Much of the main deck was left flat and clear to give the crew unobstructed room for handling sails and rigging. Deckhouses at midship provided quarters for the officers, sailors, and the ship’s cows. A raised, exposed bridge between the paddle boxes and above the deckhouses allowed the captain and his adjutants the sight lines and free access they needed to run the ship. (Years later, after paddle wheels had yielded to screw propellers for propulsion, the term ‘bridge’ remained to designate where a steamship’s officers stood and gave orders.) Aft of the mainmast, another deckhouse held the passengers’ dining saloon, the largest room on the ship at thirty-six feet by fourteen feet; it also functioned as a sitting room and assembly hall. At the stern, a raised platform gave the helmsman and his wheel a quite wet, windy place from which to steer the ship.
From the saloon, stairs descended to the gentlemen’s and ladies’ cabins and lounges. Men and women were consigned to separate sections, linked by a passage that allowed decorous contact without risking the weather up on deck. A typical ‘stateroom’ measured about twelve by six feet, tightly packed with two bunk beds, jugs and basins for washing and emergencies, a small mirror on the wall, a water carafe and glasses, a day sofa, and pegs for hanging clothes. A porthole or oil lamp provided dim light. ‘All these rooms are highly finished,’ a Bostonian noted, ‘without any attempt to dazzle with tinsel.’ The undersides of the cabin floors were covered with a thick, coarse woollen cloth intended to seal off smells and heat from the holds and engine room. Passengers – the ship had room for up to one hundred men and twenty-four women, all in a single class – shared a few water closets and had no bathing facilities at all.
The provision deck below held quarters for the engineers and firemen. They fed and tended the engine, the rhythmically beating heart of the ship. The machinery and coal bunkers at midship took up a third of the Britannia’s length, leaving relatively little space for cargo on such an enormous vessel. The firemen shovelled coal into twelve furnaces firing four boilers feeding steam to the engine. Still brand-new, the engine and its moving parts shone like burnished silver. Two cylinders, six feet in diameter, drove nineteen-foot levers to turn the paddle wheel crankshaft. At full steam the paddles, nine feet wide and twenty-eight feet in diameter, could push the ship up to almost nine knots.
To a greater degree than anything previously seen in Boston, the Britannia was a ship and a building and a machine, all at once, on the grandest and most daring scale. One dazzled observer called her ‘the consummation of human ingenuity’, no less. She seemed to vault beyond the usual construction categories, gathering them into a novel kind of manmade artefact. Large, plush and inventive, utterly modern but oddly familiar, beautiful from her soaring masts down to her gleaming engine room and yet promising such great practical significance, she left admirers in Boston mingling their superlatives. ‘She is truly a magnificent vessel, ’ the Evening Journal declared, ‘ – a floating palace.’
Three days after Samuel Cunard’s arrival, Boston threw a grand party for him attended by nearly 2000 people. The toasts were so extended, the speeches so hyperbolic even by the rhetorical standards of the time, that it seems apparent that more than just a man and his ship was being celebrated. The Cunard Line was largely a British enterprise, based in Liverpool and launched by a mail contract from the British Admiralty. The first Cunard ship was pointedly named the Britannia, and she was commanded by Captain Henry Woodruff of the Royal Navy, not a civilian. In the previous sixty-five years, Britain and America had fought two bitter wars against each other and then had engaged in constant mutual insults and fierce squabbles over Canadian independence, boundaries and fishing rights. Only a year earlier, the American state of Maine andthe Canadian province of New Brunswick had nearly started a war. Now the Cunard Line inspired new hopes for friendlier ties between mother country and wayward child. In addition, Boston by 1840 was losing its former commercial and maritime eminence to New York; but both cities had competed for the glittering prize of becoming Cunard’s American terminus, and Boston had apparently won. This coup perhaps augured a general resurgence for the city against its bumptious rival down on the Hudson. And, finally, that summer the United States was torn by an especially rancorous presidential contest, the log cabin and hard cider campaign of William Henry Harrison against the incumbent Martin Van Buren. With the Britannia on hand, at least, Boston’s feuding Whigs and Democrats might briefly unite behind a promising new venture of general benefit.
The man himself remained a mute mystery. Nobody in Boston knew Sam Cunard well; he had a few business associates there, nothing more. He didn’t talk much, and he had accepted few of those eighteen hundred dinner invitations. He was said to be an Englishman, or perhaps a Canadian, or maybe of American parentage. The city’s keenly focused interest in him derived, in part, from simple unsatisfied curiosity: Who was this man? A few sceptics remained doggedly unimpressed. ‘Mr. Cunard, a substantial, sensible Englishman, and not an Emperor, sits enthroned in state in the saloon of the Britannia,’ one doubter wrote to a local paper. ‘A proper self-respect will not warrant us in canonizing him.’ But this was only a peevish dissent, drowned out by a tidal wave of adulation and applause.
The ‘Cunard Festival’ to honour him took place at the Maverick House hotel, near the Cunard wharf in East Boston. Planned while the Britannia was still at sea, the event was staged on a scale and opulence seldom previously seen in Boston. A temporary pavilion and awning stretched 200 feet along the front of the hotel. Pennants and flags of all nations snapped in the breeze. An elliptical arch spread across the Maverick’s second storey, resting on two abutments. One of these bore the British coat of arms and the name Watt, honouring the Scottish inventor who had improved the steam engine. The other showed the American arms and the name Fulton, the Hudson River steamboat pioneer. At the centre of the arch, joining the two ancient national foes in symbol and reality, was the name Cunard in large gold letters – a premature tribute, mustered in brave hope and confidence, to the new but unproven steamship service.
On a raised platform sat the presiding officer, Josiah Quincy Jr, president of Harvard College and former mayor of Boston. To his right satSamuel Cunard, Senator Daniel Webster (the leader of Massachusetts Whigs), and other important men. To Quincy’s left sat Captain Woodruff of the Britannia, George Bancroft (the Democratic boss of Massachusetts), and others of distinction. Overlooking them, outside the pavilion itself, on the hotel’s porch and balconies and in upstairs windows, were hundreds of women dressed in their summer finery: the first time in memory that women had been invited to attend a public dinner in Boston (though not, actually, to be fed).
After a fancy meal, wines and mounds of ice cream, the extended speeches and toasts sounded the framing issues of the day. Daniel Webster, a noted orator, spoke about the rippling impacts of steam power on civilization, commerce, war and politics. George Bancroft welcomed the Cunard Line as ‘an omen of peace’, sure to usher in a new era of friendly relations, and offered a hopeful toast: ‘Old England – She renounces the ambition of ruling the seas, and effects the nobler purpose of connecting continents.’ Cigars were passed around (but quickly put away in deference to the unfamiliar feminine presence). Someone offered a song in tribute to the new line:
How timid and slow, but a few years ago,
The world hobbled on in its motion.
Old Europe seem’d far as the fixed Northern star,