The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships
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For their father, the break was more difficult. ‘I have been backwards and forwards occasionally to England,’ he said in 1847, ‘but Halifax is my home.’ His wife and one of his children were buried there. His extensive business operations were still based in Nova Scotia, and – apparently for sentimental reasons – he held on to his local post as a commissioner of lighthouses despite his frequent absences. But his hometown was not keeping pace with the nineteenth century. ‘What a slow place it is!’ exclaimed an American visitor in the 1850s. An English tourist at about the same time chided ‘the lassitude and want of enterprise of the Nova-Scotians’, who seemed to be lagging behind other Canadians; ‘the Nova-Scotians appear to have expunged the word progress from their dictionary. ’ Cunard was a modern personality, permanently moored only to his family. He wanted the snap and zoom of modernity. His steamship line, steadily reducing and taming the unruly North Atlantic, imposing human will on nature, embodied the progressive faith of the age. As he shuttled back and forth across the ocean on his ships, he was increasingly drawn away from his fading colonial homeland and towards the ever-beckoning, up-to-date future that he found in commercial England.
He leased a country estate in Edmonton, eight miles north of London Bridge. Its seventy-four acres included a park, gardens, stables, and a greenhouse with grape vines and lemon trees. The house had plenty of room for visiting children and grandchildren. Playing a country squire, he developed interests in horticulture and joined the Royal Geographic Society. The prestige of his ties to the government and – in particular – the burgeoning fame of his eponymous steamship line eased his way into the higher reaches of London society, despite his usual reticent behaviour in public. The actress Fanny Kemble later remembered him as a ‘shy, silent, rather rustic gentleman’ at a party given by the celebrated hostess and writer Caroline Sheridan Norton. A major merchant prince, the man who had bridged the ocean, Sam Cunard still presented himself as an untalkative, unpolished colonial.
The success of his Cunard Line drove out its predecessors. Junius Smith’s enterprise went under soon after the President disappeared. The Great Western company’s profits peaked in 1839, before the maiden voyage of the Britannia, then declined in each of the next three years of competing with Cunard. In a last effort to save his company, in 1846 Christopher Claxton tried to pick off part of the Cunard mail contract. ‘We are quite aware of the excellent way in which Mr. Cunard performs the work,’ Claxton testified to a committee of Parliament; ‘no one knows it better than we do; we do not want to injure Mr. Cunard, but we want something to be done for ourselves.’ The government, well satisfied with the mail service, stuck with Cunard. A year later the Great Western, the first Atlantic steamship, was sold into service in the West Indies and South American trade. For the time being, the Cunard Line had transatlantic steam to itself.
6. The Collins Line
The Cunard monopoly was soon challenged. Other nations with transatlantic commercial and political interests wanted their own steamships, without having to depend on the British mail line – no matter how excellent its service. ‘So far, we have been most fortunate in not having any formidable opposition,’ Sam Cunard wrote to his partner Charles Mac Iver in May 1847, ‘but for the future we must expect it. I do not apprehend any serious injury from the French – their Ships were built for Men of war and will be strong and heavy and not fast. The American ships will be different. They will introduce all our improvements, together with their own. We shall also have national prejudices to contend with, so that every attention will be required to meet them.’ The son of American exiles took special notice, as always, of any American competition. ‘It will behove us,’ he urged Mac Iver, ‘to think of any measures that may be considered improvements as the Americans will be alive to every thing.’
Cunard truly feared the American threat, but it also handed him a forceful argument for persuading the British government to subsidize new steamships, bigger and faster, for the Cunard Line. Since the original foursome of the Britannia and her sisters, two ships had already been added: the Hibernia in 1843 (to satisfy the revised mail contract of 1841) and the Cambria in late 1844 (to replace the Columbia after she ran onto a rock and sank in a Nova Scotia fog). The two new ships – 220 feet long, 1354 tons, and 472 horsepower – were slightly larger, more powerful versions of the original four. After the usual shakedown crossings, to let their engines and bearings settle into working order, they set new transatlantic records of nine days, twenty hours, thirty minutes out to Boston and eight days, twenty-two hours, forty-four minutes back to Liverpool, reaching an average speed home of almost twelve knots.
As passenger environments, the Hibernia and Cambria continued the Cunard practice of austere comfort, emphasis on austere. The main saloon, again placed towards the rear of the main deck, was longer and wider than on the earlier ships, with room for two long tables that could seat up to one hundred diners. The oak beams in the white ceiling included gilt mouldings, an atypical touch of plush. Adorning the walls, landscapes painted on slate offered vistas of Glasgow harbour, Liverpool, Halifax, Boston, and – suggesting the line’s future – New York. Sofas along the outer walls of the saloon passed daylight through their open bases, from windows overlooking the main deck, down to cabins on the deck below. The roof of the saloon allowed passengers a promenade, protected by a strong brass rail, that was safely out of the sailors’ way as they moved around the deck, working the billowy spread of canvas. Below the saloon, the gentlemen’s sitting room was painted imitation marble and wainscot; the counterpart for women had large sofas covered by thick, silky velvet. Towards the bow, other quarters could accommodate male passengers and servants in less comfort. (The servants’ steerage had a separate entrance.) Fully loaded, the ships could each carry 155 passengers, 130 tons of light goods, and the all-important, enabling mail.
Like the lost Columbia, the Hibernia and Cambria were engined by Robert Napier and built by Robert Steele. Napier, an original investor in the Cunard Line and one of its most trusted advisers, got its engine contracts automatically as long as he wanted them. The continued confidence in Steele, on the other hand, suggests that Cunard and his managing partners did not blame the loss of the Columbia on any defect in the ship herself. In fact, Steele would later go on to build six of the next seven Cunard Atlantic liners as well. His shipbuilding skills and standards must be granted major credit, along with the watchful Mac Ivers, for establishing the Cunard Line’s enduring reputation of safe reliability.
The two Robert Steeles, father and son, had been building wooden steam vessels since the early 1820s. Their shipyard at Greenock, near the confluence of the river with the Firth of Clyde, gave them easy access to the sea and wider, deeper water for launching large ships than places farther upriver, towards Glasgow. The senior Steele first collaborated with David Napier in 1821 to produce the Eclipse, of 140 tons and sixty horsepower, for the trade between Glasgow and Belfast. Only five years later, Steele and Robert Napier built the United Kingdom, four times the size of the Eclipse and the largest British steamboat yet. The father then retired, and his son, thirty-five years old, took over and continued to work with Napier. These ties exemplify the stability and family connections that became defining hallmarks of Clydeside shipbuilding. Such a situation might easily have led to complacency, technological inbreeding and shoddy, dangerous work. But it didn’t; instead, ‘Steele-built’ became a synonym for high levels of shipbuilding design, materials and workmanship. The younger Robert Steele, ‘in his silent, unobtrusive way,’ as a colleague put it, continued to improve his craft – and kept the exacting Cunard partners satisfied.
Early in 1846, Sam Cunard, at home in Halifax, heard that the US Congress had granted a group of New Yorkers an annual subsidy of $400,000 to start a steamship mail service between New York and England. The news struck him in two sensitive spots: American competition, and his long-nurtured plans to start running his own ships to New York, the booming centre of maritime commerce in the United States. Cunard rushed over to London and started negotiating with men at the Admiralty and Treasury. ‘I came to England to point out to the Government that an American line was about being got up, and I wished to prevent that,’ he explained. ‘I saw that the American Government were giving encouragement to a mail line which would interfere very much with me, and would interfere equally with the [British] Government; I was satisfied that it would deprive the Government of half the postage, and deprive me of half the passengers.’ As Cunard made his case, he melded his self-interest with the national interest, presenting both as equally jeopardized by the American thrust.
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