Along with these personal motives, in a larger sense Cunard was acting from patriotic or nationalist incentives. Given his American parentage and his years of business dealings down the coast of New England to New York, he had strong ties to some Yankee ports and individuals. Yet his family had, after all, been forced into unwanted exile by the American victors in the Revolution. He typically regarded his American commercial associates with a goading mixture of fear and respect; over his entire career, nothing else so motivated him as competing with Americans and striking back at them. The New York packet lines, faster and more reliable, had taken most of the transatlantic mail away from the Admiralty’s ships. At a time of strained relations between the two countries, British mail depended largely on American vessels: a galling vulnerability that in part explained the Admiralty’s sudden sprint towards steam. As a Canadian, British subject, and descendant of American Loyalists, Cunard inevitably savoured the prospect of taking the mail back from the aggressive Yankees.
Arrived in London, he took lodgings at a Piccadilly hotel and worked from a desk at the General Mining Association’s office in nearby Ludgate Hill. His GMA connections, his two decades of carrying the mail between Boston, Halifax and St John’s, Newfoundland, and his thriving agency for the East India Company’s tea trade in eastern Canada all eased his way through Whitehall and financial offices in the City. He also carried a useful letter of introduction from Sir Colin Campbell, the royally appointed lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. ‘I have always found him one of the firmest supporters of the measures of the Government,’ Campbell had written, ‘and his being one of the principal Bankers and Merchants and Agent of the General Mining Association, and also Commissioner of Light Houses, gives him a great deal of influence in this community.’
Cunard’s plan was simple and audacious: instead of a monthly mail service, he intended to run enough ships to maintain a weekly service across the ocean and thus cut more deeply, directly into the frequent sailings of the New York packets. He had taken the Admiralty’s tender and quadrupled it. Within days of his arrival in London, he was meeting with Charles Wood at the Admiralty and Francis T. Baring at the Treasury. ‘I submitted that by going once a week the whole of the letters would be taken by our steamers, and the American packet ships that had previously carried the letters would cease to carry them,’ Cunard explained later. Wood and Baring ‘entertained my plan; and they took a great deal of pains…spent many hours at different times in going through the calculations and routes with me.’ The three parties eventually split the difference between Cunard’s plan and the Admiralty tender by settling on a mail service to run twice a month at the outset.
Cunard’s formal proposal on 11 February committed to paper what they had already thrashed out in conversation. ‘I hereby offer to furnish Steam Boats of not less than three hundred Horse power,’ he wrote, ‘to convey the mails from a port in England to Halifax and back twice in each month.’ In addition, he would provide steamboats of half that power for carrying the mail between Halifax and Boston, connecting his service to the United States but saving the extra two hundred miles to continue to New York. ‘Should any improvements in Steam Navigation be made,’ he added, with a nod to the onrushing pace of technical progress, ‘…which the Lords of the Admiralty may consider as essential to the Service, I do bind myself to make such alterations and improvements as their Lords may direct.’ For these forty-eight annual transatlantic voyages he asked £55,000 a year. (The Great Western company had wanted £45,000 for twenty-four trips.) The Admiralty and Treasury moved quickly. Within two weeks of the formal proposal, long before any public announcement, word was passing around London’s political and financial circles that Samuel Cunard of Halifax had the contract.
Not quite; Cunard had skipped the thorny guesswork, which had so undone Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird, of predicting how soon his vessels would be built and available. To strengthen his case with the government, Cunard needed signed contracts for constructing his ships and engines. Still very much on his own, he appraised the feuding centres of British marine engineering. Because the Great Western company was already operating out of Bristol, and Smith and Laird out of London and Liverpool, Cunard’s search naturally drifted north to Glasgow. James C. Melvill, secretary to the East India Company, recommended the Glaswegians Robert Napier and John Wood, who had recently built the swift steamship Berenice for his company’s trade with India. In late February, two weeks after his successful proposal to the Admiralty, Cunard asked an intermediary in Glasgow to see what Napier and Wood would charge for one or two steamships of 800 tons and 300 horsepower, to be built and ready for sea in only twelve months. ‘I shall want these vessels to be of the very best description,’ he emphasized, ‘and to pass a thorough inspection and examination of the Admiralty. I want a plain and comfortable boat, but not the least unnecessary expense for show. I prefer plain work in the cabin, and it saves a large amount in the cost.’ Napier was at once quite interested, so Cunard went up to Glasgow to see him.
It is no hyperbole to say that their meeting in early March 1839 set the course of the Cunard Line for at least its first quarter-century. Napier had just finished his enormous engine for the British Queen, after embarrassing delays and relentless criticism from engineers on the Thames. He therefore welcomed another shot at building an Atlantic steamship engine. Cunard, still so unknown to most British commercial circles, needed Napier’s technical expertise and his reputation along the Clyde for shrewd business dealings. The two men were about the same age – Napier was four years younger – and of similar personalities: terse, contained, not given to public displays or extravagant statements, immersed in work, and sheltered by their families to unusual degrees. Each could recognize and (mostly) trust the other. Napier even brought Cunard home to meet his wife and children. Entrepreneur and engineer, the two formed a variation on those symbiotic partnerships that had driven the Industrial Revolution: a kind of Boulton and Watt for ocean steamships.
In Glasgow, Napier took Cunard to see his famous Vulcan Foundry and its redoubtable works manager, David Elder. The foundry sprawled across a large quadrangle on Washington Street, near the river. A sign at the gate advised, ‘No admittance except on business’, and the din and pace of work inside showed that Napier and Elder meant it. Operations were broken down into four specialized areas. In the casting house, furnaces melted raw metal to be poured into sand moulds in a pit. Some of the castings were quite large, up to a twenty-four-ton bedplate for a marine engine. This sector was relatively quiet, unlike the open area where boilers and funnels were pounded together. The steady, arhythmic jangling of hammers on rivets, iron meeting iron, pealed forth the raggedy music of the Industrial Age. It took 10,000 rivets to make an average boiler, each driven home by repeated metallic blows, all day long. The smithery joined the heat of the casting house to the hammered cacophony of the boilermakers: sweaty, muscular blacksmiths toiling over their anvils and forge fires, turning rough metal into finer pieces, with a small steam engine puffing away to force air into the forge fires. The engineering shops, the largest department, held various specialized lathes and boring and planing machines, all driven by steam-powered beltings overhead, to shape and finish to exact tolerances the cylinders, pistons, wheels, and smaller parts of a steam engine. Seven hundred men worked long days at the Vulcan, six days a week. When the noise stopped at closing time, the silence itself was deafening. Sam Cunard could only have been impressed.
As Napier and Cunard got down to the details, the size of the ships kept increasing, a process that would continue through months of revised contracts. They at first agreed on three ships, 200 feet long and 960 tons, of 375 horsepower, to cost £32,000 each. (A ship this size was still only half the tonnage of the British Queen.) Napier would build the engines, and his shipbuilding associate John Wood would provide the vessels, all by the spring of 1840. ‘He appears