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

1. The Sailing Packets

Before steamships started crossing the North Atlantic, the best way to travel between Europe and America was by the sailing ships called packets. Built and run mainly by Americans, the packet lines introduced new concepts and comfort levels for ocean voyages. They dominated the transatlantic traffic for decades, setting key precedents for the steamships that eventually replaced them. Along with their more famous contemporaries, the whaling and clipper ships, they comprised the golden age of American sail. Of these three types, the packets lasted the longest and made the most voyages and money for their owners and crews. Yet today whalers and clippers remain drenched in popular legend, while the packets are scarcely known beyond dedicated circles of ship buffs. No packet builder ever became as famous as Donald McKay with his clippers, and no novelist ever wrote a Moby Dick about the packets. They just did their jobs quietly and well, year after year, and then passed into the historical obscurity reserved for predictable competence.

Agroup of textile importers in New York started the first packet line. The main founder, Jeremiah Thompson, was an English immigrant from Yorkshire who had come to New York aged seventeen in 1801 to join his uncle in representing the family’s woollen manufacturing business. From that base they engaged in shipping and shipowning with three local associates. These five men all lived near the waterfront at the southern tip of Manhattan. Four of them were Quakers. (Jeremiah Thompson, an active Friend, was an officer in the New York Manumission Society, dedicated to freeing slaves; but he also made a fortune by exporting raw cotton, grown in the American South by slave labour.)

Thompson had a breakthrough idea for improving ocean travel. At the time, a shipowner might advertise a ship’s day of departure, but the captain would then wait until enough cargo and passengers had been loaded, and wind and weather seemed favourable, before weighing anchor. A passenger hoping to embark might have to hang around the docks, spending money on food and lodging and wasting time, for a week or more. Thompson, dealing in volatile markets for finished imports and raw exports, wanted faster, more reliable service. He conceived the notion of a transatlantic ship ‘line’: several vessels under coordinated private management, sailing on known dates between established ports, and locked into an unchanging departure schedule for the foreseeable future.

In the autumn of 1817, the Thompsons and their three associates placed a notice in New York’s newspapers. ‘In order to furnish frequent and regular conveyances for GOODS and PASSENGERS,’ they announced, ‘the subscribers have undertaken to establish a line of vessels between NEW-YORK and LIVERPOOL, to sail from each place on a certain day in every month throughout the year.’ They listed the line’s first four ships: three-masted and square-rigged, and larger than average size for their time at around 110 feet long and 400 tons. The Pacific, launched in 1807 and the oldest of the four, was especially fast; earlier that year she had made a run to Liverpool in only seventeen days. ‘These ships have all been built in New-York, of the best materials,’ the owners asserted. ‘They are known to be remarkably fast sailers, and their accommodations for passengers are uncommonly extensive and commodious.’ Thompson and his partners were promising a daring combination of speed, comfort and predictability – qualities previously unknown on the North Atlantic.

The first two ships of the line sailed from New York and Liverpool in January 1818. For identification they showed a large black ball painted on their fore topsail, at the highest point of the first mast. The ‘Black Ball Line’ at once earned a tight reputation for minding the calendar. Fighting winter gales, the Pacific made a slow return trip to New York of forty-eight days; she was then unloaded and reloaded in an impossibly short six days and left for Liverpool as scheduled on the fifth of April. Later that year, the Black Ball’s Courier on leaving Liverpool met the Pacific coming in, and when approaching New York met the Black Baller Amity going out. The line added more ships, allowing two sailings a month each way. For any eastbound trip under twenty-two days or westbound run under thirty-five, Jeremiah Thompson gave the captain a new coat, with a dress for his wife. After two years, even Niles’ Weekly Register, from the rival port of Baltimore, had to concede that the Black Ball ships were running with the speed and almost the regularity of a horse-drawn mail coach. ‘Such steadiness and despatch is truly astonishing,’ said the Register, ‘and, in a former age, would have been incredible.’

Success brought competition. Atlantic packet lines started running from Philadelphia and Boston. Early in 1824, the Boston line’s Emerald caught a rare easterly gale and rode it all the way home from Liverpool in an astonishing seventeen days, a westward record for years. In New York, the Red Star and Blue Swallowtail lines competed directly with Black Ball. Other new lines ran to London and to Le Havre on the northern coast of France. The sharp rivalry among all these lines added another new concept to transatlantic travel. Ship technologies in Europe and America had been essentially static for some two hundred years; conservative builders and owners resisted innovations and kept turning out the same old models. Packet competition kicked ship design into the progressive nineteenth century. Constructed mainly in shipyards along the East River in New York, ever bigger and fancier, the new packets became the largest and finest ships yet built in America, evolving more quickly than any other type of vessel.

Black Ball set the initial pace. The Canada, 132 feet and 525 tons, was launched in March 1823. ‘We have never examined a ship which was in all respects equal to her,’ said a local newspaper. Her dining cabin offered polished mahogany tables and pillars, sofas, and plush crimson draperies. The men’s cabins, brightened by skylights of ground glass in the main deck overhead, had olive-coloured damask silk curtains. In the ladies’ cabins the curtains were fine blue silk. A year later, the Blue Swallowtail Line answered Black Ball with its own York. To the now-expected mahogany woodwork, the York added a library with a printed catalogue, redwood pillars finished in imitation bronze, and venetian blinds in the cabin doors that allowed ventilation with privacy. Cabin washstands doubled as desks. A Turkish carpet covered the floor and muffled shipboard sounds. The ladies’ lounge even featured a small piano flanked by large mirrors. ‘In the comfort and entertainment which the American ships afford,’ a Liverpool newspaper’s account of the York acknowledged, ‘…their superiority over British vessels is most conspicuous.’

While ship interiors became plusher and better equipped, the East River shipwrights puzzled over how to increase speed without losing cargo space. By slow degrees, the rounded bow and plump midship lines of the first packets gave way to faster ships with longer, thinner hulls and sharper bows and sterns. Shipwrights believed intuitively that speed also required a V-shaped hull, tapering down to a narrow keel at the bottom of the ship. These design tendencies all meant less payload and lower profits for a ship of a given length.

A solution to this tightening dilemma was discovered accidentally. In the early 1830s, Edward Knight Collins of New York started running coastal packets to New Orleans. Because the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi River required ships of shallow draught, the New Orleans packets were built with flat bottoms; speed was not deemed so important in the coastal traffic. But it turned out, to general surprise, that flat hulls did not make the ships any slower or harm their sailing qualities. A flat bottom also let a ship rest upright when grounded by a low tide.

In 1836 Collins launched his Dramatic Line of flat-bottomed packets to Liverpool, with ships named for famous theatrical figures. Flamboyant and excessive, indeed theatrical, and bold to the point of recklessness, Collins left the competition in his foaming wake. His Shakespeare was 142 feet and 747 tons; his Garrick, Sheridan and Siddons, 158 feet and 895 tons each; and the Roscius, at 168 feet, was the first New York packet to exceed 1000 tons (and to cost $100,000). Collins also moved his passenger cabins from below deck, where they were subject to nauseating bilge odours, to a long deckhouse on the main deck stretching from the stern almost to the central mainmast. Up there, the cabins got more air and light – but without making the ship top-heavy or harming her behaviour or safety. The cabins themselves were three times larger than those on the first Black Ball ships. The Dramatic Line’s food, wines and decor all set new standards of elegance. And the ships were fast. Over their first ten years, the New York packets had averaged twenty-four days out, thirty-eight days home – excellent times compared to those of previous ships. By 1839 the Collins packets, the swiftest in the trade, had cut those averages to twenty days, twelve hours and thirty days, twelve hours. Ocean travel had never before made such vaulting strides in only two decades.

An ocean voyage, in this era or any other, had to work around three endemic aspects of the experience: seasickness, danger and boredom. The worst bouts of mal de mer usually lifted after the first few days but could last longer, especially for women and in heavy seas. Any ship – in particular a sailing vessel – remained at the mercy of mighty natural forces, and on the heavily travelled North Atlantic might also collide with another ship or with an iceberg. Every day passengers had to find ways to kill time, a search that became more desperate and exhausted towards the end of the passage. ‘A sea voyage…is a sort of Purgatory under the best of circumstances,’ William Young of Halifax, Nova Scotia, wrote in his journal aboard a packet in 1839. ‘You can follow no regular employment and tho’ not sick, I am never quite well enough for study. You can’t write on account of the motion and one’s reading is uninstructive and desultory.’ Young and his fellow passengers enjoyed clean berths, attentive service, abundant food and drink, and clear sailing. ‘And yet, from a sea voyage, Good Lord deliver me.’

A packet voyage began with the captain. A safe passage depended absolutely on his skill, judgment and tenacity. He had to make the daily computations with sextant and chronometer that established the ship’s position and heading. At any time of day and night, he might order sailors aloft to set or take in sail. All steel and velvet, he was supposed to charm the passengers and, on occasion, bully the crew. His authority was final in all shipboard matters; yet he was ultimately just another mortal dealing with the unknowable mysteries of sailing the ocean. Every sailing ship displayed her own individual personality: what sailors called ‘ship sense’, an ineffable quality of seeming alive, even of having consciousness. Under way, each seagoing amalgam of natural materials – of wood, hemp and canvas – thrummed a unique vibration which the captain could feel tingling from the rudder to the wheel, and hear blowing overhead through the sails and rigging. The trick was to pay careful attention and work with the ship, not to dominate her. To the extent that a packet voyage responded to mere human will and intention, it came down to a captain and his ship getting along well.

Passengers would pay their one-way fares of $140 to secure a particular captain as much as for his particular ship or packet line. An especially popular commander – such as George Maxwell of the Black Ball, Nash DeCost of the Blue Swallowtail, or Nathaniel Palmer of the Dramatic – reliably attracted extra business. That meant more money for the captain himself, because he typically owned a one-eighth stake in his ship and received 5 per cent of the freight and steerage charges and 25 per cent of the cabin fares. The governments in Washington and London also paid him two cents for each American letter and two pence (four cents) for each British letter he carried. These extras brought his nominal annual salary of $360 up to as much as $5000 a year, a plush income at the time. The packets therefore drew the services of the best captains on the Atlantic.

The crews were made up of sailors from many nations of Europe and North America. The cooks and stewards were usually black Americans, ‘clever mulattoes’, according to James Fenimore Cooper, ‘who have caught the civilization of the kitchen.’ Passengers had most of their shipboard contact with the stewards, who served food, cleaned and fetched, and answered redundant questions about the weather and general course of the trip. The sailors kept to themselves, bunking in cramped quarters in the forecastle at the bow of the ship and conversing in the arcane, excluding patois of the sea. Passengers would marvel, from a distance, at the sailors’ strength and agility as they danced around the rigging in all weathers and acted variously as tailor, carpenter, cooper, stevedore, clerk and astronomer. It was easy to romanticize their often brief, dangerous lives. Captains drove the packets hard, always to the limit that sails and masts could bear, straining for speed. That meant constant action in the rigging (especially in bad weather), much bellowing and cursing, and sailors occasionally falling to their sudden deaths.

Everyone, ships and humans, remained at the indifferent mercy of the North Atlantic Ocean, in particular of the capricious wind. ‘We are pensioners of the wind,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal at sea in 1833. ‘All our prosperity, enterprize, temper come and go with the fickle air. If the wind should forget to blow we must eat our masts.’ A ship could lie becalmed in mid-ocean for a week or more, the wilted sails slapping irritatingly against the masts, the ship rising and falling helplessly on the endless swells. At the other extreme, too much wind brought its own delights. In April 1831 the President of the London Black X Line picked her way from New York through twelve straight days of cold, dense fogs and heavy, rolling seas. A fierce gale pushed waves almost up to her topmast. As the ship rolled back and forth on her bow-to-stern axis, water came over the five-foot bulwarks onto the deck, then into the cabins below. The captain, standing in water up to his knees, could not leave his post for twenty-four hours. The President limped into port after a hard passage of thirty-nine days. Other ships at journey’s end might come within tantalizing sight of land and then have to spend days tacking back and forth along the coast, held at sea by contrary winds.

A recurring drama of initiation awaited those crossing for the first time. The first few days at sea might seem deceptively tranquil. No prior experience of the ocean from the vantage point of a beach or an offshore boat could adequately prepare a neophyte for the North Atlantic in full cry. In November 1835, Fanny Appleton of Boston (the future wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) embarked on the packet Francis Depau for Le Havre. Eighteen years old, bright-eyed and curious, she dismissed the fourteen other passengers as ‘well meaning, uninteresting folks’ but liked watching the sailors and the shifting sea. Commanders often managed to find time for pretty young women on board their ships; so Captain Henry Robinson gave her a puzzling lesson in navigation and ‘shooting the sun’ with his sextant at noon to find the Depau’s position. Five days out, running before a brisk following wind, the ship dashed along at ten knots, prancing like a sea horse. ‘What a glorious exhilaration in this fine sea-air, a reckless thought-defying sense of liberty and life,’ Appleton wrote in her journal, with the joy of a cosseted young woman now perceiving a wider world. ‘The exhilaration of our speed fills us with a mad glee…we run and shout.’

The wind continued as the sea got rougher. Still bowling along at ten knots, the ship pitched and rolled and tossed. Appleton felt dizzy and exhausted, had trouble dressing, and – one week out – started longing for land. After a miserable night, she ‘wondered where the romance of the sea was found – certainly not below the deck’. She wept in despair. The steward brought tea. The constant motion and cacophony of wind, sea and shipboard sounds kept her from reading and writing. ‘Oh this eternity of noise and motion stupefying the brain, exhausting the body. Truly a shipboard life teaches one…humility: we are brought to our lowest ebb of self-respect.’ Her mood fluctuated wildly for the rest of the trip, depending on the weather. Like many sea diarists, she gradually ran short of fresh material and made briefer entries as the journey dragged on. Other passengers expressed surprise that she could still write so much about so little. ‘I am determined to prove one can write a Journal at sea,’ she vowed – and then left three straight days blank. (‘Little worth recording,’ she noted.) The ship reached Le Havre after twenty-five days, none too soon for Fanny Appleton.

Most of the cabin passengers on packets were men: British textile merchants and army officers, and American businessmen. Thrown together at close quarters amid the Anglo-American political tensions of the time, they sometimes bristled at each other. More typically, as frequent transatlantic travellers they settled amicably into the shipboard routines they had come to know well. In this quite masculine atmosphere, isolated by time and circumstances, they could dress casually and indulge at will in boyish recreations. ‘We endeavored to amuse ourselves as best we could,’ one man noted, ‘and, for the want of work, turned boys again, and went to play.’ They shot rifles at random targets in the rigging, sang songs, made bets, played cards and games, held mock courts, told jokes and stories; they drank all day long. Even the tightly buttoned Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the Black Baller New York from Liverpool in 1833, succumbed to shipboard spirits. ‘These are the amusements of wise men in this sad place,’ he decided. ‘I tipple with all my heart here. May I not?’ In midsummer 1832, the English actress Fanny Kemble, bemused and amused, watched the men on a packet in a festive Saturday-night mood of drinking, dancing, singing, and romping around on the quarterdeck at the stern. They toasted their absent wives and sweethearts, in the tradition of sailors. The captain proposed ‘The Ladies – God bless them’. (‘And the Lord deliver us!’ someone added.)

The most promisingly pleasant aspect of packet life available to all cabin passengers, drunk or sober, was the food. A housed-over longboat on deck held a three-tiered menagerie: sheep and pigs on the bottom, then ducks and geese, and hens and chickens on the top. The ship’s cow lived in another structure nearby, not happily. These animals provided fresh meat, eggs, milk and cream for the laden plates in the dining saloon. On the Black Ball’s Europe in 1833, breakfast consisted of ham, eggs, bacon, mutton cutlets, shadfish, rolls and cognac. Dinner ran to three comparable courses, good pastries, seven kinds of alcohol, and dried fruits for dessert. The long, rolling swells of the North Atlantic left many passengers unable to eat or hold down their meals; but whenever circumstances allowed, especially during the early weeks of the voyage, the food and drink were generous.

Except for the Le Havre lines, which brought over thousands of German immigrants to America, the packets carried few steerage passengers until after 1840. During the first two decades, steerage business in general was just an afterthought; if a packet didn’t fill the ‘tween-deck’s upper hold with fine freight, the ship’s carpenter would fashion temporary bunks of rough, unplaned lumber, and the steeragewould take on human cargo at twenty dollars a head. That fare paid only for the cramped bunk and a place on deck to cook. Steerage passengers had to bring their own food, pots and pans, and plates and utensils. The tightly packed steerage became a fetid horror at night and in bad weather. Two small ventilating hatches had to be closed in rain or heavy seas. The steerage air mingled a stifling bouquet of foul bilge water, rotting wood and ropes, and human sweat, vomit and excrement. At times these closed-down conditions went on for days, getting worse until the storm lifted.

Everybody, cabin and steerage passengers alike, felt better up on deck. There one could breathe fresh air and take walks, play shuffleboard, and watch the sea and the other passengers. A dampening shipboard rhythm of ennui and lassitude gradually settled onto the company. Earnest intentions of reading, writing and needlework were laid aside, and people lounged away the time. Even the most trivial daily events – meeting and (after due inquiry) identifying another ship, sighting a whale or porpoise, or discovering a stowaway – took on gripping, inordinate significance. Wagers were placed on the daily run and the date of arrival. After evening tea, the dining saloon might hold lectures, charades, rounds of whist and singing. A bold man could even venture, trolling, into the ladies’ cabin. ‘This snuggery affords tolerable convenience for a little flirtation, ’ noted the Irish actor Tyrone Power, ‘if you are lucky enough to get one up.’

On clear nights, far from the obscuring lamps of shore, and in the prevailing deprived mood of being easily diverted, passengers seized on natural light shows. The sun would fall into the western horizon, a blazing ball that slowly guttered out as though being submerged in the sea. The moon would rise, never before so distinctly. Stars filled the sky, brighter and denser than when seen from land. Whole new constellations revealed themselves to the naked eye. In every direction, the sky arched all the way down to the horizon. Shooting stars zoomed around this vast inverted bowl, and the aurora borealis looked deeper and more brilliant in its roses and purples. From the Europe in 1835, cruising along at nine knots, Anna Eliot Ticknor of Boston watched the phosphorescence tossed up by the bow. The foam at the stern glittered like diamonds. Distant waves broke and lit up. Porpoises darted around, leaving trails like seaborne comets. The sails and rigging glowed. It was all so wild and beautiful.