Having in view the success of the three British lines of steamers to which I have just referred, but at the same time paying no heed to the warning presented by the Collins Company in their endeavours to traverse, with unusual speed, the fickle and stormy Atlantic, a company of English and Irish gentlemen, most of whom had little knowledge and, certainly, no experience of the business they were about to undertake, proposed to the British Government, in January 1859, to carry Her Majesty’s mails from Galway to Portland, Boston or New York, viâ St. John’s, Newfoundland, or otherwise, for the sum of 3000l. per voyage, “such voyage being the passage out and home.” The great attraction, however, of the offer lay in the further condition that “they would undertake to convey telegraphic messages from the United Kingdom to British North America and the United States in six days, casualties excepted,” the Atlantic cable being then only in contemplation: that is, they offered to make the passage between Galway and St. John’s, Newfoundland, at all seasons of the year, in the unprecedented short time of six days. A contract based on this proposal was entered into on the 21st April, 1859, to which a table was annexed[240] of the time in which this company further agreed to deliver letters at New York and at Galway. With the object of carrying out this contract, the “Royal Atlantic Steam Navigation Company concluded, on the 10th June, 1859, an agreement with Messrs. Palmer of Newcastle, for the construction of two ships at a cost of 95,000l. each, and, on the 15th June, they entered into another contract with Messrs. Samuelson of Hull, for the construction of two other ships at a cost of 97,500l. each. These vessels were to be built according to lines, plans, and specifications approved by the Admiralty, and were to be delivered within eleven months from the date of the agreements, the commencement of the postal service according to contract having been fixed for June 1860.”[241]
The dimensions of these ships were 360 feet long, 40 feet beam, and 32 feet depth of hold. They were each 2800 tons measurement, with engines of about 850 nominal horse-power; in model and equipment they were somewhat similar. Indeed, the Connaught and the Hibernia, built by Messrs. Palmer, were “precisely the same;”[242] a clause in their agreement with the company requiring, “that each of the said vessels when completed was, on a fair and proper trial thereof, to accomplish a speed at the rate of 20 statute miles per hour in smooth water, and to consume not more than 8800 pounds of fuel per hour.”[243] But, on the trial of the Connaught, the Government inspector reported that the speed of this “vessel was about thirteen knots; the average revolutions of the engines, 16·6; the average pressure of steam in the boilers being 22½ lbs. on the square inch, and the vacuum in the condensers 24½ inches.”[244]
Loss of the Connaught, 1860.
Difficulties and differences of various kinds having arisen, none of these vessels were delivered within the time agreed upon, and the company was consequently obliged to start the service with a hired vessel—the Parana—which sailed from Galway on the 27th of June, 1860, arriving at St. John’s in seven days thirteen and a half hours, and at New York in eleven days seventeen and three-quarter hours after her departure, or fifteen hours and three-quarters behind the contract time for the delivery of the mail bags at her final destination, and one day thirteen and three-quarter hours beyond the stipulated time for delivering the telegraph messages at St. John’s. The Connaught followed, in her case direct for Boston, on the 11th of July, and was twenty-two and a half hours over time in reaching that place. But serious disasters soon befell these steamers: the Connaught was totally lost on her second voyage in October, of this year when approaching Boston, she having, on this occasion, been one day and twenty and a half hours behind time in reaching St. John’s. One voyage had, consequently, to be omitted altogether. The second ship belonging to the company, the Hibernia, encountering a severe gale on her way from the Tyne to Galway was so thoroughly disabled that she never entered the service at all,[245] while their third new ship, the Columbia, which sailed for the United States on the 9th of April from Galway, returned in May disabled by ice,[246] after making the slowest passage outwards of any of the fleet, having been ten days seven and a half hours in reaching St. John’s, and seventeen days twenty and three-quarter hours before she arrived at Boston.[247]
Rapid passage of the Adriatic, 1861.
The steamship Prince Albert was chartered to take the place of the Connaught, and in February 1861 the Company purchased the Adriatic, one of the most famous ships of the Collins line. The transfer of this ship to the British flag does not seem to have reduced her speed or detracted from her celebrated sea-going qualities, for she made the run from Galway to St. John’s in six days, the specified time, and, having completed the passage to New York in one day fifteen hours and a quarter less than the contract time, returned from St. John’s to Galway in five days nineteen hours and three-quarters, perhaps the quickest passage on record from port to port across the Atlantic.[248]
But, having, within six months, lost one of their vessels, while another was disabled by storm, and a third rendered unfit for the mail service in her encounter with ice off Newfoundland, the Company, finding it impossible to raise fresh capital in the face of such disasters, had no course left but to abandon their undertaking and terminate their contract in May 1861. The return[249] of the earnings and costs to Government of the Galway line of mail steamers shows a heavy loss to the public, but, though I have no means of knowing the amount of the losses of the company itself during its brief career, these must have been far greater; indeed, it was currently reported that the shareholders lost in eighteen months nearly all, if not the whole, of their capital.
Struggles between the “clippers” and the iron screw-ships.
But, however disastrous the results to the American shareholders of the Collins line on the one hand, or to the British shareholders of the Galway line of steamers on the other (both these undertakings being, it should be remembered, largely subsidized), the ardour of private and unsubsidized energy in no way abated. The ocean race for supremacy in the carrying trade of the Atlantic was still maintained; and the struggle continued with quite as much spirit as ever between the American owners of sailing-clippers and the British shareholders of iron screw-steamers. It was a brave fight: but the wooden clippers of America had no chance against the iron screws of Great Britain, although the race was not then so unequal as might appear, arising from the fact that the current expenses of the clippers were far less then than those of the steamers, while their capacity for cargo was far greater. Indeed, for a time, it was questionable whether the clippers did not yield their owners quite as good returns on the capital invested as the steamers. The wooden clipper, however, had reached perfection, (the world having never previously seen a more splendid class of sailing-ships than the “Yankee liners of that day,”) whereas the screw, being still in its infancy, moved onwards with the progress of science, improvements in machinery tending to reduce the current expenses and to increase the capacity of the ship by reducing the consumption of fuel, so that the sailing-ships were obliged to succumb. At last, the screw-steamers slowly but surely obtained an almost complete supremacy, and have now no competitors (except among themselves) in the more valuable portion of the carrying trade across the Atlantic.
National Steam Navigation Company, 1863.