No expense having been spared to render the ships of the Collins Company complete in all respects, the cost so far exceeded the estimates that the government found it necessary not only to make an advance to the company, while the vessels were in course of construction, but also to relieve them from their obligation of building a fifth vessel as originally contemplated, and to increase the subsidy from $19,250 to $33,000 per voyage, or to the sum of $858,000 (about 178,750l.) per annum. But increased rates of speed were required in return.
Cost of steamers greatly increased by demand for increased speed.
There seems an almost insane desire for increased speed in locomotion by land and by sea, especially by persons who are not aware, or who do not consider that high speed involves increased danger, and greatly increased cost in ocean navigation. The attainment and maintenance of high speed depend upon the exertion of a high power. High speed and power require stronger parts in everything: in the materials for the ship’s build, the boilers, the machinery, and in all the working arrangements. High speed and power demand a larger outlay in prime cost for the adequate resistance required by such power, and lead to more frequent and costly repairs. High speed and power need more watchfulness, more prompt action, and consequently more persons, whether engineers, firemen, or coal-stokers; moreover, they cause the consumption of more fuel.
These propositions have been evident to all practical men in America, as they must be to those on this side of the Atlantic. In the construction of the hull, greatly increased strength is obviously requisite. The resistance to a vessel, or its concussion against the water at a low rate of speed, will not be sensibly felt, but if that speed be considerably increased, and the concussion made quicker without a corresponding increase in the strength of the frame and hull of the ship generally, the ship will creak, strain, and yield to the pressure until she finally works herself to pieces, at the same time disarranging the engines, whose stability, bracing, and keeping proper place and order depend first and essentially on the stability of the hull. If the resistance to a vessel in passing through the water increases as the square of the velocity, and if, in addition to this outward thrust against the vessel, she has to support the greater engine power within the hull, which has increased as the cube of the velocity, then her strength must be made adequate to resist without injury these two combined forces against which she has to contend.
The same increased strength is also necessary in the engines and boilers. It is evident that if the boilers have to generate and the engines to employ twice the power and exert twice the force, they must also have twice the strength, and there is no working arrangement in any way connected with the propulsion of the ship that does not partake of this increase: every pump, every valve, every bolt is connected, directly or indirectly, with the engine economy of the ship. All this is equally applicable to the ship’s hull, though in a less degree in the case of iron vessels than in those of wood. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the cost of repairs: indeed, the rapid motion of heavy parts of machinery and the necessarily severe concussions and jarrings cannot fail to destroy the costly working parts of the engine, entailing heavy and expensive repairs and substitutions.
But first cost and current expenses do not for the moment appear to have been considered by any person interested in the Collins line. One thought, and one only, prevailed, and that thought was embodied in the resolution to run the Cunarders off the Atlantic, or at least to “neutralize,” as was expressed in the discussions of the period, “an existing foreign monopoly.” The enterprise they proposed “was one of a national character, and the semblance or reality of monopoly on their side was lost,” they alleged, in the stipulation of the contractors themselves to transfer their ships at cost price with their contracts, and all the additional facilities that might be extended to them by Congress “to any person who might be acceptable to the United States’ Government, and capable of carrying out an enterprise of such vital importance to the nation.”
By this plausible but transparent mode of reasoning Congress attempted to disguise the real features of an undertaking which eventually became a great failure. From the spirit, however, which then prevailed, cost was not considered either by the projectors or by the majority of the members of Congress in their determination to surpass in speed and in splendour of equipment, any steamers which Great Britain could send afloat. “We must have speed,” exclaimed Mr. Bayard, “extraordinary speed, a speed with which they (Collins steamers) can overtake any vessel which they pursue, and escape from any vessel they wish to avoid; they must be fit for the purpose of a cruiser with armaments to attack your enemy (if that enemy were Great Britain) in her most vital part, her commerce.”
Happily, the Collins steamers were never required for any such purposes, and, in 1850, just ten years after the Cunard vessels commenced to run, they started against them in their great contest for the commercial maritime supremacy of the Atlantic Ocean, a much more sensible struggle than that which Mr. Bayard so glowingly pictured when he spoke about their “sweeping the seas.”
Further details of competing lines.
Before the Collins line was established, the Cunard steamers were receiving 7l. 10s. sterling per ton, freight, which was so much of a monopoly rate, that in two years after the Collins line had commenced, the rate of freight fell to 4l. sterling per ton. Arguing from this fact the Americans held that the excessive freights charged for transport by the Cunard Company were paid by the United States’ consumer, in most instances, on articles of British manufacture carried to America by British vessels. But now the American consumer paid only 4l. per ton, and this sum for the most part was paid to their own people, thus increasing their national wealth. Their acute political economists discovered “that formerly the American consumer paid very nearly twice as much for the service, and enriched the British capitalists: whereas, subsequently to 1850, he not only saved one-half of the former cost of freight to himself, but in paying the remaining half, benefited his fellow-citizens who, in return, aided in consuming perhaps the very merchandise which he had imported.”[201]