Towards the end of the voyage, well over 2000 miles from Liverpool – just as crews may be growing tired and irritable, with flagging attention and potential lapses in discipline, and passengers bored or restive, and food or fuel perhaps running low – the ship enters the notorious graveyard of the North Atlantic. This most hazardous sector of the great circle is encountered precisely when the ship’s company may already be stretched tight and vulnerable.
Here the winter gale season yields, with no relief, to iceberg season, which generally starts in January and then peaks from April to July. Far to the north, in the west of Greenland, glaciers flow down the coastal mountains to the sea, annually calving thousands of icebergs into the Davis Strait. The bergs float slowly southwards in the Labrador Current. At unpredictable times in the following year, the surviving remnants – about four hundred icebergs each season – reach the shipping lanes off Newfoundland. A typical splinter or castle berg weighs over 100,000 tons and stands about 150 feet high by 300 feet long, above water; in extraordinary cases both dimensions may be doubled and more. Smaller bergs, growlers, field ice and floes can pose more hidden danger to ships: lower in profile, sometimes barely above the ocean surface, they are harder to see and avoid. When a ship enters the iceberg zone, temperatures dip and the air smells different, and lookouts get edgy.
The icebergs further trouble the tumultuous Gulf Stream. The strongest of all ocean circulations, and one of the most startling, mysterious discoveries made by the early European explorers of the New World, the Gulf Stream was first charted by Benjamin Franklin in 1769. Trade winds pile up water along the continental edge of South America nearpagethe equator and send it ‘downhill’ through the quickening channel between Cuba and the Florida Keys. The stream then runs up the eastern seaboard of the United States, thirty to fifty miles wide, at two to six miles an hour. Its warm water and rapid course inhibit the growth of phytoplankton, creating a vivid swath of deep, clear, pure blue against the greener, greyer surrounding ocean. Off the North Carolina coast, it divides into smaller substreams, which loop and meander. Even so, when the Gulf Stream reaches the area south of Nova Scotia, it is still moving over 150 million cubic metres of water each second – some 10,000 times the volume of the Mississippi River.
East of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and squarely athwart the great circle route to America, the warm Gulf Stream collides with the cold Labrador Current, producing the most extreme temperature differences in any ocean. This volatile mix has vast consequences in the air and water. Some are even whimsical (icebergs spinning slowly on their vertical axes, like huge, silent, snowy carousels). Most are more serious: mists, gales, squalls, driving rain and churning waves. At its worst, the atmospheric mingling of cold Canadian air and warm, moist Gulf Stream air may generate the sudden winter hurricanes called bombs, or rapidly intensifying cyclones. An abrupt drop in atmospheric pressure at the centre of a comma-shaped cloud mass, usually in January or February, can unpredictably generate winds of hurricane force. With little warning, the bomb just explodes.
The most widespread result of this massive convergence of cold and warmth is dense, persistent fogs. Off Cape Race, at the southeastern tip of Newfoundland, from April to September at least twelve days of every month are shrouded in sea fog. At midsummer it is nearly constant. ‘These horrid fogs infest the air most part of the year,’ the English hydrographer John Purdy noted in 1817, ‘and will last eight or ten days successively, sometimes longer.’ The fogs can assume geometric, hedgelike forms, with vertical slabs at their eastern edges squared off by long, level top layers. An observer may watch a ship emerging slowly from one of these banks, revealing herself in sharply defined foot by foot, as though being dragged out of a grey cliff at the water’s edge.
In iceberg season, with visibility more crucial than ever, the Grand Banks fogs throw a dense, smothering blanket over the ice field. The wind dies down. The sea is lumpy and tumbling. Warning bells and foghorns are muffled, distorted, their direction and distance rendered unknowable. Both sight and hearing become untrustworthy. A constant condensing rain drips from the ship’s superstructure. Shapes take ongigantic, unnatural proportions. A bird may resemble a sail. Ghosts and mirages float by. Peering hopelessly through the thick white smoke, a lookout can mistake an iceberg for a ship, or ship for iceberg. The circumstances are gloomy, anxious, strange and very dangerous.
The great circle route runs along the Newfoundland coast, with its rocky headlands and variable currents driving now towards shore, then out to sea. ‘The uncertainty requires the greatest caution,’ John Purdy warned in 1817. Farther west, about a hundred miles off Nova Scotia, lurks Sable Island and its shifting shoals and sandbars. Moving steadily eastward, sometimes at a mile every four years (and therefore impossible to chart precisely), and often invisible in fog, Sable has sunk many ships. The fog can then persist all the way down the American coast to Boston and New York.
By the nineteenth century, through various accidents of history, this most dangerous sea passage had also become the most trafficked long ocean route in the world. The burgeoning imperatives of trade, empire and human migration between the hemispheres would not give way, even to the North Atlantic Ocean in winter. Some reliable means of making this roughest transatlantic crossing – in all seasons, and in reasonable speed, safety, comfort and economy – had to be devised. It posed a fundamental challenge to the newly inventive, progressive spirit of the age.
The first enduring steamship service between England and America began when the wooden paddle wheeler Britannia, of the new Cunard Line, left Liverpool for Halifax and Boston on 4 July 1840. With Samuel Cunard, founder of the line, on board, the Britannia laboured across the ocean against head winds and adverse currents. Ten days out, an iceberg was sighted in the near distance: a reminder of the North Atlantic’s perils. The ship was scheduled to depart from Liverpool a few days before the fourth, and she was therefore expected in Boston by the fourteenth. When that day passed without the Britannia, people in Boston started worrying. A steamship was supposed to make faster, more reliable ocean passages than a sailing ship; that was the whole point of adding the steam engine and paddles.
Four days went by amid swelling anxieties. Finally, at ten o’clock on the night of Saturday, the eighteenth, the Britannia glided into Boston Harbor. Despite the late hour she was greeted by fireworks and huzzahs – and a general sense of relief. She had made the passage in fourteen and a half days, just one-third of the time consumed by the most recent sailing packet from England to Boston. On Sunday, Sam Cunard received eighteen hundred invitations to dinner. ‘No event which has occurred since the commencement of the present century,’ the Reverend Ezra Gannett told his prominent congregation that morning, ‘seems to me to have involved more important consequences to this city.’
The man and his ship dominated Boston for the next two weeks. Thousands of people came to inspect the Britannia at the new Cunard wharf; Bostonians had never seen such a ship. At the time, a typical coasting steamboat was about 160 feet long and 400 tons, a typical ocean-sailing packet about 150 feet and 700 tons.