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

People stayed up late because sleeping was so difficult. After the sumptuous meals and lounges, the private sleeping quarters inevitably disappointed: small, unheated, dimly lit, and poorly ventilated. ‘About as big as that allowed to a pointer in a dog-kennel,’ the English novelist Frederick Marryat groused. ‘I thought that there was more finery than comfort.’ The berth, generously called a bed, offered thin sacking over boards and a hollow down the middle that was supposed to hold the occupant in place. Emerson’s sides grew sore from rolling back and forth. ‘Oh for a bed!’ Fanny Kemble keened. ‘A real bed! Any manner of bed, but a bed on shipboard!’ Settled down for sleep, a passenger could not miss the remarkable, unexpected variety of noises on a wooden sailing ship. The waves kept up a steady background of thumps and pulses, generating constant small motions in the seams of the hull, flexing and twisting, which caused sharp creaking sounds in the jointed woodwork of bulkheads, cabin partitions and steerage bunks. Passengers lay awake in their berths, trying not to hear. The animal barnyard overhead maintained a running, distressed commentary. The mates and sailors yelled back and forth, their footfalls thuddingly heavy at night, as they changed sails and scraped down the deck with screeching holystones. Wind whistled through the rigging. Morning could take a long time coming.

The English author and protosociologist Harriet Martineau wrote the fullest, most forgiving account of a packet voyage. In August 1834, thirty-two years old, she had just completed a popular series of short stories that improbably urged the beauties of classical economics. For over two years she had written so constantly that she could not spare time even to take a walk. With that work finally done, basking in her first great success, she booked passage for New York on the Red Star Line’s United States, 140 feet and 650 tons. Martineau looked forward to a restful month on the ocean without mail, newspapers, or intruding strangers, and then would travel around America to report on that boisterous, unmatured experiment in democracy.

She catalogued the twenty-three cabin passengers on board: a Prussian physician, a New England preacher, a Boston merchant ‘with his sprightly and showy young wife’, a high-spirited young South Carolinian returning from study in Germany, a newly married couple who kept to themselves, a Scottish army officer whose many crotchets amused the young people, an elderly widow, a Scottish lady of undisclosed age, and a young man from Yorkshire. The rest were English and American merchants, transatlantic veterans not deemed interesting enough by Martineau for detailed comment. With two or three exceptions, they all mingled congenially into a single travelling party.

The voyage began slowly, dawdling through calm days of little wind. The Americans, longing for home, became anxious. Martineau seized the welcome quiet time to think and be still. On the third day the wind freshened and the sea churned, leaving the dining saloon empty at dinner as most passengers remained seasick in their berths. The next morning, Martineau rose unsteadily but forced herself to dress and go up on deck to escape the bilious sights and activities below. Captain Nathan Holdredge took her to a seat by the rail. She looked out to sea, avoided noticing the invalids strewn around the deck, and felt better after half an hour. The wind was too strong for a large, flaring bonnet, but she tried a warm black silk cap, snugly fitted, which she recommended for any woman at sea.

An uncommon traveller, Martineau had two qualities that maintained her spirits on the ocean: a bottomless curiosity and delight in new experiences, and an absolute refusal to be discouraged by anything whatever. After six days of mostly unhelpful winds, the United States was still only three hundred miles from Liverpool; at that rate the voyage would take two months. No matter. ‘Our mode of life was very simple and quiet; to me, very delightful,’ she wrote. ‘A voyage is the most pleasant pastime I have ever known.’ After breakfast, the happiest meal of the day, she sat down to write a long article, the one major task she had set herself for the trip. The New England preacher would find her a place on deck, out of the wind and sun, and there she wrote through luncheon until two o’clock. Children from the steerage peered at the famous lady writer over her shoulder and from behind chests and casks. One particular man planted himself in front of her, arms akimbo, and stared at the point of her pen, transfixed by the mysterious act of female composition.

Finished writing for the day, she took her position at the rail and exulted in the passing scene. If she wanted to be left alone, she held a volume of Shakespeare. Otherwise someone joined her. ‘I strongly suspect,’ she later reflected, ‘that those who complain of the monotony of the ocean do not use their eyes as they do on land.’ She saw Portuguese men-of-war, flying fish, dolphins, and the web-footed birds called Mother Carey’s chickens. A sail on the horizon brought everyone over to look and exclaim. Early one morning a distant ship made signals of distress. Great flutters of excitement; ‘the faces of the gentlemen began to wear, in anticipation, an expression of manly compassion.’ Captain Holdredge took in sail and hove to. The other ship, it turned out, had only lost her longitude bearing. Holdredge shouted it out, angry over losing valuable time for such a small matter, and ordered the sails up again.

The captain, kind and patient even with repeated, unanswerable questions, could never forget his mandate for maximum speed at all times. One day Martineau noticed another ship ahead on the same westerly course. She told the captain, who took a hard look through his telescope and then barked out sharp orders to the helmsman and crew. The other ship was the Montreal of the rival Black X Line. Smaller and slower, she had left England four days before the United States. An ocean race was on. ‘Our captain left the dinner-table three times this first day of the race, and was excessively anxious throughout. It was very exciting to us all.’ In three days the United States overtook the Montreal and left her far behind, slowly falling below the eastern horizon.

Most days were clear enough for visible sunsets. Everyone, from cabin and steerage alike, gathered on deck. A few climbed up into the rigging. People grew quiet except for pointing out particular features in the clouds or sea. As the sun went under, some of the party stood on tiptoes, reaching for one last glimpse. Then the normal talk and bustle resumed as walkers promenaded the deck, thirty paces up and back.

After evening tea, Martineau avoided the convivial cabin and found a place to herself at the stern. A true writer, an onlooker by nature, she craved a safe solitude from which to watch developments. She studied the wake behind, ‘a long train of pale fire’, and the sails ahead, outlined against the sky and stars. A night fog might scud through, thick and moving fast, with occasional open spaces for the moon. Lost and engrossed, utterly content, sometimes she forgot that she was at sea. Snatches of old songs floated through her head from nowhere, and the first poems she had ever loved. ‘Such are the hours when all that one has ever known or thought that is beautiful comes back softly and mysteriously.’

She did acknowledge a few discomforts at sea: rainy days that kept everyone below in stifling air, and prolonged calms that made tempers short, provoking rude behaviour at dinner and accusations of cheating at shuffleboard. In mid-ocean, a ferocious storm lasted all night, to the disquieting sounds of breaking glass and screaming women. Towards the end of the long voyage, the dried fruits got mouldy, and the kitchen ran out of cider, ale, claret and soda water. In general, though, Martineau denied the usual purported annoyances of ocean travel. She made a list, in her methodical way, of all such claimed aggravations, along with their (to her) satisfactory remedies.

1 Seasickness. (‘An annoyance scarcely to be exaggerated while it lasts.’ No remedy.)

2 The damp, clammy feel of everything one touches. (Wear gloves, and clothes too worn to be spoiled. ‘In this latter device nearly the whole company were so accomplished that it was hard to say who excelled.’)

3 Lack of room. (Put everything away in tight, orderly fashion.)

4 The candles flare, dribble wax, and look untidy. (Avoid looking at candles; go to the stern at night, which has its own, better lights.)

5 The seats and beds are too hard. (Have patience. Try air cushions.)

6 Freshwater use is limited. (Bathe in seawater, and drink cider at dinner.)

7 The cider may run out. (Switch to other beverages.)

8 The noise of sailors scraping the deck. (Again, patience; because the deck must be scraped.)

9 The clamor overhead when the sails are shifted at night. (Go back to sleep.)

10 Sour bread. (Eat biscuits.)

11 Getting sunburned. (Don’t look in a mirror.)

Not even the North Atlantic Ocean could daunt such a temperament. (It should be noted that Martineau was partly deaf and therefore protected from the worst noises at sea.) After the restive final stretches of the passage, everyone’s spirits rose as the ship approached America. People changed into their best clothes, not seen for weeks, in preparation for landing. The United States reached New York after forty-two days: ‘a long but agreeable voyage,’ she insisted.

By the late 1830s, twenty packet ships were running from New York to Liverpool, twelve more to London, and sixteen to Le Havre. Every month, a dozen packets left New York for Europe and a dozen more arrived; an average of one ship every thirty hours, all year long, regardless of the wind and weather. The packets suffered occasional collisions and founderings at sea, but only two accidents caused any loss of life over the first two decades. The Albion of the Black Ball Line sank off Ireland in 1822, killing forty-six people, and four years later the Crisis of the Black X Line disappeared on a westbound run with her crew and about a dozen passengers. Those two disasters aside, the packets had compiled – for the time – a remarkable record of fast, safe, predictable transatlantic travel.

According to testimony from both sides of the ocean, Americans were building and running the finest sailing ships in the world. A London newspaper in 1834, after comparing the safety records of the New York packets and the British government’s mail ships, urged the Admiralty to buy American vessels. In 1836, a committee of the British Parliament inquiring into the problem of shipwrecks presented evidence that American ships were better built than their British counterparts (and thus preferred by shippers and insurance agents), and that American commanders and officers were more educated and competent and American seamen more carefully selected, more efficient, and better paid – to the point that the best British sailors were defecting to American ships. American authorities could only happily agree. Matthew Maury, an American naval officer and one of the founders of oceanography, praised the New York packets in 1839 in language of patriotic but unchallenged hyperbole: ‘For strength, safety, fleetness and beauty; and for a combination of all the requisites of a good ship, in such admirable proportions, no nation can boast of vessels, public or private, comparable to them.’

The packets became, in some measure, the victims of their own success. They had created the very notion of rapid technical improvement in transatlantic travel. Passengers came to expect bigger, faster ships every few years. The wind, however, could not be improved: it blew hard or not at all, from the east or west, but always beyond any human control. Sailing ships could only depart on a scheduled date. The time of arrival might then vary by weeks, depending on the ocean’s vagaries. Steam power extended the possibility of keeping a ship on schedule, or nearly so, at both ends of the passage. But Americans became so proficient and applauded at turning out wooden sailing ships that, as time passed, they – in complacency and inertia – kept building those ships for too long, far past their technological prime. In Great Britain, especially in Scotland, other men were about to take over the leadership of transatlantic shipbuilding.

2. Steam on Water

Steam power drove both the Industrial Revolution and the progressive nineteenth century. Of all the thousands of inventions that have created the pervasive material modernity of the past two hundred years, the steam engine was the first cause, the prime mover and sine qua non. Unlike muscle power, it never tired or slept or refused to obey. Unlike waterpower, its immediate predecessor, it ran in all seasons and weathers, always the same. Unlike the wind, it responded tractably to human will and imagination: turning on and off, modulating smoothly from the finest delicacy to greatest force, ever under responsive control. ‘It is impossible to contemplate, without a feeling of exultation, this wonder of modern art,’ the Quarterly Review of London declared in 1830. After first transforming mining, manufacturing and transportation, from those bases the steam engine eventually reached into the smallest aspects of everyday life. Seen from the distant perspective of two centuries later, the great Steam Age looks like an unbroken, triumphal march.

Seen closer at hand, the application of steam power to any given field was a messy process overflowing with false starts and repeated, redundant discoveries. The most baffling aspect of inventing a steamboat, it turned out, did not involve the engine, fuel, boiler or hull. Instead it came down to the propelling mechanism, the essential driving link between the steam engine and the water. The challenge of how to contrive a harnessing device that would let an engine power a boat forward, even against winds and tides, had no obvious, inevitable solution. Many lone tinkerers in Europe and America tried to solve the puzzle and subsided in defeat. One such inventor worked out key practical breakthroughs and even built and ran an influential steamboat; but he was overwhelmed by unrelated forces beyond his ken, became discouraged, and died broke and unappreciated. Another pioneer took the work of this inventor and others without giving credit, later lied about it, and finally perjured and embarrassed himself; but he also thereby acquired great fame and fortune, and to this day retains a thumping historical reputation as the true father of steam navigation. The story has its ironies.

The steam engine and steamboat both emerged from a visible chain of invention: a series of innovators, aware of earlier work in the field and consciously building on it, adding and subtracting and thus moving the whole process forward by small increments until the machine ran right. The final, laborious success when ultimately achieved was descended from many parents, leading to bitter quarrels and lawsuits over who should get the credit and rewards.

For thousands of years, unconnected individuals had puzzled over how to control and use the power of steam. Nothing important happened until Thomas Newcomen started a chain of invention in 1712. An ironmonger in southwestern England, Newcomen made tools for the tin miners of Cornwall. As mines were dug deeper, they were flooded with groundwater, overwhelming any manual or horse-driven pumps. Newcomen invented a steam-powered mine drainer: a large horizontal beam, pivoting at the middle, linked to a water pump at one end and a vertical piston and cylinder at the other. Steam entered the cylinder at the bottom and drove the piston upward; at the top of the stroke, cold water sprayed into the cylinder below the piston condensed the vapour back into liquid form, creating a partial vacuum which pulled the piston back down to repeat the cycle. The engine worked – but was bulky, expensive, and inefficient. ‘It takes an iron mine to build a Newcomen engine,’ the saying went, ‘and a coal mine to keep it going.’

Skip ahead to a classic moment in the history of modernity. In the winter of 1763-64, a Scottish instrument maker at Glasgow University was asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine. James Watt, then twenty-eight years old, mended the model and started pondering the general problem of steam power, especially the obvious waste and inefficiency of the Newcomen design. He tried making the boiler surface larger, and placing the fire in the middle of the water supply, and even using wooden pipes and boilers (because they would conduct and lose less heat than metal components). One Sunday early in 1765, while walking across Glasgow green, Watt finally got it: create a separate condenser so the cylinder could remain at essentially the same temperature throughout the cycle, saving time and fuel because no steam would be lost to condensation from entering a cold cylinder. ‘I can think of nothing else but this machine,’ Watt informed a friend. ‘Write me…if any part of what you have to tell me concerns the fire-engine.’

For the next crucial step, moving from inspiration to application, Watt needed help. Beset all his life by poor health and severe headaches, timid by nature and easily discouraged, Watt dealt uncertainly with the world outside his workshop. ‘Jamie is a queer lad,’ noted the wife of an associate. Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer, offered to become ‘a midwife to ease you of your burthen’, as he put it to Watt, ‘and to introduce your brat into the world.’ Boulton had more experience than Watt in the metal industry, ready access to money, and many useful contacts. Watt joined Boulton as partners in Birmingham. With a patent obtained in 1769, and later extended, they essentially controlled steamengine technology for the next three decades. Watt and Boulton formed the first and most important of the many talent-meshing teams of engineer and entrepreneur that later propelled the Industrial Revolution.

With Boulton in the background, prodding and executing, Watt made further improvements, notably a double-acting cylinder whereby steam alternately drove the piston in both directions, yielding two power strokes in each cycle. He also devised linkages and gearings to convert the piston’s in-and-out reciprocating action to a rotary motion that could power the machinery of mills and factories. ‘The people in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, are Steam Mill Mad,’ Boulton advised Watt, ‘and therefore let us be wise and take the advantage.’

Amid his great success, Watt never stopped fretting about competitors and potential patent infringers. To protect himself and his inventions from the onrushing progress of modernity, he grew defensive and started resisting improvements. He quashed innovations in his own shop (especially efforts to raise boiler pressures and efficiencies beyond a modest four pounds per square inch), refused to license others to use his refinements, and hounded anybody else who dared to build a steam engine. The exploding genie of constant, rapid technological change – which his steam engine had midwifed – finally turned and overwhelmed him. ‘I do not think that we are safe a day to an end in this enterprizing age,’ he warned Boulton in 1782. ‘One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them.…It is with the utmost difficulty I can hatch anything new.’ Beset by this immobilizing difficulty, losing his fragile nerve, he stopped trying. But his engine and its revolutionary impacts steamed ahead, gathering speed.

From the 1780s on, various lone inventors in France, Great Britain and the United States tried to create a steamboat. For the propelling device, some of these pioneers used an application of the familiar waterpower wheel, which converted a stream of water into rotary motion to run a mill or factory: instead of water moving the wheel, the process was reversed so the engine-driven paddle wheel moved the surrounding water and thus the boat. But a paddle wheel was only one of several unsatisfactory early alternatives. Other propelling mechanisms given trials included a set of vertical oars that imitated manual rowing action (by the American John Fitch, in 1786), a jet of water forcefully expelled at the stern (by another American, James Rumsey, in 1787), and palmipedes, or duck-footed paddles (by the Earl of Stanhope, in London in 1790). None of these early attempts worked very well or led to any ongoing commercial success. Their inventors tinkered in general isolation from each other, without knowing about or profiting from what their predecessors had done. Steamboats as yet lacked a chain of invention.

William Symington started such a chain through his own inventions and by their later impact on others. He was another Scotsman, born in 1764 in Lanarkshire, south of Glasgow. Educated for the ministry, he was instead caught up in the inventive currents then starting to swirl around southern Scotland. ‘My natural turn for mechanical philosophy led me to change my object,’ he recalled, ‘and to direct my studies to the exercise of the profession of a civil engineer.’ He made some improvements in the steam engine – earning the suspicion of James Watt – and crafted a model of a steam carriage for road travel. This model brought him to the attention of Patrick Miller, a retired Edinburgh banker who had devised a manually powered paddleboat.

In 1788 Miller hired Symington to build and install a steam engine in this vessel. Symington used his own design, an engine with two cylinders of four-inch diameter and eighteen-inch stroke. A second version with a larger engine had a successful trial a year later, carrying seven passengers at five miles an hour. But this success drew potential legal action by the ever-vigilant Watt for alleged patent infringement. After Miller lost interest in the experiments and withdrew his financial support, Symington dropped his steamboat efforts for a decade and made a living by building mining machinery.

The expiration of Watt’s patent in 1800 released a flood of pent-up inventive energy. Thomas, Lord Dundas of Kerse, a large shareholder in the Forth and Clyde Canal, remembered Symington’s experiments of the late 1780s. The canal, completed in 1790, stretched thirty-five miles from the River Forth near Edinburgh to the River Clyde near Glasgow, providing a water link across Scotland between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The canal’s average width of about fifty-six feet left little room for a sailing vessel to tack back and forth, so most of the barge traffic was drawn by horses along a tow path. Lord Dundas provided Symington initial seed money for a canal steamer.

In June 1801, Symington’s first new prototype ran successfully for two or three miles on the River Carron to Grangemouth. ‘The nice and effectual manner in which the machinery is applied,’ a Glasgow newspaper commented, ‘is an additional proof of the merit of Mr Symington, the engineer, and the whole plan is highly honourable to Lord Dundas.’ That autumn Symington patented his novel arrangement of a connecting rod and crank between the engine and paddle wheel shaft.

A second prototype, larger and more powerful, was named the Charlotte Dundas after the sponsor’s wife and daughter, who shared the name. The vessel was a broad-beamed towboat, fifty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide, powered by a one-cylinder engine driving a paddle wheel in a recess at the stern. The engine was built at a local foundry, the Carron Works, with a piston twenty-two inches in diameter and a four-foot stroke: an enormous increase over Symington’s first steamboat engine of 1788. His solution to the besetting early problem of paddle wheels – the dilemma that drove other pioneers to water jets and palmipedes – was to elevate the wheel quite high above the water. When a wheel was submerged to its midpoint, half in and half out of the water, much of its driving motion was wasted. A paddle entered the water in a horizontal position, slapping downward, and did no useful propelling work until it had run through almost forty-five degrees of its rotation. Only at the bottom of the cycle was it actually propelling the boat forward. On the back stroke, the process was reversed, as for the final forty-five degrees the paddle pushed largely upward until it cleared the surface. About half its energy simply thrashed the water up and down to no purpose. To avoid this waste, Symington placed the eight-bladed wheel of the Charlotte Dundas so high in the hull that only three of the paddles reached the water at once, at the bottom of the cycle, all of them working together to move the boat forward.