Samuel Cunard had a plan. He characteristically discussed it with nobody outside his family. Only his son Ned, now twenty-three years old and an active partner in the Cunard enterprises, knew what his father was up to. During his annual trips to England, Sam had observed the first efforts at transatlantic steam. Taking their measure, he thought he could do better. In January 1839 he boarded a sailing packet to England and embarked on his greatest gamble. As an outsider, he felt no hobbling allegiance to Bristol or London or Glasgow. Well connected to some British power brokers, yet with no loyalties or commitments to any steam builders, Cunard moved around quietly, asking questions and making judgments. ‘Altho I am a colonist,’ he later explained, ‘I have many friends in this country.’ The silent colonial attracted little attention; the real transatlantic action seemed to rest in other, more famous hands. Stealthy and independent, he found the right men for his ships and cut the deal of his life. Cunard got his boats built and running – and stole the game away from its earlier players. ‘The plan was entirely my own,’ he said later, ‘and the public have had the advantage of it.’
Cunard went to England early in 1839 because the British government had declared its intention to subsidize steam navigation between England and America, not to carry passengers or cargo (except incidentally) but mainly to transport the mail, that most essential tool of commerce and empire. The Great Western, by her five routine round-trip voyages in 1838, had shown the possibilities of regular transatlantic steam. Her performance highlighted the many inadequacies of the British Admiralty’s sail-powered mail boats, the ten-gun brigs that ran monthly and unpredictably between Falmouth and North America. In November 1838, rushing to catch up, the Admiralty invited hasty bids from British contractors to provide a monthly steamer mail service between England and Halifax, stipulating ships of at least 300 horsepower. The bids were due in only a month, and the service was to start by April – a schedule so tight that it restricted the field to existing vessels already built for other purposes.
At the time, the Great Western Steam Ship Company maintained a virtual monopoly on transatlantic steam. It had far outclassed the few competing ships, and Junius Smith’s overdue British Queen would not finally be ready until the following summer. Holding all the cards, the Bristol company proceeded to overplay its hand with the government. On 13 December, two days before the deadline, Christopher Claxton wrote to Charles Wood of the Admiralty that his company was interested but needed much more time. The last voyage of the Great Western, with a slow winter passage of nineteen days to New York, had shown (said Claxton) the need for specially constructed mail ships of 1200 tons and 450 horsepower, slightly smaller but more powerful than the Great Western. Claxton offered to build three such ships within eighteen to twenty-four months, and then to carry the mail once a month in each direction, for £45,000 annually under a seven-year contract.
The government wanted action in four months, not two years. The Great Western company ignored that urgency and rewrote the terms of the tender: in effect, instructing the Admiralty about the realities of steam on the North Atlantic. The company’s correcting tone may have annoyed the Admiralty (which believed it had some knowledge of steamships and oceans), and it compounded an earlier, related offence by Thomas Guppy. In the autumn of 1837, at a scientific meeting in Liverpool, Guppy – a founder and director of the Great Western company – had sharply criticized the Royal Navy’s steamship designs. ‘Many of the government vessels are of very bad forms; their power and size greatly disproportioned, ’ Guppy declared. ‘Whoever had seen the fine private steamers belonging to the ports of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol, and had then gone to view the government ones in Woolwich basin, must have been astonished at the extraordinary forms there collected; it would be well if a glass case could be constructed over the basin, to procure those curiosities of practical science, as exercised in our naval building yards.’ (The audience laughed at this sally.) Guppy did not just doubt the government ships; he mocked and made jokes of them. His remarks were published in the Nautical Magazine of London, which was carefully read at the Admiralty. And now his company had doubled the insult by turning the government’s urgent mail tender inside out. The Admiralty, no surprise, rejected the Great Western proposal on 10 January.
On that same day, across the ocean, the Halifax Novascotian printed its first announcement of the original Admiralty tender. (This delay of two months itself argued for adding steam power to the Atlantic mail.) In its headlong rush towards steam, the Admiralty was not allowing enough time for any proposals from the colonies. Sam Cunard nonetheless caught the next sailing packet from Halifax to England, unaware of recent developments. He did not yet know about the Great Western offer, its rejection by the government, or the expired deadline for other bids. He had only his own secret plan.
It was not, as it happened, the best time for Cunard to embark on a grand, risky new venture. The British economic crash of 1837 was still lingering over the country, tightening money markets, headed towards a major industrial depression. Cunard was himself overextended at home. George Renny Young, an influential lawyer and politician in Halifax, had drawn Cunard into a grandiose scheme to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres on Prince Edward Island. It brought him a touchy alliance with the Young family, leaders among the local oligarchs. (Agnes Renny Young, the family matriarch, warned her son George about Cunard’s ‘immense’ power: ‘People fear him so much that they keep quiet and submit. He never was friendly to our family and will give you a blow where he can.’) Sam took a one-third interest in the land company and soon fought with George Young over the appointment of a company attorney. Young wanted his brother Charles, and Sam favoured his son-in-law James Horsfield Peters, who had married his eldest daughter, Mary. Family loyalties, always a tugging allegiance for Cunard, quickly poisoned the venture. ‘You seem afraid that I intend making a family party of this,’ Cunard wrote to Young in August 1838. ‘I trust I am sufficiently well known in this community to be believed when I assert that I had no intention of taking advantage.…I must now decline any further correspondence on the subject.’ After Cunard pulled rank, James Peters got the job as attorney, but Young nursed the grievance. The quarrel was only resolved when Cunard bought out Young’s shares in the spring of 1839. That left Sam, at this crucial moment, heavily mortgaged and cash-poor for investing in any major new enterprise. (Young and his family became enemies with long memories and later found a damaging chance to strike back at the Cunards.)
What, then, was nonetheless drawing Cunard towards transatlantic steam? Fifty-one years old, still in his prime, he remained as active and ambitious as ever. After his long career in ships and shipping, and (since the Royal William) in steam vessels as well, he had in some ways outgrown Halifax and craved a larger arena. An Atlantic steamship line was a logical extension of his lifework. He knew from weary experience the limitations of the British government’s mail packets; he had been enduring their slow, precarious service for almost two decades. (On a trip to England in 1831, Cunard had fallen on a packet’s deck and broken his arm.) To compete with the fast New York packet lines, the government brigs had been redesigned for more speed. But that made the ships less stable and too prone to foundering at sea. ‘Almost every year, two hundred or three hundred people were lost in the mail packets, and at last they got the designation of “coffins”,’ Cunard said later. ‘I came home in those ships very frequently, and of course felt the danger and discomfort of coming in them, and I have lost a very great many friends in them.’ In January 1839, even as Cunard was crossing to England, that month’s westbound Falmouth packet sailed away and just disappeared. ‘