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