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

By then both Scottish and English engineers had settled on the side-lever engine as the best mechanism for an ocean steamship. Derived from Watt’s old overhead beam engine, it placed the main weight of the power source at the bottom of the ship, lowering its centre of gravity to limit rolling and pitching in heavy seas. A vertical engine cylinder drove a horizontal beam pivoted in the middle, with tandem connecting rods at its ends running downward to side levers, which drove a crank on the paddle shaft to turn the paddles. It was complicated and inefficient, moving massive weights up and down, with each stroke coming to a dead stop and then reversing. The bulky rods and levers added weight and took up precious cargo space. But the various parts were easily accessible and well balanced, minimizing friction and strain and needing less lubrication than other engine types. The piston’s long stroke made full use of steam in the cylinder. Confined to the ship’s closed hold, it was protected from foul weather and did not interfere with sailors moving about on the deck. Napier changed the framing from cast to wrought iron, making it lighter and stronger. The side-lever engine was considered exceptionally rugged and reliable, important qualities for crossing 3000 miles of ocean.

The earliest marine boilers were kettle types, simply a drum of water heated by an external fire. Around 1830, Maudslay and others introduced a variation on the locomotive boiler, featuring an internal furnace that expelled its exhaust gases through long, narrow flues, making fuller use of the heat to produce more steam. But steamship boilers remained primitive and inconsistent, box-shaped and riddled with fragile seams. Each engine builder made his own boilers, using construction methods and metals of unpredictable quality. No one as yet dared push a seagoing boiler beyond a modest pressure of about five pounds per square inch. Lower pressure held down horsepower and made the engine use more coal, which limited the ship’s range and cargo capacity. More than any other technical factor, the state of boiler technology was keeping steamships off the Atlantic.

Several steamers had already crossed the ocean, but not under continuous power or as part of a regularly scheduled service. The American vessel Savannah went from the United States to England in 1819, steaming only for about eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day passage. Over the next fourteen years, at least five other steamships made an Atlantic crossing, down to the Scottish-Canadian Royal William in 1833, Samuel Cunard’s first venture into steam navigation. None of these ships could carry enough fuel to steam all the way. In any case, the salt water’s scaly deposits in the boilers had to be blown off or laboriously chipped out with hammer and chisel at frequent intervals; that meant stopping the engine for up to a day and proceeding under sail until the puny boilers could be cleaned, refilled, and get up steam again.

One possible solution to these fuel and boiler limitations was to reduce the route across the ocean. The shortest great circle course between Europe and North America ran just 1900 miles between Valentia, at the southwestern tip of Ireland, to St John’s, Newfoundland. The run from there to Halifax brought the total to 2400 miles. In 1824 a group in London under Maurice Fitzgerald, the knight of Kerry – an Irish statesman and member of Parliament – launched the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company to carry traffic from London to Valentia to Halifax to New York. The company included Alexander Nimmo, a government civil engineer who was building piers and harbours along the Irish coast, and other men of influence. They planned steamships of 1000 tons, almost twice the size of any vessel then afloat. In the autumn of 1825, American newspapers declared it ‘almost certain’ that the service would start in the following spring. But it never did. In these years, just before the railway, the journey by coach and steamboat from London to Valentia took fifty hours, and forty hours from Liverpool. The whole trip would have demanded at least four changes of conveyance, with the usual uncertainties of baggage and schedules, to reach New York. It was much easier just to take one of the swift sailing packet lines the whole way from London or Liverpool. The Valentia company disappeared, though the general idea was periodically revived.

Junius Smith’s protracted crusade for an Atlantic steamship line began with an interminable fifty-four-day sailing voyage from England to New York in the autumn of 1832. He was then fifty-two years old, a Connecticut Yankee and Yale graduate who had lived in London since 1805, prospering as a merchant. Dawdling across the Atlantic for almost two months, Smith had plenty of time to ponder an alternative means of ocean travel. In his innocence of steamship technology, he conceived a line of four steaming packets, to cost £30,000 each and make the hard westbound run from Portsmouth to New York in just twelve or thirteen days. ‘I shall not relinquish this project,’ he vowed, ‘unless I find it absolutely impracticable.’ For two years, nobody he contacted in London or New York expressed any flicker of interest. Smith kept trying, virtually alone. ‘The patience and labor of forming a company in London is beyond all that you can imagine,’ he wrote to an associate in New York. ‘It is the worst place in the whole world to bring out a new thing, the best when it is done… All the old sailing interest of course is against me.’

The project became credible when Smith extended his search for supporters to northern England. Macgregor Laird, from a Scottish shipbuilding family that had moved down to Liverpool, became the secretary of Smith’s projected company. He brought acutely needed technical expertise and steamship contacts to the enterprise. They planned four ships of 1200 tons and 300 horsepower, to make the trip from London (and now Liverpool as well) to New York in fifteen days on average. After The Times announced the scheme in November 1835, over £1 million in stock was subscribed – though not actually paid up – in a few weeks. Many English investors, scenting any reasonable plan, were ready for transatlantic steam. ‘Job’s patience is much celebrated,’ Smith remarked, ‘but I don’t think that he ever undertook…to establish a steam company.’

Meantime brunel and his Bristol associates were getting ready to build their own Atlantic steamship, the Great Western, starting out a few months behind Smith and Laird. brunel decided on the size of the engine and picked its builder. He went through the motions of a careful search, taking tenders from three firms. But given his family’s intimate ties to Maudslay over four decades, the five years that Thomas Guppy had spent there as a young engineer, the company’s long experience in making powerful marine engines, and Joshua Field’s eminence as an engineer, the contract could have gone nowhere else. The Maudslay firm agreed to build a two-cylinder side-lever engine of 400 horsepower. For this special project, with its high and public stakes, Field designed a system of engine cams that improved steam economy – useful for the broad Atlantic – and invented new, more efficient double-storey boilers. brunel occasionally dropped by the Maudslay works at Lambeth, checking on the engine’s progress, and he mediated squabbles between Claxton and the firm’s management about bills and payments. ‘There are but few good Engine builders,’ he reminded Claxton, ‘and it will not be prudent to quarrel with the principal one.’

brunel’s role in the ship herself has been exaggerated. He came to the project with no shipbuilding experience and throughout its construction was intensely preoccupied with the Great Western Railway. Claxton and Patterson, the real ship men, had already recommended a very large vessel, and Patterson designed the hull and fittings with just occasional advice from the others. brunel, drawing on his knowledge of bridge stresses and bracings, did recommend adding to the ship’s longitudinal strength with extra iron bolts and trusses. (A longer ship, so the logic went, would need additional strength when suspended from the bow and stern between two high ocean waves.) brunel wanted to make the ship 400 to 500 tons larger, but Patterson doubted her stability at that size, so she was kept to 1320 tons. brunel and Guppy, his fellow landlubber, urged fitting larger cabin windows at the stern for more light and air, as in drawing-room windows ashore. Claxton ‘took the liberty of reminding them’, he recalled, ‘that there was water outside which was sometimes very uneven in its surface, and unlike the generality of lawns; and strange as it may appear, Mr. Patterson, their builder, agreed.’ brunel played a vital part in creating the Great Western, but no more than Claxton, Patterson and Field did. Most accounts ever since have slighted their contributions in favour of their more famous colleague.

In London and Liverpool, the rival steamship project of Junius Smith was splintering into sniping factions. Instead of four ships at once, they had pulled back and decided to build a single enormous vessel of 1800 tons. As an apparent compromise, the construction of the British Queen was split between the Thames and the Clyde. The shipbuilding contract went to the London firm of Curling and Young. Macgregor Laird wanted his friend and fellow Scotsman Robert Napier to make the engine, but Napier’s bid of £20,000 was rejected, presumably by the London faction – a fatal error. Another Clyde engine builder, Claude Girdwood of Greenock, got the job instead at a lesser price. ‘The steamer is going forward in all its branches,’ Smith noted in March 1837. ‘I look back with amazement and see how I was guided by Providence in this thing.’ A few months later, though, Girdwood went bankrupt, and no other builder would complete his unfinished engine. In August, Napier – no doubt with a certain grim satisfaction – agreed to build another engine, of 420 horsepower, for £21,000: more than his spurned offer of a year earlier. This long delay let the Great Western company pull ahead in the race to steam across the Atlantic.

By the spring of 1838, after more than two years of planning and building, the Great Western was ready. At that moment she was, as designed, the biggest and most up-to-date steamship in the world. Most of the technical improvements came from Joshua Field. His version of a spray condenser, which converted some of the engine’s used steam back into fresh water, limited scale deposits enough to let the boilers fire continuously across the ocean. Along with his innovative engine cams and double-storey boilers, Field had addressed the besetting inefficiency of paddle wheels: the pointless thrashings up and down as the paddles entered and left the water. Borrowing from the geometric figure of the cycloid (the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line), Field added three staggered boards to each paddle, stepped in from the circumference towards the hub so that each section entered the water at the same place in immediate succession. This ‘cycloidal wheel’ was supposed to reduce both the initial downward slap of a paddle on the water and the heaving motion at the other end of the immersion, as it allowed the paddle to clear and shed the water more smoothly. From boilers to paddles, the Great Western was engineered specifically for service on the North Atlantic.

The overall dimensions of her wooden hull, 236 feet long and 35 feet wide, didn’t make her look much different from other large ships of the day. ‘Her size, when seen by herself, does not appear so great as it really is,’ one visitor noticed, ‘and it is only when on board, or seen alongside other vessels, whose size is known, that her magnitude is appreciated.’ The black-painted hull of the Great Western presented a flaring clipper bow with a figurehead of Neptune holding a gilded trident. The deck was dominated by four low masts, one looming black smokestack, and two elevated bridges that linked the paddle boxes. A double wheel on a circular platform at the stern allowed two (or more) sailors to muscle her rudder and steer the vessel. Three structures on the deck enclosed a forecabin 46 feet long, the top of the engine room at midship, and the 75-foot main saloon at the rear, the showplace of the ship.

The saloon offered a seagoing opulence and high-ceilinged airiness matched, at the time, only by Edward Knight Collins’s Dramatic Line of American sailing packets. The ornamental work was contracted out to Frederick Crace of Wigmore Street and the Messrs Jackson of Rathbone Place, two noted London decorating firms. In early Victorian style, they festooned the saloon with columns that imitated palm trees and large pier glasses that suggested Dresden china, and they painted the walls and ceiling in warm, delicate colours with gold highlights. Edward Thomas Parris, the historical painter to the queen, contributed door panels five feet high that presented vignettes across a carnival of cultures: rural scenery and farming, music, interior views and landscapes, sports and amusements, and the arts and sciences, all in the rococo manner of Louis XV. The main staircase, to the cabins below, had a bronzed and gilded ornamental railing, with woodwork painted in imitation oak. The small cabins accommodated up to 128 passengers and twenty servants. Regardless of brunel’s relative share in her creation, the Great Western had emerged as a recognizable brunel product: made of the finest materials and newest engineering, extravagant and original, truly the Great Western Railway at sea. (One impressed observer inevitably called her a ‘floating palace’.)

Engined and finished in London, on 31 March she left Blackwall for Bristol, whence she would embark on her maiden voyage to New York. She steamed in large majesty down the Thames to the English Channel, the engine pumping easily with contained power, black coal smoke pouring from the stack. brunel and Claxton were aboard, watching and approving. Everything seemed in fine order on this shakedown cruise – until a serious fire broke out in the engine room. The felt insulation around the boilers, installed to improve steam efficiencies and keep the room temperature tolerable for the stokers, had ignited from the heat of the pipes, and the fire was quickly spread by oil paint and gas to the wooden beams and deck overhead. The flames licked as high as the top of the smokestack, holding back attempts to reach into the engine room. Claxton took a leather hose down to the fore-hatch and from there poured water on the fire. brunel started down to help him, lost his footing on the burned rung of a ladder, fell heavily on top of Claxton, and lay unconscious, facedown in a puddle of water. (It recalled his accident in the Thames Tunnel ten years earlier: nearly killed by his own engineering project.) Claxton saved his life by breaking his fall, pulling him out of the puddle, and calling for a rope. brunel was hauled up on deck, suffering from a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg.

The fire burned on. The commander, Lieutenant James Hosken of the Royal Navy, thought about running out the lifeboats and taking off passengers, but he instead beached the Great Western on a flat riverbank, where she sat upright on her bottom. Men finally broke through the deck into the engine room and put out the flames. Refloated on the next high tide, surprisingly undamaged except for the burned felt and some charred wood, the ship proceeded to Bristol. After three days, brunel felt well enough to dictate a long letter to Claxton about the generally satisfactory performance of the ship and her engine, hardly mentioning his injuries. ‘I hope the Vessel will be a long way on her Voyage to New York,’ he wrote, ‘before I could be in a state to go onboard again.’

The fire must have pleased Junius Smith. Nursing an exalted opinion of his own historical significance, he liked to call himself ‘the father of Atlantic steam navigation’. Smith believed that he alone owned the very concept of a transatlantic steamship. He had started his company before the Bristol group got under way, and now, with the long-delayed British Queen not even launched yet, he could not bear in frustration and defeat to let the Great Western beat him across the ocean. So Smith and Macgregor Laird chartered the Sirius, a well-regarded channel steamer of only 700 tons, loaded her down with fuel, and sent her on a risky, shortened passage to New York from Cork, on the southern coast of Ireland. (Starting from Cork knocked a day’s sailing off the course to America from Bristol.) The voyage of the Sirius was just a heedless, dangerous publicity stunt, a desperate gambit by sore losers, and hardly worth the historical attention it has received ever since.

The Great Western left Bristol for New York as scheduled on 8 April, four days behind the Sirius. The first Atlantic steamship race, contrived and unequal, was under way. brunel had provided Hosken with an engraved Mercator-projection chart of his great circle route, marked with bearings and soundings, to help keep the ship on the fastest course. The Great Western carried only seven passengers at thirty-five guineas (about thirty-seven pounds) apiece; fifty additional passengers had intended to go but were scared away by the fire. These seven brave pioneers in transatlantic steaming were amply serviced by fifty-seven crew members, including twenty-four seamen above deck and fifteen sweating coal stokers below. During the entire voyage, the engine was only stopped three times, briefly, for minor adjustments and to take soundings on the Newfoundland Banks. That meant little rest for the stokers. They struggled to bring coal by basket and wheelbarrow from holds at the bow and stern, where the ship’s pitching and rolling motions were exaggerated. The stokers complained; Captain Hosken warned them to obey the chief engineer. Without enough coal, the boilers were barely maintaining adequate steam pressure. The stokers were pushed harder and promised extra pay. One exhausted stoker named Crooks got drunk and unruly, which inspired him to try to throw the captain overboard. For this egregious lapse of discipline, Crooks was restrained and tied up. The other stokers stopped working until he was released: not a near-mutiny by real sailors but a hint of proletarian industrial unrest transferred from land to the unfamiliar regimen of a seaborne boiler room.

Up on deck, the more experienced passengers noticed differences from life on a sailing packet. Morning conversations brought fewer fretful speculations about the wind and weather; the wind hardly mattered now. Instead the novel, somewhat frightening steam engine dominated everything on board. Nobody had ever crossed the ocean in the relentless presence of so audible, tangible a machine. All day and night it hissed and clanked, smoked and steamed, heating the deck from below so that tar bubbled up between the seams, sticky and persistent. The smoke and smuts blew around unpredictably, blackening clothes and alighting on hair. The engine lubricants, derived from animal fats with low combustion points, burned and smelled pervasively like a constant, enormous kitchen fire, a bilious irritant to anyone fighting seasickness or confined to a cabin below. The sea atmosphere, usually clean and bracing, felt cooked and greasy. Some people worried about being blown up by the overworked boilers or getting suddenly forced out of bed with no time to get dressed.

The machine was working, though, with the strong and steady rhythm of a heartbeat, practically without stopping, all the way across the ocean. A new era was finally at hand. ‘How this glorious steamer wallops, and gallops, and flounders along!’ wrote a passenger on the Great Western. ‘She goes it like mad. Its motion is unlike that of any living thing I know; puffing like a porpoise, breasting the waves like a sea-horse, and at times skimming the surface like a bird. It possesses the joint powers of the tenants of the air, land, and water, and is superior to them all.’ As the days passed, the ship clicked off daily runs never before achieved on a westward crossing. A new speed record seemed easily in reach.

The Sirius, nearly out of fuel, reached New York on 23 April. The Great Western came in only twelve hours later after a voyage of fifteen and a half days, the fastest crossing ever from England to America. Of her initial 660 tons of coal, she had 203 tons left in her bunkers – a reassuring margin of safety, for prospective customers, in the most doubted, uncertain aspect of transatlantic steam. The Great Western took sixty-six passengers on her trip back to Bristol. After losing almost £4000 on her first passage out and home, she made four more round-trips that year, turning small profits and lowering her own records in both directions. Already, at this early point, ocean travellers had begun to accept the modernist bargain of steam dangers and discomforts in exchange for consistent, unprecedented speed. In September the Great Western carried 131 passengers to New York and had to refuse 30 more for lack of space. This passage took sixteen days, nine hours – almost one day slower than her maiden, but still two weeks faster than a crack sailing packet.

The Great Western puffed back and forth across the ocean while the British Queen inched along towards completion. It was a surprising reversal of expected form, Bristol over London, the fading western port over the burgeoning urban colossus; so London, seeking an explanation, blamed Glasgow. During the spring and summer of 1839, partisans of the Thames and the Clyde engaged in a ferocious public debate about the practical wisdom of sending the British Queen north for her machinery. ‘Here we have a magnificent vessel dragged from the Thames to Glasgow, at great risk and expense, in search of engines,’ wrote a man from Cheapside in London. ‘All the world, except the sapient gentlemen connected with the “British Queen” are perfectly aware that London-made steam-engines (like most London-made goods) are decidedly the best… Our good friends, the Scotch, proverbially know how to pass off certain inferior birds “as swans”.’ In rebuttal, Robert Napier’s friends pointed out that he had been obliged to replace and reinforce much of the carpentry work installed by the British Queen’s southern shipwrights. Napier also had to lower the keelsons (heavy bracing timbers that ran parallel to the keel) by about six inches just to fit his taller machinery into the engine room. ‘The people in the North,’ said one rebutter, ‘…consider the London-built ships very light and flimsy; in proof of which, amongst many other improvements made in the British Queen at Port Glasgow, it was deemed absolutely necessary to strengthen her with several additional iron knees. It is notorious that steam and other ships can be built and fitted out, decorated, and finished, as expeditiously on the Clyde as on any other river in the world.’

These arguments drew on ancient, bitter rivalries between Glasgow and London, Scotland and England, North and South. British political and commercial power was centred in London, to the continuous irritation of the provinces. But Scotland could still claim a better educational system and an older, more eminent engineering tradition than the Thames – and the famous Scottish thrift. Clydeside builders paid lower wages and enjoyed closer, cheaper access to coal and iron than Londoners, which meant they could build steam engines less expensively. That introduced another element to the public debates: ‘the avarice or parsimoniousness of steam-boat companies,’ as one Clyde defender put it, ‘who, finding that their orders can generally be more cheaply executed by Scotch engineers than London ones, run to them, and instead of being liberal in their dealings, screw them down to contracts, not consistent either with good materials or workmanship.’ Such sharp practices, so this explanation ran, left Clyde engineers the unhappy choice of losing highstandard business or producing shoddy work at cut rates that harmed their reputations as engine builders.

The contest between the Great Western and the British Queen, overtly a race to dominate Atlantic steam, became an acrid showdown between the two main centres of British shipbuilding and marine engineering. With a lucrative market for transatlantic steamers just opening up, the outcome could have a decisive impact on the steam futures of London and Glasgow. ‘If our Scotch friends would puff their work less, and perform more, it would be more creditable to them,’ a shipping official in London suggested. After all, shipboard explosions of Glasgow boilers had caused far more deaths than accidents on London vessels; but perhaps – came the reply – that was just because the Clyde had produced so many more steamships than the Thames. ‘Let any one travel by the Thames river steamers,’ wrote a Scots enthusiast, ‘and then go and take a trip by the fleet, strong, and beautifully-built Clyde boats, and then say without prejudice which he prefers… No engineers in the world are more ably qualified for the just, cautious, and accurate execution or manufacture of marine steam-engines, than are the Scotch.’