Most days were clear enough for visible sunsets. Everyone, from cabin and steerage alike, gathered on deck. A few climbed up into the rigging. People grew quiet except for pointing out particular features in the clouds or sea. As the sun went under, some of the party stood on tiptoes, reaching for one last glimpse. Then the normal talk and bustle resumed as walkers promenaded the deck, thirty paces up and back.
After evening tea, Martineau avoided the convivial cabin and found a place to herself at the stern. A true writer, an onlooker by nature, she craved a safe solitude from which to watch developments. She studied the wake behind, ‘a long train of pale fire’, and the sails ahead, outlined against the sky and stars. A night fog might scud through, thick and moving fast, with occasional open spaces for the moon. Lost and engrossed, utterly content, sometimes she forgot that she was at sea. Snatches of old songs floated through her head from nowhere, and the first poems she had ever loved. ‘Such are the hours when all that one has ever known or thought that is beautiful comes back softly and mysteriously.’
She did acknowledge a few discomforts at sea: rainy days that kept everyone below in stifling air, and prolonged calms that made tempers short, provoking rude behaviour at dinner and accusations of cheating at shuffleboard. In mid-ocean, a ferocious storm lasted all night, to the disquieting sounds of breaking glass and screaming women. Towards the end of the long voyage, the dried fruits got mouldy, and the kitchen ran out of cider, ale, claret and soda water. In general, though, Martineau denied the usual purported annoyances of ocean travel. She made a list, in her methodical way, of all such claimed aggravations, along with their (to her) satisfactory remedies.
1 Seasickness. (‘An annoyance scarcely to be exaggerated while it lasts.’ No remedy.)
2 The damp, clammy feel of everything one touches. (Wear gloves, and clothes too worn to be spoiled. ‘In this latter device nearly the whole company were so accomplished that it was hard to say who excelled.’)
3 Lack of room. (Put everything away in tight, orderly fashion.)
4 The candles flare, dribble wax, and look untidy. (Avoid looking at candles; go to the stern at night, which has its own, better lights.)
5 The seats and beds are too hard. (Have patience. Try air cushions.)
6 Freshwater use is limited. (Bathe in seawater, and drink cider at dinner.)
7 The cider may run out. (Switch to other beverages.)
8 The noise of sailors scraping the deck. (Again, patience; because the deck must be scraped.)
9 The clamor overhead when the sails are shifted at night. (Go back to sleep.)
10 Sour bread. (Eat biscuits.)
11 Getting sunburned. (Don’t look in a mirror.)
Not even the North Atlantic Ocean could daunt such a temperament. (It should be noted that Martineau was partly deaf and therefore protected from the worst noises at sea.) After the restive final stretches of the passage, everyone’s spirits rose as the ship approached America. People changed into their best clothes, not seen for weeks, in preparation for landing. The United States reached New York after forty-two days: ‘a long but agreeable voyage,’ she insisted.
By the late 1830s, twenty packet ships were running from New York to Liverpool, twelve more to London, and sixteen to Le Havre. Every month, a dozen packets left New York for Europe and a dozen more arrived; an average of one ship every thirty hours, all year long, regardless of the wind and weather. The packets suffered occasional collisions and founderings at sea, but only two accidents caused any loss of life over the first two decades. The Albion of the Black Ball Line sank off Ireland in 1822, killing forty-six people, and four years later the Crisis of the Black X Line disappeared on a westbound run with her crew and about a dozen passengers. Those two disasters aside, the packets had compiled – for the time – a remarkable record of fast, safe, predictable transatlantic travel.
According to testimony from both sides of the ocean, Americans were building and running the finest sailing ships in the world. A London newspaper in 1834, after comparing the safety records of the New York packets and the British government’s mail ships, urged the Admiralty to buy American vessels. In 1836, a committee of the British Parliament inquiring into the problem of shipwrecks presented evidence that American ships were better built than their British counterparts (and thus preferred by shippers and insurance agents), and that American commanders and officers were more educated and competent and American seamen more carefully selected, more efficient, and better paid – to the point that the best British sailors were defecting to American ships. American authorities could only happily agree. Matthew Maury, an American naval officer and one of the founders of oceanography, praised the New York packets in 1839 in language of patriotic but unchallenged hyperbole: ‘For strength, safety, fleetness and beauty; and for a combination of all the requisites of a good ship, in such admirable proportions, no nation can boast of vessels, public or private, comparable to them.’
The packets became, in some measure, the victims of their own success. They had created the very notion of rapid technical improvement in transatlantic travel. Passengers came to expect bigger, faster ships every few years. The wind, however, could not be improved: it blew hard or not at all, from the east or west, but always beyond any human control. Sailing ships could only depart on a scheduled date. The time of arrival might then vary by weeks, depending on the ocean’s vagaries. Steam power extended the possibility of keeping a ship on schedule, or nearly so, at both ends of the passage. But Americans became so proficient and applauded at turning out wooden sailing ships that, as time passed, they – in complacency and inertia – kept building those ships for too long, far past their technological prime. In Great Britain, especially in Scotland, other men were about to take over the leadership of transatlantic shipbuilding.
Steam power drove both the Industrial Revolution and the progressive nineteenth century. Of all the thousands of inventions that have created the pervasive material modernity of the past two hundred years, the steam engine was the first cause, the prime mover and sine qua non. Unlike muscle power, it never tired or slept or refused to obey. Unlike waterpower, its immediate predecessor, it ran in all seasons and weathers, always the same. Unlike the wind, it responded tractably to human will and imagination: turning on and off, modulating smoothly from the finest delicacy to greatest force, ever under responsive control. ‘It is impossible to contemplate, without a feeling of exultation, this wonder of modern art,’ the Quarterly Review of London declared in 1830. After first transforming mining, manufacturing and transportation, from those bases the steam engine eventually reached into the smallest aspects of everyday life. Seen from the distant perspective of two centuries later, the great Steam Age looks like an unbroken, triumphal march.
Seen closer at hand, the application of steam power to any given field was a messy process overflowing with false starts and repeated, redundant discoveries. The most baffling aspect of inventing a steamboat, it turned out, did not involve the engine, fuel, boiler or hull. Instead it came down to the propelling mechanism, the essential driving link between the steam engine and the