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

The money lavished on decorations might better have been applied to the engine. At 540 horsepower it was the most powerful on the ocean; but only a bit more so than the engine of the much smaller British Queen, which was itself underhorsed compared to the Great Western and the Cunard ships. That left the President a much lower ratio of horsepower to tonnage than any of the competing vessels. Some sceptics doubted the President’s stability, suspecting that the third deck might make her top-heavy and too prone to rolling on the North Atlantic’s mountainous swells. She was also shorter and broader than the British Queen, not a likely design for great speed. An undeniably impressive sight, the President was more notable for her cosmetic features than her basic engineering.

She turned out to be a big, gaudy turkey, and a steady disappointment to her owners. Her first two captains were blamed for slow passages and quickly relieved of duty. The President’s lumbering maiden run in the summer of 1840 took sixteen and a half days in each direction. Her second trip home was worse: fighting a heavy gale from the east, in four days from New York she managed only three hundred miles. At that rate she would run out of coal before reaching Liverpool, so she turned around and limped back to New York. Amply coaled up, and with fair winds, she finally arrived at the Mersey on 28 November, ten days overdue: a cause of great relief and rejoicing, since nobody in England knew that she had earlier been forced back to New York. (‘What on earth or water,’ Isambard brunel had asked in passing, ‘is the President about.’) Laid up for two months through the worst winter weather, and refitted at Plymouth after just two voyages across the ocean, she took three weeks to reach New York in February, her slowest time yet.

The President left New York for home on 11 March 1841, with about 110 passengers and crew. She was sailing low in the water because of heavy cargo and full coal bunkers. Stormy seas on previous voyages had weakened and twisted the wooden hull, perhaps fracturing the engine frame. (According to an oral tradition later passed down in the Laird family, shortly after her departure two people – the Smith line’s New York agent and the brother of her latest captain, Richard Roberts – had the same dream on the same night. They saw the President with a confused crowd on her deck and Captain Roberts on the bridge, giving orders. Then the ship suddenly, unaccountably disappeared.)

She steamed into a screeching winter storm. Towards the end of the second day, another ship’s captain sighted the President labouring through a dangerous area between the Nantucket Shoals and George’s Bank, where the Gulf Stream collides with shallow soundings, sometimes generating starkly vertical waves as high as a five-storey house. The other ship’s captain saw the President rising on top of an enormous swell, pitching and struggling violently. Then he lost sight of her. The captain later guessed that she was shipping heavy seas, perhaps to the point of snuffing her boiler fires and leaving her powerless in the storm.

Once again the President was late to Liverpool. Her belated but eventual appearance in the previous November restrained, for a time, the usual worries about an overdue ship. After a month The Times noted her tardiness amid stray rumours that she had been sighted here or there, or hit an iceberg, or come into Bermuda, or run ashore in Newfoundland, or suffered a mutiny, or fallen in with pirates. The line’s London office was besieged by friends and relatives of the missing, hoping for any trace of encouraging news. The late-ship deathwatch stretched on for another month, tighter and more hopeless as time passed to no definite resolution. Queen Victoria, on leaving Buckingham Palace for Windsor Castle, asked that a special messenger be sent to her with any news of the overdue ship. When Fanny Appleton sighted a large iceberg from the Columbia in May, she declared it the ghost of the President. ‘I do not altogether give up the President as lost,’ Junius Smith wrote on 14 May, trying to convince himself, ‘and yet I fear there is but slight ground for hope.’

The President had simply disappeared into the North Atlantic, taking 110 people down with her. It was the first transatlantic steamship disaster – and not the last time that the newest, biggest ship on the ocean would steam into a catastrophe.

The competition was dropping away, yet the Cunard Line was going broke. To get his contract, Sam Cunard had offered the government much better terms than the Great Western company’s – impossible terms, it turned out. Even before his ships started running, Cunard asked the Admiralty to halve his winter sailings to once a month. ‘At the time I entered into the Contract,’ he explained, ‘steam boats had not crossed during the Winter and I was therefore quite ignorant of the risk and danger I had to encounter indeed I was very hasty in making the arrangement.…In the Winter Season there is not much commercial interest, and no passengers and once a month may, I hope be considered by their Lordships sufficient to cross during the inclement Season of the year – I have not only to contend with the storms on this Coast and on the Atlantic but with the severe Winter weather on the coast of Halifax and Boston… These vessels have cost me nearly double the sum I originally expected and I find my Contract is by no means a favorable one, but I am determined to fulfill my engagements.’ The Admiralty agreed to a monthly schedule from November to February but cut £4000 from Cunard’s already-inadequate annual subsidy.

Back in the optimistic spring of 1839, Cunard when haggling with Napier had guessed that his line would run at an annual profit of almost £41,000. No doubt this figure was inflated to entice Napier and his Glasgow investors; but Cunard surely did not expect to operate at a loss. Over its first nine months, the Cunard Line ran £15,355 in the red. When added to his money problems at home, these losses threatened Cunard with financial ruin. He thought about asking the government for a more generous contract but then decided not even to make the request and perhaps to give up the whole, leaky enterprise.

At this bleak moment in the spring of 1841, his partner David Mac Iver replied to a gloomy letter from Cunard with a reassuring blend of caution and optimism. ‘The day must have been cold, I think, or the subject has had a chilling effect over your spirits,’ Mac Iver wrote. ‘It is incumbent on us as shrewd Merchants to have our eyes ever open to the dark side of our doings – there is so much of show, and of the imaginary, in the money matters of steamers… Our own doings, up till now, I rate the experimental; and not sound evidence of our true position or prospects. We have paid, like all beginners in new trades of magnitude, thro costly experience, and are now arrived at that point where we must turn this experience to profit.’ Their ships could not carry much cargo, Mac Iver noted, and only attracted such freight in the summertime. So their only way of increasing revenues was to raise fares; Mac Iver suggested new rates of thirty pounds from Boston and forty pounds, nineteen shillings from Liverpool. Drawing from his years of running a steamship line, and knowing the implacable cycles of that business, he counselled patience: wait for better times.

Cunard, having operated ships for three decades, got the point. He, Mac Iver and George Burns met in London to gather their ammunition. Cunard took the grim statistics of their initial operations over to Whitehall, urging that the contract be doubled to £120,000 a year. The Treasury, not persuaded, asked to see the line’s books; Cunard assented ‘with pleasure’. After the Treasury’s own inquiry and report, the government granted a new contract raising the annual subsidy to £80,000, with the added stipulation that the Cunard Line build a fifth steamship. ‘It would have been wrong to let so important a line drop for want of the necessary support,’ a Glasgow newspaper reported. ‘We have, moreover, reason to know that the Government complimented the contractors, not only for having acted up to the terms of the previous contract, but also for having far exceeded them.’

The new contract of 1841, much less than he wanted, did not ease Sam Cunard’s own financial crisis. He had risked his fortune to start the transatlantic line on terms soon revealed to be disastrous. He was the founder and leader, the man who handled those delicate negotiations with the government. In a humbling act that must have embarrassed him, he had to ask his Cunard Line partners for a personal loan. In September 1841 he borrowed £15,000 from them, offering some of his own shares as security, and promising repayment with interest in two years. By the end of the year, Cunard had spent the entire loan on various debts.

Aside from a depressed general cycle in shipping and shipbuilding, Cunard was saddled with wayward investments at home, especially the Prince Edward Island land company. The Young family, his associates-turned-enemies in that venture, were not friendly to Cunard. (At a London party in 1839, William Young and Cunard were dismayed to run into each other. ‘Sam and I exchanged very distant bows,’ Young noted in his diary.) As Cunard’s money crisis got tighter and more desperate, William and George Young – by a suspicious coincidence – turned up as the attorneys for his more anxious creditors. ‘They have been at different times employed by persons in England,’ Sam objected, ‘and they have resorted to every means in their power to injure me by arresting me and heaping costs upon me. You cannot imagine anything more unfeeling than their proceedings – they hesitate at no act if it will put a few pounds into their pocket.’

The Youngs were only seeking revenge. Cunard, fighting for his very survival, was equally ruthless, scratching for money anywhere he could find it. In Nova Scotia, he sold the house and land in Hants County where he had sent his late mother to spend her last days. He mortgaged his wharves and warehouses in Halifax. The Bank of Nova Scotia suspended a rule to loan him £45,000. All his enterprises were squeezed hard. As the largest landlord on Prince Edward Island, he had his agent (his son-in-law James Peters) extract every possible penny of rent from the immigrant tenants. One of them, a bard from the Isle of Raasay named MacLean, took refuge in a mournful song. Translated from the Gaelic:

We left there

and came out here

thinking we would receive consideration,

and that the rent would not be so exacting.

But Peters is oppressing us,

and, if he doesn’t die,

we must leave this place

and Cunard, himself a beast.

The beast had become the quarry. In the spring of 1842, he admitted to debts of £130,000 and mortgaged property worth £47,000, against claimed (and probably exaggerated) assets of £257,000. A Liverpool bank, trying to present a writ for £2000 against him, sent a sheriff’s officer to the chambers of Cunard’s lawyer in London; the lawyer hid Cunard in an adjoining room, and he escaped the process. A short while later, Cunard quietly scurried up to Liverpool and arranged another flight. He hid overnight in a cottage on the river below Eastham. Several writ servers, suspecting his intentions, waited for Cunard on one of his steamships until the last minute before departure. When they were finally sent ashore, the steamer weighed anchor and started out to sea. Cunard came alongside in a small boat; his ship slowed down and picked him up. The eminent founder and leader of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company stole furtively home to Halifax.

From that nadir, Cunard slowly recovered his fortunes. In 1843 he and his partners again asked the Admiralty for more money, claiming a loss in the previous year of almost £26,400. The Admiralty allowed them an additional £10,000 annually. Through all of Cunard’s own troubles, his ships steamed across the ocean ‘with regularity almost unexpected and wholly unsurpassed’, as a New York newspaper grudgingly admitted. As competing steamships receded from the Atlantic, the Cunard Line gained an essential monopoly and could raise its fares with impunity, up to forty-one pounds by 1846 for passage from Liverpool. His stock dividends and commissions gradually paid off Cunard’s loan to his partners. The shipping business in general cycled upwards again, and the Cunard Line started turning profits and paying more consistent dividends to stockholders. Sam Cunard’s financial crisis lifted.

The Cunard Line steamed towards solvency on its unmatched reputation for safety and order. That reputation – so coveted by passengers venturing forth on the dreaded North Atlantic – began with the first sailings in 1840. John Quincy Adams, a former president of the United States, and a man whose life was typically an exercise in rigid discipline and organization, took the Acadia from Boston to Halifax in September 1840. Adams approved of the captain, the food, the crockery and glassware, the cleanliness, and the neat finish to the iron, brass and woodwork. The Acadia was an uncommonly tight ship, Adams confided to his diary: ‘There is great order and discipline.’ Those qualities were associated with the Cunard Line ever after. Over the years, other Atlantic steamship lines would run ships that were bigger, faster, more luxurious, or with better service. Cunard ships retained their own unique, dominating cachet: they got you there alive.

No steamship line could entirely escape the North Atlantic’s rigours; Cunard always had its share of accidents. In the first eight years, Cunard ships ran aground at least nine times in dense fogs off Ireland and the Canadian and American coasts, and at least twice collided with smaller vessels, sinking them and killing eight of their crewmen. (Other collisions may have happened at night and gone unnoticed, at least officially, by the Cunarder.) Charles Dickens’s frightening experience on the Britannia was not so unusual. The most serious grounding was by the Columbia in July 1843. She had left Boston in a thick fog, picking her way carefully along the New England coast, and was pulled off course by an unusually swift current. Given the fog, the captain could not shoot the sun and take his bearings. Early in the afternoon, while running nearly full speed at ten knots, the Columbia struck a notorious reef called the Devil’s Limb, 11/2 offshore and about 150 miles southwest of Halifax. Despite desperate efforts, she could not be budged. A boat came out from a nearby island and plucked off the crew and all eighty-five passengers before the ship, buffeted by chopping waves, broke up and sank – the first Cunard steamship lost at sea.

The most remarkable aspect of these first eleven Cunard accidents is that nobody on the Cunard ship involved was killed. In fact, for the first seventy-five years of the line’s history no passenger in its North Atlantic traffic ever died from a shipwreck. Meantime all the other transatlantic steamship lines suffered terrible disasters, one after the other, typically causing hundreds of deaths each time. Only the Cunard Line escaped. Perhaps this was just Cunard luck again, over and over. Or perhaps it was how the line was run.

In the division of labour among the three founding partners, Sam Cunard with his sons Ned and William supervised the line’s offices in Canada and America, and Sam on his frequent trips to England represented the enterprise to the government. In Glasgow, George Burns looked after the construction and repair of the Cunard vessels by Robert Napier and various Clydeside shipbuilders. In Liverpool, David Mac Iver (and, after his death in 1845, his brother Charles) saw to the day-to-day management of the ships, keeping the captains and crews up to rigorous standards, making sure the vessels were well supplied and repaired and precisely on schedule both going and coming. These lines of authority at times became mingled; any one of the three founders might briefly take up any role, and major decisions emerged from polite, muted exchanges among all of them, with Cunard usually functioning as the first among equals.

If the safety record has a single overriding explanation, it was the Mac Ivers. Only twenty-eight years old in 1840, Charles stood at the top of the Cunard Line leadership for over forty years, even longer than Sam Cunard or George Burns. Nobody ever laboured harder, more persistently or effectively, to keep the line in its usual position of transatlantic supremacy. Almost every day, he went down to the Cunard wharves on the Mersey, watching and measuring, taking notes and giving orders. Quick and decisive, at times imperious, he had absolute confidence in his own judgments and opinions, seemingly never retreating from them once expressed. ‘Up to the last moment,’ a long-time Liverpool associate said later, ‘he will persist with all the energy of his nature in a course which his reason is gradually convincing him against his will to be erroneous…though even then he by some ingenious process satisfies himself and thinks he convinces others that he is not giving way at all.’

The Mac Iver brothers were sons of a Greenock sea captain who was washed overboard in 1812 in the Bay of Biscay. As a young man, Charles spent some time in the American port of Charleston, South Carolina, but he soon came home and joined David in their coastal steamship enterprises. In about 1833 he had an experience that, as he told the story, confirmed his core insistence on relentless standards and inspections for oceangoing vessels. He booked passage on a particular sailing ship because he knew the captain. Off the Azores they ran into a powerful gale that lasted twelve hours. The ship, nearly sunk, was damaged and obviously unsound. ‘When you go home you had better throw up command of this vessel,’ Mac Iver told the captain, ‘or you will lose your life.’ The captain did leave her, but her owners – in their ignorance or greed – sent her out again under another commander. She disappeared with all hands. Any reasonable inspection, Mac Iver concluded, ‘would have prevented that ship from going to sea.’

When the Cunard Line got under way, the Mac Ivers issued and enforced stringent regulations for their captains and crews. The two primary goals for the enterprise, speed and safety, were to some degree contradictory; to favour one could undermine the other. The Mac Ivers impartially emphasized both. ‘It will be obvious to you,’ they instructed the commanders of the Cunard ships in 1840, ‘that it is of first importance…that she attains a Character for speed and safety. We trust to your vigilance for this – good steering, good lookouts, taking advantage of every slant of wind, and precautions against fire, are principal elements. ’ At the start of the voyage, the ship was heavily loaded with coal, and the paddles were deeply immersed, not working at peak efficiency. As coal was consumed and the hull rose in the water, the boilers could be fully fired up and the engine pushed harder. But coal use was to be carefully monitored and recorded, along with other supplies in the engine room. Only stokers and trimmers were to carry coal from bunkers to boilers; the sailors up on deck, a separate breed, were not expected to help out.

The Mac Ivers established other rules for the passengers and stewards. ‘A cheerful acquiescence is expected in the following Regulations and Suggestions,’ they explained in 1840, ‘which, if in any instance at variance with the opinions, habits, or inclinations of the few, are framed with a regard to the comfort of the whole.’ The staterooms were to be swept and carpets taken out and shaken every morning after breakfast. As soon as passengers left their rooms in the morning, their bedding was turned over, beds were made, wash basins cleaned, and slops emptied. Bed linen was changed on the eighth day, and boots and shoes cleaned overnight and returned to the rooms every morning at eight o’clock. Two towels were provided for each passenger and changed every other day, or more often if requested. The wine and spirits bar, always a favourite part of any ocean voyage, closed for the night at eleven but reopened quite early, at six the next morning. Lights went out in the saloons at half past eleven, in the staterooms at midnight, with no exceptions allowed for late readers.

Other Atlantic steamship lines had similar rules. The difference, it seems, is that the Cunard Line extracted routine obedience to its regulations. In January 1847, Charles Mac Iver found that the officers’ mess in a recent transatlantic voyage had committed ‘wanton and extravagant waste of the Company’s victualling stores’, as he put it, and had subverted specific rules ‘which have for their object general comfort and good order’. Unable to discover the particular culprits, Mac Iver sent his prescribed bill of fare to all officers of the mess. ‘I shall be very happy to receive the resignation of any one who is not satisfied with it,’ he warned. ‘No man in this concern has had it in his power to say in truth that he has been otherwise than well treated, but wherever I find a set of men rating themselves only by what they can stow away in their bellies, I have prima facie evidence that they are not the men for the British & North American Royal Mail Service… Specific and known orders shall never be infringed with impunity or trampled upon.’ Was that sufficiently clear? (‘Mac Iver’s letters quite discompose one,’ an associate explained; ‘you must talk over the matter with him to understand what a fine fellow he is.’)

As time passed, Mac Iver’s directives became even more definite and specific. His orders to commanders in 1848 ran to eighteen handwritten pages. Each ship was to leave port with enough food and water for thirty days in summer and forty days in winter (though a typical passage took less than half that time). If a very long trip depleted the coal supply, the captain was to put aside enough fuel to run the engine for twenty-four hours and then proceed under sail alone until land was sighted; then the boilers would be fired so the ship could reach port under power. Furthermore: Keep the ship clean to control vermin. ‘Ventilate, Ventilate. ’ Only safely locked lanterns, no open flames, were allowed in the spirits room. No tobacco smoking was permitted anywhere below decks. ‘Want of cleanliness in the water closets is a constant cause of complaint, we shall be glad if you can take any measures to remedy this.’ Every Sunday at sea, the captain must limit unnecessary work and read aloud the Church of England service in the main saloon. Invite a passenger to read from a book of short sermons provided by the line. ‘If this does not meet with a favorable response, do not press it. Let your crew retire.’ Don’t be too friendly with any particular set of passengers, or make or permit generalizations about any national tendencies; Americans and perhaps Englishmen can be quite sensitive about such matters. ‘Card Playing on the part of the Captains on board ship has been the cause of so much dissatisfaction and trouble, that it cannot be longer tolerated.’ Nor should the captain allow card playing or gambling in his private quarters, or in the officers’ mess, or by any officers.

Year after year, voyage after voyage, life on a Cunard ship expressed the flinty personality of Charles Mac Iver. He resisted luxuries and any fancy touches in the food or furnishings or decorations. He most valued safe predictability: always the same procedures and standards, unchanged unless for a very compelling reason. When accidents at sea happened, the captain and crew followed a precise, well-practised drill, and so maintained order. The line’s amazing safety record was no coincidence. Behind it, sustaining it, was Mac Iver standing at the dock every day, getting ready to inspect another Cunard ship and her personnel, missing and excusing nothing. ‘The highest court to which you could bring me,’ he once told a parliamentary commission, ‘would be my own conscience.’

For Sam Cunard himself, the responsibility and success of his transatlantic steamship line made him a transatlantic citizen. He and his children were spending longer periods in England, bringing traces of English culture home to Halifax and setting themselves apart from their neighbours. When Fanny Appleton visited the Cunards in 1841, she noticed ‘the luxury of Mr. Cunard’s house contrasting with the shabbiness of the town’. One of Cunard’s six daughters presided at the meals, ‘a very elegant girl of pale complexion, regular features, very black hair and a fine figure who has been to London and did the honors of lunch and Dinner with quite a distingué air.’ Though Appleton was dressed only in her sailing costume, she was persuaded to stay for dinner, at which the Cunard daughters, ‘a l’Anglaise, arrayed themselves in full dress.’ At table the Cunard girls talked about parties and balls with a determined gaiety; it reminded Appleton of scenes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. ‘It all has the strangest Anglo-American aspect,’ she decided. ‘A tedious provincial life they must have of it.’ Eventually all the Cunard daughters but one married English army officers and left Halifax permanently.