The Ocean Railway
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard, and the revolutionary world of the great Atlantic steamships
Stephen Fox
To the memory of PHYLLIS RUTH BLAKELEY (1922-1986)
Provincial archivist for Nova Scotia
Biographer of Samuel Cunard
Table of Contents
Prologue THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN AND THE BRITANNIA
PART ONE: The Packet Ship Era, 1820-1840
PART TWO: The Era of Cunard Domination, 1840-1870
3. Ships as Enterprise: Samuel Cunard of Halifax
4. Ships as Engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel
8. Emigration and the Inman Line
PART THREE: The Era of Steamship Competition, 1870-1910
12. Ships as Buildings: Two Cycles to Cunard
13. Ships as Towns: Officers, Crew, Steerage
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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