY
