ANCHOR LINE S.S. “VICTORIA.”
The Victoria.
In their Victoria may be seen a good specimen of a business ship, perhaps not so swift or so elegantly fitted as some of her competitors from Liverpool, or equal to their own latest ships, the Ethiopia, Bolivia, and Anchora,[270] but a vessel well adapted for the trade on which she is employed. The Victoria is a sister ship to the California, launched from the shipbuilding yard, on the Clyde, of Messrs. Alexander Stephens and Sons, who have constructed a great many vessels for the Anchor Company. She is like all the other steamers now engaged in the Transatlantic trade, built of iron and propelled by the screw.[271] Though of larger capacity, she is said to have cost, complete for sea, somewhere about 100,000l. or 20,000l. less than the American iron screw ship Pennsylvania, to which reference has just been made, which was built about the same time on the Delaware.
Hamburg American Steam Packet Company.
But besides the fleets we have specially named there are other equally fine British steamers, plying between London and New York and Boston direct, and also viâ Southampton and Havre; together with various other lines of first-class steamers engaged in the American trade belonging to France, Hamburg, and Belgium, though most of these are British built: for instance, the Hamburg and American Steam Packet Company have a large fleet of high classed steamers, comprising the Suavia,[272] Pomerania, Thuringia, Hammonia, Westphalia, Silesia, Cimbria, Frisia, and Holsatia, which leave Hamburg every Saturday throughout the year for New York; and another line of eight equally fine steamers, which trade with the West Indies and Mexico every month from Hamburg, calling alternately at Grimsby and Havre.
North German Lloyd’s Company.
There are also the steamers of the North German Lloyd’s, an old established company, trading between Bremen, Baltimore, and New York viâ Southampton and Havre; while, besides those engaged in the trade with the United States, two lines of French steamers, most of which were built in England, now maintain a weekly intercourse between the ports of that country and the West Indies and Brazil.
FOOTNOTES:
[228] The dimensions of the City of Manchester are as follows:—Length on deck, 274 feet with 38 feet breadth of beam. She registers 2125 tons, and is propelled by engines of 400-horse power, driving a three-bladed screw. Her two foremasts are of tubular plate-iron.