As expressions of steamship technology, they started a durable Cunard tradition of summarizing recent progress in the field and adding only small, careful improvements: advancing the art but not by any risky grand leaps. They embodied the habitual technological caution – ships as enterprise, not as engineering – of their two main creators. Sam Cunard had crossed on both the Great Western and British Queen, and Robert Napier knew the latter ship well from providing her engine. Traces of these transatlantic predecessors showed up in the Cunard vessels. They were lavishly trussed and bolted, like the Great Western, with (for example) ‘two strong bilge-pieces in the engine room’, as Napier’s contract with Cunard made explicit, ‘similar to what is in the “British Queen” steam ship and well bolted.’ To avoid the Great Western’s initial difficulties over retrieving coal from distant holds at the bow and stern, the Cunard ships carried their fuel in midship compartments lining the sides of the vessels, from which the coal simply descended by gravity to trapdoors near the furnaces. Ambient heat from the Great Western’s boilers had made nearby areas feel and smell uncomfortably cooked; so the Cunard ships included a thick, coarse woollen cloth underneath the cabin floors and on bulkheads around the engine rooms ‘secured by beams and knees’, the contract specified, ‘so arranged that a space can be left for air courses to ventilate and carry off the heated air and gases.’ The cycloidal Great Western paddle wheels devised by Joshua Field had not worked well; Napier gave the Cunard ships conventional paddles.
Designed to carry mail, not cargo, they were smaller than the Great Western and British Queen— but a bit faster, with slightly higher ratios of horsepower to tonnage. Napier’s newest engines squeezed more power from less fuel by almost doubling the Great Western’s boiler steam pressure, from five to nine pounds per square inch, which helped reduce average coal consumption from forty-four to thirty-eight tons a day. Within a year of the Britannia’s maiden voyage to Boston in July 1840, the Cunard ships had beaten the Great Western’s Atlantic records in both directions, achieving peak average speeds of almost ten knots out and eleven knots home, and cutting the best eastbound passage to just under ten days. Over the first two years, as a fleet they averaged thirteen days, six hours to Halifax and eleven days, five hours to Liverpool. The overmatched Great Western company, competing on its own with just one steamship against four newer, faster vessels backed by the authority and prestige of the government’s mail contract, began to lose passengers and profits to the Cunard Line.
Charles Dickens, impressed by what he had heard, took the Britannia to Boston in January 1842. His description of the voyage, soon published in his travel book American Notes, became the most famous – indeed notorious – account of a nineteenth-century transatlantic steamship trip. Dickens, about to turn thirty, had already achieved great success with the Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other novels. He went to tour America as a literary celebrity and was expecting an ocean passage that conformed with his status. At the Cunard agent’s office in London he had seen imaginatively embellished lithographs of the Britannia’s interiors. When he boarded ship, the actual accommodations caused his first disappointment. The main saloon, the grandest room on the ship, turned out to be ‘a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands’. The overhead racks for glassware ‘hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather’. Grimmer surprises awaited Dickens below. The ‘state-room’ specially reserved for Dickens and his wife was, alas, an ‘utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box’. It inspired another funereal reference: the bunk beds by their narrow dimensions and thin mattresses reminded Dickens of coffins, a most unfortunate association at the start of a long ocean voyage.
Once under way, he retreated during daylight hours to the ladies’ cabin, less noisy and smelly than the main saloon. The stewardess dispensed many tactful services and told ‘piously fraudulent’ stories of previous winter passages, always calm and pleasant. Everybody worried about the stability of their stomachs; at dinner, Dickens noticed the most coveted seats were those closest to the door. Afterwards he stayed out on deck till midnight, afraid to go below. Despite his frettings, he looked around and sensed the powerful mysteries of an oceangoing ship at night: ‘The gloom through which the great black mass holds its direct and certain course; the rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; the broad, white, glistening track that follows in the vessel’s wake; the men on the look-out forward, who would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars…the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain.’
Finally, too cold to avoid it any longer, Dickens took to his dubious berth. With hatches and portholes closed down for the night, he could fully savour ‘that extraordinary compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold’. All the woodwork creaked. The stateroom rose and fell with the waves. The night eventually passed. For the next two days, through fair winds and good weather, Dickens mostly stayed in bed, ate hard biscuits, and drank cold brandy and water in a resolute, hopeless effort to avoid sliding over from mere seagoing discomfort into full-blown seasickness.
Teetering on this agonizing edge – nauseous or not? – Dickens fell over hard when the third morning brought a winter gale worthy of the North Atlantic. He awoke to his wife’s screams. Objects were floating on the seawater that now covered the stateroom floor. The room pitched and tossed, seemingly standing on its head. ‘Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say “Thank Heaven!” she wrongs again.’ The ship ran on like a creature with broken knees, as it leaped and dived and somersaulted in jarring sequences and combinations. Dickens hailed a passing steward and asked what was the matter. ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir,’ came the reply, understated and unperturbed, ‘and a head wind.’ It continued for four days and nights of relentless motion and noise: wind, sea and rain, howling in concert; the heavy footfalls of sailors rushing about and shouting hoarsely to each other; high waves pounding over the gunwales and gurgling out through the scuppers, after landing on the wooden deck with the deep, ponderous sound of thunder heard within a confined space; blank, endless nights as the ship rolled to one side, dipping her masts, and then to the other side, and even seemed to stop dead in the water, staggering as though stunned, before ploughing onward. ‘All is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree… Only a dream can call it up again in all its fury, rage, and passion.’
The storm blew out, but the weather remained dark and cold. Settling into a determined daily routine, Dickens and his party would gather in the ladies’ cabin shortly before noon. Captain Hewitt, recently transferred to the Britannia and always in good humour, would drop by and predict better weather. (‘The weather is always going to improve tomorrow, at sea.’) At one o’clock a bell rang and the stewardess brought baked potatoes, roasted apples, and plates of cold ham, pig’s face, and salted beef. At last free of seasickness, and seeking any possible diversion, they ate with hearty appetites and dawdled over the task as long as they could. They read, dozed, and chatted away the afternoon, passing around and chewing over the few available wisps of shipboard gossip: one passenger has lost heavily at gambling, fourteen pounds in fact, and drinks a bottle of champagne a day though he is only a clerk; the head engineer has never seen such awful weather; the cook was found drunk and severely punished; all the stewards have fallen downstairs, and some are sorely injured; the cabins are all leaking. The dinner bell rang at five, announcing more potatoes (boiled this time), various meats (perhaps roast pig if one of the ship’s swine had been butchered), flowing wine and brandy, and rather mouldy apples, grapes and oranges for dessert. Then a game of whist, with the tricks placed securely in pockets instead of on the ever-agitated table, and an insistently cheerful good night from the captain.
Approaching Halifax on the fifteenth night, with a bright moon and calm sea, the local pilot – who was supposed to know the harbour so well – managed to run the Britannia aground on a mud bank. Everybody rushed up on deck. The engine, ‘which had been clanking and blasting in our ears incessantly