The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships
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The voyage showed that a long ocean passage by steamboat was in fact feasible – though not as yet on a routine basis. The apparently insoluble limitation remained the fuel supply. The Glasgow burned two tons of coal every twenty-four hours. Coal was expensive and bulky, requiring inordinate storage space aboard ship and, therefore, frequent landfalls for refuelling. An extended ocean voyage across open water with no coaling stops was still impossible, awaiting bigger ships and the invention of better engines and boilers. It would be more than two decades before a steam vessel could cross the North Atlantic under sustained power.
Scotland produced the first British steamboats and then dominated that field ever after. By 1822, forty-eight steamers had been launched from the Clyde, more than from any other part of the country. Shipbuilders and marine engineers along the Clyde drew from well-entrenched west-of-Scotland traditions of millwrighting, iron smelting and founding, and engineering. Glasgow also lay at the western end of the geologic formation known as the Clyde Basin, rich in coal and iron deposits. All the necessary human and mineral resources were at hand. The river itself was periodically diked and deepened, allowing access all the way to Glasgow for even the newest, biggest steamships. In these burgeoning circumstances, the Napier and Elder families established durable steam shipbuilding dynasties. With an uncanny (and canny) consistency that came to resemble an orderly series of monarchical successions, these two families, their associates, and their lineal descendants in other firms would build and engine most of the notable Atlantic steamships of the nineteenth century.
David Napier, the first of this line, was born in 1790 in Dumbarton, on the Clyde about halfway between Glasgow and Greenock. The men in his family worked as blacksmiths and iron founders. He attended school briefly, acquiring a little Latin and French, but was inevitably bound for his father’s workshop. In 1803 he glimpsed his future when he saw the Charlotte Dundas at Port Dundas, near Glasgow. ‘Although then only twelve years of age,’ he recalled a half-century later, ‘having been reared among engines and machinery, I took particular notice of it.’ David went along when his father moved the family business to a foundry on Howard Street in Glasgow. At the age of twenty, after his father’s death, he took over. In another brush with British steamboat history, he built the boiler for Henry Bell’s Comet. ‘Not having been accustomed to make boilers with internal flues,’ he noted, ‘we made them first of cast iron but finding that would not do we tried our hand with malleable iron and ultimately succeeded, with the aid of a liberal supply of horse dung, in getting the boiler filled.’ (Napier never forgot that Bell had neglected to pay him for it.)
After the Glasgow’s pioneering voyage from the Clyde to the Thames, Napier set out to build a steamboat designed for regular ocean service. He studied the sailing packets that took up to a week to run from Glasgow to Belfast, the shapes of their bows and how they moved through the high swells of the Irish Sea. Under sail, the masts acted like tall levers, pushing down the forward part of the hull and demanding extra buoyancy there. Did steam propulsion therefore call for a different kind of hull? Napier tried various models in a tank of water. Eventually he decided to slice the full, rounded bow of the sailing packets into a sharper, finer wedge shape for his steamboats. The Rob Roy, the first vessel so designed, was built by his kinsman William Denny of Dumbarton in 1818. She was eighty feet long and eighty-eight tons, with a thirty-horsepower engine by Napier. Under Napier’s own command – he would try his hand at anything – she ran from Dublin to Greenock in an unprecedented twenty-six hours. For two years the Rob Roy gave reliable service between Greenock and Belfast, then was transferred to the English Channel to run between Dover and Calais.
Over the next few years Napier built progressively larger vessels, up to the 240-ton, 70-horsepower Superb and the 350-ton, 100-horsepower Majestic, for other packet lines to Dublin and Liverpool. These ocean steamers were bigger, stronger, and more powerful than anything else yet built in Great Britain. Their success meant that steamboats were starting to evolve into steamships – though still, for the time being, with the old masts and sails and wooden hulls. ‘I was the first that successfully established steam packets in the open sea,’ Napier claimed in 1822, when obliged to brag by competing claims on behalf of Boulton and Watt. ‘The Superb is now plying the third year between Greenock and Liverpool, and not a single article of her machinery has ever given way, although she has been out in the worst of weather… The truth is, I have made nearly double the number of engines for boats going to sea that Mr. Watt has, and their machinery has not in a single instance been so far deranged as to prevent them from making their passage in a reasonable time.’
As engineer, shipowner, packet entrepreneur and sometime ship captain, Napier was forever popping with ideas and inventions. He pushed the evolving steamship forms to their limits, skirting and sometimes exceeding those vague boundaries at which novelty became dangerous. For all his mechanical brilliance, he lacked a sense of due restraint and proportion. He charged ahead like a dashing cavalry regiment, leaving to humbler foot soldiers the grubby tasks of mopping up and administering details. In time he yielded the leadership of Clyde steamship engineering to his cousin Robert, who was less inventive and dazzling but more patient and meticulous and, ultimately, more sound and substantial.
Robert Napier was born in Dumbarton in 1791 with, as he liked to say, a hammer in his hand, the son and grandson of blacksmiths. Of Robert and his three brothers, one became a minister while the others followed family tradition into smithing and millwrighting. At the Dumbarton grammar school, Robert received a liberal education, supplemented by outside lessons in mechanical drawing which gave him a lifelong taste for fine paintings and beautiful objects. His father groomed him for college, but Robert preferred to apprentice in the family workshop. He excelled at ornamental ironwork, fashioning metal into art. In his spare time he made tools and guns, and practised drawing. At twenty he took off for Edinburgh, armed with an allowance of five pounds from his father and a certificate of good character from the minister of his parish. Soon he was back to work briefly for his father and then left home for good, this time to Glasgow. His artistic side may have craved the heady intellectual ferment of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment, but he was an engineer at heart, at home on the Clyde.
Bankrolled by fifty pounds from his father, in 1815 he bought the tools and goodwill of a small blacksmith shop. By making millwheels and tools for tinsmiths, he prospered enough to marry his first cousin Isabella Napier three years later. The marriage brought him into closer contact with her brother, cousin David. Restless as ever, in 1821 David let Robert take over his business at Camlachie Foundry, at the east end of the Gallowgate. Robert made iron pipes for the Glasgow Water Company, which had just started pumping from the Clyde, and then his first steam engine, for a spinning factory in Dundee.
In 1823, thirty-two years old, Robert Napier found his métier by making his first marine engine. It was installed in the Leven, built by James Lang of Dumbarton for the river traffic between that town and Glasgow. Napier was crucially assisted, with the Leven and for the next four decades, by his recently hired works manager, David Elder, who had come from a family of millwrights near Edinburgh. For the Leven’s engine, Elder made various refinements in the air pump, condenser and slide valves. He was using the rudimentary machine tools of the day, which were powered by a central steam engine linked to overhead belts and pulleys. At Camlachie Foundry these devices ran just a few turning lathes (the small pulleys and belts were forever slipping), a horizontal boring mill, and a smaller vertical boring machine. From these modest beginnings, Elder gradually improved his tools, products and men. The veteran millwrights of the time would not work to the tolerances he demanded, so he preferred to hire cartwrights and house carpenters instead, transferring their fine woodworking skills to the new problems of metal fabrication. ‘He was a man of great natural force of character,’ it was said of David Elder, ‘and maintained his opinions with considerable vigour.’
The Leven’s steadfast performance brought the firm other marine contracts. For the United Kingdom of 1826 – the biggest, fastest British steam vessel yet at 175 feet and 560 tons – they put an engine of 200 horsepower in the ship built by Robert Steele of Greenock. In 1828 they moved to a larger site in Glasgow, the soon-famous Vulcan Foundry on Washington Street, near the river. They added heavy new machine tools for making even more powerful engines. Robert Napier and David Elder became, by general reputation, the best engineers on the Clyde.
Any new steam-powered shipping company would routinely seek Napier’s advice and active participation; his approval could mark the difference between success and failure. In the workshop, Elder continued his ongoing technical improvements and trained several generations of the top Clyde engineers, including his distinguished son John. Eventually Napier acquired his own shipbuilding yard as well, at Govan on the south bank of the Clyde, and applied the firm’s exacting standards to every aspect of producing a steamship. One of his most loyal and long-term customers would be Samuel Cunard.
As Henry Bell had insisted about himself, these pioneers of Clyde steamboat building – from William Symington to Robert Napier – were not just self-taught engineers who worked simply by untutored intuition. They typically had mentors and family backgrounds in their fields. But most of their education did take place outside school, and the best of them then engaged in a continuous process of self-education all through their working lives. Immersed in such a bold new undertaking, they had to contrive their own patterns. They ‘read Nature’s laws in their own fashion’, the Scottish naval architect Robert Mansel remarked after the younger Robert Steele’s death in 1879. ‘Admittedly they knew little or no Latin or Greek, and, on the whole, were decidedly averse to talking and talkers.’ Diligent and laconic in the Scots manner, they left terse, incomplete surviving records of what they did, and nothing whatever about their private thoughts and feelings. Any curiosity about such intimacies would have puzzled them. They poured themselves into their steamboats and steam engines – which also have not survived, except for a few stray shards. Entering their world now requires an act of imagination, with casual leaps over yawning gaps in the historical evidence.
So wedded to the progressive nineteenth century, their work helped change the world within their lifetimes. Whatever they may have thought about this grand transformation has been lost to history, except for off-hand hints. Robert Napier’s fine mansion at Shandon on the Gareloch preserved a lingering trace of the old world within its opulent outer walls. The house was built in successive additions around the original modest cottage. A visitor in 1855 marvelled at the many beautiful paintings and art objects in the plush outer rooms. David Elder, a music lover, had made his boss a waterpowered pump for the pipe organ in the main gallery. Napier, sixty-four years old in 1855, liked to show the treasures from his lifetime of collecting. At the core of the mansion, happy to remain behind in one of the old cottage’s small rooms, sat his wife, Isabella Napier Napier. ‘A very simple and unaffected Scotch woman,’ the visitor surmised. The mother of seven children, five still living, she sat spinning by the fireplace, moving steadily to a rhythm older than steam on water. The great Steam Age roared on, around and past her.
3. Ships as Enterprise: Samuel Cunard of Halifax
The Samuel Cunard who appeared so mysteriously in Boston on his Britannia in 1840 had come from a tumultuous family history of upheaval and dislocation, of religious and political persecution, and then of neglect and alcoholism in his parents’ generation. In the absence of much given structure, he had attained a preternatural early maturity on his own. He essentially invented himself and then took on necessary paternal roles for his younger siblings. Having emerged from such an uncertain background, he might reasonably have wanted a safe future based on some dependable job that provided a secure living. Instead he dealt in ocean ships and shipments, with all their endemic risks and uncertainties. Cunard would spend his working life worrying about cargoes and profits, captains and crews, and an occasional overdue vessel plying the pitiless North Atlantic Ocean. ‘Those who have the charge of ships,’ he wrote in old age, ‘are never free from anxiety.’
Sam Cunard was descended from a group of German Quakers who came to America in 1683. His great-great-grandfather, Thones Kunders, lived in the German town of Crefeld, on the lower Rhine River near the Dutch border. Kunders and his family were religious dissenters, first as Mennonites, then Quakers, at odds with local established church authorities. William Penn granted the Crefeld Friends about 18,000 acres in his Quaker haven of Pennsylvania. They sailed away from intolerance in July 1683, thirteen men with their families, thirty-three people in all: among the minority of immigrants to America who came not for economic opportunity but for reasons of conscience, to worship as they wished. The pilgrims from Crefeld landed in Philadelphia after a voyage of seventy-four days.
They settled an area to be known as Germantown, later incorporated into greater Philadelphia. For three years, until they put up a meetinghouse, the Crefeld Friends worshipped at the home of Thones Kunders. He worked as a textile dyer, his trade in the old country, and was appointed one of the local burgesses by William Penn. Kunders died in 1729, ‘an hospitable, well-disposed man, of an inoffensive life and good character’. At some point he had Americanized his name to Dennis Conrad. In 1710 his sixth child, Henry, married the daughter of another Crefeld colonist. They bought a farm of 220 acres in Montgomery County and had six sons, who later spelled their last name four ways. (With the trail thus obscured, the family line has puzzled genealogists.) Henry’s son Samuel took the name Cunrad. In turn, Samuel’s son Abraham, born in 1754, later switched two letters and came up with Cunard, where the matter finally rested.
According to an oral tradition passed down within the family, Thones Kunders and his sons were ploughing a field one day when they turned up a bag of gold coins – perhaps a pirate’s loot, brought ashore and buried but never recovered. This windfall helped establish the family in America. The story, if true, marks the first hint of what afterwards was called ‘Cunard luck’ or the ‘luck of Cunards’. Four generations later, Sam Cunard’s good fortune in his ever-dangerous shipping business was sometimes ascribed – especially by frustrated competitors – not to alertness or hard work but to his unfair, unearned, uncanny luck.
The American Revolution, however, brought the family nothing but bad luck. As Quakers, the descendants of Thones Kunders could not support the revolutionary cause. The Quaker peace testimony prohibited any violent opposition to governments. Pennsylvania Friends felt no great loyalty to British authority; their pacifism simply made all wars untenable. The local rebels, mainly Presbyterians, took their opportunity to cut into the power of the more established Quakers. This complex internecine conflict, fuelled by both religion and politics, became quite bitter. The rebels would place candles in their windows at night to celebrate American victories; Quaker windows without candles might be broken. Friends who declined to join public fast days might have their businesses attached or lose blankets and horses to rebel army requisitions. Soldiers could be billeted in Quaker homes. Quakers could be fined for refusing muster duty or an oath of allegiance to the rebels. Some, like Abraham Cunard’s cousin Robert Cunard, were convicted of treason and had their property confiscated.
During the war, and especially after the final American victory, many Quakers (including Abraham Cunard) left for the Loyalist stronghold of New York. When New York in turn fell to the rebels, much of its swelling Loyalist community was banished to the British outpost of Nova Scotia. An elite group of Loyalists petitioned British colonial authorities for land grants and other privileges in their new Canadian home. Abraham Cunard joined a less well-connected group of nine hundred others bound for Nova Scotia in asking for their own considerations. ‘Chagrined as your Memorialists are at the manner in which the late Contest has been terminated,’ they declared, ‘and disappointed as they find themselves in being left to the lenity of their Enemys…your Memorialists humbly implore redress from your Excellency and that enquiry may be made into their respective Losses Services Situations and Sufferings.’ Cunard sailed to Nova Scotia with a flotilla of Loyalists in the spring of 1783. Exactly one hundred years after his ancestors had come to America for religious freedom, political and religious strife now forced him to leave home for another new land in a wilderness.
Perched at the southeastern edge of Canada, technically a peninsula but actually more like an island, Nova Scotia in 1783 was a raw frontier territory. It had been lightly settled by immigrants from England, Scotland and Germany, and by Americans from nearby New England states. During the war it became a bristling garrison for British army and navy forces, who dominated the principal town of Halifax. The newly arrived Loyalists, lured by favourable reports, were generally disheartened by what they found. ‘All our golden promises have vanished,’ said one Loyalist. ‘We were taught to believe this place was not barren and foggy, as had been represented, but we find it ten times worse.…It is the most inhospitable climate that ever mortal set foot on. The winter is of insupportable length and coldness, only a few spots fit to cultivate, and the land is covered with a cold, spongy moss, instead of grass, and the entire country is wrapt in the gloom of perpetual fog.’ Yet Nova Scotia was the most accessible place from New York still under British rule, closer than the West Indies or the Canadian interior, with rich fishery and timber resources and, at Halifax, one of the finest natural harbours in North America. By the end of 1783 some 20,000 Loyalist refugees had arrived, more than doubling the local population.
In these circumstances of widespread chaos and hardship, of overcrowding, high prices, and temporary shacks, Abraham Cunard found and married a wife. Margaret Murphy was the daughter of Irish immigrants who had settled in South Carolina just before the war; her father joined the British forces and saw action in Georgia. The Murphys fled to Nova Scotia after the evacuation of Charleston in 1782. Abraham and Margaret were married on 22 June 1783; he was twenty-nine, she twenty-five. It was an odd match. The Murphys were Irish Catholics, had owned slaves in South Carolina, and did not share the pacifism, anti-slavery convictions, or abstemious habits of Quakers. This difficult marriage produced ten children over the next two decades. Samuel, the second child and oldest boy, was born on 21 November 1787, and named for his paternal grandfather.
Most of the Pennsylvania Loyalists settled in the new town of Shelburne, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia. Abraham Cunard – perhaps because of his rather heterodox marriage – instead went up to Halifax. The harbour town, less than forty years old, had been laid out on the slope of a steep hill that offered some protection from the northwest winter wind. Cunard found work as a foreman carpenter in the army’s timberyard at the docks. The Cunards lived near the water on Brunswick Street in the north end, a German section known as Dutchtown. Abraham and Margaret compromised their ancestral religious differences by joining an Anglican church. On his own time, Abraham bought vacant property and built houses for sale, turning good profits. He prospered enough to pay eight hundred pounds in cash, a substantial sum, for two waterfront land parcels in 1796 and 1798. He was also granted 1000 acres of timberland in northern Nova Scotia. At the yard he was promoted to master carpenter, earning nine shillings a day. As far as most outsiders could tell, the Cunards were doing well.
In private, the family was contending with an ongoing crisis caused by Margaret’s uncontrolled drinking. Years later, people told stories of her lying in the streets of Halifax, dead drunk, while her children went barefoot and sold produce from the family garden for a few coins. Abraham’s response is not known; his extended working hours, between his timberyard job and the houses he was building to sell, might have functioned as a refuge from his wife’s alcoholism – or perhaps a contributing factor to it. What seems clear is that Sam, as the oldest boy, had to assume early responsibilities. After a few years of grammar school, he started working for pay, wasting no time. Driving the cows home at night, he walked along knitting a bag to hold his money. He ran errands, picked dandelions and sold them at market, and purchased fish, potatoes and other goods at the wharves to sell door to door. At age fourteen he proudly bought a broadcloth suit, his first, with his own money.
Children from an alcoholic home may respond in wildly varying ways. In Sam Cunard’s case, he clamped a lifelong tight discipline on his emotions and pleasures. For a family of partly Quaker heritage, trying to make its way in a new and strange place, Margaret’s drinking was a shameful secret. But it could not really be kept hidden in a small town isolated by geography and circumstances. Gossips knew and talked about it. From this background, it seems, Sam developed his enduring habit of keeping himself under cover, of not giving public speeches or revealing much even in private letters. His own habits were notably ascetic; he associated heavy drinking with failure and embarrassment. When he later made such bald statements as ‘I have never known an industrious sober man who has not succeeded’, he was referring obliquely to his mother’s losing struggle with rum.
From boyhood Sam toiled as a merchant, buying goods and selling them at a profit. He lacked the education for a professional career, like law or medicine, and had no taste for government or military positions, the other main avenues available to ambitious boys in Halifax. Living in a harbour town dominated by its waterfront commerce, he naturally turned to ships and shipping as the main medium for his business activities. On a typical working day he was up early and down to the docks, looking for deals, and finding them often enough to believe that his chosen field would reward hard effort and concentration. “Tis true that the merchant does not always succeed,’ Cunard later reflected, ‘ – but with patient industry he generally does – there is one thing certain that no one succeeds without application and close attention to the business he is intended for.’
He worked under his father, then with him, and quickly moved beyond him.
Abraham got him his first real job, as a clerk in the naval dockyard’s engineer department, and next arranged for him to spend a few years down in Boston, working in a shipbroker’s office and learning that business. By the age of twenty-one, in 1809, Sam had returned to Halifax and talked his father into founding the firm of A. Cunard & Son, ship agents and general merchants in the West Indian trade. On his own he also bought two parcels of wilderness land in the lightly settled northern reaches of Nova Scotia, a total of 5000 acres – the first of many distant land speculations he would try for their potential rents, timber or minerals.