Early in 1830, the Assembly of Lower Canada doubled its steam offer to £3000, and the Nova Scotian legislature again added its £750. In Halifax, Cunard formed a committee to solicit stockholders in the renewed steamboat company. At a meeting in March he adroitly manoeuvred himself into local leadership of the undertaking. Flourishing a list of 169 people who had promised to buy shares, he proposed a resolution that each subscriber – whether for £500 or £25 – would have just one vote in the proceedings, ‘thus depriving the intelligent and enterprising merchant,’ one high roller later objected, ‘of the proper control over his large advances and placing it at the disposal of a number of small shareholders, in most instances entirely unacquainted with the nature of the business.’ After his resolution passed, the seventy-six subscribers on hand, mostly small investors, elected Cunard as Halifax agent for the steamboat company, granting him the power of general management and control of funds.
Awkwardly balanced between directors in Halifax and Quebec, the company proceeded to build a steamship. The contract went to George Black, a shipbuilder in Quebec City, and his merchant associate John Saxton Campbell. The designer and construction foreman was James Goudie, a local boy who had been sent to Scotland in his mid-teens to apprentice under a Clyde shipbuilder, William Simmons of Greenock. As an assistant foreman to Simmons, Goudie had worked on four steamboats similar to the one he now laid out in Quebec. He had brought the plans back from Scotland in the summer of 1830. ‘As I had the drawings and the form of the ship, at that time a novelty in construction,’ Goudie later recalled, ‘it devolved upon me to lay off and expand the draft to its full dimensions on the floor of the loft, where I made several alterations in the lines as improvements. Mr. Black, though the builder and contractor, was in duty bound to follow my instructions, as I understood it.’ When the keel was laid in September, young Goudie was still three months shy of his twenty-first birthday.
The Royal William, named after the reigning king of England, was a large steamship for the time, 160 feet long and 44 feet wide overall, with three masts in a schooner rig. The upper strakes of the hull were flared out to contain and protect the paddle wheels, perhaps with the St Lawrence River’s ice in mind; this bulging gave the vessel an inflated gross capacity of 1370 tons. After being launched in the spring of 1831, she was towed down to Montreal and fitted with a two-cylinder engine of 200 horsepower by Bennet and Henderson. (John Bennet, that firm’s senior partner, had apprenticed at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham.) The crankshafts were forged by Robert Napier at his Camlachie works in Glasgow. Goudie, Black, Campbell and Bennet were all of Scots background. The boat’s designs came from Scotland, as did her crankshafts. Previous accounts have neglected this point: the Royal William was actually a Scottish steamship, built and financed in Canada.
In August she left Quebec on her maiden voyage, carrying twenty cabin passengers (who paid six pounds, five shillings apiece, including meals and a berth), seventy in steerage, some freight, and 120 tons of coal. After stopping in New Brunswick, she reached Halifax in six and a half days from Quebec. ‘Her beautiful fast sailing appearance,’ noted the Acadian Recorder, ‘the powerful and graceful manner in which her paddles served to pace along, and the admirable command which her helmsman had over her, afforded a triumphant specimen of what steam ships are.’ Sam Cunard visited her repeatedly, and no doubt proudly, asking questions and taking notes about her speed, coal consumption and sailing qualities. The Royal William made two more round-trips that year before ice closed the river. The proprietors thought about sending her to England for the winter, to ply a coastal route there and earn back more of their investments, but instead she was laid up at Quebec.
She finished her first season amid anaemic receipts, and complaints about excessive charges for passengers and freight that scared business away. ‘While at this port thousands of barrels, and scores of passengers, have been landing from Quebec and Halifax,’ a New Brunswick newspaper asked, ‘why has the Royal William been passing our wharves in want of both: as if by the splashing of her paddles, and the smoke of her furnace, she could forever bedim the vigilant eye of an interested public.’ At the start of the 1832 season, the Royal William offered sharply reduced rates in order to draw more customers – but then ran into a cholera epidemic. She made only one trip to Halifax that year, was quarantined, and returned to Quebec after almost two months.
Over the winter, her disappointed owners fell to angry squabbling among themselves. The Quebec stockholders accused Sam Cunard of claiming too large a fee for his services and of not working in harmony with the company. Cunard in turn charged the Quebec authorities with mistreating the Royal William during the previous season. ‘She was neglected in the Winter,’ he maintained, ‘and the frost burst the Pipes & otherwise injured the Machinery by which means a great expense was incurred and the sailing of the Boat delayed until the 15th June whereas she should have made two or three trips before that period – this might have been guarded against by a little care on the part of the committee and having an agent in pay they can have no excuse for the neglect.’ The company was foundering in red ink and feuding leadership. The cholera epidemic of 1832, blamed ever since for the collapse of the enterprise, had merely delivered the final, mortal blow.
In the spring of 1833 the Royal William was sold at a sheriff’s auction in Montreal for £5000 – some £11,000 less than her initial cost only two years earlier. Her new owners tried a coastal voyage down to Boston and back, and then sent her off to England to be sold again. No steamship had ever tried to cross the North Atlantic from Canada to Europe; it was a voyage now conceived in financial desperation. She left Nova Scotia on 18 August 1833, with just seven bold passengers, 324 tons of coal, and a cargo of six spars, one box, one trunk, some produce, household furniture, a box of stuffed birds and a harp.
It was a perilous trip. ‘We were very deeply laden with coal,’ the captain, John McDougall, said later, ‘deeper in fact than I would ever attempt crossing the Atlantic with her again.’ On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a gale knocked off the top of the foremast and disabled one of the engine’s cylinders. For a time they seemed to be sinking. But they ploughed ahead on the remaining cylinder, stopping the engine every fourth day to spend twenty-four hours cleaning seawater deposits from the leaky boilers. They proceeded under sail when the engine was down. After nineteen days they limped into Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, for repairs and a cosmetic paint job. They went on to London, where the Royal William was sold for £10,000 to the Portuguese government.
From this whole unlucky episode, Sam Cunard could draw two conclusions. Steamship technology did not, as yet, allow for routine, safe, profitable passages across the Atlantic – or even, for that matter, between Halifax and Quebec. And if he ever got involved in another steamship venture, he would need to run his own show, without having to clear his decisions through ranks of meddling associates. The Royal William experience ultimately reinforced his carefully guarded, self-contained ways.
The failure of his first steamship did Cunard no immediate harm in Halifax; the blame could be shifted elsewhere. Now entering middle age, he was reaching