Having settled in America, the immigrants relied upon ships from England for a great variety of merchandise, everything which they could not grow or make themselves and some of them also kept a more personal contact with the homeland, crossing for business or pleasure, or sending their sons across to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. By the eighteenth century, the 'news of Virginia' was a familiar topic in the London coffee houses, and throughout the nineteenth century, a strong Atlantic culture was in flower. Americans followed the Washington Irving trail to Stratford-upon-Avon, and Dickens went to America at Irving's invitation; Ralph Waldo Emerson called on Wordsworth in the Lake District; Fanny Kemble, the actress, was impressed by Niagara, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, regretted that she could never again visit Sir Walter Scott's country for the first time. Yet even the best passages were grimly uncomfortable, at least by the standards of today. Until the 1830s the crowded ships were propelled by the same capricious power that had taken Sir Richard Grenville's colonists to Roanoke in 1585 and the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to the James River in 1607. Voyages were long and uncertain; a vessel might be weeks beating her way down Channel from the Thames or waiting for a favourable wind.
The Black Ball Line, founded at New York in 1816, brought the first big improvement by shortening the period of discomfort. It boasted an average passage of 40 days from Liverpool to New York and 23 days back to Liverpool.
Running in competition with the packets of the Swallow Tail Line, the Black Star, the Red Star, the Black X, the White Diamond and the Dramatic, the Black Ball vessels sailed on time whether they were packed or empty; one of them left New York for Liverpool on the first and sixteenth of every month.
When the ship berthed, none of the new arrivals was happier than those travelling steerage. While first-class passengers drank whisky and played cards like travellers in Mississippi and Ohio steamboats, poor emigrants huddled in semi-darkness, enduring frightful discomforts and miseries, and sometimes agonies too. Most of the passengers had no intention of returning, except perhaps on a visit when they had found their crock of gold. According to the official figures, over 2,300,000 immigrants crossed to America from the British Isles in the ten years from 1846 το 1855.
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| Statue of Samuel Cunard Flickr user: Snapshooter46 |
By an agreement made on 11 February 1839, he undertook to provide three steamships and to incorporate, during the continuance of the contract, 'any improvements in Steam Navigation' which the heads of the Admiralty might consider essential. He then called on James C. Melvill, Secretary of the East India Company for advice as to who could build the three ships. Without hesitation, Melvill recommended Robert Napier, a brilliant marine engineer who designed and built the machinery for hulls constructed by his partner, John Wood.
In March 1839, Samuel Cunard and Robert Napier met for the first time. Out of that meeting grew the great and famous Cunard Steamship Company. The problem of finance was solved when Napier called in George Burns, owner of coastal steamships, and David McIver, his Liverpool agent. Within a few days, 32 businessmen had subscribed £270,000, more than enough capital to build the three ships required by the Admiralty and another vessel as well, the head postmaster at Quebec having suggested that with four ships the service could have fixed departure days on both sides of the Atlantic. The line was first known as 'The British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company'.
Writing to Melvill about Cunard on 18 March, Napier had said: 'From the frank off-hand manner in which he contracted with me, I have given him the vessels cheap, and I am certain they will be good and very strong ships.' The four were the Britannia of 1840 and her sister ships, the Acadia, Caledonia and the Columbia.
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| Steamship Britannia of 1840 depicted on her maiden Liverpool departure. By Charles E. Turner - Cunard Line, Public Domain |
At Liverpool, the Britannia had to be swung out into midstream 'owing to her immense size'. She was 228ft long overall and 34.3ft in beam (56ft over the paddle boxes) with a mean draught of 16.8ft and a gross tonnage of 1,156. Two side-lever engines of 740 indicated horsepower turned her 28ft paddle wheels at sixteen revolutions a minute and gave her a normal speed of about 8.5 knots. Leaving Liverpool on 4 July 1840, she crossed to Halifax in eleven days, four hours at a mean speed of ten knots and completed her run to Boston in fourteen days, eight hours.
Her accommodation the dining saloon and cabins for 115 on the main deck below described as luxurious.
When the Britannia was gripped by ice seven feet thick at Boston on 1 February 1844, residents cut a passage seven miles long and 100 feet wide to free her. She left on 3 February, only two days late, followed by cheering citizens in sleighs and 'sailing boats fitted up with long blades of iron like skates'. Bostonians were proud of the Britannia, and they did not want her to call at New York instead on the grounds that the sea there was less likely to freeze.
The Cunard company did not lack competitors. At the outset the Great Western Steamship Company at Bristol had expected to receive the mail contract as the owners of the only fully effective Atlantic steamship, Brunel's Great Western. When the Admiralty accepted Samuel Cunard's tender, Brunel began work on the Great Britain. But she took six years to build, and by the time she went into service the Cunard Line was firmly established. She did not remain long on the Atlantic, as we shall see.
Samuel Cunard met his first serious challenge when Edward Knight Collins from Cape Cod after running the Dramatic Line of sailing - packets, turned to steamships. He was not one = to do things by halves. His first packet had been the Shakespeare, the largest merchant ship that had ever flown the American flag; and his - Atlantic of 1849 was a beautiful wooden steam-ship of 2,860 tons which set new standards in e comfort and speed. Contracting with the United States Government to operate a subsidized mail service between New York and Liverpool every two weeks for eight months of the year and e monthly in the winter, he devoted himself to 'the absolute conquest of this man Cunard' by offering the Atlantic travellers a fast voyage in a ship which boasted such luxuries as steam heat, - bathrooms (Cunard passengers were hosed down e on request), ice, a barber's shop, a proper smoking room, and two main saloons panelled in expensive woods and furnished with sofas and upholstered chairs resting on deep carpet. The menu in the dining room, a space 60 feet long and 20 wide, suggested a first-class hotel on shore.
So attractive were the Collins liners that in 1851 they carried three passengers for every two travelling with Cunard. The Atlantic, Pacific, Baltic and Arctic won the distinction later known as the Blue Riband; but the speed of the Collins vessels was dearly bought. It has been said that they shook themselves to pieces: at New York mechanics worked day and night on repairs.
Off Cape Race on 27 September 1854 the Arctic went down with the loss of 322 lives after a collision in dense fog with the small French steamer Vesta, the crew of which took to the boats, not knowing that it was the other ship which had received by far the worst damage. Among the casualties were the wife, son and daughter of Edward Collins. As though this were not misfortune enough, his Pacific vanished without trace in 1856. In the following year he acquired the 3,670-ton Adriatic, remembered as the last and biggest wooden paddle steamer to be built for the North Atlantic. She cost over a million dollars, a vast sum at any time in the nineteenth century, but she was too late to save the Collins Line from bankruptcy despite a subsidy from Congress.
The next important arrival on the Atlantic scene, William Inman of Liverpool, also lost two ships. In March 1854 his 1,600-ton City of Glasgow, an iron-hulled screw steamer built by Tod and McGregor, sailed from Liverpool with 480 on board and was never heard of again, and in the summer his new 2,200-ton City of Philadelphia was wrecked, without loss of life, off Cape Race. Nevertheless his company prospered. In the last 27 years of his life his ships carried more than a million emigrants to the United States. All the vessels had names beginning with 'City of'. In 1867 the 2,650-ton City of Paris made the passage from Queenstown to New York in eight days four hours, a record not broken for another five years. The 8,400-ton City of Rome set a fashion as the first three-funnelled liner in the trade, but the company was dissatisfied and her builders sold her to the Anchor Line, which at one stage ran a twice-weekly service between Glasgow and New York. Eventually the Inman Line itself passed into other hands - the American International Navigation Company.
Competition was increasing. In 1870 the line founded by Stephen Barker Guion, formerly head of Cunard's new steerage department, had seven Atlantic passenger vessels. On a voyage in 1879, its 5,150-ton Arizona put into St John's, Newfoundland, after striking an iceberg - excellent proof, the Victorians said, that Guion ships could be trusted. The Guion Oregon, which crossed from Queenstown to New York in six days and ten hours, was the fastest vessel afloat. When the company failed, Cunard took her over and benefited accordingly.
Cunard competitors came and went, but the Oceanic Steamship Company, the White Line, founded by Thomas Henry Ismay from Maryport in Cumberland, opened a battle of giants which did not end until the British Government compelled them to unite in 1934.
White Star suffered two frightful tragedies. In April 1873, after a week of appalling weather, the Atlantic changed course for Halifax on her way to New York, the engineer having incorrectly reported that she was running out of coal. Off Meagher's Head, near the Canadian port, she struck some notorious rocks and was wrecked -, with the loss of 562 lives. The disaster was the - grimmest ever recorded in the Atlantic trade until that other April 39 years later when White Star's 'unsinkable' Titanic ran into an iceberg and 1,494 people died.
However much the Cunard vessels might be outclassed at various periods in speed and comfort, they possessed one superlative virtue. They were as safe as skill and care could make them. The Cunard people', testified Mark
[to be continued]
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