But tho’ it was hard–at the word of Cunard
Britannia herself is a rover.
Old England a while, that fast anchor’d Isle,
By steam is now here–half seas over.
Josiah Quincy introduced the man of the hour. ‘The enlightened foresight of Mr. Cunard, a citizen of Nova Scotia,’ he declared, ‘aided by the liberality of the British crown, has established a line of steam packets on a permanent basis.’ By advancing the interests of his own country, Cunard had incidentally conferred coveted gifts on America, and – Quincy hoped – Boston might now recover its old prosperity. The band impartially played both ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. The climactic moment had arrived.
In this speechmaking age, when events happened live, in oral discourse, any distinguished man was expected to have an easy knack for facing and holding an audience. Grand oratory was a routine tool of persuasion and power. The crowd clapped and cheered hard for Cunard,waiting in curiosity and expectation for him to speak, watching him. He was a handsome man, apparently of middle age, a bit less than average height. He had a large, round head, balding at the crown, with a fringe of grey hair turning white, and closely trimmed muttonchop whiskers in the style of the day. He looked healthy and well knit, compact and tightly wound, and quite decisive around the mouth and eyes.
Cunard stood up and started speaking, inaudibly, before the last applause subsided. The newspaper reporters seated nearby could not hear him. He said only a few more words, and then – to the surprise of everyone – sat down. Josiah Quincy, rushing into the dead air, sprang up to say that Mr Cunard had explained he was unaccustomed to public speaking and thus would make no speech, but he felt quite grateful to be so honoured, given that the real credit for the new steamship line belonged to the British government. And that was that. His odd performance concluded, the hero remained triumphantly unknown in Boston.
A few days later, in much more modest circumstances, another dinner was held for men of the Britannia. Only Captain Woodruff and a few officers had been invited to the Cunard Festival; so a group of local machinists and mechanics, described as ‘respectable’ by one newspaper, threw a small celebration for the ship’s chief engineer, Peter Kenneth, and his mates at the Stackpole House, on Milk Street near the waterfront. The innkeeper, James Ryan, provided entertainment. (No Boston Irishmen like Ryan had taken visible part in the Cunard Festival.) All the guests on hand told a story or sang a song or ventured a sentiment. They raised their own toasts to the owners and hands of the Britannia (‘Her successful voyage has proved that their capital and labor were most happily united’) and, in engineer’s vernacular, to the mother country (‘She sometimes gets the steam up a little too high, but she finds an escape pipe when she visits her daughter’). The engine men, both ashore and from below decks, added their voices to the general spirit of determined reconciliation.
After two weeks, Cunard and his ship left Boston for Halifax and Liverpool on the afternoon of I August, well loaded with eighty passengers. Spectators around the harbour were again frustrated; having arrived in night-time darkness, the Britannia departed in a daytime thick fog that left her visible only from close at hand. She picked her way slowly along the Maine coast, taking three days to Halifax, shrouded in fog the whole way. The North Atlantic was again extending its typical welcome.
‘The Atlantic to America is the worst navigation in the world,’ Sam Cunard pointed out years later, from a prudent and well-earned distance.‘The westerly winds prevail very much, and you have ice and fog to contend with.’ Despite these daunting natural obstacles, however, he had launched his Atlantic steamship line and made it run through endless crises and troubles. ‘I originated this service at a great risk,’ he claimed in pardonable pride, dropping the humble pose of the Cunard Festival in Boston, ‘and at a time when no other party could be found to undertake it.’ And the result? ‘A beautiful line of communication between the eastern and western world.’
It was all there from the start. The major themes of transatlantic steamship history, to be echoed repeatedly over the next hundred years, first appeared in the summer of 1840 during the Britannia’s maiden round trip, Liverpool to Boston and back.
The daunting North Atlantic Ocean passage between Britain and America.
To meet and perhaps subdue this most difficult natural environment: the peerless shipbuilding and marine engineering along the River Clyde, where most of the finest Atlantic liners of the nineteenth century would be designed and built.
The magical, transforming element of steam, the universal microchip of this era, and the utopian hopes of abolishing time and space it inspired.
The touchy ties among nations, especially between Britain and America, and the additional utopian hopes of international reconciliation forged by regular steamship service.
The stratifications of class and duty among the ship crews: officers and men, sailors and engineers, canvas and coal, above and below decks.
The recurring public wonder over every successive version of the newest, biggest, fastest steamship on the ocean, each likely to be described in turn as ‘a floating palace’.
And at the centre of it all, driving and organizing, the elusive figure of Samuel Cunard and the great transatlantic steamship line he founded.
Before steamships started crossing the North Atlantic, the best way to travel between Europe and America was by the sailing ships called packets. Built and run mainly by Americans, the packet lines introduced new concepts and comfort levels for ocean voyages. They dominated the transatlantic traffic for decades, setting key precedents for the steamships that eventually replaced them. Along with their more famous contemporaries, the whaling and clipper ships, they comprised the golden age of American sail. Of these three types, the packets lasted the longest and made the most voyages and money for their owners and crews. Yet today whalers and clippers remain drenched in popular legend, while the packets are scarcely known beyond dedicated circles of ship buffs. No packet builder ever became as famous as Donald McKay with his clippers, and no novelist ever wrote a Moby Dick about the packets. They just did their jobs quietly and well, year after year, and then passed into the historical obscurity reserved for predictable competence.
Agroup of textile importers in New York started the first packet line. The main founder, Jeremiah Thompson, was an English immigrant from Yorkshire who had come to New York aged seventeen in 1801 to join his uncle in representing the family’s woollen manufacturing business. From that base they engaged in shipping and shipowning with three local associates. These five men all lived near the waterfront at the southern tip of Manhattan. Four of them were Quakers. (Jeremiah Thompson, an active Friend, was an officer in the New York Manumission Society, dedicated to freeing slaves; but he also made a fortune by exporting raw cotton, grown in the American South by slave labour.)
Thompson had a breakthrough idea for improving ocean travel. At the time, a shipowner might advertise a ship’s day of departure, but the captain would then wait until enough cargo and passengers had been loaded, and wind and weather seemed favourable, before weighing anchor. A passenger hoping to embark might have to hang around the docks, spending money on food and lodging and wasting time, for a week or more. Thompson, dealing in volatile markets for finished imports and raw exports, wanted faster, more reliable service.