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

To the memory of PHYLLIS RUTH BLAKELEY (1922-1986)

Provincial archivist for Nova Scotia

Biographer of Samuel Cunard

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN AND THE BRITANNIA

PART ONE: The Packet Ship Era, 1820-1840

1. The Sailing Packets

2. Steam on Water

PART TWO: The Era of Cunard Domination, 1840-1870

3. Ships as Enterprise: Samuel Cunard of Halifax

4. Ships as Engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

5. The Cunard Line

6. The Collins Line

7. Distinguished Failures

8. Emigration and the Inman Line

9. Life on a Steamer

PART THREE: The Era of Steamship Competition, 1870-1910

10. The White Star Line

11. Competition and Invention

12. Ships as Buildings: Two Cycles to Cunard

13. Ships as Towns: Officers, Crew, Steerage

14. Anglo-Americans

15. Germans

16. The Two Finest Cunarders

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author

P.S.

About the author

Q&A

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the book

A Critical Eye

The Routes of History

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Copyright

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Prologue The North Atlantic Ocean and the Britannia

From Liverpool, on the River Mersey, a ship bound for a port in the northeastern United States heads west eighty miles across the Irish Sea, and then – when clear of Holyhead – turns sharply south into St George’s Channel. The ship navigates carefully through St George’s, which funnels currents and storms from larger contiguous seas into a narrowing, unpredictable passage squeezed between England and Ireland. She moves southwesterly along the Irish coast, skirting the Old Head of Kinsale and other jutting headlands, to reach (but avoid) Cape Clear and the Fastnet Rocks at the bottom of Ireland. To this point the ship has gone about 300 miles since departing from Liverpool. From Cape Clear the ocean stretches out unimpeded to the western horizon and far beyond. Starting there, the great circle route to America arcs across nearly 3000 miles of the North Atlantic: one of the most varied, troublesome ocean voyages in the world.

Over its entire course, the great circle route veers gradually southwards from fifty-three to forty degrees north latitude. Giant spirals of wind and weather gust far above and perpendicular to the ocean’s surface, rotating across twenty or more degrees of latitude in counterclockwise systems that generally hit the great circle to America in the southern half of their spins. Prevailing winds in that stretch of ocean therefore come from the west and southwest, fighting any westbound ship. The weather is typically unsettled, with odd, sudden shifts in temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction. Systems collide and combine and bouncearound. Long, high, stately deepwater waves march along over hundreds of miles of ocean. On occasion, several wave components may converge momentarily, producing a rogue wave much bigger than any of its parts – up to four times the height of an average North Atlantic wave, sometimes even 100 feet high or more.

The weather, seldom agreeable, turns worse in winter. From October to March, the days are cold, short and dark, the sun low in the sky, the sea a turbulent dark grey. At mid-ocean, abrupt winter gales may quickly reach speeds of sixty-five knots, with steep waves of 40 to 60 feet and smaller combers curling out in extended cycles up to 400 feet from crest to crest. White flecks – from spindrift and foam atop the breaking waves – stand out in sharp relief against the slates of sea and sky: the natural world pared down to stark monochromes of grey and white, pretty but indifferent in its muted danger.

Towards the end of the voyage, well over 2000 miles from Liverpool – just as crews may be growing tired and irritable, with flagging attention and potential lapses in discipline, and passengers bored or restive, and food or fuel perhaps running low – the ship enters the notorious graveyard of the North Atlantic. This most hazardous sector of the great circle is encountered precisely when the ship’s company may already be stretched tight and vulnerable.

Here the winter gale season yields, with no relief, to iceberg season, which generally starts in January and then peaks from April to July. Far to the north, in the west of Greenland, glaciers flow down the coastal mountains to the sea, annually calving thousands of icebergs into the Davis Strait. The bergs float slowly southwards in the Labrador Current. At unpredictable times in the following year, the surviving remnants – about four hundred icebergs each season – reach the shipping lanes off Newfoundland. A typical splinter or castle berg weighs over 100,000 tons and stands about 150 feet high by 300 feet long, above water; in extraordinary cases both dimensions may be doubled and more. Smaller bergs, growlers, field ice and floes can pose more hidden danger to ships: lower in profile, sometimes barely above the ocean surface, they are harder to see and avoid. When a ship enters the iceberg zone, temperatures dip and the air smells different, and lookouts get edgy.

The icebergs further trouble the tumultuous Gulf Stream. The strongest of all ocean circulations, and one of the most startling, mysterious discoveries made by the early European explorers of the New World, the Gulf Stream was first charted by Benjamin Franklin in 1769. Trade winds pile up water along the continental edge of South America nearpagethe equator and send it ‘downhill’ through the quickening channel between Cuba and the Florida Keys. The stream then runs up the eastern seaboard of the United States, thirty to fifty miles wide, at two to six miles an hour. Its warm water and rapid course inhibit the growth of phytoplankton, creating a vivid swath of deep, clear, pure blue against the greener, greyer surrounding ocean. Off the North Carolina coast, it divides into smaller substreams, which loop and meander. Even so, when the Gulf Stream reaches the area south of Nova Scotia, it is still moving over 150 million cubic metres of water each second – some 10,000 times the volume of the Mississippi River.

East of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and squarely athwart the great circle route to America, the warm Gulf Stream collides with the cold Labrador Current, producing the most extreme temperature differences in any ocean. This volatile mix has vast consequences in the air and water. Some are even whimsical (icebergs spinning slowly on their vertical axes, like huge, silent, snowy carousels). Most are more serious: mists, gales, squalls, driving rain and churning waves. At its worst, the atmospheric mingling of cold Canadian air and warm, moist Gulf Stream air may generate the sudden winter hurricanes called bombs, or rapidly intensifying cyclones. An abrupt drop in atmospheric pressure at the centre of a comma-shaped cloud mass, usually in January or February, can unpredictably generate winds of hurricane force. With little warning, the bomb just explodes.

The most widespread result of this massive convergence of cold and warmth is dense, persistent fogs. Off Cape Race, at the southeastern tip of Newfoundland, from April to September at least twelve days of every month are shrouded in sea fog. At midsummer it is nearly constant. ‘These horrid fogs infest the air most part of the year,’ the English hydrographer John Purdy noted in 1817, ‘and will last eight or ten days successively, sometimes longer.’ The fogs can assume geometric, hedgelike forms, with vertical slabs at their eastern edges squared off by long, level top layers. An observer may watch a ship emerging slowly from one of these banks, revealing herself in sharply defined foot by foot, as though being dragged out of a grey cliff at the water’s edge.

In iceberg season, with visibility more crucial than ever, the Grand Banks fogs throw a dense, smothering blanket over the ice field. The wind dies down. The sea is lumpy and tumbling. Warning bells and foghorns are muffled, distorted, their direction and distance rendered unknowable. Both sight and hearing become untrustworthy. A constant condensing rain drips from the ship’s superstructure. Shapes take ongigantic, unnatural proportions. A bird may resemble a sail. Ghosts and mirages float by. Peering hopelessly through the thick white smoke, a lookout can mistake an iceberg for a ship, or ship for iceberg. The circumstances are gloomy, anxious, strange and very dangerous.

The great circle route runs along the Newfoundland coast, with its rocky headlands and variable currents driving now towards shore, then out to sea. ‘The uncertainty requires the greatest caution,’ John Purdy warned in 1817. Farther west, about a hundred miles off Nova Scotia, lurks Sable Island and its shifting shoals and sandbars. Moving steadily eastward, sometimes at a mile every four years (and therefore impossible to chart precisely), and often invisible in fog, Sable has sunk many ships. The fog can then persist all the way down the American coast to Boston and New York.

By the nineteenth century, through various accidents of history, this most dangerous sea passage had also become the most trafficked long ocean route in the world. The burgeoning imperatives of trade, empire and human migration between the hemispheres would not give way, even to the North Atlantic Ocean in winter. Some reliable means of making this roughest transatlantic crossing – in all seasons, and in reasonable speed, safety, comfort and economy – had to be devised. It posed a fundamental challenge to the newly inventive, progressive spirit of the age.

The first enduring steamship service between England and America began when the wooden paddle wheeler Britannia, of the new Cunard Line, left Liverpool for Halifax and Boston on 4 July 1840. With Samuel Cunard, founder of the line, on board, the Britannia laboured across the ocean against head winds and adverse currents. Ten days out, an iceberg was sighted in the near distance: a reminder of the North Atlantic’s perils. The ship was scheduled to depart from Liverpool a few days before the fourth, and she was therefore expected in Boston by the fourteenth. When that day passed without the Britannia, people in Boston started worrying. A steamship was supposed to make faster, more reliable ocean passages than a sailing ship; that was the whole point of adding the steam engine and paddles.

Four days went by amid swelling anxieties. Finally, at ten o’clock on the night of Saturday, the eighteenth, the Britannia glided into Boston Harbor. Despite the late hour she was greeted by fireworks and huzzahs – and a general sense of relief. She had made the passage in fourteen and a half days, just one-third of the time consumed by the most recent sailing packet from England to Boston. On Sunday, Sam Cunard received eighteen hundred invitations to dinner. ‘No event which has occurred since the commencement of the present century,’ the Reverend Ezra Gannett told his prominent congregation that morning, ‘seems to me to have involved more important consequences to this city.’

The man and his ship dominated Boston for the next two weeks. Thousands of people came to inspect the Britannia at the new Cunard wharf; Bostonians had never seen such a ship. At the time, a typical coasting steamboat was about 160 feet long and 400 tons, a typical ocean-sailing packet about 150 feet and 700 tons. (In nautical idiom, a ‘ton’ measured not weight or displacement but interior space, calculated in different ways but, in 1840, supposed to equal forty cubic feet.) The Britannia was much bigger than contemporary ship norms at 207 feet and 1156 tons, with steam power in due proportion. She had been built of African oak and yellow pine at Robert Duncan’s shipyard on the River Clyde; the celebrated Robert Napier of Glasgow had provided her 403-horsepower engine. From a distance she looked like a quite large sailing ship, dominated by three masts and sails in conventional riggings. But at midship two black-and-gold paddle boxes extended almost twelve feet out to each side, with a single smokestack just aft, painted burnt-red with a black ring at the top: a future signature of Cunard ships. The Britannia was, properly speaking, neither steamship nor sailing ship but a hybrid of the two.

Much of the main deck was left flat and clear to give the crew unobstructed room for handling sails and rigging. Deckhouses at midship provided quarters for the officers, sailors, and the ship’s cows. A raised, exposed bridge between the paddle boxes and above the deckhouses allowed the captain and his adjutants the sight lines and free access they needed to run the ship. (Years later, after paddle wheels had yielded to screw propellers for propulsion, the term ‘bridge’ remained to designate where a steamship’s officers stood and gave orders.) Aft of the mainmast, another deckhouse held the passengers’ dining saloon, the largest room on the ship at thirty-six feet by fourteen feet; it also functioned as a sitting room and assembly hall. At the stern, a raised platform gave the helmsman and his wheel a quite wet, windy place from which to steer the ship.

From the saloon, stairs descended to the gentlemen’s and ladies’ cabins and lounges. Men and women were consigned to separate sections, linked by a passage that allowed decorous contact without risking the weather up on deck. A typical ‘stateroom’ measured about twelve by six feet, tightly packed with two bunk beds, jugs and basins for washing and emergencies, a small mirror on the wall, a water carafe and glasses, a day sofa, and pegs for hanging clothes. A porthole or oil lamp provided dim light. ‘All these rooms are highly finished,’ a Bostonian noted, ‘without any attempt to dazzle with tinsel.’ The undersides of the cabin floors were covered with a thick, coarse woollen cloth intended to seal off smells and heat from the holds and engine room. Passengers – the ship had room for up to one hundred men and twenty-four women, all in a single class – shared a few water closets and had no bathing facilities at all.

The provision deck below held quarters for the engineers and firemen. They fed and tended the engine, the rhythmically beating heart of the ship. The machinery and coal bunkers at midship took up a third of the Britannia’s length, leaving relatively little space for cargo on such an enormous vessel. The firemen shovelled coal into twelve furnaces firing four boilers feeding steam to the engine. Still brand-new, the engine and its moving parts shone like burnished silver. Two cylinders, six feet in diameter, drove nineteen-foot levers to turn the paddle wheel crankshaft. At full steam the paddles, nine feet wide and twenty-eight feet in diameter, could push the ship up to almost nine knots.

To a greater degree than anything previously seen in Boston, the Britannia was a ship and a building and a machine, all at once, on the grandest and most daring scale. One dazzled observer called her ‘the consummation of human ingenuity’, no less. She seemed to vault beyond the usual construction categories, gathering them into a novel kind of manmade artefact. Large, plush and inventive, utterly modern but oddly familiar, beautiful from her soaring masts down to her gleaming engine room and yet promising such great practical significance, she left admirers in Boston mingling their superlatives. ‘She is truly a magnificent vessel, ’ the Evening Journal declared, ‘ – a floating palace.’

Three days after Samuel Cunard’s arrival, Boston threw a grand party for him attended by nearly 2000 people. The toasts were so extended, the speeches so hyperbolic even by the rhetorical standards of the time, that it seems apparent that more than just a man and his ship was being celebrated. The Cunard Line was largely a British enterprise, based in Liverpool and launched by a mail contract from the British Admiralty. The first Cunard ship was pointedly named the Britannia, and she was commanded by Captain Henry Woodruff of the Royal Navy, not a civilian. In the previous sixty-five years, Britain and America had fought two bitter wars against each other and then had engaged in constant mutual insults and fierce squabbles over Canadian independence, boundaries and fishing rights. Only a year earlier, the American state of Maine andthe Canadian province of New Brunswick had nearly started a war. Now the Cunard Line inspired new hopes for friendlier ties between mother country and wayward child. In addition, Boston by 1840 was losing its former commercial and maritime eminence to New York; but both cities had competed for the glittering prize of becoming Cunard’s American terminus, and Boston had apparently won. This coup perhaps augured a general resurgence for the city against its bumptious rival down on the Hudson. And, finally, that summer the United States was torn by an especially rancorous presidential contest, the log cabin and hard cider campaign of William Henry Harrison against the incumbent Martin Van Buren. With the Britannia on hand, at least, Boston’s feuding Whigs and Democrats might briefly unite behind a promising new venture of general benefit.

The man himself remained a mute mystery. Nobody in Boston knew Sam Cunard well; he had a few business associates there, nothing more. He didn’t talk much, and he had accepted few of those eighteen hundred dinner invitations. He was said to be an Englishman, or perhaps a Canadian, or maybe of American parentage. The city’s keenly focused interest in him derived, in part, from simple unsatisfied curiosity: Who was this man? A few sceptics remained doggedly unimpressed. ‘Mr. Cunard, a substantial, sensible Englishman, and not an Emperor, sits enthroned in state in the saloon of the Britannia,’ one doubter wrote to a local paper. ‘A proper self-respect will not warrant us in canonizing him.’ But this was only a peevish dissent, drowned out by a tidal wave of adulation and applause.

The ‘Cunard Festival’ to honour him took place at the Maverick House hotel, near the Cunard wharf in East Boston. Planned while the Britannia was still at sea, the event was staged on a scale and opulence seldom previously seen in Boston. A temporary pavilion and awning stretched 200 feet along the front of the hotel. Pennants and flags of all nations snapped in the breeze. An elliptical arch spread across the Maverick’s second storey, resting on two abutments. One of these bore the British coat of arms and the name Watt, honouring the Scottish inventor who had improved the steam engine. The other showed the American arms and the name Fulton, the Hudson River steamboat pioneer. At the centre of the arch, joining the two ancient national foes in symbol and reality, was the name Cunard in large gold letters – a premature tribute, mustered in brave hope and confidence, to the new but unproven steamship service.

On a raised platform sat the presiding officer, Josiah Quincy Jr, president of Harvard College and former mayor of Boston. To his right satSamuel Cunard, Senator Daniel Webster (the leader of Massachusetts Whigs), and other important men. To Quincy’s left sat Captain Woodruff of the Britannia, George Bancroft (the Democratic boss of Massachusetts), and others of distinction. Overlooking them, outside the pavilion itself, on the hotel’s porch and balconies and in upstairs windows, were hundreds of women dressed in their summer finery: the first time in memory that women had been invited to attend a public dinner in Boston (though not, actually, to be fed).

After a fancy meal, wines and mounds of ice cream, the extended speeches and toasts sounded the framing issues of the day. Daniel Webster, a noted orator, spoke about the rippling impacts of steam power on civilization, commerce, war and politics. George Bancroft welcomed the Cunard Line as ‘an omen of peace’, sure to usher in a new era of friendly relations, and offered a hopeful toast: ‘Old England – She renounces the ambition of ruling the seas, and effects the nobler purpose of connecting continents.’ Cigars were passed around (but quickly put away in deference to the unfamiliar feminine presence). Someone offered a song in tribute to the new line:

How timid and slow, but a few years ago,

The world hobbled on in its motion.

Old Europe seem’d far as the fixed Northern star,

On the boundless expanse of the ocean;

But tho’ it was hard–at the word of Cunard

Britannia herself is a rover.

Old England a while, that fast anchor’d Isle,

By steam is now here–half seas over.

Josiah Quincy introduced the man of the hour. ‘The enlightened foresight of Mr. Cunard, a citizen of Nova Scotia,’ he declared, ‘aided by the liberality of the British crown, has established a line of steam packets on a permanent basis.’ By advancing the interests of his own country, Cunard had incidentally conferred coveted gifts on America, and – Quincy hoped – Boston might now recover its old prosperity. The band impartially played both ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. The climactic moment had arrived.

In this speechmaking age, when events happened live, in oral discourse, any distinguished man was expected to have an easy knack for facing and holding an audience. Grand oratory was a routine tool of persuasion and power. The crowd clapped and cheered hard for Cunard,waiting in curiosity and expectation for him to speak, watching him. He was a handsome man, apparently of middle age, a bit less than average height. He had a large, round head, balding at the crown, with a fringe of grey hair turning white, and closely trimmed muttonchop whiskers in the style of the day. He looked healthy and well knit, compact and tightly wound, and quite decisive around the mouth and eyes.

Cunard stood up and started speaking, inaudibly, before the last applause subsided. The newspaper reporters seated nearby could not hear him. He said only a few more words, and then – to the surprise of everyone – sat down. Josiah Quincy, rushing into the dead air, sprang up to say that Mr Cunard had explained he was unaccustomed to public speaking and thus would make no speech, but he felt quite grateful to be so honoured, given that the real credit for the new steamship line belonged to the British government. And that was that. His odd performance concluded, the hero remained triumphantly unknown in Boston.

A few days later, in much more modest circumstances, another dinner was held for men of the Britannia. Only Captain Woodruff and a few officers had been invited to the Cunard Festival; so a group of local machinists and mechanics, described as ‘respectable’ by one newspaper, threw a small celebration for the ship’s chief engineer, Peter Kenneth, and his mates at the Stackpole House, on Milk Street near the waterfront. The innkeeper, James Ryan, provided entertainment. (No Boston Irishmen like Ryan had taken visible part in the Cunard Festival.) All the guests on hand told a story or sang a song or ventured a sentiment. They raised their own toasts to the owners and hands of the Britannia (‘Her successful voyage has proved that their capital and labor were most happily united’) and, in engineer’s vernacular, to the mother country (‘She sometimes gets the steam up a little too high, but she finds an escape pipe when she visits her daughter’). The engine men, both ashore and from below decks, added their voices to the general spirit of determined reconciliation.