Ill luck pursued her new owners, who, on her return to Quebec, decided to send her to England for sale. She left Quebec on August 5, 1833, coaled at Pictou, which lies on the Gulf side of Nova Scotia, and took her departure from there on the 18th, for her epoch-making voyage, with the following most prosaic clearance: 'Royal William, 363 tons. 36 men. John M'Dougall, master. Bound to London. British. Cargo: 254 chaldrons of coals [nearly 300 tons], a box of stuffed birds, and six spars, produce of this province. One box and one trunk, household furniture and a harp, all British, and seven passengers.' The fare was fixed at £20, 'not including wines.'
The voyage soon became eventful. Nearly three hundred tons of coal was a heavy concentrated cargo for the tremendous storm she encountered on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. She strained; her starboard engine was disabled; she began to leak; and the engineer came up to tell M'Dougall she was sinking. But M'Dougall held his course, started the pumps, and kept her under way for a week with only the port engine going. The whole passage from Pictou, counting the time she was detained at Cowes repairing boilers, took twenty-five days. M'Dougall, a sturdy Scotsman, native of Oban, must have been sorely tempted to 'put the kettle off the boil' and run her under sail. But either the port or starboard engine, or both, worked her the whole way over, and thus for ever established her claim to priority in transatlantic navigation under steam alone.
In London she was sold for £10,000, just twice what she had fetched at sheriff's sale in Quebec some months before. She was at once chartered, crew and all, by the Portuguese government, who declined to buy her for conversion into a man-of-war. In 1834, however, she did become a man-of-war, this time under the Spanish flag, though flying the broad Pennant of Commodore Henry, who was then commanding the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron against the Carlists in the north of Spain. Two years later, on May 5, 1836, under her Spanish name of Isabella Segunda, she made another record. When the British Legion, under Sir de Lacy Evans, was attacking the Carlists in the bay of St Sebastian, she stood in towards the Carlist flank and thereupon fired the first shot that any steam man-of-war had ever fired in action.
Strangely enough, she cannot be said to have come to any definite end as an individual ship. She continued in the Spanish service till 1840, when she was sent to Bordeaux for repairs. The Spaniards, who are notorious slovens at keeping things shipshape, had allowed her to run down to bare rot after her Britisher-Canadian crew had left her. So the French bought her for a hulk and left her where she was. But the Spaniards took her engines out and put them into a new Isabella Segunda, which was wrecked in a storm on the Algerian coast in 1860.
Her career of record-making is well worth a general summary: the Royal William was the first steamer built to foster inter-colonial trade in Canada; the first Canadian steamer specially designed for work at sea; the first sea-going steamer to enter a port in the United States under the British flag; the first steam transport in Portugal; the first steam man-of-war in Spain; the first naval steamer that ever fired a shot in action; and the first vessel in the world that ever crossed an ocean under steam alone.
The next step in the history of Canadian steamers is not concerned with a ship but with a man. Sir Hugh Allan, who, though the greatest, was not the first of the pioneers. The Cunard brothers preceded the Allan brothers in establishing a transatlantic line. Samuel Cunard had been one of the shareholders in the Royal William. He had wonderful powers of organization. He knew the shipping trade as very few have ever known it; and his name has long since become historical in this connection. The first 'Cunarder' to arrive in Canada was the Britannia, 1154 tons, built on the Clyde, and engined there by Napier. From that time on till Confederation, that is, from 1840 to 1867, Cunarders ran from Liverpool to Halifax. But Halifax was always treated as a port of call. The American ports were the real destination. And after 1867 the Cunarders became practically an Anglo-American, not an Anglo-Canadian, line. During their connection with Canada, partially renewed in the present century, the Cunards never did anything really original. They were not among the first to make the change from wood to iron or from paddle-wheels to screws. But they did business honestly and well and always took care of their passengers' safety.
The Cunards were Canadians. Sir Hugh Allan was a Scotsman. But he and the line he founded are unchallengeably first in their services to Canada. Hugh Allan was born in 1810, the son of a Scottish master mariner who about that time was mate of a transport carrying supplies to the British Army in the Peninsular War. He arrived in Canada when he was only fifteen, entered the employ of a Montreal shipping firm when he came of age, and at forty-eight obtained complete control of it with his brother Andrew. From that day to this the Allan family have been the acknowledged leaders of Canadian transatlantic shipping.
Hugh Allan was a man of boundless energy, iron will, and consummate business ability. The political troubles of the Pacific Scandal in 1873 prevented him from anticipating the present Canadian Pacific Railway in making a single united service of trains and steamers to connect England with China and both with Canada. But what he did succeed in carrying through, against long odds, was quite enough for one distinguished business lifetime. He began by running a line of sailing craft between Montreal and the mother country in conjunction with his father's firm in Glasgow. Then, in 1853, he and his brother headed a company which ordered two iron screw steamers to be built in Scotland for the St Lawrence. The first of these, the Canadian, came out to Quebec on her maiden voyage in 1854; but both she and her sister ship were soon diverted to the Crimea, where high rates were being paid for transports during the war.
In 1858 the Allans contracted with the government for a weekly mail service and bought out all their partners, as they alone considered that the time had come for such a venture. The subsidy was doubled the next year to prevent the collapse of the service after a widespread financial panic. But heavy forfeits were imposed for lateness in delivering mails, an adverse factor in the greatest fight against misfortune ever known to Canadian shipping history. Within eight years the Allans lost as many vessels. In every case there was disastrous loss of property; in some, a total loss of everything—vessel, cargo, crew, and passengers.