The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships

Provincial rhetorics aside, the real-world proof of the matter lay in the ships themselves. The British Queen did replace her rival as the biggest, highest-powered steamship in the world: 275 feet long, 1863 tons, and an engine jacked up beyond its contracted size to 500 horsepower. Robert Napier sent the ship down to the Thames for final fittings before her maiden voyage; his cousin David Napier, who had moved to London, gave her a suspicious inspection. ‘They unfortunately let one of the boilers get dry while coming round, either carelessly or willingly,’ David informed Robert, hinting at possible Thamesian sabotage, ‘which has given the Cockneys another handle against Scotch engineers.’ The British Queen at last left for New York on 12 July 1839 (fifteen months after the Great Western’s maiden). Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird went along as her most interested passengers. Also aboard, and quite interested himself, was Samuel Cunard of Halifax, returning home from business in England, and by this time quite intent on developing his own steamers across the Atlantic.

Laird’s unpublished diary of the voyage, recently discovered and donated to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, is a doleful litany of worries and discomforts. As the ship’s main designer, he felt the burden of responsibility for her performance. At midsummer the weather should have been as favourable as the westward run ever allowed. Instead the British Queen fought unusually strong opposing winds and currents, and Laird – famous for an earlier African river expedition, but normally an armchair sailor – spent most of the trip miserably seasick. For days he could eat nothing but brown biscuit; he envied the nine or ten women who lay supine in the ladies’ cabin, quaffing six expensive bottles of champagne a day to relieve their queasiness. Hopefully overestimating the ship’s speed, a proud father ever blind to his offspring’s limitations, Laird kept losing bets on the daily run. ‘Summer passage indeed!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s hard, very hard upon me – there she goes, pitch and toss! Talk of her being large! She is a plaything on the ocean.’

Seven days out, they were still not halfway across. ‘I’ll get nervous if we don’t go faster homewards, the only comfort I have is that the ship answers [her rudder] beautifully and is as easy as any slipper, all on board are loud in her praise.’ Even the large complement of paying passengers did not please him. Laird rather disapproved of the ship’s diverse company, which included Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Russians and Poles, about 120 people in all, eating and jabbering loudly in strange tongues at dinner. Miserable, lonesome, and ever worried about his ship, Laird longed for home and dry land. ‘It being my duty I came, but certainly if I could get my living in any other way, than being connected with these passenger steamers, I would most thankfully do it. I am never well, thoroughly well on board ship – I don’t care for the talk and society of people I care nothing about and who care as little for me.’ In the final days, a more favourable wind helped the ship cruise at eleven knots. The British Queen reached New York after fourteen and a half days, excellent time by sailing standards but twenty-four hours worse than the Great Western’s latest record. ‘The public will look at the time only,’ Laird knew, ‘and not to all the circumstances of the voyage.’

A fairer test came at once, as both Atlantic steamships left New York for home on the first of August. The Great Western carried 59 passengers, the British Queen 103. Sailing at the same time, by similar routes, they encountered essentially identical winds and currents; no differing ‘circumstances’ would console the loser. This first true transatlantic steamship race, between the only two vessels yet designed and built for the North Atlantic trade, was keenly followed on both sides of the ocean. After a head start of forty-five minutes, the Great Western steadily lengthened her lead for most of the voyage. On the last two days, though, the British Queen— still breaking in her machinery – closed the gap rapidly and reached Portsmouth only about two hours after the Great Western came into Bristol on 14 August. The British Queen did set a new elapsed round-trip record of thirty-two days, twelve hours. Engineers from both the Thames and Clyde could find reasons to preen themselves.

Later voyages, however, proved that Smith and Laird had built a larger but slower vessel. ‘The British Queen was a fine ship,’ noted Sam Cunard, who was paying close attention, ‘but she had not power sufficient. ’ During the 1839 season, in three round-trips she averaged seventeen days, eight hours to New York and sixteen days, fourteen hours home. (The latter figure was skewed by an extended December voyage, hobbled by machinery breakdowns, of twenty-two days, twelve hours.) The Great Western in six round-trips beat her rival’s averages by twenty hours out and three days, five hours home. With a higher ratio of horsepower to tonnage, she showed more effective power against the wind, better sailing qualities with it, and the durability necessary for regular ocean crossing. ‘Is it not reasonable to conclude,’ offered a Londoner, ‘that the engineers of the Thames must be vastly superior to those of the Clyde?’

In the entrepreneurial contest over building and managing an Atlantic steamship, brunel and Bristol had beaten Smith and London. In the engineering battle of the rivals for transatlantic engine-building supremacy, the Thames had won the first round. Across this combined arena of enterprise and engineering, Glasgow – the founder and still centre of British steam navigation – had not much to brag about, as yet.

5. The Cunard Line

Samuel Cunard had a plan. He characteristically discussed it with nobody outside his family. Only his son Ned, now twenty-three years old and an active partner in the Cunard enterprises, knew what his father was up to. During his annual trips to England, Sam had observed the first efforts at transatlantic steam. Taking their measure, he thought he could do better. In January 1839 he boarded a sailing packet to England and embarked on his greatest gamble. As an outsider, he felt no hobbling allegiance to Bristol or London or Glasgow. Well connected to some British power brokers, yet with no loyalties or commitments to any steam builders, Cunard moved around quietly, asking questions and making judgments. ‘Altho I am a colonist,’ he later explained, ‘I have many friends in this country.’ The silent colonial attracted little attention; the real transatlantic action seemed to rest in other, more famous hands. Stealthy and independent, he found the right men for his ships and cut the deal of his life. Cunard got his boats built and running – and stole the game away from its earlier players. ‘The plan was entirely my own,’ he said later, ‘and the public have had the advantage of it.’

Cunard went to England early in 1839 because the British government had declared its intention to subsidize steam navigation between England and America, not to carry passengers or cargo (except incidentally) but mainly to transport the mail, that most essential tool of commerce and empire. The Great Western, by her five routine round-trip voyages in 1838, had shown the possibilities of regular transatlantic steam. Her performance highlighted the many inadequacies of the British Admiralty’s sail-powered mail boats, the ten-gun brigs that ran monthly and unpredictably between Falmouth and North America. In November 1838, rushing to catch up, the Admiralty invited hasty bids from British contractors to provide a monthly steamer mail service between England and Halifax, stipulating ships of at least 300 horsepower. The bids were due in only a month, and the service was to start by April – a schedule so tight that it restricted the field to existing vessels already built for other purposes.

At the time, the Great Western Steam Ship Company maintained a virtual monopoly on transatlantic steam. It had far outclassed the few competing ships, and Junius Smith’s overdue British Queen would not finally be ready until the following summer. Holding all the cards, the Bristol company proceeded to overplay its hand with the government. On 13 December, two days before the deadline, Christopher Claxton wrote to Charles Wood of the Admiralty that his company was interested but needed much more time. The last voyage of the Great Western, with a slow winter passage of nineteen days to New York, had shown (said Claxton) the need for specially constructed mail ships of 1200 tons and 450 horsepower, slightly smaller but more powerful than the Great Western. Claxton offered to build three such ships within eighteen to twenty-four months, and then to carry the mail once a month in each direction, for £45,000 annually under a seven-year contract.

The government wanted action in four months, not two years. The Great Western company ignored that urgency and rewrote the terms of the tender: in effect, instructing the Admiralty about the realities of steam on the North Atlantic. The company’s correcting tone may have annoyed the Admiralty (which believed it had some knowledge of steamships and oceans), and it compounded an earlier, related offence by Thomas Guppy. In the autumn of 1837, at a scientific meeting in Liverpool, Guppy – a founder and director of the Great Western company – had sharply criticized the Royal Navy’s steamship designs. ‘Many of the government vessels are of very bad forms; their power and size greatly disproportioned, ’ Guppy declared. ‘Whoever had seen the fine private steamers belonging to the ports of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol, and had then gone to view the government ones in Woolwich basin, must have been astonished at the extraordinary forms there collected; it would be well if a glass case could be constructed over the basin, to procure those curiosities of practical science, as exercised in our naval building yards.’ (The audience laughed at this sally.) Guppy did not just doubt the government ships; he mocked and made jokes of them. His remarks were published in the Nautical Magazine of London, which was carefully read at the Admiralty. And now his company had doubled the insult by turning the government’s urgent mail tender inside out. The Admiralty, no surprise, rejected the Great Western proposal on 10 January.

On that same day, across the ocean, the Halifax Novascotian printed its first announcement of the original Admiralty tender. (This delay of two months itself argued for adding steam power to the Atlantic mail.) In its headlong rush towards steam, the Admiralty was not allowing enough time for any proposals from the colonies. Sam Cunard nonetheless caught the next sailing packet from Halifax to England, unaware of recent developments. He did not yet know about the Great Western offer, its rejection by the government, or the expired deadline for other bids. He had only his own secret plan.

It was not, as it happened, the best time for Cunard to embark on a grand, risky new venture. The British economic crash of 1837 was still lingering over the country, tightening money markets, headed towards a major industrial depression. Cunard was himself overextended at home. George Renny Young, an influential lawyer and politician in Halifax, had drawn Cunard into a grandiose scheme to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres on Prince Edward Island. It brought him a touchy alliance with the Young family, leaders among the local oligarchs. (Agnes Renny Young, the family matriarch, warned her son George about Cunard’s ‘immense’ power: ‘People fear him so much that they keep quiet and submit. He never was friendly to our family and will give you a blow where he can.’) Sam took a one-third interest in the land company and soon fought with George Young over the appointment of a company attorney. Young wanted his brother Charles, and Sam favoured his son-in-law James Horsfield Peters, who had married his eldest daughter, Mary. Family loyalties, always a tugging allegiance for Cunard, quickly poisoned the venture. ‘You seem afraid that I intend making a family party of this,’ Cunard wrote to Young in August 1838. ‘I trust I am sufficiently well known in this community to be believed when I assert that I had no intention of taking advantage.…I must now decline any further correspondence on the subject.’ After Cunard pulled rank, James Peters got the job as attorney, but Young nursed the grievance. The quarrel was only resolved when Cunard bought out Young’s shares in the spring of 1839. That left Sam, at this crucial moment, heavily mortgaged and cash-poor for investing in any major new enterprise. (Young and his family became enemies with long memories and later found a damaging chance to strike back at the Cunards.)

What, then, was nonetheless drawing Cunard towards transatlantic steam? Fifty-one years old, still in his prime, he remained as active and ambitious as ever. After his long career in ships and shipping, and (since the Royal William) in steam vessels as well, he had in some ways outgrown Halifax and craved a larger arena. An Atlantic steamship line was a logical extension of his lifework. He knew from weary experience the limitations of the British government’s mail packets; he had been enduring their slow, precarious service for almost two decades. (On a trip to England in 1831, Cunard had fallen on a packet’s deck and broken his arm.) To compete with the fast New York packet lines, the government brigs had been redesigned for more speed. But that made the ships less stable and too prone to foundering at sea. ‘Almost every year, two hundred or three hundred people were lost in the mail packets, and at last they got the designation of “coffins”,’ Cunard said later. ‘I came home in those ships very frequently, and of course felt the danger and discomfort of coming in them, and I have lost a very great many friends in them.’ In January 1839, even as Cunard was crossing to England, that month’s westbound Falmouth packet sailed away and just disappeared. ‘I lost five or six intimate friends,’ Cunard recalled of that vanished ship. ‘They were never heard of.’ This latest packet disaster invested his mission with an immediate, sharper edge and made its own human case for adding steam’s protecting power to the ocean mail.

Along with these personal motives, in a larger sense Cunard was acting from patriotic or nationalist incentives. Given his American parentage and his years of business dealings down the coast of New England to New York, he had strong ties to some Yankee ports and individuals. Yet his family had, after all, been forced into unwanted exile by the American victors in the Revolution. He typically regarded his American commercial associates with a goading mixture of fear and respect; over his entire career, nothing else so motivated him as competing with Americans and striking back at them. The New York packet lines, faster and more reliable, had taken most of the transatlantic mail away from the Admiralty’s ships. At a time of strained relations between the two countries, British mail depended largely on American vessels: a galling vulnerability that in part explained the Admiralty’s sudden sprint towards steam. As a Canadian, British subject, and descendant of American Loyalists, Cunard inevitably savoured the prospect of taking the mail back from the aggressive Yankees.

Arrived in London, he took lodgings at a Piccadilly hotel and worked from a desk at the General Mining Association’s office in nearby Ludgate Hill. His GMA connections, his two decades of carrying the mail between Boston, Halifax and St John’s, Newfoundland, and his thriving agency for the East India Company’s tea trade in eastern Canada all eased his way through Whitehall and financial offices in the City. He also carried a useful letter of introduction from Sir Colin Campbell, the royally appointed lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. ‘I have always found him one of the firmest supporters of the measures of the Government,’ Campbell had written, ‘and his being one of the principal Bankers and Merchants and Agent of the General Mining Association, and also Commissioner of Light Houses, gives him a great deal of influence in this community.’

Cunard’s plan was simple and audacious: instead of a monthly mail service, he intended to run enough ships to maintain a weekly service across the ocean and thus cut more deeply, directly into the frequent sailings of the New York packets. He had taken the Admiralty’s tender and quadrupled it. Within days of his arrival in London, he was meeting with Charles Wood at the Admiralty and Francis T. Baring at the Treasury. ‘I submitted that by going once a week the whole of the letters would be taken by our steamers, and the American packet ships that had previously carried the letters would cease to carry them,’ Cunard explained later. Wood and Baring ‘entertained my plan; and they took a great deal of pains…spent many hours at different times in going through the calculations and routes with me.’ The three parties eventually split the difference between Cunard’s plan and the Admiralty tender by settling on a mail service to run twice a month at the outset.

Cunard’s formal proposal on 11 February committed to paper what they had already thrashed out in conversation. ‘I hereby offer to furnish Steam Boats of not less than three hundred Horse power,’ he wrote, ‘to convey the mails from a port in England to Halifax and back twice in each month.’ In addition, he would provide steamboats of half that power for carrying the mail between Halifax and Boston, connecting his service to the United States but saving the extra two hundred miles to continue to New York. ‘Should any improvements in Steam Navigation be made,’ he added, with a nod to the onrushing pace of technical progress, ‘…which the Lords of the Admiralty may consider as essential to the Service, I do bind myself to make such alterations and improvements as their Lords may direct.’ For these forty-eight annual transatlantic voyages he asked £55,000 a year. (The Great Western company had wanted £45,000 for twenty-four trips.) The Admiralty and Treasury moved quickly. Within two weeks of the formal proposal, long before any public announcement, word was passing around London’s political and financial circles that Samuel Cunard of Halifax had the contract.

Not quite; Cunard had skipped the thorny guesswork, which had so undone Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird, of predicting how soon his vessels would be built and available. To strengthen his case with the government, Cunard needed signed contracts for constructing his ships and engines. Still very much on his own, he appraised the feuding centres of British marine engineering. Because the Great Western company was already operating out of Bristol, and Smith and Laird out of London and Liverpool, Cunard’s search naturally drifted north to Glasgow. James C. Melvill, secretary to the East India Company, recommended the Glaswegians Robert Napier and John Wood, who had recently built the swift steamship Berenice for his company’s trade with India. In late February, two weeks after his successful proposal to the Admiralty, Cunard asked an intermediary in Glasgow to see what Napier and Wood would charge for one or two steamships of 800 tons and 300 horsepower, to be built and ready for sea in only twelve months. ‘I shall want these vessels to be of the very best description,’ he emphasized, ‘and to pass a thorough inspection and examination of the Admiralty. I want a plain and comfortable boat, but not the least unnecessary expense for show. I prefer plain work in the cabin, and it saves a large amount in the cost.’ Napier was at once quite interested, so Cunard went up to Glasgow to see him.

It is no hyperbole to say that their meeting in early March 1839 set the course of the Cunard Line for at least its first quarter-century. Napier had just finished his enormous engine for the British Queen, after embarrassing delays and relentless criticism from engineers on the Thames. He therefore welcomed another shot at building an Atlantic steamship engine. Cunard, still so unknown to most British commercial circles, needed Napier’s technical expertise and his reputation along the Clyde for shrewd business dealings. The two men were about the same age – Napier was four years younger – and of similar personalities: terse, contained, not given to public displays or extravagant statements, immersed in work, and sheltered by their families to unusual degrees. Each could recognize and (mostly) trust the other. Napier even brought Cunard home to meet his wife and children. Entrepreneur and engineer, the two formed a variation on those symbiotic partnerships that had driven the Industrial Revolution: a kind of Boulton and Watt for ocean steamships.

In Glasgow, Napier took Cunard to see his famous Vulcan Foundry and its redoubtable works manager, David Elder. The foundry sprawled across a large quadrangle on Washington Street, near the river. A sign at the gate advised, ‘No admittance except on business’, and the din and pace of work inside showed that Napier and Elder meant it. Operations were broken down into four specialized areas. In the casting house, furnaces melted raw metal to be poured into sand moulds in a pit. Some of the castings were quite large, up to a twenty-four-ton bedplate for a marine engine. This sector was relatively quiet, unlike the open area where boilers and funnels were pounded together. The steady, arhythmic jangling of hammers on rivets, iron meeting iron, pealed forth the raggedy music of the Industrial Age. It took 10,000 rivets to make an average boiler, each driven home by repeated metallic blows, all day long. The smithery joined the heat of the casting house to the hammered cacophony of the boilermakers: sweaty, muscular blacksmiths toiling over their anvils and forge fires, turning rough metal into finer pieces, with a small steam engine puffing away to force air into the forge fires. The engineering shops, the largest department, held various specialized lathes and boring and planing machines, all driven by steam-powered beltings overhead, to shape and finish to exact tolerances the cylinders, pistons, wheels, and smaller parts of a steam engine. Seven hundred men worked long days at the Vulcan, six days a week. When the noise stopped at closing time, the silence itself was deafening. Sam Cunard could only have been impressed.

As Napier and Cunard got down to the details, the size of the ships kept increasing, a process that would continue through months of revised contracts. They at first agreed on three ships, 200 feet long and 960 tons, of 375 horsepower, to cost £32,000 each. (A ship this size was still only half the tonnage of the British Queen.) Napier would build the engines, and his shipbuilding associate John Wood would provide the vessels, all by the spring of 1840. ‘He appears from the little I have seen of him to be a straight-forward business man,’ Napier noted of Cunard. ‘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.’

Cunard returned to London, brought his first Napier contract over to the Admiralty and Treasury, and found them ‘highly pleased’. Reporting this news to Napier, Cunard invoked the regional engineering rivalries, then raging, to warn and inspire Napier to his best efforts and punctuality. ‘You have no idea of the prejudice of some of our English Builders,’ Cunard wrote, guileless in his guile. ‘I have had several offers from Liverpool and this place and when I have replied that I have contracted in Scotland they invariably say “You will neither have substantial work or completed in time.” The Admiralty agree with me in opinion the Boats will be as good as if built in this Country and I have assured them that you will keep to time.’ (An oblique reference to the British Queen and her delays.) Someone else had told him that Thames engines would use less coal per horsepower, but Cunard assured the man he was mistaken and pointedly reported the exchange to Napier: ‘The Admiralty cautioned me on this head therefore take good care that you bear me out in my assertions. ’ Cunard also pressed Napier and Wood to start building his ships (‘How is Mr Wood progressing – tell him I will be down upon him some of these mornings when he may not expect me’).