The Youngs were only seeking revenge. Cunard, fighting for his very survival, was equally ruthless, scratching for money anywhere he could find it. In Nova Scotia, he sold the house and land in Hants County where he had sent his late mother to spend her last days. He mortgaged his wharves and warehouses in Halifax. The Bank of Nova Scotia suspended a rule to loan him £45,000. All his enterprises were squeezed hard. As the largest landlord on Prince Edward Island, he had his agent (his son-in-law James Peters) extract every possible penny of rent from the immigrant tenants. One of them, a bard from the Isle of Raasay named MacLean, took refuge in a mournful song. Translated from the Gaelic:
and came out here
thinking we would receive consideration,
and that the rent would not be so exacting.
But Peters is oppressing us,
and, if he doesn’t die,
we must leave this place
and Cunard, himself a beast.
The beast had become the quarry. In the spring of 1842, he admitted to debts of £130,000 and mortgaged property worth £47,000, against claimed (and probably exaggerated) assets of £257,000. A Liverpool bank, trying to present a writ for £2000 against him, sent a sheriff’s officer to the chambers of Cunard’s lawyer in London; the lawyer hid Cunard in an adjoining room, and he escaped the process. A short while later, Cunard quietly scurried up to Liverpool and arranged another flight. He hid overnight in a cottage on the river below Eastham. Several writ servers, suspecting his intentions, waited for Cunard on one of his steamships until the last minute before departure. When they were finally sent ashore, the steamer weighed anchor and started out to sea. Cunard came alongside in a small boat; his ship slowed down and picked him up. The eminent founder and leader of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company stole furtively home to Halifax.
From that nadir, Cunard slowly recovered his fortunes. In 1843 he and his partners again asked the Admiralty for more money, claiming a loss in the previous year of almost £26,400. The Admiralty allowed them an additional £10,000 annually. Through all of Cunard’s own troubles, his ships steamed across the ocean ‘with regularity almost unexpected and wholly unsurpassed’, as a New York newspaper grudgingly admitted. As competing steamships receded from the Atlantic, the Cunard Line gained an essential monopoly and could raise its fares with impunity, up to forty-one pounds by 1846 for passage from Liverpool. His stock dividends and commissions gradually paid off Cunard’s loan to his partners. The shipping business in general cycled upwards again, and the Cunard Line started turning profits and paying more consistent dividends to stockholders. Sam Cunard’s financial crisis lifted.
The Cunard Line steamed towards solvency on its unmatched reputation for safety and order. That reputation – so coveted by passengers venturing forth on the dreaded North Atlantic – began with the first sailings in 1840. John Quincy Adams, a former president of the United States, and a man whose life was typically an exercise in rigid discipline and organization, took the Acadia from Boston to Halifax in September 1840. Adams approved of the captain, the food, the crockery and glassware, the cleanliness, and the neat finish to the iron, brass and woodwork. The Acadia was an uncommonly tight ship, Adams confided to his diary: ‘There is great order and discipline.’ Those qualities were associated with the Cunard Line ever after. Over the years, other Atlantic steamship lines would run ships that were bigger, faster, more luxurious, or with better service. Cunard ships retained their own unique, dominating cachet: they got you there alive.
No steamship line could entirely escape the North Atlantic’s rigours; Cunard always had its share of accidents. In the first eight years, Cunard ships ran aground at least nine times in dense fogs off Ireland and the Canadian and American coasts, and at least twice collided with smaller vessels, sinking them and killing eight of their crewmen. (Other collisions may have happened at night and gone unnoticed, at least officially, by the Cunarder.) Charles Dickens’s frightening experience on the Britannia was not so unusual. The most serious grounding was by the Columbia in July 1843. She had left Boston in a thick fog, picking her way carefully along the New England coast, and was pulled off course by an unusually swift current. Given the fog, the captain could not shoot the sun and take his bearings. Early in the afternoon, while running nearly full speed at ten knots, the Columbia struck a notorious reef called the Devil’s Limb, 11/2 offshore and about 150 miles southwest of Halifax. Despite desperate efforts, she could not be budged. A boat came out from a nearby island and plucked off the crew and all eighty-five passengers before the ship, buffeted by chopping waves, broke up and sank – the first Cunard steamship lost at sea.
The most remarkable aspect of these first eleven Cunard accidents is that nobody on the Cunard ship involved was killed. In fact, for the first seventy-five years of the line’s history no passenger in its North Atlantic traffic ever died from a shipwreck. Meantime all the other transatlantic steamship lines suffered terrible disasters, one after the other, typically causing hundreds of deaths each time. Only the Cunard Line escaped. Perhaps this was just Cunard luck again, over and over. Or perhaps it was how the line was run.
In the division of labour among the three founding partners, Sam Cunard with his sons Ned and William supervised the line’s offices in Canada and America, and Sam on his frequent trips to England represented the enterprise to the government. In Glasgow, George Burns looked after the construction and repair of the Cunard vessels by Robert Napier and various Clydeside shipbuilders. In Liverpool, David Mac Iver (and, after his death in 1845, his brother Charles) saw to the day-to-day management of the ships, keeping the captains and crews up to rigorous standards, making sure the vessels were well supplied and repaired and precisely on schedule both going and coming. These lines of authority at times became mingled; any one of the three founders might briefly take up any role, and major decisions emerged from polite, muted exchanges among all of them, with Cunard usually functioning as the first among equals.
If the safety record has a single overriding explanation, it was the Mac Ivers. Only twenty-eight years old in 1840, Charles stood at the top of the Cunard Line leadership for over forty years, even longer than Sam Cunard or George Burns. Nobody ever laboured harder, more persistently or effectively, to keep the line in its usual position of transatlantic supremacy. Almost every day, he went down to the Cunard wharves on the Mersey, watching and measuring, taking notes and giving orders. Quick and decisive, at times imperious, he had absolute confidence in his own judgments and opinions, seemingly never retreating from them once expressed. ‘Up to the last moment,’ a long-time Liverpool associate said later, ‘he will persist with all the energy of his nature in a course which his reason is gradually convincing him against his will to be erroneous…though even then he by some ingenious process satisfies himself and thinks he convinces others that he is not giving way at all.’
The Mac Iver brothers were sons of a Greenock sea captain who was washed overboard in 1812 in the Bay of Biscay. As a young man, Charles spent some time in the American port of Charleston, South Carolina, but he soon came home and joined David in their coastal steamship enterprises. In about 1833 he had an experience that, as he told the story, confirmed his core insistence on relentless standards and inspections for oceangoing vessels. He booked passage on a particular sailing ship because he knew the captain. Off the