American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Abbot, Willis J. - CHAPTER II.

American Merchant Ships and Sailors

CHAPTER II.

THE TRANSITION FROM SAILS TO STEAM--THE CHANGE IN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--THE DEPOPULATION OF THE OCEAN--CHANGES IN THE SAILOR'S LOT--FROM WOOD TO STEEL--THE INVENTION OF THE STEAMBOAT--THE FATE OF FITCH--FULTON'S LONG STRUGGLES--OPPOSITION OF THE SCIENTISTS--THE “CLERMONT”--THE STEAMBOAT ON THE OCEAN--ON WESTERN RIVERS--THE TRANSATLANTIC PASSAGE--THE “SAVANNAH” MAKES THE FIRST CROSSING--ESTABLISHMENT OF BRITISH LINES--EFFORTS OF UNITED STATES SHIP-OWNERS TO COMPETE--THE FAMOUS COLLINS LINE--THE DECADENCE OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE--SIGNS OF ITS REVIVAL--OUR GREAT DOMESTIC SHIPPING INTEREST--AMERICA'S FUTURE ON THE SEA.

Even as recently as twenty years ago, the water front of a great seaport like New York, viewed from the harbor, showed a towering forest of tall and tapering masts, reaching high up above the roofs of the water-side buildings, crossed with slender spars hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a web of taut cordage. Across the street that passed the foot of the slips, reached out the great bowsprits or jibbooms, springing from fine-drawn bows where, above a keen cut-water, the figurehead--pride of the ship--nestled in confident strength. Neptune with his trident, Venus rising from the sea, admirals of every age and nationality, favorite heroes like Wellington and Andrew Jackson were carved, with varying skill, from stout oak, and set up to guide their vessels through tumultuous seas.

[Illustration: “THE WATER FRONT OF A GREAT SEAPORT LIKE NEW YORK”]

To-day, alas, the towering masts, the trim yards, the web of cordage, the quaint figureheads, are gone or going fast. The docks, once so populous, seem deserted--not because maritime trade has fallen off, but because one steamship does the work that twenty stout clippers once were needed for. The clipper bow with figurehead and reaching jib-boom are gone, for the modern steamship has its bow bluff, its stem perpendicular, the “City of Rome” being the last great steamship to adhere to the old model. It is not improbable, however, that in this respect we shall see a return to old models, for the straight stem--an American invention, by the way--is held to be more dangerous in case of collisions. Many of the old-time sailing ships have been shorn of their towering masts, robbed of their canvas, and made into ignoble barges which, loaded with coal, are towed along by some fuming, fussing tugboat--as Samson shorn of his locks was made to bear the burdens of the Philistines. This transformation from sail to steam has robbed the ocean of much of its picturesqueness, and seafaring life of much of its charm, as well as of many of its dangers.

The greater size of vessels and their swifter trips under steam, have had the effect of depopulating the ocean, even in established trade routes. In the old days of ocean travel the meeting of a ship at sea was an event long to be remembered. The faint speck on the horizon, discernible only through the captain's glass, was hours in taking on the form of a ship. If a full-rigged ship, no handiwork of man could equal her impressiveness as she bore down before the wind, sail mounting on sail of billowing whiteness, until for the small hull cleaving the waves so swiftly, to carry all seemed nothing sort of marvelous. Always there was a hail and an interchange of names and ports; sometimes both vessels rounded to and boats passed and repassed. But now the courtesies of the sea have gone with its picturesqueness. Great ocean liners rushing through the deep, give each other as little heed as railway trains passing on parallel tracks. A twinkle of electric signals, or a fluttering of parti-colored flags, and each seeks its own horizon--the incident bounded by minutes where once it would have taken hours.

It would not be easy to say whether the sailor's lot has been lightened or not, by the substitution of steel for wood, of steam for sail. Perhaps the best evidence that the native-born American does not regard the change as wholly a blessing, is to be found in the fact that but few of them now follow the sea, and scarcely a vestige is left of the old New England seafaring population except in the fisheries--where sails are still the rule. Doubtless the explanation of this lies in the changed conditions of seafaring as a business. In the days which I have sketched in the first chapter, the boy of good habits and reasonable education who shipped before the mast, was fairly sure of prompt promotion to the quarter-deck, of a right to share in the profits of the voyage, and of finally owning his own ship. After 1860 all these conditions changed. Steamships, always costly to build, involved greater and greater investments as their size increased. Early in the history of steam navigation they became exclusively the property of corporations. Latterly the steamship lines have become adjuncts to great railway lines, and are conducted by the practiced stock manipulator--not by the veteran sea captain.

Richard J. Cleveland, a successful merchant navigator of the early days of the nineteenth century, when little more than a lad, undertook an enterprise, thus described by him in a letter from Havre:

“I have purchased a cutter-sloop of forty-three tons burden, on a credit of two years. This vessel was built at Dieppe and fitted out for a privateer; was taken by the English, and has been plying between Dover and Calais as a packet-boat. She has excellent accommodations and sails fast. I shall copper her, put her in ballast, trim with L1000 or L1500 sterling in cargo, and proceed to the Isle of France and Bourbon, where I expect to sell her, as well as the cargo, at a very handsome profit, and have no doubt of being well paid for my twelve months' work, calculating to be with you next August.”

[Illustration: AN ARMED CUTTER]

In such enterprises the young American sailors were always engaging--braving equally the perils of the deep and not less treacherous reefs and shoals of business but always struggling to become their own masters to command their own ships, and if possible, to carry their own cargoes. The youth of a nation that had fought for political independence, fought themselves for economic independence.

To men of this sort the conditions bred by the steam-carrying trade were intolerable. To-day a great steamship may well cost $2,000,000. It must have the favor of railway companies for cargoes, must possess expensive wharves at each end of its route, must have an army of agents and solicitors ever engaged upon its business. The boy who ships before the mast on one of them, is less likely to rise to the position of owner, than the switchman is to become railroad president--the latter progress has been known, but of the former I can not find a trace. So comparatively few young Americans choose the sea for their workshop in this day of steam.

If this book were the story of the merchant marine of all lands and all peoples, a chapter on the development of the steamship would be, perhaps, the most important, and certainly the most considerable part of it. But with the adoption of steam for ocean carriage began the decline of American shipping, a decline hastened by the use of iron, and then steel, for hulls. Though we credit ourselves--not without some protest from England--with the invention of the steamboat, the adaptation of the screw to the propulsion of vessels, and the invention of triple-expansion engines, yet it was England that seized upon these inventions and with them won, and long held, the commercial mastery of the seas. To-day (1902) it seems that economic conditions have so changed that the shipyards of the United States will again compete for the business of the world. We are building ships as good--perhaps better--than can be constructed anywhere else, but thus far we have not been able to build them as cheap. Accordingly our builders have been restricted to the construction of warships, coasters, and yachts. National pride has naturally demanded that all vessels for the navy be built in American shipyards, and a federal law has long restricted the trade between ports of the United States to ships built here. The lake shipping, too--prodigious in numbers and activity--is purely American. But until within a few years the American flag had almost disappeared from vessels engaged in international trade. Americans in many instances are the owners of ships flying the British flag, for the United States laws deny American registry--which is to a ship what citizenship is to a man--to vessels built abroad. While the result of this attempt to protect American shipyards has been to drive our flag from the ocean, there are indications now that our shipyards are prepared to build as cheaply as others, and that the flag will again figure on the high seas.

Popular history has ascribed to Robert Fulton the honor of building and navigating the first steamboat. Like claims to priority in many other inventions, this one is strenuously contested. Two years before Fulton's “Clermont” appeared on the Hudson, John Stevens, of Hoboken, built a steamboat propelled by a screw, the model of which is still in the Stevens Polytechnic Institute. Earlier still, John Fitch, of Pennsylvania, had made a steamboat, and urged it upon Franklin, upon Washington, and upon the American Philosophical Society without success; tried it then with the Spanish minister, and was offered a subsidy by the King of Spain for the exclusive right to the invention. Being a patriotic American, Fitch refused. “My invention must be first for my own country and then for all the world,” said he. But later, after failing to reap any profit from his discover and finding himself deprived even of the honor of first invention, he wrote bitterly in 1792:

“The strange ideas I had at that time of serving my country, without the least suspicion that my only reward would be contempt and opprobrious names! To refuse the offer of the Spanish nation was the act of a blockhead of which I should not be guilty again.”

Indeed Fitch's fortune was hard. His invention was a work of the purest originality. He was unread, uneducated, and had never so much as heard of a steam-engine when the idea of propelling boats by steam came to him. After repeated rebuffs--the lot of every inventor--he at length secured from the State of New Jersey the right to navigate its waters for a term of years. With this a stock company was formed and the first boat built and rebuilt. At first it was propelled by a single paddle at the stem; then by a series of paddles attached to an endless chain on each side of the boat; afterwards by paddle-wheels, and finally by upright oars at the side. The first test made on the Delaware River in August, 1787--twenty years before Fulton--in the presence of many distinguished citizens, some of them members of the Federal Convention, which had adjourned for the purpose, was completely successful. The boiler burst before the afternoon was over, but not before the inventor had demonstrated the complete practicability of his invention.

For ten years, struggling the while against cruel poverty, John Fitch labored to perfect his steamboat, and to force it upon the public favor, but in vain. Never in the history of invention did a new device more fully meet the traditional “long-felt want.” Here was a growing nation made up of a fringe of colonies strung along an extended coast. No roads were built. Dense forests blocked the way inland but were pierced by navigable streams, deep bays, and placid sounds. The steamboat was the one thing necessary to cement American unity and speed American progress; but a full quarter of a century passed after Fitch had steamed up and down the Delaware before the new system of propulsion became commercially useful. The inventor did not live to see that day, and was at least spared the pain of seeing a later pioneer get credit for a discovery he thought his own. In 1798 he died--of an overdose of morphine--leaving behind the bitter writing: “The day will come when some powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention; but nobody will ever believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention.”

In trying to make amends for the long injustice done to poor Fitch, modern history has come near to going beyond justice. It is undoubted that Fitch applied steam to the propulsion of a boat, long before Fulton, but that Fitch himself was the first inventor is not so certain. Blasco de Garay built a rude steamboat in Barcelona in 1543; in Germany one Papin built one a few years later, which bargemen destroyed lest their business be injured by it. Jonathan Hulls, of Liverpool, in 1737 built a stern-wheeler, rude engravings of which are still in existence, and Symington in 1801 built a thoroughly practical steamboat at Dundee. 'Tis a vexed question, and perhaps it is well enough to say that Fitch first scented the commercial possibilities of steam navigation, while Fulton actually developed them--the one “raised” the fox, while the other was in at the death.

To trace a great idea to the actual birth is apt to be obstructive to national pride. It is even said that the Chinese of centuries ago understood the value of the screw-propeller--for inventing which our adoptive citizen Ericsson stands in bronze on New York's Battery.

From the time of Robert Fulton, at any rate, dates the commercial usage of the steamboat. Others had done the pioneering--Fitch on the Delaware, James Rumsey on the Potomac, William Longstreet on the Savannah, Elijah Ormsley on the waters of Rhode Island, while Samuel Morey had actually traveled by steamboat from New Haven to New York. Fulton's craft was not materially better than any of these, but it happened to be launched on

----that tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

But the flood of that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of miniatures and went to London to study under Benjamin West, whom all America of that day thought a genius scarcely second to Raphael or Titian. He was not, like poor Fitch, doomed to the narrowest poverty and shut out from the society of the men of light and learning of the day, for we find him, after his London experience, a member of the family of Joel Barlow, then our minister to France. By this time his ambition had forsaken art for mechanics, and he was deep in plans for diving boats, submarine torpedoes, and steamboats. Through various channels he succeeded in getting his plan for moving vessels with steam, before Napoleon--then First Consul--who ordered the Minister of Marine to treat with the inventor. The Minister in due time suggested that 10,000 francs be spent on experiments to be made in the Harbor of Brest. To this Napoleon assented, and sent Fulton to the Institute of France to be examined as to his fitness to conduct the tests. Now the Institute is the most learned body in all France. In 1860 one of its members wrote a book to prove that the earth does not revolve upon its axis, nor move about the sun. In 1878, when Edison's phonograph was being exhibited to the eminent scientists of the Institute, one rushed wrathfully down the aisle and seizing by the collar the man who manipulated the instrument, cried out, “Wretch, we are not to be made dupes of by a ventriloquist!” So it is readily understandable that after being referred to the Institute, Fulton and his project disappeared for a long time.

The learned men of the Institute of France were not alone in their incredulity. In 1803 the Philosophical Society of Rotterdam wrote to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, for information concerning the development of the steam-engine in the United States. The question was referred to Benjamin H. Latrobe, the most eminent engineer in America, and his report was published approvingly in the _Transactions_. “A sort of mania,” wrote Mr. Latrobe, “had indeed prevailed and not yet entirely subsided, for impelling boats by steam-engines.” But his scientific hearers would at once see that there were general objections to it which could not be overcome. “These are, first, the weight of the engine and of the fuel; second, the large space it occupies; third, the tendency of its action to rack the vessel and render it leaky; fourth, the expense of maintenance; fifth, the irregularity of its motion and the motion of the water in the boiler and cistern, and of the fuel vessel in rough weather; sixth, the difficulty arising from the liability of the paddles, or oars, to break, if light, and from the weight if made strong.”

But the steamboat survived this scientific indictment in six counts. Visions proved more real than scientific reasoning.

While in the shadow of the Institute's disfavor, Fulton fell in with the new minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, and the result of this acquaintance was that America gained primacy in steam navigation, and Napoleon lost the chance to get control of an invention which, by revolutionizing navigation, might have broken that British control of the sea, that in the end destroyed the Napoleonic empire. Livingston had long taken an intelligent interest in the possibilities of steam power, and had built and tested, on the Hudson, an experimental steamboat of his own. Perhaps it was this, as much as anything, which aroused the interest of Thomas Jefferson--to whom he owed his appointment as minister to France--for Jefferson was actively interested in every sort of mechanical device, and his mind was not so scientific as to be inhospitable to new, and even, revolutionary, ideas. But Livingston was not possessed by that idea which, in later years, politicians have desired us to believe especially Jeffersonian. He was no foe to monopoly. Indeed, before he had perfected his steamboat, he used his political influence to get from New York the concession of the _exclusive_ right to navigate her lakes and rivers by steam. The grant was only to be effective if within one year he should produce a boat of twenty tons, moved by steam. But he failed, and in 1801 went to France, where he found Fulton. A partnership was formed, and it was largely through Livingston's money and influence that Fulton succeeded where others, earlier in the field than he, had failed. Yet even so, it was not all easy sailing for him. “When I was building my first steamboat,” he said, "the project was viewed by the public either with indifference, or with contempt as a visionary scheme. My friends, indeed, were civil, but were shy. They listened with patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast of incredulity upon their countenances. I felt the full force of the lamentation of the poet--

Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land; All fear, none aid you, and few understand.

[Illustration: “THE LOUD LAUGH ROSE AT MY EXPENSE”]

“As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building yard while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered unknown near the idle groups of strangers gathered in little circles and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, or sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull, but endless repetition of 'the Fulton Folly.' Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish cross my path.”

The boat which Fulton was building while the wiseacres wagged their heads and prophesied disaster, was named “The Clermont.” She was 130 feet long, 18 feet wide, half-decked, and provided with a mast and sail. In the undecked part were the boiler and engine, set in masonry. The wheels were fifteen feet in diameter, with buckets four feet wide, dipping two feet into the water.

It was 1806 when Fulton came home to begin her construction. Since his luckless experience with the French Institute he had tested a steamer on the Seine; failed to interest Napoleon; tried, without success, to get the British Government to adopt his torpedo; tried and failed again with the American Government at Washington. Fulton's thoughts seemed to have been riveted on his torpedo; but Livingston was confident of the future of the steamboat, and had had an engine built for it in England, which Fulton found lying on a wharf, freight unpaid, on his return from Europe. The State of New York had meantime granted the two another monopoly of steam navigation, and gave them until 1807 to prove their ability and right. The time, though brief, proved sufficient, and on the afternoon of August 7, 1807, the “Clermont” began her epoch-making voyage. The distance to Albany--150 miles--she traversed in thirty-two hours, and the end of the passenger sloop traffic on the Hudson was begun. Within a year steamboats were plying on the Raritan, the Delaware, and Lake Champlain, and the development and use of the new invention would have been more rapid than it was, save for the monopoly rights which had been granted to Livingston and Fulton. They had the sole right to navigate by steam, the waters of New York. Well and good. But suppose the stream navigated touched both New York and New Jersey. What then? Would it be seriously asserted that a steamer owned by New Jersey citizens could not land passengers at a New York port?

Fulton and Livingston strove to protect their monopoly, and the two States were brought to the brink of war. In the end the courts settled the difficulty by establishing the exclusive control of navigable waters by the Federal Government.

From the day the “Clermont” breasted the tide of the Hudson there was no check in the conquest of the waters by steam. Up the narrowest rivers, across the most tempestuous bays, along the placid waters of Long Island Sound, coasting along the front yard of the nation from Portland to Savannah the steamboats made their way, tying the young nation indissolubly together. Curiously enough it was Livingston's monopoly that gave the first impetus to the extension of steam navigation. A mechanic by the name of Robert L. Stevens, one of the first of a family distinguished in New York and New Jersey, built a steamboat on the Hudson. After one or two trips had proved its usefulness, the possessors of the monopoly became alarmed and began proceedings against the new rival. Driven from the waters about New York, Stevens took his boat around to Philadelphia. Thus not only did he open an entirely new field of river and inland water transportation, but the trip to Philadelphia demonstrated the entire practicability of steam for use in coastwise navigation. Thereafter the vessels multiplied rapidly on all American waters. Fulton himself set up a shipyard, in which he built steam ferries, river and coastwise steamboats. In 1809 he associated himself with Nicholas J. Roosevelt, to whom credit is due for the invention of the vertical paddle-wheel, in a partnership for the purpose of putting steamboats on the great rivers of the Mississippi Valley, and in 1811 the “New Orleans” was built and navigated by Roosevelt himself, from Pittsburg to the city at the mouth of the Mississippi. The voyage took fourteen days, and before undertaking it, he descended the two rivers in a flatboat, to familiarize himself with the channel. The biographer of Roosevelt prints an interesting letter from Fulton, in which he says, “I have no pretensions to be the inventor of the steamboat. Hundreds of others have tried it and failed.” Four years after Roosevelt's voyage, the “Enterprise” made for the first time in history the voyage up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Louisville, and from that era the great rivers may be said to have been fairly opened to that commerce, which in time became the greatest agency in the building up of the nation. The Great Lakes were next to feel the quickening influence of the new motive power, but it was left for the Canadian, John Hamilton, of Queenston, to open this new field. The progress of steam navigation on both lakes and rivers will be more fully described in the chapters devoted to that topic.

So rapidly now did the use of the steamboat increase on Long Island Sound, on the rivers, and along the coast that the newspapers began to discuss gravely the question whether the supply of fuel would long hold out. The boats used wood exclusively--coal was then but little used--and despite the vast forests which covered the face of the land the price of wood in cities rose because of their demand. Mr. McMaster, the eminent historian, discovers that in 1825 thirteen steamers plying on the Hudson burned sixteen hundred cords of wood per week. Fourteen hundred cords more were used by New York ferry boats, and each trip of a Sound steamer consumed sixty cords. The American who traverses the placid waters of Long Island Sound to-day in one of the swift and splendid steamboats of the Fall River or other Sound lines, enjoys very different accommodations from those which in the second quarter of the last century were regarded as palatial. The luxury of that day was a simple sort at best. When competition became strong, the old Fulton company, then running boats to Albany, announced as a special attraction the “safety barge.” This was a craft without either sails or steam, of about two hundred tons burden, and used exclusively for passengers. It boasted a spacious dining-room, ninety feet long, a deck cabin for ladies, a reading room, a promenade deck, shaded and provided with seats. One of the regular steamers of the line towed it to Albany, and its passengers were assured freedom from the noise and vibration of machinery, as well as safety from possible boiler explosions--the latter rather a common peril of steamboating in those days.

[Illustration: “THE DREADNAUGHT”--NEW YORK AND LIVERPOOL PACKET]

It was natural that the restless mind of the American, untrammeled by traditions and impatient of convention, should turn eagerly and early to the question of crossing the ocean by steam. When the rivers had been made busy highways for puffing steamboats; when the Great Lakes, as turbulent as the ocean, and as vast as the Mediterranean, were conquered by the new marine device; when steamships plied between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston, braving what is by far more perilous than mid-ocean, the danger of tempests on a lee shore, and the shifting sands of Hatteras, there seemed to the enterprising man no reason why the passage from New York to Liverpool might not be made by the same agency. The scientific authorities were all against it. Curiously enough, the weight of scientific authority is always against anything new. Marine architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces. It is a matter of history that an eminent British scientist was engaged in delivering a lecture on this very subject in Liverpool when the “Savannah,” the first steamship to cross the ocean, steamed into the harbor. It is fair, however, to add that the “Savannah's” success did not wholly destroy the contention of the opponents of steam navigation, for she made much of the passage under sail, being fitted only with what we would call now “auxiliary steam power.” This was in 1819, but so slow were the shipbuilders to progress beyond what had been done with the “Savannah,” that in 1835 a highly respected British scientist said in tones of authority: “As to the project which was announced in the newspapers, of making the voyage from New York to Liverpool direct by steam, it was, he had no hesitation in saying, perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making a voyage from New York or Liverpool to the moon.” Nevertheless, in three years from that time transatlantic steam lines were in operation, and the doom of the grand old packets was sealed.

The American who will read history free from that national prejudice which is miscalled patriotism, can not fail to be impressed by the fact that, while as a nation we have led the world in the variety and audacity of our inventions, it is nearly always some other nation that most promptly and most thoroughly utilizes the genius of our inventors. Emphatically was this the case with the application of steam power to ocean steamships. Americans showed the way, but Englishmen set out upon it and were traveling it regularly before another American vessel followed in the wake of the “Savannah.” In 1838 two English steamships crossed the Atlantic to New York, the “Sirius” and the “Great Western.” That was the beginning of that great fleet of British steamers which now plies up and down the Seven Seas and finds its poet laureate in Mr. Kipling. A very small beginning it was, too. The “Sirius” was of 700 tons burden and 320 horse-power; the “Great Western” was 212 feet long, with a tonnage of 1340 and engines of 400 horse-power. The “Sirius” brought seven passengers to New York, at a time when the sailing clippers were carrying from eight hundred to a thousand immigrants, and from twenty to forty cabin passengers. To those who accompanied the ship on her maiden voyage it must have seemed to justify the doubts expressed by the mathematicians concerning the practicability of designing a steamship which could carry enough coal to drive the engines all the way across the Atlantic, for the luckless “Sirius” exhausted her four hundred and fifty tons of coal before reaching Sandy Hook, and could not have made the historic passage up New York Bay under steam, except for the liberal use of spars and barrels of resin which she had in cargo. Her voyage from Cork had occupied eighteen and a half days. The “Great Western,” which arrived at the same time, made the run from Queenstown in fifteen days. That two steamships should lie at anchor in New York Bay at the same time, was enough to stir the wonder and awaken the enthusiasm of the provincial New Yorkers of that day. The newspapers published editorials on the marvel, and the editor of _The Courier and Enquirer_, the chief maritime authority of the time, hazarded a prophecy in this cautious fashion:

“What may be the ultimate fate of this excitement--whether or not the expenses of equipment and fuel will admit of the employment of these vessels in the ordinary packet service--we cannot pretend to form an opinion; but of the entire feasibility of the passage of the Atlantic by steam, as far as regards safety, comfort, and dispatch, even in the roughest and most boisterous weather, the most skeptical must now cease to doubt.”

Unfortunately for our national pride, the story of the development of the ocean steamship industry from this small beginning to its present prodigious proportions, is one in which we of the United States fill but a little space. We have, it is true, furnished the rich cargoes of grain, of cotton, and of cattle, that have made the ocean passage in one direction profitable for shipowners. We found homes for the millions of immigrants who crowded the “'tween decks” of steamers of every flag and impelled the companies to build bigger and bigger craft to carry the ever increasing throngs. And in these later days of luxury and wealth unparalleled, we have supplied the millionaires, whose demands for quarters afloat as gorgeous as a Fifth Avenue club have resulted in the building of floating palaces. America has supported the transatlantic lines, but almost every civilized people with a seacoast has outdone us in building the ships. For a time, indeed, it seemed that we should speedily overcome the lead that England immediately took in building steamships. Her entrance upon this industry was, as we have seen, in 1838. The United States took it up about ten years later. In 1847 the Ocean Steam Navigation Company was organized in this country and secured from the Government a contract to carry the mails between New York and Bremen. Two ships were built and regular trips made for a year or more; but when the Government contract expired and was not renewed, the venture was abandoned. About the same time the owners of one of the most famous packet lines, the Black Ball, tried the experiment of supplementing their sailing service with a steamship, but it proved unprofitable. Shortly after the New York and Havre Steamship Company, with two vessels and a postal subsidy of $150,000, entered the field and continued operations with only moderate success until 1868.

The only really notable effort of Americans in the early days of steam navigation to get their share of transatlantic trade--indeed, I might almost say the most determined effort until the present time--was that made by the projectors of the Collins line, and it ended in disaster, in heavy financial loss, and in bitter sorrow.

E.K. Collins was a New York shipping merchant, the organizer and manager of one of the most famous of the old lines of sailing packets between that port and Liverpool--the Dramatic line, so called from the fact that its ships were named after popular actors of the day. Recognizing the fact that the sailing ship was fighting a losing fight against the new style of vessels, Mr. Collins interested a number of New York merchants in a distinctly American line of transatlantic ships. It was no easy task. Capital was not over plenty in the American city which now boasts itself the financial center of the world, while the opportunities for its investment in enterprises longer proved and less hazardous than steamships were numerous. But a Government mail subsidy of $858,000 annually promised a sound financial basis, and made the task of capitalization possible. It seems not unlikely that the vicissitudes of the line were largely the result of this subsidy, for one of its conditions was extremely onerous: namely, that the vessels making twenty-six voyages annually between New York and Liverpool, should always make the passage in better time than the British Cunard line, which was then in its eighth year. However, the Collins line met the exaction bravely. Four vessels were built, the “Atlantic,” “Pacific,” “Arctic,” and “Baltic,” and the time of the fleet for the westward passage averaged eleven days, ten hours and twenty-one minutes, while the British ships averaged twelve days, nineteen hours and twenty-six minutes--a very substantial triumph for American naval architecture. The Collins liners, furthermore, were models of comfort and even of luxury for the times. They averaged a cost of $700,000 apiece, a good share of which went toward enhancing the comfort of passengers. To our English cousins these ships were at first as much of a curiosity as our vestibuled trains were a few years since. When the “Atlantic” first reached Liverpool in 1849, the townspeople by the thousand came down to the dock to examine a ship with a barber shop, fitted with the curious American barber chairs enabling the customer to recline while being shaved. The provision of a special deck-house for smokers, was another innovation, while the saloon, sixty-seven by twenty feet, the dining saloon sixty by twenty, the rich fittings of rosewood and satinwood, marble-topped tables, expensive upholstery, and stained-glass windows, decorated with patriotic designs, were for a long time the subject of admiring comment in the English press. Old voyagers who crossed in the halcyon days of the Collins line and are still taking the “Atlantic ferry,” agree in saying that the increase in actual comfort is not so great as might reasonably be expected. Much of the increased expenditures of the companies has gone into more gorgeous decoration, vastly more of course into pushing for greater speed; but even in the early days there was a lavish table, and before the days of the steamships the packets offered such private accommodations in the of roomy staterooms as can be excelled only by the “cabins de luxe” of the modern liner. Aside from the question of speed, however, it is probable that the two inventions which have added most to the passengers' comfort are the electric light and artificial refrigeration.

The Collins line charged from thirty to forty dollar a ton for freight, a charge which all the modern improvements and the increase in the size of vessels, has not materially lessened. In six years, however, the corporation was practically bankrupt. The high speed required by the Government more than offset the generous subsidy, and misfortune seemed to pursue the ships. The “Arctic” came into collision with a French steamer in 1854, and went down with two hundred and twenty-two of the two hundred and sixty-eight people on board. The “Pacific” left Liverpool June 23, 1856, and was never more heard of. Shortly thereafter the subsidy was withdrawn, and the famous line went slowly down to oblivion.

It was during the best days of the Collins line that it seemed that the United States might overtake Great Britain in the race for supremacy on the ocean. In 1851 the total British steam shipping engaged in foreign trade was 65,921 tons. The United States only began building steamships in 1848, yet by 1851 its ocean-going steamships aggregated 62,390 tons. For four years our growth continued so that in 1855 we had 115,000 tons engaged in foreign trade. Then began the retrograde movement, until in 1860--before the time of the Confederate cruisers--there were; according to an official report to the National Board of Trade, “no ocean mail steamers away from our own coasts, anywhere on the globe, under the American flag, except, perhaps, on the route between New York and Havre, where two steamships may then have been in commission, which, however, were soon afterward withdrawn. The two or three steamship companies which had been in existence in New York had either failed or abandoned the business; and the entire mail, passenger, and freight traffic between Great Britain and the United States, so far as this was carried on by steam, was controlled then (as it mainly is now) by British companies.” And from this condition of decadence the merchant marine of the United States is just beginning to manifest signs of recovery.

When steam had fairly established its place as the most effective power for ocean voyages of every duration, and through every zone and clime, improvements in the methods of harnessing it, and in the form and material of the ships that it was to drive, followed fast upon each other. As in the case of the invention of the steamboat, the public has commonly lightly awarded the credit for each invention to some belated experimenter who, walking more firmly along a road which an earlier pioneer had broken, attained the goal that his predecessor had sought in vain. So we find credit given almost universally to John Ericsson, the Swedish-born American, for the invention of the screw-propeller. But as early as 1770 it was suggested by John Watt, and Stevens, the American inventor, actually gave a practical demonstration of its efficiency in 1804. Ericsson perfected it in 1836, and soon thereafter the British began building steamships with screws instead of paddle-wheels. For some reason, however, not easy now to conjecture, shipbuilders clung to the paddle-wheels for vessels making the transatlantic voyage, long after they were discarded on the shorter runs along the coasts of the British isles. It so happened, too, that the first vessel to use the screw in transatlantic voyages, was also first iron ship built. She was the “Great Britain,” a ship of 3,000 tons, built for the Great Western Company at Bristol, England, and intended to eclipse any ship afloat. Her hull was well on the way to completion when her designer chanced to see the “Archimedes,” the first screw steamer built, and straightway changed his plans to admit the use of the new method of propulsion So from 1842 may be dated the use of both screw propellers and iron ships. We must pass hastily over the other inventions, rapidly following each other, and all designed to make ocean travel more swift, more safe, and more comfortable, and to increase the profit of the shipowner. The compound engine, which has been so developed that in place of Fulton's seven miles an hour, our ocean steamships are driven now at a speed sometimes closely approaching twenty-five miles an hour, seems already destined to give way to the turbine form of engine which, applied thus far to torpedo-boats only, has made a record of forty-four miles an hour. Iron, which stood for a revolution in 1842, has itself given way to steel. And a new force, subtile, swift, and powerful, has found endless application in the body of the great ships, so that from stem to stern-post they are a network of electric wires, bearing messages, controlling the independent engines that swing the rudder, closing water-tight compartments at the first hint of danger, and making the darkest places of the great hulls as light as day at the throwing of a switch. During the period of this wonderful advance in marine architecture ship-building in the United States languished to the point of extinction. Yachts for millionaires who could afford to pay heavily for the pleasure of flying the Stars and Stripes, ships of 2500 to 4000 tons for the coasting trade, in which no foreign-built vessel was permitted to compete, and men-of-war--very few of them before 1890--kept a few shipyards from complete obliteration. But as an industry, ship-building, which once ranked at the head of American manufactures, had sunk to a point of insignificance.

The present moment (1902) seems to show the American shipping interest in the full tide of successful reestablishment. In Congress and in boards of trade men are arguing for and against subsidies, for and against the policy of permitting Americans to buy ships of foreign builders if they will, and fly the American flag above them. But while these things remain subjects of discussion natural causes are taking Americans again to sea. Some buy great British ships, own and manage them, even although the laws of the United States compel the flying of a foreign flag. For example, the Atlantic Transport line is owned wholly by citizens of the United States, although at the present moment all its ships fly the British flag. Two new ships are, however, being completed for this line in American shipyards, the “Minnetonka” and “Minnewaska,” of 13,401 tons each. This line, started by Americans in 1887, was the first to use the so-called bilge keels, or parallel keels along each side of the hull to prevent rolling. It now has a fleet of twenty-three vessels, with a total tonnage of about 90,000, and does a heavy passenger business despite the fact that its ships were primarily designed to carry cattle. Quite as striking an illustration of the fact that capital is international, and will be invested in ships or other enterprises which promise profit quite heedless of sentimental considerations of flags, was afforded by the purchase in 1901 of the Leyland line of British steamships by an American. Immediately following this came the consolidation of ownership, or merger, of the principal British-American lines, in one great corporation, a majority of the stock of which is held by Americans. Despite their ownership on this side of the water, these ships will still fly the British flag, and a part of the contract of merger is that a British shipyard shall for ten years build all new vessels needed by the consolidated lines this situation will persist. This suggests that the actual participation of Americans in the ocean-carrying trade of the world is not to be estimated by the frequency or infrequency with which the Stars and Stripes are to be met on the ocean. It furthermore gives some indication of the rapidity with which the American flag would reappear if the law to register only ships built in American yards were repealed.

Indeed, it would appear that the law protecting American ship-builders, while apparently effective for that purpose, has destroyed American shipping. Our ship-building industry has attained respectable and even impressive proportions; but our shipping, wherever brought into competition with foreign ships, has vanished. One transatlantic line only, in 1902 displayed the American flag, and that line enjoyed special and unusual privileges, without which it probably could not have existed. In consideration of building two ships in American yards, this line, the International Navigation Company, was permitted to transfer two foreign-built ships to American registry, and a ten years' postal contract was awarded it, which guaranteed in advance the cost of construction of all the ships it was required to build. It is a fact worth noting that, while the foreign lines have been vying with each other in the construction of faster and bigger ships each year, this one has built none since its initial construction, more than a decade ago. Ten years ago its American-built ships, the “New York” and the “Paris,” were the largest ships afloat; now there are eighteen larger in commission, and many building. Besides this, there are only two American lines on the Atlantic which ply to other than coastwise ports--the Pacific Mail, which is run in connection with the Panama railway, and the Admiral line, which plies between New York and the West Indies. Indeed, the Commissioner of Navigation, in his report for 1901, said:

“For serious competition with foreign nations under the conditions now imposed upon ocean navigation, we are practically limited to our registered iron and steam steel vessels, which in all number 124, of 271,378 gross tons. Those under 1,000 gross tons are not now commercially available for oversea trade. There remains 4 steamships, each of over 10,000 gross tons; 5 of between 5,000 and 6,000 gross tons; 2 of between 4,000 and 5,000 tons; 18 between 3000 and 4000 tons; 35 between 2000 and 3000 tons, and 33 between 1000 and 2000 tons; in all 97 steamships over 1000 tons, aggregating 260,325 gross tons.”

Most of these are engaged in coastwise trade. The fleet of the Hamburg-American line alone, among our many foreign rivals, aggregates 515,628 gross tons.

However, we must bear in mind that this seemingly insignificant place held by the United States merchant marine represents only the part it holds in the international carrying trade of the world. Such a country as Germany must expend all its maritime energies on international trade. It has little or no river and coastwise traffic. But the United States is a little world in itself; not so very small, and of late years growing greater. Our wide extended coasts on Atlantic, Pacific, and the Mexican Gulf, are bordered by rich States crowded with a people who produce and consume more per capita than any other race. From the oceans great navigable rivers, deep bays, and placid sounds, extend into the very heart of the country. The Great Lakes are bordered by States more populous and cities more busy and enterprising than those, which in the proudest days of Rome, and Carthage and Venice skirted the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The traffic of all these trade highways is by legislation reserved for American ships alone. On the Great Lakes has sprung up a merchant marine rivaling that of some of the foremost maritime peoples, and conducting a traffic that puts to shame the busiest maritime highways of Europe. Long Island Sound bears on its placid bosom steamships that are the marvel of the traveling public the world over. The Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi, are all great arteries through which the life current of trade is ceaselessly flowing. A book might be written on the one subject of the part that river navigation has played in developing the interior States of this Union. Another could well be devoted to the history of lake navigation, which it is no overstatement to pronounce the most impressive chapter in the history of the American merchant marine. In this volume, however, but brief attention can be given to either.

The figures show how honorably our whole body of shipping compares in volume to that operated by any maritime people. Our total registered shipping engaged in the fisheries, coastwise, and lake traffic, and foreign trade numbered at the beginning of 1902, 24,057 vessels, with an aggregate tonnage of 5,524,218 tons. In domestic trade alone we had 4,582,683 tons, or an amount exceeding the total tonnage of Germany and Norway combined, or of Germany and France. Only England excelled us, but her lead, which in 1860 was inconsiderable, in 1901 was prodigious; the British flag flying over no less than 14,261,254 tons of shipping, more than three times our tonnage! It is proper to note that more than two-thirds of our registered tonnage is of wood.

[Illustration: THERE ARE BUILDING IN AMERICAN YARDS ]

I have already given reasons why, in the natural course of things, this disparity between the American and the British foreign-going merchant marine will not long continue. And indeed, as this book is writing, it is apparent that its end is near. Though shipyards have multiplied fast in the last five years of the nineteenth century, the first years of the new century found them all occupied up to the very limit of their capacity. Yards that began, like the Cramps, building United States warships and finding little other work, were soon under contract to build men-of-war for Russia and Japan. The interest of the people in the navy afforded a great stimulus to shipbuilding. It is told of one of the principal yards, that its promotor went to Washington with a bid for naval construction in his pocket, but without either a shipyard or capital wherewith to build one. He secured a contract for two ships, and capital readily interested itself in his project. When that contract is out of the way the yard will enter the business of building merchant vessels, just as several yards, which long had their only support from naval contracts, are now doing. There were built in the year ending June 30, 1901, in American yards, 112 vessels of over 1000 tons each, or a total of 311,778. Many of these were lake vessels; some were wooden ships. Of modern steel steamers, built on the seaboard, there were but sixteen. At the present moment there are building in American yards, or contracted for, almost 255,325 tons of steel steamships, to be launched within a year--or 89 vessels, more than twice the output of any year in our history, and an impressive earnest for the future. Nor is this rapid increase in the ship-building activity of the United States accompanied by any reduction in the wages of the American working men. Their high wages, of which ship-builders complain, and in which everyone else rejoices, remain high. But it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction, even of foreign observers, that the highly-paid American labor is the most effective, and in the end the cheapest. Our workingmen know how to use modern tools, to make compressed air, steam, electricity do their work at every possible point, and while the United States still ranks far below England as a ship-building center, Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen are coming over here to learn how we build the ships that we do build. If it has not yet been demonstrated that we can build ships as cheaply as any other nation, we are so near the point of demonstration, that it may be said to be expected momentarily. With the cheapest iron in the world, we have at least succeeded in making steel, the raw material of the modern ship, cheaper than it can be made elsewhere, and that accomplished, our primacy in the matter of ship-building is a matter of the immediate future. A picturesque illustration of this change is afforded by the fact that in 1894 the plates of the “Dirigo,” the first steel square-rigged vessel built in the United States, were imported from England. In 1898 we exported to England some of the plates for the “Oceanic,” the largest vessel built to that time.

Even the glory, such as it may be, of building the biggest ship of the time is now well within the grasp of the United States. At this writing, indeed, the biggest ship is the “Celtic,” British built, and of 20,000 tons. But the distinction is only briefly for her, for at New London, Connecticut, two ponderous iron fabrics are rising on the ways that presently shall take form as ocean steamships of 25,000 tons each, to fly the American flag, and to ply between Seattle and China. These great ships afford new illustrations of more than one point already made in this chapter. To begin with they are, of course, not constructed for any individual owner. Time was that the farmer with land sloping down to New London would put in his spare time building a staunch schooner of 200 tons, man her with his neighbors, and engage for himself in the world's carrying trade. It is rather different now. The Northern Pacific railroad directors concluded that their railroad could not be developed to its fullest earning capacity without some way of carrying to the markets of the far East the agricultural products gathered up along its line. As the tendency of the times is toward gathering all branches of a business under one control, they determined to not rely upon independent shipowners, but to build their own vessels. That meant the immediate letting of a contract for $5,000,000 worth of ship construction, and that in turn meant that there was a profit to somebody in starting an entirely new shipyard to do the work. So, suddenly, one of the sleepiest little towns in New England, Groton, opposite New London, was turned into a ship-building port. The two great Northern Pacific ships will be launched about the time this book is published, but the yard by that time will have become a permanent addition to the ship-building enterprises of the United States. So, too, all along the Atlantic coast, we find ancient shipyards where, in the very earliest colonial days, wooden vessels were built, adapting themselves to the construction of the new steel steamships.

How wonderful is the contrast between the twentieth century, steel, triple-screw, 25,000-ton, electric-lighted, 25-knot steamship, and Winthrop's little “Blessing of the Bay,” or Fulton's “Clermont,” or even the ships of the Collins line--floating palaces as they were called at the time! Time has made commonplace the proportions of the “Great Eastern,” the marine marvel not only of her age, but of the forty years that succeeded her breaking-up as impracticable on account of size. She was 19,000 tons, 690 feet long, and built with both paddle-wheels and a screw. The “Celtic” is 700 feet long, 20,000 tons, with twin screws. The one was too big to be commercially valuable, the other has held the record for size only for a year, being already outclassed by the Northern Pacific 25,000-ton monsters. That one was a failure, the other a success, is almost wholly due to the improvements in engines, which effect economy of space both in the engine-room and in the coal bunkers. It is, by the way, rather a curious illustration of the growing luxury of life, and of ocean travel, that the first voyage of this enormous ship was made as a yacht, carrying a party of pleasure-seekers, with not a pound of cargo, through the show places of the Mediterranean.

It will be interesting to chronicle here some of the characteristics of the most modern of ocean steamships, and to show by the use of some figures, the enormous proportions to which their business has attained. For this purpose it will be necessary to use figures drawn from the records of foreign lines, and from such vessels as the “Deutschland” and the “Celtic,” although the purpose of this book is to tell the story of the American merchant marine. But the figures given will be approximately correct for the great American ships now building, while there are not at present in service any American passenger ships which are fairly representative of the twentieth century liner.

The “Celtic,” for example, will carry 3,294 persons, of whom 2,859 will be passengers. That is, it could furnish comfortable accommodations, heated and lighted, with ample food for all the students in Harvard University, or the University of Michigan, or Columbia University, or all in Amherst, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Williams combined. If stood on end she would almost attain the height of the Washington monument placed on the roof of the Capitol at Washington. She has nine decks, and a few years ago, if converted into a shore edifice, might fairly have been reckoned in the “skyscraper” class. Her speed, as she was built primarily for capacity is only about seventeen knots, and to attain that she burns about 260 tons of coal a day. The “Deutschland,” which holds the ocean record for speed, burns nearly 600 tons of coal a day, and with it carries through the seas only 16,000 tons as against the “Celtic's” 20,000. But she is one of the modern vessels built especially to carry passengers. In her hold, huge as it is, there is room for only about 600 tons of cargo, and she seldom carries more than one-sixth of that amount. One voyage of this great ship costs about $45,000, and even at that heavy expense, she is a profit earner, so great is the volume of transatlantic travel and so ready are people to pay for speed and luxury. Her coal alone costs $5,000 a trip, and the expenses of the table, laundry, etc., equal those of the most luxurious hotel.

But will ever these great liners, these huge masses of steel, guided by electricity and sped by steam, build up anew the race of American sailors? Who shall say now? To-day they are manned by Scandinavians and officered, in the main, by the seamen of the foreign nations whose flags they float. But the American is an adaptable type. He at once attends upon changing conditions and conquers them. He turned from the sea to the railroads when that seemed to be the course of progress; he may retrace his steps now that the pendulum seems to swing the other way. And if he finds under the new regime less chance for the hardy topman, no opportunity for the shrewd trader to a hundred ports, the gates closed to the man of small capital, yet be sure he will conquer fate in some way. We have seen it in the armed branch of the seafaring profession only within a few months. When the fine old sailing frigates vanished from the seas, when the “Constitution” and the “Hartford” became as obsolete as the caravels of Columbus, when a navy officer found that electricity and steam were more serious problems in his calling than sails and rigging, and a bluejacket could be with the best in his watch without ever having learned to furl a royal, then said everybody: “The naval profession has gone to the dogs. Its romance has departed. Our ships should be manned from our boiler shops, and officered from our institutions of technology. There will be no more Decaturs, Somerses, Farraguts, Cushings.” And then came on the Spanish war and the rush of the “Oregon” around Cape Horn, the cool thrust of Dewey's fleet into the locked waters of Manila Bay, the plucky fight and death of Bagley at Cardenas, the braving of death by Hobson at Santiago, and the complete destruction of Cervera's fleet by Schley showed that Americans could fight as well in steel ships as in wooden ones. Nor can we doubt that the history of the next half-century will show that the new order at sea will breed a new race of American seamen able as in the past to prove themselves masters of the deep.

Table to Contents

<< CHAPTER I.CHAPTER III >>