Already, then, the steamboat had shown herself capable of doing her work on inland waters, and even for short voyages across Channel, as well as for coasting within sight of land. Independent of calms, currents and tides, she was a being of a different kind as compared with the sailing ship and was carving out for herself an entirely novel career of usefulness. But the pessimists believed that here her sphere ended; the long ocean voyages could never be undertaken except in the sail-carrying ships. However, in the year 1819, the first attempt was made to conquer the North Atlantic by means of a ship fitted with a steam engine. In the lower illustration facing page 90 will be seen the Savannah, a full-rigged ship of 350 tons burthen which was built in New York in 1818 as a sailing vessel pure and simple. That, it will be remembered, was eleven years after the launching of the Clermont, and during these eventful years there had been plenty of opportunity for those who wished to obtain proof of what steam could do for a ship. Whilst the Savannah was still on the stocks, one Moses Rogers, who had followed the efforts of both Stevens and Fulton, and had even commanded some of the early steamboats, suggested to Messrs. Scarborough and Isaacs, of Savannah, that they should purchase this ship; which eventually they did. Therefore, after being fitted with her engine, a steam trial trip was made in March, 1819, round New York Harbour, and a few days later she left for Savannah under sail. During this voyage of 207 hours she was practically nothing but a sailing ship, for her engine was only running for four and a half hours. On the 22nd of May she set forth from Charleston and steamed outside. It will be noticed on referring to the illustration that there were no paddle-boxes to cover her wheels, and a remarkable feature of the Savannah was her ability suddenly to transform her character as a steamship to a sailing vessel, and vice versa. Within twenty minutes she could take off her paddle-wheels, and away she could go without any hindrance to her speed.

So it was, then, after she had brought up outside Charleston. Unshipping her wheels she got under weigh early in the morning of May 24th, and arrived off the coast of Ireland at noon of June 17th, and three days later was off the bar at Liverpool. But this voyage proved little or nothing of the capabilities of the ocean steamship; for of the twenty-one days during which she was at sea the Savannah only used steam for eighty hours, and by the time she had arrived off Cork she had used up all her fuel. However, having now taken on board what she needed, she was able to steam up the Mersey with the aid of her engines alone. From Liverpool she went to the Baltic, using her engine for about a third of the passage. Thence she returned to America, having unshipped her paddle-wheels off Cronstadt, but, after crossing the Atlantic and arriving off the Savannah river, she adjusted her wheels once more and steamed home. Shortly afterwards her engines were taken out of her, and she ended her days as a sailing packet. Although her voyages did nothing to help forward the ocean steamer, yet she caused some amazement to the revenue cruiser Kite, which espied her off the coast of Ireland. Seeing volumes of smoke pouring out from this “three-sticker,” the Kite’s commander took her for a ship on fire and chased her for a whole day. The illustration gives a fairly accurate idea of the ship, though the bow has not been quite correctly given, and should show the old-fashioned and much modified beak which survived as a relic of medieval times. It will be noticed that the distance which separates the main and fore-mast was sufficiently great to allow of plenty of room for the engine and boiler.

In the meantime the steamship was slowly but surely coming into prominence and recognition, and the year 1821 was far from unimportant as showing the practical results which had been obtained. As proof of the faith which was now placed in steam, the first steamship company that was ever formed had already been inaugurated the year before, and in 1821 began running its trading steamers. This was the now well-known General Steam Navigation Company, Ltd., whose first steamer, the City of Edinburgh, was built on the Thames by Messrs. Wigram and Green, whose names will ever be associated with the fine clippers which in later years they were destined to turn out from their Blackwall yard. The steamship City of Edinburgh was launched in March, 1821, for the Edinburgh trade, and created so much attention that the future William IV. and Queen Adelaide paid her a visit, and expressed surprise at the magnificence of the passenger accommodation. The machinery (which was only of 100 horsepower) was described by the contemporary press as “extremely powerful.” In June of that year was also launched the James Watt, of which an illustration is given from an old water-colour. This vessel was built by Messrs. Wood and Co., of Port Glasgow, and was referred to by the newspapers of that time as “the largest vessel ever seen in Great Britain propelled by steam.” The James Watt, it will be seen, was rigged as a three-masted schooner, with the typical bow and square stern of the period. She was of 420 tons, and measured 141 feet 9 inches in length, 25½ feet wide, and 16½ feet deep. She had a paddle-wheel, 18 feet in diameter, on either side of the hull. These were driven by engines of the same horsepower as those of the City of Edinburgh, which had been made by Boulton and Watt. It was in this year also that the Lightning, a vessel of about 200 tons and 80 horse-power, gained further confidence for the newer type of vessel, for she was the first steamship ever used to carry mails.

Before the third decade of the nineteenth century was closed, a little vessel named the Falcon, of 176 tons, had made a voyage to India—of course, via the Cape—and the Enterprise, a somewhat larger craft of 470 tons, had also done the passage from England to Calcutta; but like the Savannah’s performance, these voyages were made partly under steam and partly under sail, so that these vessels may be regarded rather as auxiliary-engined than as steamships proper. At the same time, the Enterprise was singularly loyal to her name, for out of the 113 days which were taken on the voyage, she steamed for 103.

Let us now pause for a moment to witness some of the changes which were going on in regard to the machinery for steamships. In the engines which were installed in the Russian ship shown opposite page 84 we saw how the beam had become the side-lever, and why it had been placed in this position in the steamboat. This had become the customary type for steamships which were still propelled by paddle-wheels, and the perfected development had been due to Boulton and Watt, dating from about 1820. Until about 1860 this type was used most generally, until ocean-going steamers discarded the paddle-wheel for the screw. It is, therefore, essential that before proceeding farther we should get well-acquainted with it, and we shall find that following the lead which had been given them, especially by the famous Robert Napier, marine engineers began to build these types, as well for deep-sea ships as for river-going craft. The illustration here facing, which has been taken from a model in the South Kensington Museum, represents the regular side-lever type, the full-sized engines having been made by a Poplar firm in 1836 for the Ruby, which plied between London and Gravesend, a vessel of 170 tons, and the fastest Thames steamer of that time. On referring to our illustration, the side-lever will be immediately recognised in the fore-ground at the bottom. To the left of this are the two cylinders, side by side. The side-lever is seen to be pivoted at its centre, whilst at the reader’s left hand the end of this is joined by a connecting rod. Thus, as the piston-rod is moved upwards or downwards, so the left-hand half of the side-lever will move. At the opposite, right-hand, side of the latter the connecting rod will be observed to be attached to the side-lever, whilst the other end of the connecting rod drives the crank; the latter, in turn, driving the shaft on either end of which will be placed a paddle-wheel. In this engine before us there are two cranks, of which one is seen prominently at the very top of the picture. Each connecting rod is attached to two side-levers, one on either side of the cylinder, by means of a cross-head. Similarly at the piston-rod there is also a cross-head, with a connecting rod on either side, of which one only is visible. Later on a modified form of this type of engine was introduced in order to economise space, for one of the great drawbacks of the side-lever engine was that it took up an enormous amount of room, which could ill be spared from that to be devoted to the carrying of cargo or the accommodation of the passengers. In this modification the cylinders, instead of being placed side by side, or athwartships, were fore and aft, the one behind the other.

In 1831, there was built in Quebec, to run between there and Halifax, a steamer called the Royal William (not to be confused with a vessel of the same name to which we shall refer presently). The engines were made by Boulton and Watt, and dispatched across the Atlantic to Montreal, where they were installed. In 1833, after taking on board over three hundred tons of coal at Pictou, Nova Scotia, she started on her journey to the South of England, and arrived off Cowes, Isle of Wight, after seventeen days, having covered a distance of 2,500 miles. There is some doubt as to whether she steamed the whole way, or whether she used her sails for part of the time. At any rate, she measured 176 feet long, 43 feet 10 inches wide (including her paddle-boxes), and after calling at Portsmouth, proceeded to Gravesend, and was afterwards sold to the Spanish Government.

We now come to the year 1838, in which a handful of steamers made history, and showed how uncalled-for had been the ridicule which the pessimists had cast at the steamship. With this year we reach the turning-point of the steamship, and from that date we may trace all those wonderful achievements which are still being added to year by year. Hitherto no vessel had crossed the Atlantic under steam power solely. Because of the large amount of fuel consumption which was a necessary failing of the early steamships, in proportion to the amount of steam developed, it was denied that it would ever be financially possible for steamers to run across oceans as the sailing packets were doing, even if they were capable of carrying sufficient fuel together with their passengers and cargo. But deeds were more eloquent than the expounding of theories, and the first surprise was quickly followed by another, far from inferior. The first of these epoch-making steamers was the Sirius. She was rigged as a brig, like many of the contemporary sailing ships which then carried mails, passengers, and cargo between the Old World and the New, whose unsavoury characters had earned for them the nickname of “coffin-brigs.” This Sirius was a comparatively small ship of 703 tons, and quite small enough to cross the Atlantic in the weather which is to be found thereon. She measured only 178 feet along the keel, was 25½ feet wide, her hold was 18¼ feet deep, and her engines developed 320 horsepower. Built for the service between London and Cork, she was specially chartered for this transatlantic trip by the British Queen Steam Navigation Company, whose own vessel, the British Queen (shown opposite page 102), was not yet ready, owing to the fact that one of her contractors had gone bankrupt. With ninety-four passengers on board, the Sirius steamed away from London and called at Queenstown, where she coaled. After clearing from the Irish port, she encountered head winds, and it was only with difficulty that her commander, Lieut. R. Roberts, R.N., was able to quell a mutiny among the crew, who had made up their minds that to try and get across the North Atlantic in such a craft was pure folly. Having been seventeen days out, the Sirius arrived off New York on April 22nd, and before the end of her journey had not merely consumed all her coal, at a daily average of 24 tons, but had even to burn some of her spars, so that she had got across just by the skin of her teeth. But it was her engines which had got her there and not her sails; the former were of the side-lever type to which we have just referred.

The next day came in the Great Western, a much larger craft, that had come out of Bristol three days after the Sirius had started; and in her we see the prototype of those enormous liners which go backwards and forwards across the Atlantic to-day with a regularity that is remarkable. Unlike the little Sirius, the Great Western had been specially designed for the Atlantic by that engineering genius, Brunel, who, like his ships and his other works of wonder, was one of the most remarkable products of the last century. She was built with the intention of becoming practically an extension of the Great Western Railway across the Atlantic, and in order to be able to withstand the terrible battering of the seas, which she would have to encounter, she was specially strengthened. Here was a vessel of 1,321 tons (gross), with a length of 236 feet over all, with about half her space taken up with her boilers and engines. Now the strain of so much dead-weight in so long a ship whose beam was only 35 feet 4 inches, or about one-seventh of her length, had to be thought out and guarded against with the greatest care. And let us not forget that at this time vessels were still built of wood, and that, except in a few instances, iron had not yet been introduced. She was given strong oak ribs, placed close together, while iron was also used to some extent in fastening them. The advantage of making an ocean-going vessel long is that she is less likely to pitch in a sea, and will not dip twice in the same hollow; and if she is proportionately narrow in comparison with her length, she will also roll less than a more beamy craft. But the difficulty, so long as wood was employed, was to get sufficient longitudinal strength to endure the strains of so long a span. We shall be able to get some idea of this when we consider the behaviour of a vessel in a sea. Waves consist, so to speak, of mountains and valleys. If the waves are short and the vessel is long, then she may stretch right over some of them; but if the contrary is the condition, then, while her ’midship portion is supported by the water, her fore and aft ends are inclined to droop, so that in a very extreme case she would break in two. At any rate, the tendency is for the centre of the ship to bend upwards and the unsupported ends to droop. This is technically called “hogging.” In the reverse circumstance, when the ends are supported on the tops of two mountains of waves, whilst the centre of the ship spans, unsupported, the intervening valley, the tendency is to “sag.” Now this has to be allowed for in the construction of the ship, and, as already pointed out in my “Sailing Ships and Their Story,” this was understood as far back as the times of the Egyptians, who counteracted such strains as these by means of a longitudinal cable stretched tightly from one end of the ship to the other. But with the coming of steamships there was another problem to be taken into consideration. Engines, boilers, fresh water for the boilers, coal and so on are serious weights to be placed in one part of the ship. (In the case of the Great Western, the first three alone weighed 480 tons, although the gross tonnage of the whole ship was only 1,321.)

Throughout the length of the ship, then, she is subjected not merely to irregular strains by the peaks and valleys of the waves, but by the distribution of weights. Her structure has to undergo the severest possible stresses, and these are different when the ship is loaded and when she is “light.” If you divide a ship into sections transversely, as is actually done by the designer, you will find that some parts are less buoyant than others, no matter whether your ship is made of wood, iron, or steel. Those sections, for instance, which contain a steamer’s machinery will have much inferior buoyancy, and, indeed, were you to sever them from the ship and seal them up so as to be perfectly water-tight, they would in many cases sink. Therefore, this irregularity of buoyancy has to be met by making the more-buoyant sections help to support the less-buoyant. In actual shipbuilding practice it is customary to regard the greatest stress to a ship as occurring when she is poised on the crest of a wave, and it is usual to suppose, in order to safeguard her manner of construction, that she is poised upon the crest of a wave whose length from trough to trough is equal to the length of the ship, and the height of the wave from trough to crest to be one-twentieth of its length when 300 feet long and below, and one twenty-fifth when exceeding that length.

We have digressed a little from our immediate subject in order to put into the mind of the general reader some conception of the difficulties which Brunel had to encounter when he set to work to produce such a vessel as the Great Western. That she was built on sound lines is proved by the service which she rendered to her owners before she was finally broken up in 1847. On her first return voyage from New York she took fifteen days, and the Sirius seventeen. The Great Western had no such trouble with her “coal-endurance” on her maiden voyage as the Sirius had suffered, for she had reached New York with one quarter of her coals still unconsumed, and the obvious conclusion which came to any reasoning mind was that it certainly paid to build a vessel big enough to carry plenty of fuel. But the Great Western “paid” in more senses than this; and at the end of her first year, her directors were able to announce a dividend of 9 per cent. Thirty-five guineas was the fare in those days, and the largest number of passengers carried on any one of her journeys was 152.

Like her contemporaries, the Great Western was fitted with side-lever engines, built by Maudslay. Steam was generated from four boilers, and conducted into two cylinders, her daily consumption of coal being about 33 tons. A model of one of her paddle-wheels, which were 28 feet 9 inches in diameter, is here illustrated. This type is known as the “cycloidal” wheel, in which each float, instead of being made of one solid piece of material, is composed of several horizontal widths arranged after the manner of steps in a cycloidal curve, as will be seen by looking at the right-hand of the wheel. It will be noticed that through the space left between each “step” the water could penetrate when the wheel was in the sea, but when revolving out of it, the resistance to the air was diminished because the latter was allowed to get through. As the paddle came in contact with the sea, the concussion was lessened, and thus there was not so much strain on the engines. The Great Western employed the type introduced by Joshua Field in 1833, but this form was brought in again by Elijah Galloway two years later.

So far we have seen steamers running from London and from Bristol to New York. Now we shall see the first steam-vessel crossing from Liverpool to New York. Facing page 96 is the other Royal William, which was built in 1838 for the Irish passenger trade between Liverpool and Kingstown, and owned by the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, by whose courtesy this picture is now reproduced. The Royal William was 3 feet shorter than the Sirius, but 2 feet wider, and with a hold just 6 inches shallower. In July of that same memorable year, the Royal William made her maiden trip from Liverpool to New York, having been built and engined at the former port. In was no doubt a great temptation to emulate what the Sirius had been the first to perform, especially as the two ships were so similar in many respects. Outward bound, the Royal William did the trip in about the same time as the Sirius, though her return journey occupied about a day and a half less than that of the other vessel. But these vessels were not big enough, nor seaworthy enough, for the toil of the Atlantic, and both were soon taken off from this route. The illustration reproduced is from an engraving after a sketch made of the Royal William, as seen in the Atlantic on July 14th, 1838, when in latitude 47.30 N., longitude 30.0 W., on her first voyage to New York, and the landsman in looking at the waves which the artist has depicted may find some assistance in reading our previous remarks on “hogging” and “sagging” in this connection.

Finally, we come to the British Queen, which was yet another vessel to steam across the broad Atlantic, and to show once more that it was neither good fortune nor the powers of any single vessel that had conquered the ocean, but the building of the right kind of ship, engined with suitable machinery. Built in London, and installed with engines by Robert Napier (by the courtesy of whose kinsman, Mr. James Napier, the illustration is here given), the British Queen was considered a wonder in her day, and even exceeded the dimensions of the famous Great Western, costing as much as £60,000 to build. As will be seen, she is neither brig- nor ship-rigged, but is a barque. In spite of the hideous old stern of those times and the old-fashioned square ports, and the medieval custom of stowing one of her anchors abreast of the fore-mast—a practice which survived until well into the nineteenth century—her appearance shows that she was an advance on what had gone before. She had about seven beams to her length, and her bow gives evidence that the old Dutch influence was at last being forsaken: it is, in fact, the transition stage before the clippers modified it still more. The same long space which we noted in an earlier ship, extending between the fore- and main-mast to afford room for the engines, will here be recognised, and the paddle-wheels, unlike those of the early river craft, are placed about amidships. In designing her with about 40 feet greater length than the Great Western had possessed, the aim was no doubt to attain not merely sufficient space for passengers, cargo, engines and ample fuel, but also to be able to wrestle with the long Atlantic waves, whose average length has been computed at about 200 feet. Seventy years ago this British Queen was designed to be 275 feet over all; to-day, the Lusitania is 760 feet thus measured, and it is this appreciation of the value of length which has a good deal to do with the evolution of the modern liner from being a moderate-sized vessel to one of enormous proportions. In her first voyage from Portsmouth to New York, the British Queen kept up an average speed for one day of over ten knots, whereas the Great Western had on her maiden voyage outward-bound averaged about two knots less. Leaving Portsmouth on April 2nd, 1839, the British Queen arrived in New York on April 16th, or three days quicker than the first Royal William had done the journey in the opposite direction under sail and steam. The British Queen consumed about 613 tons of coal on the way.

Thus we have seen the steamship arrive at a stage very far from being merely experimental. We have watched her gradually grow from her infancy, when she was good only as a tug or river craft, until now she has shown in the enthusiasm of her youth that she can stride across the Atlantic. It will be our duty in the following chapter to indicate how she came to be treated with entire confidence, and to take her part in the regular routine of the world’s work.