The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (97 page)

As impressive as the growth in the sheer number of vessels were increases in speed and the length of the sailing season. The busiest route on the Mississippi-Ohio system was between New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky, 1,332 miles. Between 1815 and the 1850s, the
average time for the northbound passage fell from twenty days to under seven, while the southbound passage was halved, to just over five days. Clearing rivers of tree trunks and other obstacles expanded the scope of operations. In the 1830s, Shreve designed a twin-hulled snagboat fitted with steam pulleys, cables, chains, and other devices to remove the “
great raft,” a thicket of trees, mud, and other growth that choked two hundred miles of the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi that rises in the Texas panhandle. The Army Corps of Engineers took six years to clear the raft, and in 1839—two years after the
Republic of Texas won its independence from
Mexico, and six years before its annexation by the United States—the Red River was navigable for twelve hundred miles from the Mississippi to Fort Towson on the Oklahoma-Texas border.

To the north, steam similarly expanded opportunities for Canadians and Americans living around the
Great Lakes, yet the steamship’s utility and the profitability of western settlement were limited by the impossibility of reaching the upper lakes from the sea. Proposals for a canal between Lakes Ontario and Erie dated from the early eighteenth century but, as with steam power,
overcoming the technological, geographical, and political obstacles required people of vision and connections. One such was
Gouverneur Morris, who first imagined a canal—if later claims are credible—while stationed near
Lake Champlain during the
American Revolution. He did not actually set eyes on Lake Erie until 1800, whereupon he wrote a friend,

The federal government abandoned financial support for a westward canal and it fell to New York state to build, between 1817 and 1825, the Erie Canal between the Hudson and Lake Erie, a difference in elevation of 165 meters. As with the coming of the steamboat to the Mississippi, the benefits were immediately evident.
The time needed for the 363-mile trip from
Albany to Buffalo fell from thirty-two days to no more than six for a flatboat freighted with fifty tons of cargo. Shipping costs plummeted by as much as 95 percent—from 120 dollars to 6 dollars for a ton of grain carried from Buffalo to New York City. By seizing the initiative when the federal government balked, the state had earned for itself the first place in the competition for overseas trade, and
New York became the primary port of entry for immigrants to the United States, taking the lead that
Philadelphia had held throughout the eighteenth century. At the same time,
Canada embarked on a parallel set of improvements. The fifteen-kilometer-long Lachine Canal, which bypasses the thirteen-meter drop of the Lachine Rapids on the St. Lawrence above
Montreal, opened in 1825, and four years later, the forty-two-kilometer Welland Canal, parallel to the Niagara River, made it possible for ships to sail between the
St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario south to Lake Erie, a difference in elevation of a hundred meters.

While few
improvements to inland navigation had such immediate and dramatic effects as those in the Mississippi drainage or on the
Great Lakes, similar efforts were by no means confined to the United States. Britain had more than 4,700 miles of canals by 1875, and the
floating population was estimated at between eighty and a hundred thousand people, widely regarded as outcasts, living aboard twenty-five thousand
barges. In the Netherlands, France, and
Germany, the science of hydrology was usually directed at flood control and reclamation, and in some instances navigation was almost
incidental to the main object. Such was the case with
Johann Gottfried Tulla’s ambitious program to straighten the upper Rhine, which, he proposed, should be “
directed into a single bed with gentle curves adapted to nature … or where it is practicable, a straight line.” Work on the Rhine started in the same year as the digging of the Erie Canal, and over the next six decades Tulla’s program of dike building, channel cutting, and removing islands shortened the distance of the Rhine between Basel and Worms from 200 to 160 miles—and pushed the problems of flooding downstream. More than a century and a half later, cities built on the once stable banks of the middle Rhine like Cologne are subject to periodic flooding as a result of the increased velocity of the upper river. Although the Rhine is now a major shipping corridor all the way to
Switzerland and a crucial component of a trans-
European system of rivers and canals that links the North Sea to the Main and Danube Rivers and the Black Sea, navigation was not part of Tulla’s plan and steamers did not reach the upper Rhine until 1831.

Even as ground was being broken on the Erie Canal in 1817, a group of New York investors announced the establishment of the first regular transatlantic sailing ship service: “
It is our intention that these Ships shall leave New York, full or not full on the 5th, and Liverpool on the 1st, of every Month throughout the year—and if it be necessary to employ a Steam Boat to tow them out of the River we wish it to be done.” The
Black Ball Line’s offer of regularly scheduled sailings was a bold initiative and because of a shipping glut that depressed prices on the North Atlantic, a hangover from the end of the
Napoleonic Wars and the
War of 1812, it was not until 1821 that a competitor service was established. A more intractable problem faced by the
sailing packets was the great difference in sailing times between passages to and from Europe, which in the Black Ball Line’s first year
averaged about twenty-five days eastbound and forty-three days westbound. Steam power held the promise of equalizing the time at sea, but although a handful of ships crossed the Atlantic more or less under steam starting in 1819, it was not until the 1830s that the idea of building a steamship specifically for the purpose became practical. American entrepreneurs were especially eager to take the plunge, but credit for the first purpose-built transatlantic steamer ultimately fell to British engineer
Isambard Kingdom Brunel. When his company, the
Great Western Railway, built a train line from London to
Bristol, he is said to have suggested that the company extend the service to New York via a “steamboat.” Considerably larger than any vessel of its day, Brunel’s seventy-two-meter-long
wooden-hulled
Great Western
was trussed with diagonals of wood and iron, the latter a relatively new material in shipbuilding. This internal strength helped accommodate the ship’s hundred-ton boilers and engine, which were supplemented by a four-masted rig. For her 150 passengers the
Great Western
also boasted a vast passenger saloon measuring twenty-three by thirty-four meters.

In the meantime, firms in Liverpool, Britain’s second largest port and Bristol’s main rival, had entered the race to be first to offer transatlantic steamship service. Realizing that they could not build a new ship before the
Great Western
sailed, the British & American Steam Navigation Company chartered and modified the
Irish Sea steamer
Sirius
for the passage. Departing
Cork, Ireland, on April 4, 1838, the
Sirius
entered New York Harbor on April 22 to garner the exultant headline from the
New York Herald:

The
Great Western
reached New York the next day, her departure having been delayed by a fire that ignited the deck beams around the funnel. Damage was minimal, and after repairs she sailed from Bristol on April 8 to cross the Atlantic at an average speed of 8.8 knots, 2 knots faster than the
Sirius
. More important for establishing the feasibility of transatlantic steamer service, she had used barely half of her eight hundred tons of coal.

The race between the
Sirius
and
Great Western
took place one year after the British government had decided to overhaul its cumbersome and expensive postal service, an effort that dovetailed neatly with the
Admiralty’s need to ensure access to oceangoing steam shipping in wartime and steamship companies’ need for outside investment. This confluence of interests led to the disbursement of
government subsidies for carrying the mails. In 1837, the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) received the Admiralty’s first contract for subsidized mail service from
Falmouth to Spain, Portugal, and
Gibraltar. Three years later P&O extended this route to
Alexandria, where passengers took the “overland route” to
Port Suez to join another ship for the passage onward to
Calcutta, by way of Galle, Sri Lanka. Four years after that, P&O service was extended to Singapore and China, and in 1852, via a feeder line from Singapore, to Australia.

Acknowledging the success of the
Sirius
and
Great Western,
in 1838 the Admiralty let a subsidy for transatlantic service to
Samuel Cunard of Halifax,
Nova Scotia. His rivals protested the award, but Cunard’s prudence made him an outstanding choice. Not all were favorably disposed to his ships’ meager
comforts, however. In January 1842,
Charles Dickens and his wife took the line’s flagship,
Britannia,
on the author’s first visit to the United States. Singularly unimpressed, in a blizzard of letters before sailing Dickens panned his accommodations with gusto. “
Our cabin is something immensely smaller than you can possibly picture to yourself,” he wrote his brother. “Neither of the portmanteaus could by any mechanical contrivance be got into it. When the door is open, you can’t turn around. When it’s shut, you can’t put on a clean shirt, or take off a dirty one. When its [
sic
] day, it’s dark. When it’s night, it’s cold.” Dickens grudgingly acknowledged that the adjacent lady’s cabin was “really a comfortable room … well-lighted, sofa’d, mirrored and so forth.” But if Cunard harbored spartan tendencies, no one could fault the line for the care of its managers and masters, who gave it an exemplary safety record. In its first three decades Cunard lost only two ships, and no one died in either accident.

The same could not be said of other companies, the most infamous being the
New York and Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company, known as the
Collins Line, founded specifically to compete with Cunard. Throughout the 1840s, the United States Congress debated the wisdom of relying on subsidized British ships to carry the mail between the United States and Europe. For more than one senator, the only reasonable response was an American subsidy for American ships: “
I suggest cost not be considered.… I suggest, too, that Congress grant a carefully selected American shipping expert a completely free hand to proceed with the absolute conquest of this man Cunard.” An obvious choice was
Edward Knight Collins. Having cut his teeth in the packet trade between New York,
Mexico, and
New Orleans, Collins entered transatlantic service with the
sailing packet
Shakespeare
in 1837. His
Dramatic Line of square-riggers was a great success, and in 1846 he submitted a bid for a
congressional subsidy of $385,000 to run steamers on twenty round-trips per year between New York and Liverpool. As in England, the enabling legislation provided that the ships could serve as naval auxiliaries, and the ships were to be “
under the inspection of a naval constructor in the employ of the Navy Department … and so constructed as to render them convertible at the least possible cost, into war steamers of the first class.” With funds in hand, Collins ordered four wooden, bark-rigged, side-wheel steamships. Measuring just over eighty-five meters in length, the
Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific,
and
Baltic
were pacesetters on the North Atlantic, nearly 50 percent faster than the
Britannia
’s 8.5 knots. However, their enormous fuel and maintenance costs forced Collins to request a new subsidy of $858,000, which a profligate Congress duly approved.

Their potential as auxiliaries notwithstanding, the Collins Line ships were
renowned for their sumptuous appointments, which the navy’s overseer,
Matthew Calbraith Perry, decried as “
extravagantly showy.” Writing in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
John Abbott reported that the
Arctic
’s main cabin had “
an air of almost Oriental magnificence.… When this saloon is brilliantly lighted in the evening it is gorgeous in the extreme.” The “large, airy” dining room “with windows opening upon the ocean as pleasantly as those of any parlor” seated two hundred and the “state-rooms are really
rooms,
provided with every comfort which can be desired.… Some of these rooms have large double beds with French bedsteads and rich curtains.” This may have been journalistic puffery, for a passenger on the
Arctic
’s running mate,
Atlantic,
enjoined prospective travelers “
to take a whole state-room
to one’s self
…rather than have a fellow-citizen so near you as to breathe half your air, and make you breathe all his.” Regardless, to many both in and out of Congress, the ships were a manifestation of America’s “national glory,” and thirty thousand people turned out to watch the
Arctic
’s launch in 1850. As Abbott proclaimed, “The United States have never yet done any thing which has contributed so much to their honor in Europe, as the construction of this Collins line of steamers. We have made a step in advance of the whole world. Nothing ever before floated equal to these ships.… No one thinks of questioning their superiority.”