The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

The Beginning of the New Age in Steam Power.

  The Broad Atlantic bridged at last.

  Annihilation of Space and Time.

  The Great Western reached New York the next day, her departure having been delayed by a fire that ignited the deck beams around the funnel. Damage was minimal, and after repairs she sailed from Bristol on April 8 to cross the Atlantic at an average speed of 8.8 knots, 2 knots faster than the Sirius. More important for establishing the feasibility of transatlantic steamer service, she had used barely half of her eight hundred tons of coal.

  The race between the Sirius and Great Western took place one year after the British government had decided to overhaul its cumbersome and expensive postal service, an effort that dovetailed neatly with the Admiralty’s need to ensure access to oceangoing steam shipping in wartime and steamship companies’ need for outside investment. This confluence of interests led to the disbursement of government subsidies for carrying the mails. In 1837, the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) received the Admiralty’s first contract for subsidized mail service from Falmouth to Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. Three years later P&O extended this route to Alexandria, where passengers took the “overland route” to Port Suez to join another ship for the passage onward to Calcutta, by way of Galle, Sri Lanka. Four years after that, P&O service was extended to Singapore and China, and in 1852, via a feeder line from Singapore, to Australia.

  Acknowledging the success of the Sirius and Great Western, in 1838 the Admiralty let a subsidy for transatlantic service to Samuel Cunard of Halifax, Nova Scotia. His rivals protested the award, but Cunard’s prudence made him an outstanding choice. Not all were favorably disposed to his ships’ meager comforts, however. In January 1842, Charles Dickens and his wife took the line’s flagship, Britannia, on the author’s first visit to the United States. Singularly unimpressed, in a blizzard of letters before sailing Dickens panned his accommodations with gusto. “Our cabin is something immensely smaller than you can possibly picture to yourself,” he wrote his brother. “Neither of the portmanteaus could by any mechanical contrivance be got into it. When the door is open, you can’t turn around. When it’s shut, you can’t put on a clean shirt, or take off a dirty one. When its [sic] day, it’s dark. When it’s night, it’s cold.” Dickens grudgingly acknowledged that the adjacent lady’s cabin was “really a comfortable room … well-lighted, sofa’d, mirrored and so forth.” But if Cunard harbored spartan tendencies, no one could fault the line for the care of its managers and masters, who gave it an exemplary safety record. In its first three decades Cunard lost only two ships, and no one died in either accident.

  The same could not be said of other companies, the most infamous being the New York and Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company, known as the Collins Line, founded specifically to compete with Cunard. Throughout the 1840s, the United States Congress debated the wisdom of relying on subsidized British ships to carry the mail between the United States and Europe. For more than one senator, the only reasonable response was an American subsidy for American ships: “I suggest cost not be considered.… I suggest, too, that Congress grant a carefully selected American shipping expert a completely free hand to proceed with the absolute conquest of this man Cunard.” An obvious choice was Edward Knight Collins. Having cut his teeth in the packet trade between New York, Mexico, and New Orleans, Collins entered transatlantic service with the sailing packet Shakespeare in 1837. His Dramatic Line of square-riggers was a great success, and in 1846 he submitted a bid for a congressional subsidy of $385,000 to run steamers on twenty round-trips per year between New York and Liverpool. As in England, the enabling legislation provided that the ships could serve as naval auxiliaries, and the ships were to be “under the inspection of a naval constructor in the employ of the Navy Department … and so constructed as to render them convertible at the least possible cost, into war steamers of the first class.” With funds in hand, Collins ordered four wooden, bark-rigged, side-wheel steamships. Measuring just over eighty-five meters in length, the Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific, and Baltic were pacesetters on the North Atlantic, nearly 50 percent faster than the Britannia’s 8.5 knots. However, their enormous fuel and maintenance costs forced Collins to request a new subsidy of $858,000, which a profligate Congress duly approved.

  Their potential as auxiliaries notwithstanding, the Collins Line ships were renowned for their sumptuous appointments, which the navy’s overseer, Matthew Calbraith Perry, decried as “extravagantly showy.” Writing in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, John Abbott reported that the Arctic’s main cabin had “an air of almost Oriental magnificence.… When this saloon is brilliantly lighted in the evening it is gorgeous in the extreme.” The “large, airy” dining room “with windows opening upon the ocean as pleasantly as those of any parlor” seated two hundred and the “state-rooms are really rooms, provided with every comfort which can be desired.… Some of these rooms have large double beds with French bedsteads and rich curtains.” This may have been journalistic puffery, for a passenger on the Arctic’s running mate, Atlantic, enjoined prospective travelers “to take a whole state-room to one’s self…rather than have a fellow-citizen so near you as to breathe half your air, and make you breathe all his.” Regardless, to many both in and out of Congress, the ships were a manifestation of America’s “national glory,” and thirty thousand people turned out to watch the Arctic’s launch in 1850. As Abbott proclaimed, “The United States have never yet done any thing which has contributed so much to their honor in Europe, as the construction of this Collins line of steamers. We have made a step in advance of the whole world. Nothing ever before floated equal to these ships.… No one thinks of questioning their superiority.”

  This proved a lamentable oversight and although other shipwrecks would cost more lives, the loss of the Arctic in 1854 became for more than half a century the benchmark against which all shipwrecks were measured. When the Titanic sank in 1912, the New York Post observed that “Ocean tragedies have been numerous and sensational in the intervening decades but … to parallel the present week’s story … one would have to go back to the story of the ill-fated Arctic.” Steaming westbound about fifty miles south of Newfoundland in patchy fog, the Arctic had collided with the Vesta, a French iron-hulled auxiliary steamer en route from St. Pierre to France. The immediate assumption aboard both ships was that the smaller Vesta was doomed, and the Arctic’s captain, James C. Luce, sent his first mate to offer assistance. When informed that water was pouring into his ship’s uncompartmentalized hull, however, he abandoned the French steamer and his lifeboat to race for Newfoundland, but the rising water extinguished the boiler fires and the engines and pumps fell silent.

  The Arctic exceeded the requirements of the safety regulations set forth in the Steamboat Law of 1852, which stipulated that vessels over 1,500 tons carry six lifeboats, including at least one of metal construction. All six of the Arctic’s were Francis Metallic Lifeboats fitted with watertight compartments. As would prove the case with the Titanic, what was wanted was quantity not quality. The mate’s lifeboat having been abandoned, there were only five boats for the ship’s company, more than three hundred of whom died. In the meantime, after watching in horror as the American superliner paddled into the fog, taking with it some ten feet of his ship’s bow, the Vesta’s captain found that the remainder of the iron hull had withstood the collision relatively well. Shoring up the foremost of the ship’s three watertight bulkheads, he reached Newfoundland, and after extensive repairs the Vesta returned to France.

  The loss of life aboard the Arctic was horrendous by any standard. That she was the pride of the American merchant marine heightened the tragedy. But what fixed the infamy of the Arctic in the public imagination were reports of the crew’s appalling behavior: sixty-one of the eighty-six survivors were members of the ship’s company. The New York Daily Times observed, “One in view of their conduct, can scarcely help deploring their escape as much as the loss of the dead.” More shocking
still, the survivors included not one woman or child—not even Collins’s wife and two children (Collins himself was not on board)—a fact memorialized by editorialists, ministers, and others of the day, most hauntingly Walt Whitman, who wrote

  Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations … Of the steamship Arctic going down,

  Of the veil’d tableau—Women gather’d together on deck, pale, heroic, waiting the moment that draws so close—O the moment!

  A huge sob—A few bubbles—the white foam spirting up—and then the women gone,

  Sinking there, while the passionless wet flows on—

  Despite ample precedent, no charges seem to have been filed against the Arctic’s crew, but public indignation animated congressional opponents of the mail subsidy, who could now point to the fatal extravagance of its beneficiaries. As one congressman asserted, “If [the Collins Line] had spent in lifeboats for that vessel the money which they spent in gingerbread ornaments and decorations, there might have been hundreds of valuable lives saved.”

  The tragedy was followed by widespread calls for reform. The fate of the sturdy Vesta (aptly named for the virgin goddess of hearth and home) made it clear that iron hulls with watertight compartments were more likely to survive a collision than uncompartmentalized wooden hulls. That western shipwrights did not incorporate compartmentalization into their construction principles prior to this seems inexplicable. The concept was known and employed in Chinese ships from a very early date, and in the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin, among others, proposed building hulls in emulation of “the well known practice of the Chinese, to divide the hold of a great ship into a number of separate chambers by partitions tight caulked … so that, if a leak should spring in one of them, the others are not affected by it; and, though that chamber should fill to a level with the sea, it would not be sufficient to sink the vessel.” Franklin believed that whatever additional cost this might entail would be offset by reduced insurance rates “and by a higher price taken of passengers, who would rather prefer going in such a vessel.” In a pamphlet called Steam-Lanes Across the Atlantic (1855), superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury included these among a number of improvements suggested in the wake of the disaster:

  Lifeboats and life-preservers, watertight compartments, station-bills for passengers and crew to “save ship” were among the remedial plans, and among those preventive were fog signals, true compasses, rate of sailing, lookout, and lanes, or a double track for the steamers crossing this part of the Atlantic, viz, a lane for them to go in and another for them to come in.b

  The last recommendation fit Maury’s interests well. An analysis of Cunard and Collins Line logbooks showed that their ships sailed within a band about three hundred miles wide. After consulting the extensive oceanographic data held by his office, Maury recommended that westbound steamers keep to a northerly lane twenty to twentyfive miles wide, and that eastbound steamers use a more southerly lane of fifteen to twenty miles in width. These lanes would reduce the likelihood of steamers colliding with one another and lessen the likelihood of collision between steamers and sailing ships, whose “public-spirited shipmasters” were enjoined to avoid the steamer lanes to the extent possible. The New York Board of Underwriters published Maury’s recommendations and he mapped the steam lanes in that year’s edition of his Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts. Although the U.S. Navy and many shipping lines required that their captains follow these lanes, compliance was voluntary. The benefits, however, could not be ignored and several subsequent accidents were attributed to ships not being in their proper lane. In 1889, the steam lane issue was debated at a conference in Washington convened “to decide the momentous question of fixed routes for steamers crossing the Atlantic,” but Maury’s plan was not adopted until a meeting of the International Maritime Conference in 1900, forty-six years after the Arctic’s loss.

  Serving as they did the elite markets of northwest Europe and the eastern United States, the transatlantic subsidies are the best known, but subsidies supported other shipping routes, too. The United States used them to encourage trade to the Caribbean and on the west coast of North America. At the same time the Collins Line subsidy was let, the Sloo Line received one for service to the east coast of Panama via Charleston and Savannah, and W. H. Aspinwall’s Pacific Mail Steamship Company received one for its service from the west coast of Panama to San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco, and Astoria. Aspinwall’s timing was exceptional, for the discovery of gold in California the following year ignited a mass migration to the west coast. While steamship operators benefited enormously from the unexpected windfall, the majority of the seventy-five thousand “forty-niners” who embarked for California did so in more than 750 sailing ships that sailed from east coast ports to San Francisco via Cape Horn, most of them nonstop. Although the distance from New York or Boston to the Golden Gate is more than thirteen thousand miles via the Horn (and some ships actually covered more than twenty thousand miles in search of favorable winds) compared with less than three thousand miles overland, an ordinary sailing ship could cover the longer distance in less than six months, and clippers could make the passage in four months or less. By comparison, the transcontinental journey along the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon, took six months, and that was in addition to the time, effort, and expense required to reach Missouri. These factors had kept the numbers of westward migrants small, and in the years 1843–45 only four or five thousand settlers had set out for the Pacific Northwest. The explosive growth of the American population in California, which had seceded from Mexico in 1846, led to its admission as a state in 1850. Thanks to its strong maritime connections with the east coast, California is the only one of the lower forty-eight states apart from Louisiana that did not initially border another of the United States.

  Paths of the Seas and the Heyday of Commercial Sail

  Maury’s recommendation that steamships follow prescribed shipping lanes across several thousand miles of open ocean was a natural extension of his earlier research into how to plot faster sailing times across the world’s oceans, which in turn drew on advances in the study of the oceans that began making real headway in the late 1700s. In the early centuries of European overseas expansion, a nation’s knowledge of safe and efficient routes comprised a jealously guarded body of trade secrets. The institutionalization of state-sponsored surveys intended for the broad dissemination of hydrographic knowledge proceeded slowly in the eighteenth century, but even without formal organization, substantial advances were made. In 1768 Benjamin Franklin was asked, in his capacity as deputy postmaster of the American colonies, to explain why passages from the colonies to England took less time than those to North America. With the help of his cousin, a Nantucket ship captain, Franklin described “the Gulph Stream, a strong Current so called which comes out of the Gulph of Florida, passing northeasterly running at the rate of 4, 3½, 3 and 2½ Miles an Hour,” and which retards westbound ships and speeds eastbound ones. The post office published a chart showing the Gulf Stream, and Franklin refined the chart by observations made on three transatlantic crossings between 1775 and 1785. A decade after Franklin’s initial research into the Gulf Stream, the East India Company surveyor George Rennell mapped the Agulhas current along the southern coast of East Africa, and after the turn of the century Alexander von Humboldt measured the northward-flowing Peruvian current, which was soon named for him.

  Benjamin Franklin’s Gulf Stream map, which shows the width, strength, and course of the warm-water current as it flows between the truncated Florida peninsula and the Bahamas, along the coast of the United States to the vicinity of Cape Hatteras and Chesapeake Bay, where it branches off in a more easterly direction south of the major fishing banks below Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This French copy of an original by Franklin’s cousin Timothy Folger was drawn and published by George Louis Le Rouge circa 1780–83. Franklin int
ended for copies to be given to all French ships supplying arms to the Americans during the Revolution. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

  This search for order in the chaos of the deep manifested itself in other ways. The first director of the Admiralty’s Hydrographical Office (1795), Admiral Francis Beaufort, established a table that categorized winds by their speed and provided descriptions of the wind’s effects on the water so that its force could be determined without an anemometer. The Beaufort scale allowed for the transmissibility of reliable information about wind speeds. The practical application for this was anticipated by Alexander Dalrymple, who as hydrographer of the East India Company had undertaken “the very useful work of examining the Journals of the [company’s] Ships, for improving the Charts in the Navigation of the East Indies.” Maury revolutionized this process by designing an “abstract log” in which captains could note the direction and speed of the wind and current, magnetic variation, and ocean temperature on a daily basis. Compiling data from thousands of voyages, the Depot of Charts and Instruments produced a series of Wind and Current Charts showing the prevailing winds and currents for every month of the year, “to generalize the experience of the mariner in such a manner that each may have before him, at a glance, the experience of all” and so plot the optimal course to his destination. First published in 1848, Maury’s charts had a staggering effect on sailing times and shipping costs. The average time for the passage from New York to San Francisco fell from 188 days to 145 days in 1851 and 136 days four years later. The release of Maury’s charts coincided with the development of the clipper ship, but a report in 1854 estimated that use of the charts worldwide was saving the British merchant marine ten million dollars per year, and Maury deserves most of the credit.

  Although the early nineteenth century had seen the development of a variety of fast ship types, it was not until the California gold rush that “the search for speed under sail” became an imperative. The early 1850s saw the full flower of the clipper age, when speed generated higher profits than sheer volume. The first extreme clipper, the Stag Hound of 1850, was the creation of the Boston naval architect Donald McKay, who subsequently launched such renowned and evocatively named vessels as the Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, and Great Republic. The Stag Hound’s launch excited great interest and the Boston Atlas was effusive in its praise of McKay’s accomplishment: