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

In the spring of 1833 the Royal William was sold at a sheriff’s auction in Montreal for £5000 – some £11,000 less than her initial cost only two years earlier. Her new owners tried a coastal voyage down to Boston and back, and then sent her off to England to be sold again. No steamship had ever tried to cross the North Atlantic from Canada to Europe; it was a voyage now conceived in financial desperation. She left Nova Scotia on 18 August 1833, with just seven bold passengers, 324 tons of coal, and a cargo of six spars, one box, one trunk, some produce, household furniture, a box of stuffed birds and a harp.

It was a perilous trip. ‘We were very deeply laden with coal,’ the captain, John McDougall, said later, ‘deeper in fact than I would ever attempt crossing the Atlantic with her again.’ On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a gale knocked off the top of the foremast and disabled one of the engine’s cylinders. For a time they seemed to be sinking. But they ploughed ahead on the remaining cylinder, stopping the engine every fourth day to spend twenty-four hours cleaning seawater deposits from the leaky boilers. They proceeded under sail when the engine was down. After nineteen days they limped into Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, for repairs and a cosmetic paint job. They went on to London, where the Royal William was sold for £10,000 to the Portuguese government.

From this whole unlucky episode, Sam Cunard could draw two conclusions. Steamship technology did not, as yet, allow for routine, safe, profitable passages across the Atlantic – or even, for that matter, between Halifax and Quebec. And if he ever got involved in another steamship venture, he would need to run his own show, without having to clear his decisions through ranks of meddling associates. The Royal William experience ultimately reinforced his carefully guarded, self-contained ways.

The failure of his first steamship did Cunard no immediate harm in Halifax; the blame could be shifted elsewhere. Now entering middle age, he was reaching the peak of his local career. In the autumn of 1830, the governor of Nova Scotia had appointed him to the Council, the twelve-man body that served as the upper chamber of the Assembly. His appointment symbolized inclusion at the highest level of the Halifax elite. ‘We sincerely hope that the same liberal and expansive views which have distinguished Mr. Cunard as a merchant,’ Joe Howe declared in his Novascotian, ‘may be observable in his legislative character. He is wealthy and influential – he need fear no man, nor follow blindly any body of men; and we trust that he will not disappoint the hopes which many entertain.’ He served on the Council for ten years, often displeasing the reformers.

On a social and cultural level, the entrenched Halifax oligarchs still saw him as slightly alien, not quite a peer. In 1831 the lawyer Lewis Bliss urged his brother Henry, who lived in London, to welcome Cunard on his next trip to England. Lewis admitted he did not know Cunard intimately, having dined at his home only once. ‘I think he may be called a gentlemanly man,’ Bliss ventured, ‘– very polished he cannot be expected to be having I believe received rather a scanty education, and moved for the early part of his life not so much in the higher circles now thrown open to him.’ Yet Bliss guessed that Cunard owned, in whole or part, more than thirty ships, and probably cleared £2000 a year from his East India Company tea agency alone: the kind of wealth and imperial connections that could almost compensate for an ungentlemanly background. ‘He is the most liberal as well as the most extensively engaged in business of all our Merchants,’ wrote Bliss. ‘He certainly is mild & pleasant in his manners – of an apparently equal temper, and possesses a gentle and not inharmonious voice – in short I look on him as a very good kind of man, and if not very pleasant & agreeable very far from the reverse.’ Furthermore, Cunard’s steady rise from humble origins to heady eminence had not caused any rude behaviour. ‘He may be said to be modest – free from pride & affectation, and I think ambition, or if ambitious, not manifesting it in his conduct at all turns & on all occasions.’

Though his careful manners concealed it, he in fact remained ferociously ambitious. During the 1830s he became a resident director of the Bank of British North America, served as the local agent of the London-based General Mining Association (in charge of coal mines in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island), and bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of timber and rental land on Prince Edward Island – all before the most ambitious act of his life. The Royal William did not entirely kill his interest in steam navigation, as he ran more modest steamboats in the local coastal traffic. At times he took extravagant risks, skirting financial ruin by moving fluid capital from one enterprise to launch yet another. Most of his undertakings, though, were apparently protected by the famous Cunard luck. On one occasion late in 1832, Haligonians waited anxiously for another overdue vessel to arrive. ‘As it is one of Cunard’s ships,’ William Blowers Bliss mused, ‘I suppose she will get in at last, he is too lucky to lose her unless she be well insured.’

It was not only luck, of course. Nor, as far as Cunard was concerned, was it the guiding hand of Providence. In his letters he would make passing religious references. ‘If it should please God that we should all live to see the next year,’ he might write, ‘…if I should be spared I hope I may yet be useful to our concern.’ But this was just obeisance to an expected form, perhaps inserted simply to please a pious correspondent. Cunard had no real religious convictions. On his deathbed, when his son Ned suggested the attention of a clergyman, Sam declared ‘that he did not feel and admit and believe’ – a dying confession that told the stark if unwanted truth.

What he really believed in was himself, the hard, driving, ruthless, tireless engine at the core of his being. Over his lifetime, he lived out the story so beloved by minor novelists of the nineteenth century: the poor boy from the provinces who worked hard, curbed his vices, hoped for the best and took optimistic chances, came to the big city and made his deserving way, and finally seized the most coveted material rewards his society offered. He bridged several distinct eras, from a late-eighteenth-century colonial frontier to high Victorian London. Across these steadily more progressive times, Cunard was a quite modern personality, focused intensely and narrowly on the ongoing prosperity of his enterprises. He prudently adopted new technologies when they seemed useful, measuring his success by profits and numbers that he could see and weigh and count. He trusted nothing but his immediate family and his own unquenchable ambitions.

4. Ships as Engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The dream of starting a transatlantic steamship line depended in equal measure on enterprise and engineering, or money and machinery. Engineering had to come first. Once it seemed that engines, boilers and ships had been improved enough to bear the overpowering demands of the North Atlantic Ocean, moneyed investors might come forth to launch the enterprise. Almost nothing in history is truly inevitable; any major event or turning point could have turned out quite differently if shaded by other twists of luck or contingency. But given the ongoing progress in steamship technology, the swelling commercial and political pressures for faster, surer links between Europe and America, and many interested parties on both sides of the ocean ready to invest in any plausible scheme, transatlantic steam seemed virtually certain. The only lingering questions were how soon and by whom. ‘Indeed, all things considered, ’ said the Mechanics’ Magazine of London in 1837, ‘the strangest thing about the matter is, that the object should not have been effected many years ago.’

Ocean steamships became the largest, most complicated machines yet devised. As such, they drew on engineering developments in many different fields. British engineering in general was now approaching its nineteenth-century zenith, a dazzling peak moment of practical imagination, commercial success and global impact. British engineers were, for the time being, the best in the world. They had started the first Industrial Revolution and then provided the models for its cloning in Europe and North America. Great Britain was producing far more coal, iron, machinery and technological optimism than any other country. The earliest successful Atlantic steamships could not have come from anywhere else.

Engineering as an exact science was barely a century old. It had originated in France, before the advent of the steam engine, as a real-world application of the Age of Reason. The term ‘engineer’ traditionally meant someone who built only war machines and fortifications; ‘civil engineering’ thus came to mean similar pursuits carried out in peacetime. Influenced by then-current philosophical emphases on rationalist modes of thought, French engineers adapted new ideals of mathematical precision, measurability and experimentation to their practical building tasks. Such pioneers as Pierre Bouguer and Charles Augustin Coulomb invented the fields of structural analysis, applied mechanics and hydraulics. The first engineering schools appeared in eighteenth-century France and long remained the most exacting such institutions in the world.

In Great Britain, engineering at the outset was more intuitive and direct, neither assisted nor impeded by much conscious philosophical baggage. The first British civil engineers – John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, John Rennie – mainly worked with the traditional materials of wood, stone and masonry to build improved roads, bridges and harbours. In particular, they constructed canals, the prevailing transportation fad during the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. A canal, a water medium, had to remain as level as possible throughout its course. That meant rearranging the natural environment to an unprecedented degree: building up embankments, running high viaducts across valleys, bridging rivers, cutting down the smaller hills, and tunnelling through larger ones. The Sapperton Tunnel on the Thames and Severn Canal, finished in 1789, was over two miles long – an amazing feat at the time. Humans were imposing their will on nature as never before, for all to see, and by their success were encouraged to entertain yet more Promethean ambitions for themselves. As civil engineering matured, it shed its original honest-workman’s aura, became a more socially acceptable career, and professionalized itself. The Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818, mainly by canal men. ‘Civil Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man,’ explained an ICE leader. ‘The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic.’

The next generation of British engineers typically adopted newer building materials and power, especially iron, coal and steam engines. The line between the two groups was not quite that stark; Telford and Rennie, from the first generation, had used cast iron in their bridges as early as the 1790s. The real demarcation came down to function. The founding civil engineers built objects that did not move. The later mechanical engineers, as they were called, built machines that snorted and clanked across the landscape. One was best known for canals and bridges, the other for railways and steam power. Many individuals continued to work at every type of engineering. But with the narrowing of newer specializations, and the relentless deepening of requisite knowledge in any given field, the civils and mechanicals diverged ever more sharply, sometimes feuding with each other. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, started in 1846 by railway men, gave this hardening division an organized boundary.

Most of the early British engineers, both civil and mechanical, came from Scotland and northern England. Telford and Rennie were Scotsmen who learned their crafts in Edinburgh, then migrated south to find work. Henry Maudslay, a noted steam engine builder and inventor of machine tools, was from a Lancashire family outside Liverpool. He grew up in his father’s carpentry shop but preferred working with iron, so he switched to blacksmithing. Wielding his hammer, file and chisel, he was a true artist, deft and inventive, utterly in his element. He moved to London and opened a workshop that became famous for its marine steam engines and general excellence. James Nasmyth, one of his many apprentices who went on to notable engineering careers, fondly recalled his first impression of Maudslay’s shop at Lambeth in 1829: ‘the beautiful machine tools, the silent smooth whirl of the machinery, the active movements of the men, the excellent quality of the work in progress, and the admirable order and management that pervaded the whole establishment.’ Maudslay stressed simplicity and economy to his assistants, demonstrating the lesson by turning a rough piece of metal into a smooth, plane surface with just a few precise strokes of his file.

Civil and mechanical engineers jointly created their most significant early achievement, the steam railway. Mining operations had already produced the first small steam locomotives and had demonstrated the unmatchable rolling efficiency of iron wheels on iron tracks. Because the earliest railway locomotives lacked much pulling or braking power, the right-of-way had to avoid steep hills; that meant borrowing from the canal builders’ levelling techniques for tunnels, viaducts, embankments and cuttings. Mail coaches and coastal steamboat lines had shown the advantages of providing public transportation on set timetables at fixed fees. All these separate strands came together in tracks and trains. Because the Industrial Revolution had arrived so early in Britain, it happened there long before the railway – a sequence not repeated anywhere else. The iron horse then exploded on a society already well industrialized, quickly transforming everyday life in ways that steam-powered mines, mills and factories had not touched.

George Stephenson, the seminal British railway pioneer, was an illiterate engine mechanic born near Newcastle. He always spoke with a thick Northumbrian accent barely intelligible to southerners. After a delayed education, Stephenson built the initial two railways in England, the Stockton and Darlington (1825) and the Liverpool and Manchester (1830), designing the locomotives and rolling stock as well as laying down the track and its associated structures. The Liverpool and Manchester, the first line to run between major cities, was expected mainly to carry freight such as coal, cotton and timber between the port on the Mersey and the booming inland factory city. But passengers came forth in surprising numbers, so Stephenson started offering them fast trains on a regular schedule.

What the customers were buying was speed, achieved with a smoothness and consistency previously unknown. It seemed extraordinary that a businessman could leave Liverpool in the morning, travel thirty-three miles and spend his long workday in Manchester, and still return home by that night in reasonable fettle. A mail coach might average only about ten quite jostling miles an hour. A fast horse and rider at full gallop could reach up to forty miles an hour, but only in brief spurts, and with an exhausting clatter and commotion. Railway engines would match a galloping horse and maintain that speed serenely for hours, chuffing along in a steady rhythm with no apparent strain.

In the summer of 1830, the actress Fanny Kemble – fresh from her first great triumphs on the London stage – took an excited ride on a Liverpool and Manchester locomotive, with Stephenson himself driving. She felt inclined to pat the small iron horse, which consisted of just a boiler, stove, engine and gleaming steel pistons, a platform, bench, coals and a barrel of water. ‘How strange it seemed,’ she noted, ‘to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace.’ No horse, no sail; how did it move? They glided easily through cuttings, across bridges and a viaduct, along raised embankments, and over a swamp. Stephenson described the construction of his locomotive, which Kemble thought she understood (‘His way of explaining himself is peculiar, but very striking’). After taking on more water, he let out the throttle, pushing the engine to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour. Sensing the dramatic moment, Kemble stood up, took off her bonnet, and drank it in. The onrushing air pushed against her, forcing her eyelids down. It felt like flying, so fast and yet so smooth and free. ‘When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet, strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear.’

Fanny Kemble’s joyful initiation into railbound flight symbolized a turning point in material history. The triumphs of engineering now hooked the nineteenth century on an ongoing expectation of constant, unsatisfied acceleration: speed and progress, reaching into every area of life, ever faster, and regardless of the dangers. ‘Verily is ours the age for invention,’ said the Illustrated London News in 1842. It was in many ways a Faustian contract, balanced uncertainly between gains and losses. Critics of modernity such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris played a steady minor-keyed threnody in the background as Victorian progress boomed inexorably along. A few dissenting engineers did express timid misgivings about such headlong haste, and about the harrowing, infernal landscape of the Black Country of coal and iron mines in the industrial Midlands. But most practitioners, civils and mechanicals alike, shrugged off such criticisms. ‘If we would credit these imbecile philosophers, the introduction of every machine is an injury rather than a benefit,’ one engineer bristled. ‘There can be no greater fallacy than this.’

Most engineers apparently believed their work would improve humankind – lightening its labour, speeding and easing travel, making life more comfortable and abundant. In any case, they devoted themselves to engineering for the more basic reason that they so enjoyed their craft. Engineers worked very hard, to the point in many cases of wearing themselves out at a premature age. R. A. Buchanan, the eminent historian of Victorian engineering, has suggested that they toiled such long hours mainly because they preferred it to any other possible activity. They didn’t socialize much, avoided religious and political strifes, and lived simply and quietly. In 1838 a young railway engineer, Daniel Gooch, made an expected appearance at a dinner party thrown by his boss’s family – but quickly escaped. ‘I believe I did succeed in getting as far as the staircase,’ he scolded himself in his diary, ‘and left it disgusted with London parties, making a note in my memorandum-book never to go to another.’

Nestled into their workshops, pondering some engineering puzzle of agreeable difficulty, they found their truest happiness in making up a brand-new world. Henry Maudslay took obvious, extravagant pleasure in manipulating his tools, loving the work for its own sake as much as for its applied uses. It called on all the keenest faculties of mind, eye and hand. To plan their projects, engineers made careful drawings and crafted detailed models. ‘Drawing is the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words,’ James Nasmyth insisted. ‘The language of the tongue is often used to disguise our thoughts, whereas the language of the pencil is clear and explicit.’ Fondling their raw materials on a workbench, shaping and pounding and drilling, the engineers absorbed cues and knowledge directly through their fingertips. Inspiration flowed from the head and eyes out through the hands to the work, and then back again, in a seamless, tactile circuit of material creation. At their peaks, they felt the exultation of artists.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a prime inventive force behind the three most innovative ocean steamships built before 1870. Yet he spent most of his career on other projects ashore; he was not a naval architect or shipbuilder or any sort of marine engineer. As a landlubber, prone to seasickness, he never even took a major ocean voyage until the last year of his life. His steamships seem still more imposing as the off-hand products of a very busy engineer usually focused in other directions. During his lifetime of great fame and achievement, brunel was often called a genius for the crunching power, range and originality of his mind. More successfully than any of his contemporaries, he straddled the widening split between civil and mechanical engineering, resisting the modernist specializing trend. He deplored ‘the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority’, as he put it, ‘this tendency to legislate and to rule, which is the “fashion” of the day’ No strict categories or conventions could ever contain him.

He made his first reputation as the engineer to the Great Western Railway. brunel surveyed its route – a winding course that ran 117 miles west from London to the port city of Bristol – and then planned every detail of its construction, from the locomotives and rolling stock down to the lamp-posts and stations. ‘No one can fill up the details,’ he explained. ‘I am obliged to do all myself.’ He made lavish use of all the canal builders’ methods for remaking a resistant landscape, so levelling the grade that the line was known as ‘brunel’s billiard table’. The Box Tunnel east of Bath ran for 1.8 miles through an insurmountable hill, much of it solid rock. The digging and blasting on this single project engaged up to 4000 workmen and 300 horses at a time, consumed a weekly ton of gunpowder and ton of candles, and killed nearly 100 men in five years. On completion it was the longest railway tunnel in the world. (The rising sun is said to shine clear through the tunnel on one day of the year, 9 April, brunel’s birthday. Given the usual spring weather in southwest England, this intriguing legend can seldom be tested, which may explain its survival.)

Queen Victoria chose the Great Western for her first trip by railway. In June 1842, returning to London from a sojourn at Windsor Castle, she and Prince Albert boarded a special train at Slough. The royal party, in six carriages, was greeted at the station by the Great Western’s top brass, and brunel personally took charge of the locomotive. The train reached Paddington Station in twenty-five fast minutes. Victoria and Albert alighted on a crimson carpet that stretched across the platform, and were cheered by crowds at the station and along the avenue outside. ‘Free from dust and crowd and heat,’ the queen noted of her railway baptism, ‘and I am quite charmed with it.’ A year later, Albert flew from Bristol to London in just over two hours, averaging a breathtaking fifty-seven miles an hour. Nothing could have better advertised the Great Western Railway – and its chief engineer.

brunel became a celebrity, an engineering superstar at a time when the public works of engineers were remaking everyday life in large, visible ways and sparking the popular imagination as never before. ‘Even to shake hands with one so remarkable,’ an acquaintance later wrote of meeting brunel, ‘was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime.’ He loved any spotlight, courting it and capering in it, presenting himself in dramatic ways. He was a small man, about five feet four inches tall, with an olive complexion and blazing dark eyes under a strong brow. He moved about quickly under clouds of cigar smoke, vital and vigorous, gesturing expansively with his hands as he spoke. brunel worked killing hours, even by engineering standards, but maintained a boyishly playful disposition, fond of jokes and pranks. Regardless of any contrary fashions, he wore a tall, cylindrical silk hat everywhere, even in his own travelling carriage. He explained, perhaps seriously, that it would protect his head from any blow by collapsing before the skull was struck. ‘It is at once warm and airy,’ he elaborated, ‘and you cannot improve upon it.’ (It also made him look taller.)