Engined and finished in London, on 31 March she left Blackwall for Bristol, whence she would embark on her maiden voyage to New York. She steamed in large majesty down the Thames to the English Channel, the engine pumping easily with contained power, black coal smoke pouring from the stack. brunel and Claxton were aboard, watching and approving. Everything seemed in fine order on this shakedown cruise – until a serious fire broke out in the engine room. The felt insulation around the boilers, installed to improve steam efficiencies and keep the room temperature tolerable for the stokers, had ignited from the heat of the pipes, and the fire was quickly spread by oil paint and gas to the wooden beams and deck overhead. The flames licked as high as the top of the smokestack, holding back attempts to reach into the engine room. Claxton took a leather hose down to the fore-hatch and from there poured water on the fire. brunel started down to help him, lost his footing on the burned rung of a ladder, fell heavily on top of Claxton, and lay unconscious, facedown in a puddle of water. (It recalled his accident in the Thames Tunnel ten years earlier: nearly killed by his own engineering project.) Claxton saved his life by breaking his fall, pulling him out of the puddle, and calling for a rope. brunel was hauled up on deck, suffering from a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg.
The fire burned on. The commander, Lieutenant James Hosken of the Royal Navy, thought about running out the lifeboats and taking off passengers, but he instead beached the Great Western on a flat riverbank, where she sat upright on her bottom. Men finally broke through the deck into the engine room and put out the flames. Refloated on the next high tide, surprisingly undamaged except for the burned felt and some charred wood, the ship proceeded to Bristol. After three days, brunel felt well enough to dictate a long letter to Claxton about the generally satisfactory performance of the ship and her engine, hardly mentioning his injuries. ‘I hope the Vessel will be a long way on her Voyage to New York,’ he wrote, ‘before I could be in a state to go onboard again.’
The fire must have pleased Junius Smith. Nursing an exalted opinion of his own historical significance, he liked to call himself ‘the father of Atlantic steam navigation’. Smith believed that he alone owned the very concept of a transatlantic steamship. He had started his company before the Bristol group got under way, and now, with the long-delayed British Queen not even launched yet, he could not bear in frustration and defeat to let the Great Western beat him across the ocean. So Smith and Macgregor Laird chartered the Sirius, a well-regarded channel steamer of only 700 tons, loaded her down with fuel, and sent her on a risky, shortened passage to New York from Cork, on the southern coast of Ireland. (Starting from Cork knocked a day’s sailing off the course to America from Bristol.) The voyage of the Sirius was just a heedless, dangerous publicity stunt, a desperate gambit by sore losers, and hardly worth the historical attention it has received ever since.
The Great Western left Bristol for New York as scheduled on 8 April, four days behind the Sirius. The first Atlantic steamship race, contrived and unequal, was under way. brunel had provided Hosken with an engraved Mercator-projection chart of his great circle route, marked with bearings and soundings, to help keep the ship on the fastest course. The Great Western carried only seven passengers at thirty-five guineas (about thirty-seven pounds) apiece; fifty additional passengers had intended to go but were scared away by the fire. These seven brave pioneers in transatlantic steaming were amply serviced by fifty-seven crew members, including twenty-four seamen above deck and fifteen sweating coal stokers below. During the entire voyage, the engine was only stopped three times, briefly, for minor adjustments and to take soundings on the Newfoundland Banks. That meant little rest for the stokers. They struggled to bring coal by basket and wheelbarrow from holds at the bow and stern, where the ship’s pitching and rolling motions were exaggerated. The stokers complained; Captain Hosken warned them to obey the chief engineer. Without enough coal, the boilers were barely maintaining adequate steam pressure. The stokers were pushed harder and promised extra pay. One exhausted stoker named Crooks got drunk and unruly, which inspired him to try to throw the captain overboard. For this egregious lapse of discipline, Crooks was restrained and tied up. The other stokers stopped working until he was released: not a near-mutiny by real sailors but a hint of proletarian industrial unrest transferred from land to the unfamiliar regimen of a seaborne boiler room.
Up on deck, the more experienced passengers noticed differences from life on a sailing packet. Morning conversations brought fewer fretful speculations about the wind and weather; the wind hardly mattered now. Instead the novel, somewhat frightening steam engine dominated everything on board. Nobody had ever crossed the ocean in the relentless presence of so audible, tangible a machine. All day and night it hissed and clanked, smoked and steamed, heating the deck from below so that tar bubbled up between the seams, sticky and persistent. The smoke and smuts blew around unpredictably, blackening clothes and alighting on hair. The engine lubricants, derived from animal fats with low combustion points, burned and smelled pervasively like a constant, enormous kitchen fire, a bilious irritant to anyone fighting seasickness or confined to a cabin below. The sea atmosphere, usually clean and bracing, felt cooked and greasy. Some people worried about being blown up by the overworked boilers or getting suddenly forced out of bed with no time to get dressed.
The machine was working, though, with the strong and steady rhythm of a heartbeat, practically without stopping, all the way across the ocean. A new era was finally at hand. ‘How this glorious steamer wallops, and gallops, and flounders along!’ wrote a passenger on the Great Western. ‘She goes it like mad. Its motion is unlike that of any living thing I know; puffing like a porpoise, breasting the waves like a sea-horse, and at times skimming the surface like a bird. It possesses the joint powers of the tenants of the air, land, and water, and is superior to them all.’ As the days passed, the ship clicked off daily runs never before achieved on a westward crossing. A new speed record seemed easily in reach.
The Sirius, nearly out of fuel, reached New York on 23 April. The Great Western came in only twelve hours later after a voyage of fifteen and a half days, the fastest crossing ever from England to America. Of her initial 660 tons of coal, she had 203 tons left in her bunkers – a reassuring margin of safety, for prospective customers, in the most doubted, uncertain aspect of transatlantic steam. The Great Western took sixty-six passengers on her trip back to Bristol. After losing almost £4000 on her first passage out and home, she made four more round-trips that year, turning small profits and lowering her own records in both directions. Already, at this early point, ocean travellers had begun to accept the modernist bargain of steam dangers and discomforts in exchange for consistent, unprecedented speed. In September the Great Western carried 131 passengers to New York and had to refuse 30 more for lack of space. This passage took sixteen days, nine hours – almost one day slower than her maiden, but still two weeks faster than a crack sailing packet.
The Great Western puffed back and forth across the ocean while the British Queen inched along towards completion. It was a surprising reversal of expected form, Bristol over London, the fading western port over the burgeoning urban colossus; so London, seeking an explanation, blamed Glasgow. During the spring and summer of 1839, partisans of the Thames and the Clyde engaged