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

The prolonged Napoleonic wars and, in particular, the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States brought flush times to Halifax. It became the main staging area and supply depot for British army and navy forces in America. At the same time, it continued doing business with those New England states that opposed the conflict. Within three months of the American declaration of war, Sam Cunard was granted a licence to import certain goods from the states: flour, meal, corn, pitch, tar and turpentine, all of them in turn useful for the naval war against the United States. Halifax seized the fortunate (if unprincipled) opportunity to supply both belligerents against each other. Privateering and smuggling also flourished, as captured ships and cargoes were auctioned off at low prices. ‘As all around me are smuggling,’ one Nova Scotian decided, ‘I am beginning to smuggle too.’ Tobacco, soap and candles could be hidden in hogsheads and puncheons of codfish and then unpacked in a back room, out of sight. The Cunards probably joined in this lucrative, illicit, barely policed ™ the profits were hard to resist. By the end of the war they were buying and selling not just cargoes but the ships themselves.

The windfalls of war made Sam rich enough to take a wife. On 4 February 1815, at the age of twenty-seven he married Susan Duffus, seven years his junior. She was the daughter of a dry goods merchant and tailor who had come to Halifax from Scotland as a young man. Sam settled his bride in a fine new house at 21 Brunswick Street, adjacent to the home of his parents. His changed circumstances, upwardly striving and soon to include children, pushed Sam into taking a definite step, both merciful and ruthless, about his poor, sodden mother.

In late June 1815, with Susan three months pregnant, he bought farmland out in Hants County, at Pleasant Valley. He had a house built (a better home than most in that area, including a butler’s pantry and a central chimney with four fireplaces) and sent his mother to live there, near some of her Murphy relatives. Perhaps, with their first child soon to arrive, Sam and Susan did not want the addled grandmother right next door, visiting and possibly endangering the baby. Sam added more land to the property a few weeks after his son Edward was born. According to the local folklore that persisted in Hants County even into the 1950s, Margaret Cunard was dispatched in order to control her rum supply and to limit social embarrassments in Halifax. She was, significantly, banished without her husband – but with, it seems, his willing assent. Abraham kept working as a master carpenter at the timberyard, too far from Pleasant Valley for commuting fifty miles a day on horseback. After Margaret died in 1821, he finally retired in his late sixties and went out to live alone in her house.

As this crisp transaction made clear, Sam in his late twenties was functioning as the head of the entire family. The firm of A. Cunard & Son really consisted of the son. Sam also assumed responsibility for the education of his three youngest brothers. He sent Henry and Thomas, eleven and ten years old, to a private school in Pictou, Nova Scotia. ‘If you think it best, I have no objection to Henry & Thomas learning Latin,’ he wrote to the schoolmaster, Thomas McCulloch, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland. ‘The only reason I have for not requesting you to teach them Latin, namely that they are intended for business and that a plain English education answers the purpose. You will say that I have very contracted ideas and I must allow it. I shall feel much obliged if you will have the kindness to supply the little wants of the boys from time to time, they will require as the winter approaches worsted socks, and strong shoes which can be had at Pictou better than here.’

Sam was not satisfied with the educational progress of his brother John, fifteen years old, so McCulloch was given another charge. ‘The masters under whose care he has been heretofore,’ Sam explained, ‘have paid but little attention to his improvement and what he learnt at school he has forgot within the last year.…I wish him taught what I requested you to teach the other boys, and I hope within one year (the time I propose leaving him with you) that he will have made considerable improvement. ’ Sam’s uncertain grasp of grammar and punctuation at times revealed the limits of his own education; he often neglected to end sentences with full stops and to start sentences with capital letters, and his spelling could be erratic. But he wanted more schooling for his brothers, despite his businesslike doubts about the real value of learning Latin, and was willing to pay for a privilege he himself had not enjoyed.

Halifax in these years had a population of about 15,000. Seen from the water, it looked like a giant rectangle laid sideways on the slope of a hill: six major streets running parallel to the harbour, intersected at right angles by ten smaller cross streets. Two miles long by a half mile wide, Halifax was capped by a fortress called Citadel Hill and a prominent tower displaying the town clock. Ships, docks and warehouses were ranged thickly along the waterfront. Only Water Street, closest to the harbour, was paved; the other streets were often muddy or dusty, and buried in deep snow from December to March. These conditions, along with the steepness of the hill, made carriages impractical. People got about on foot or horseback. The houses, built to no particular pattern, were mostly wooden, of one storey, and unpainted.

High society was divided between a small gentry class and a massive military presence. The old settlers and the Loyalists, initially at odds, by now had intermarried and merged their interests. The Loyalists had brought money, energy, and a new assertiveness to the small town. The oligarchy that dominated Halifax consisted essentially of the children of those Loyalists. Allegiances to the mother country still ran deep, in both politics and culture. Newcomers were struck by the pervading Englishness of the place. ‘Nova Scotia approaches nearer, in most respects, to the customs and ideas most approved in England, than any other part of America,’ one British visitor noted. ‘The style of living, hours of entertainment, fashions, manners, are all English. Dress is fully as much attended to as in London.’

This Anglophilia was reinforced by British military power. Halifax was both a naval station and garrison town, its streets filled with soldiers and sailors. Three regiments lived in barracks on the north and south sides of Citadel Hill. Brunswick Street, running between the barracks, was littered with well-patronized grog shops, gambling dens and whorehouses. (The Cunards lived in a better section of Brunswick Street.) Returning to barracks at night, drunk and frisky, the soldiers and sailors would pick fights with each other and commit small vandalisms. Native Haligonians prudently stayed indoors, out of their way, at such times.

Military officers and the local oligarchy mingled at the Ionic-columned Province Building in the centre of town, in the middle of a square enclosed by an iron railing. It was easily the most impressive structure in Halifax, 140 feet long by 70 feet wide by 45 feet high, built to last of locally quarried ironstone. Here met the meshed institutions of Nova Scotian government. The English monarch appointed a governor for the province, who appointed a Council which could amend or reject any bill passed by the Assembly, which was elected by male Nova Scotians who owned houses or land. The Council also designated sheriffs, coroners and school commissioners and could review some judicial decisions. Occasional democratic pressures from below were, as yet, easily stifled.

In sum: Halifax was a small but quite diverse place, from the deliberating chambers of the Province Building to the nearby dives along Brunswick Street. For a young man on the make like Sam Cunard, it had some of the fluidity of a frontier town, unformed and open to enterprising newcomers. But political power was mostly appointive, beyond any popular control; individual leaders of the oligarchy, in general, came from more privileged backgrounds than Cunard’s. Henry H. Cogswell, Richard J. Uniacke and Thomas Chandler Haliburton were college-educated lawyers. Joseph Howe, the crusading editor of the Halifax Novascotian, was the son of a postmaster general and king’s printer. The father of the three Bliss brothers was a Harvard graduate who served as attorney general and chief justice of New Brunswick; the Blisses would pepper their letters with French aphorisms and Greek quotations, in the original Greek. The two Young brothers were literate, well-educated lawyers and politicians from Scotland. Moving in such civilized, professional company, Cunard must at times have felt intimidated and culturally inadequate.

His career nonetheless flourished. Just after the war, he obtained his first royal mail contract: a foreshadowing of his later transatlantic steamship line. Given his command of ships and shipping, and useful contacts among the military authorities in Halifax, he was chosen to carry the mail between Boston, Halifax, and St John’s, Newfoundland; occasionally his sailing packets also took letters all the way to Bermuda. The steady performance of his mail ships, year after year, gave him a reliable reputation with British authorities that would help clinch subsequent dealings. ‘I have always found the Government very liberal and reasonable, ’ he said later, ‘where the Contractor has endeavoured to fulfill his engagement I have never met with the least difficulty.’

After Abraham Cunard’s death early in 1824, Sam changed the name of his firm to Samuel Cunard & Company. The new name reflected the long-established reality. Sam took his brothers Edward and Joseph into the firm; his oldest brother, William, had recently died in a shipwreck. On formal occasions Sam now called himself Samuel Cunard, Esquire. The Cunard brothers built an imposing office and warehouse on Water Street, on one of the waterfront plots their father had bought back in the 1790s: a four-storey stone fortress that stretched 110 feet along the street, with a large arched doorway in the middle giving secured access to the wharves. From this solid base, the family engaged in shipping, shipowning, shipbuilding, whaling, timber, iron and coal mining, landowning, property management and banking. Most of these enterprises succeeded, but ships were always at the base of everything else.

In 1825 Samuel Cunard obtained another crucial connection to British imperial power. The quite English province of Nova Scotia thirsted for real tea, which at the time was produced only in China. Lacking a consistent supply of the genuine article, people had to resort to peppermint, cloves, or aniseed – all deemed poor substitutes. Cunard sailed to London to petition the controlling East India Company for his own tea agency. ‘Our pretensions are grounded upon our long residence in the Provinces,’ he wrote in one of his run-on sentences, ‘and a thorough knowledge of the Trade and People, we possess every convenience in Fireproof Warehouses and means to effect the intended object, we are ready to give such security in London…and should you think proper to appoint us to the Agency and management of the proposed Consignments and future business of the Hon. Company you may rely upon our zeal and attention thereto and we shall be happy to give such information’ – and so on. The besieged company granted him the agency.

The first tea ship arrived in Halifax a year later, smelling like a gigantic teapot, with 6517 chests from Canton. Customers snapped them up in a public sale at the Cunard warehouse. For the next thirty-five years, quarterly tea auctions were held there, typically with Sam as the auctioneer. The East India commissions became his most reliable source of income; at times he would use the gross revenues, in the short term, to finance other enterprises and then later remit the balances due. Cunard’s coveted tea shipments also strengthened his ascending position in the Halifax oligarchy.

The principal merchants in town persuaded him, briefly, to stand for political office. In the spring of 1826 he agreed to run for an Assembly seat. On the day appointed for the candidates to declare their intentions at an Assembly session, he met with his committee in the morning. Everything seemed in order. He would even make a rare public address. In the Assembly chamber, he stood up, faced the audience, and took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘I also had intended to have said a few words from the Hustings,’ he said, reading, ‘but recent considerations have induced me to alter my views.…I did not come forward to offer myself at the present Election of my own accord, but at the written request of the Merchants, and other respectable inhabitants. I had no ambitious views to gratify, no objects to attain, the good of the country was the sole consideration which induced me to assent to their request.’ And with that he withdrew his candidacy and sat down, having told no one in advance of his change of mind.

However startling to his supporters, this performance was quite in character. He invariably kept his own counsel, trusting and confiding in nobody outside his family. (‘I have always been in the habit,’ he once said, ‘of looking after my own business.’) A politician would have to make regular speeches, a prospect that quite terrified him. Aside from his inherent shyness in front of an audience, public speaking and thinking on his feet could expose the awkward gaps in his education and the real limits of his verbal powers. ‘His conduct is strange and has done him no good,’ noted the Halifax attorney William Blowers Bliss, as flabbergasted as anyone. Though Cunard had offered an implausible explanation, Bliss astutely guessed his actual reason for pulling out: ‘I believe the real cause to have been that he grew nervous and frightened and timidity got the better of his judgment.’

Cunard let his guard down, and relaxed, only at home. After the difficulties of his own childhood, and the inevitable uncertainties of a career in ships, and the watchful complexities of picking his way through the Halifax elite, he found a safe haven within his own expanding family circle. Sam and Susan had nine children in thirteen years. But Susan died in February 1828, at the age of thirty-two, a few days after the birth of her last child. A newspaper notice of her death – the main fragment of historical evidence about her – offered more than the usual conventional pieties: ‘Those only who witnessed how intimately blended, in her Character, were the mild unassuming virtues of domestic life, with an amiable disposition, sound judgement and religious principle, can appreciate the loss that has been sustained by an attached husband, a numerous family of young children, and a large connection of relatives and friends.’

Sam was forty years old when she died. At the time, it was not uncommon for a woman to die from the complications of childbirth, often after having had many babies. The widower then usually married again and produced more children, especially if he commanded the wealth to support a second family. Sam never remarried; he remained permanently ‘attached’ to his dead wife. Susan’s mother took over the raising of her grandchildren. Sam sent his two sons, Edward and William, to King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia, the favoured school for scions of the Halifax oligarchy. Eventually Edward, called Ned, became his father’s closest business confidant, the only associate he truly trusted with his private plans and ambitions. He travelled with his older daughters, who presided over his homes. His family circle maintained a high wall between himself and the outside world. (On his own deathbed, thirty-seven years after Susan’s death, Sam would doze and wake up to speak about many things. At one point, with his sons on hand, he awoke with tears in his eyes. ‘I have been dreaming about your dear mother,’ he said. ‘And a good woman she was.’)

In the early 1830s, Cunard took part in his first steamship venture, the Royal William, which became the first steam-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic from Canada to England. By its limited success and ultimate failure, this undertaking helped prepare him for his transatlantic steamship line.

The principal coastal ship traffic in eastern Canada ran northeasterly from Halifax, around the tip of Cape Breton Island, northwesterly through the Gulf of St Lawrence (perhaps stopping at Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick), and then southwesterly down the St Lawrence River to Quebec City and Montreal. It was an exceptionally dangerous course: whipped by strong, fickle winds and currents, studded with islands and land protrusions, and littered with ice and fog for much of the year. The river froze solid during the long winter. The run between Halifax and Quebec exacted a terrible annual toll in lost ships and men. Under sail, depending on the weather, the trip could take up to five weeks.

The Assembly of Lower Canada, which included Quebec, took steps towards adding steam power to the St Lawrence in the spring of 1825. For expertise they inevitably turned to the River Clyde in Scotland. Charles Wood of Port Glasgow (the son of John Wood, who had built Henry Bell’s Comet and other notable early steamboats) suggested a vessel of 500 tons and 100 horsepower, to cost between £10,000 and £12,000, and capable of running from Halifax to Quebec in a week or less. The Lower Canadian legislature offered a subsidy of £1500; the Assembly of Nova Scotia added another £750. In London, an ambitious prospectus was issued to raise £50,000 for the Halifax and Quebec Steam Boat Company. But the scheme attracted no additional support on either side of the Atlantic and went nowhere. ‘It does seem a stain upon our enterprise, ’ said the Novascotian newspaper of Halifax, ‘that upon the harbours or estuaries of this Province we have yet received no advantage from the most gigantic improvement of modern times – navigation by steam.’

Sam Cunard was always cautious about new ship technologies. In his trips to England and down the American coast, he had seen steamboats and acquired some sense of the current state of the art. He was characteristically waiting for others to make the initial mistakes. In the autumn of 1829 some men in Pictou, Nova Scotia, tried to interest him in a steamboat scheme. ‘We are entirely unacquainted with the cost of a Steam Boat,’ Cunard told them, ‘& should not like to embark in a business of which we are quite ignorant & must therefore decline taking any part in the one you propose getting up.’ But just a few months later, a local steam ferry of thirty horsepower started running from Halifax across the bay to Dartmouth. After overcoming initial problems caused by salt water in her boilers, the ferry gave quick, reliable service. Cunard could watch her puffing back and forth every day, through any wind and weather, and count the additional paying customers she attracted. He began to see possibilities in steam on water.

Early in 1830, the Assembly of Lower Canada doubled its steam offer to £3000, and the Nova Scotian legislature again added its £750. In Halifax, Cunard formed a committee to solicit stockholders in the renewed steamboat company. At a meeting in March he adroitly manoeuvred himself into local leadership of the undertaking. Flourishing a list of 169 people who had promised to buy shares, he proposed a resolution that each subscriber – whether for £500 or £25 – would have just one vote in the proceedings, ‘thus depriving the intelligent and enterprising merchant,’ one high roller later objected, ‘of the proper control over his large advances and placing it at the disposal of a number of small shareholders, in most instances entirely unacquainted with the nature of the business.’ After his resolution passed, the seventy-six subscribers on hand, mostly small investors, elected Cunard as Halifax agent for the steamboat company, granting him the power of general management and control of funds.

Awkwardly balanced between directors in Halifax and Quebec, the company proceeded to build a steamship. The contract went to George Black, a shipbuilder in Quebec City, and his merchant associate John Saxton Campbell. The designer and construction foreman was James Goudie, a local boy who had been sent to Scotland in his mid-teens to apprentice under a Clyde shipbuilder, William Simmons of Greenock. As an assistant foreman to Simmons, Goudie had worked on four steamboats similar to the one he now laid out in Quebec. He had brought the plans back from Scotland in the summer of 1830. ‘As I had the drawings and the form of the ship, at that time a novelty in construction,’ Goudie later recalled, ‘it devolved upon me to lay off and expand the draft to its full dimensions on the floor of the loft, where I made several alterations in the lines as improvements. Mr. Black, though the builder and contractor, was in duty bound to follow my instructions, as I understood it.’ When the keel was laid in September, young Goudie was still three months shy of his twenty-first birthday.

The Royal William, named after the reigning king of England, was a large steamship for the time, 160 feet long and 44 feet wide overall, with three masts in a schooner rig. The upper strakes of the hull were flared out to contain and protect the paddle wheels, perhaps with the St Lawrence River’s ice in mind; this bulging gave the vessel an inflated gross capacity of 1370 tons. After being launched in the spring of 1831, she was towed down to Montreal and fitted with a two-cylinder engine of 200 horsepower by Bennet and Henderson. (John Bennet, that firm’s senior partner, had apprenticed at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham.) The crankshafts were forged by Robert Napier at his Camlachie works in Glasgow. Goudie, Black, Campbell and Bennet were all of Scots background. The boat’s designs came from Scotland, as did her crankshafts. Previous accounts have neglected this point: the Royal William was actually a Scottish steamship, built and financed in Canada.

In August she left Quebec on her maiden voyage, carrying twenty cabin passengers (who paid six pounds, five shillings apiece, including meals and a berth), seventy in steerage, some freight, and 120 tons of coal. After stopping in New Brunswick, she reached Halifax in six and a half days from Quebec. ‘Her beautiful fast sailing appearance,’ noted the Acadian Recorder, ‘the powerful and graceful manner in which her paddles served to pace along, and the admirable command which her helmsman had over her, afforded a triumphant specimen of what steam ships are.’ Sam Cunard visited her repeatedly, and no doubt proudly, asking questions and taking notes about her speed, coal consumption and sailing qualities. The Royal William made two more round-trips that year before ice closed the river. The proprietors thought about sending her to England for the winter, to ply a coastal route there and earn back more of their investments, but instead she was laid up at Quebec.

She finished her first season amid anaemic receipts, and complaints about excessive charges for passengers and freight that scared business away. ‘While at this port thousands of barrels, and scores of passengers, have been landing from Quebec and Halifax,’ a New Brunswick newspaper asked, ‘why has the Royal William been passing our wharves in want of both: as if by the splashing of her paddles, and the smoke of her furnace, she could forever bedim the vigilant eye of an interested public.’ At the start of the 1832 season, the Royal William offered sharply reduced rates in order to draw more customers – but then ran into a cholera epidemic. She made only one trip to Halifax that year, was quarantined, and returned to Quebec after almost two months.

Over the winter, her disappointed owners fell to angry squabbling among themselves. The Quebec stockholders accused Sam Cunard of claiming too large a fee for his services and of not working in harmony with the company. Cunard in turn charged the Quebec authorities with mistreating the Royal William during the previous season. ‘She was neglected in the Winter,’ he maintained, ‘and the frost burst the Pipes & otherwise injured the Machinery by which means a great expense was incurred and the sailing of the Boat delayed until the 15th June whereas she should have made two or three trips before that period – this might have been guarded against by a little care on the part of the committee and having an agent in pay they can have no excuse for the neglect.’ The company was foundering in red ink and feuding leadership. The cholera epidemic of 1832, blamed ever since for the collapse of the enterprise, had merely delivered the final, mortal blow.