Earliest steamships to cross the Atlantic

The Great Britain, launched in England in 1844 for the Great Western Lines, represents a landmark in the history of the ship, for she was the first iron-hulled, double-bottomed, screw-propelled Atlantic liner. As everyone knows, the wooden-hulled paddle-wheeler, the Clermont, which steamed up the Hudson River on Aug. 17, 1807, was the first steamship to engage in commercially successful operations. The wooden, paddle-wheel steamboat, ideal for navigation on rivers and protected waters of sounds and bays, had been an American invention; the oceangoing steamship was born in the tempestuous seas around the British Isles.

After several experimental voyages, effective steamship service was begun between Europe and North America in 1838, the year in which the Great Western (1,340 gross tons) and the British Queen (1,862 tons) were launched. The British soon added subsidized lines to carry the mails, including Cunard, the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. During the 1850's, an American, E. K. Collins, also offered transatlantic service with his steamships, the Arctic, Atlantic, Baltic, and Pacific.

Although good shipbuilding timber had been in short supply in the British Isles for generations, the iron hull made rather slow progress. The admiralty was ready to accept steam (the Royal Navy had acquired three steamships, the Comet, the Meteor, and the Lightning, between 1820 and 1823), but regarded iron-hulled ships with skepticism, because officials considered them more vulnerable to solid shot than wooden vessels. This stand of the admiralty limited experimentation with iron ships to nonsubsidized operators, or at least to nonsubsidized operations, for the Peninsula and Oriental urged the use of iron for ship construction as early as the 1840's. The leaders, however, were such free operators as the Great Western Railway Lines. Iron gained over wood rapidly after 1846, when the Great Britain was stranded off the coast of Ireland and remained on the beach all winter with little damage. Furthermore, the screw propeller had been invented. It was recognized as much more suitable for the rough-and-tumble workaday trade of oceangoing traffic than the cumbersome yet delicate paddle wheels, but its vibrations made wooden hulls leak. In 1854, Lloyd's organized a special committee to draw up rules for the classification of iron ships, both sailers and steamships.

The screw propeller was soon followed by the compound engine, with a great saving of fuel. Next came the surface condenser, which made it unnecessary to carry large quantities of fresh water for the boilers. These changes increased the cruising range of ships, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say their carrying capacity. To save on the coal for bunkers, all early steamships carried auxiliary sails, a practice that was continued up to the 1880's. One of the earliest steamships to cross the Atlantic was the Sirius, which loaded 95 passengers and 450 tons of coal at Cork in 1848 and arrived in New York eighteen and a half days later, after having scraped the coalbins and supplemented her coal bunkers with the ship's fittings and furniture. By the 1870's, the British were producing iron steamships of 2,000 gross tons, capable of 7 knots and requiring 40 tons of coal per day.

By the 1860's, the iron steamship had come into its own, and though British shipyards were turning them out as fast as possible, they could not keep up with the demand. By then, approximately 30 percent of the British ships were iron, and 50 percent of those being constructed were iron, many of them iron sailers. This was due in part to limitations of manpower, for a man who had sailed before the mast was not necessarily equipped to serve as a crewman on a steamship, and the navy, by then building only iron steamships, had first call on the services of trained personnel. To meet the demand for vessel tonnage to carry an everexpanding overseas commerce, British shipyards turned out thousands of iron sailers. The first of these was the bark Ironsides, launched in 1838 for trade with Brazil, and the last big year was 1892. British steamships were naturally used on the busiest routes such as the North Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, and to South America, while the iron sailers were used in the Australian wool trade, the grain trade, and so forth. As soon as British yards could furnish replacements, the iron sailing ships were sold abroad -- to Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and others then building up their merchant marines.

Prior to 1880, very little steel was used in vessel construction because of the cost. In fact, after the Bessemer process for producing steel plate was perfected, Germany led with the steel ship for a time, but by the 1890's, Britain had turned from iron to steel. At the beginning of that decade, the world's merchant fleet was composed as follows: iron, 10 million gross tons; wood, 7 million tons; and steel, 4 million tons.

The decline of the American merchant marine is contemporary with the development of the steamship. From the vantage point of the 1950's, it is apparent that American shipowners, the American public, and the government had little understanding of the revolutionary changes taking place in the shipping industry. Although the Federal government had subsidized steamships to the extent of 14 million dollars by 1858 only ships that had been making money were the nonsubsidized transatlantic sailing packets and the California clippers. Present profits blinded shipping men to future prospects and to warnings that they might have heeded. On Mar. 31, 1860, they could have read in the Scientific American:

Three years ago we directed attention to the great increase of foreign screw steamers, and showed clearly how they were rapidly taking away the trade that has been formerly carried by American ships.... To-day nearly all the mail and passenger, besides a great deal of the goods, traffic, is carried by foreign ships, the great majority of which are iron screw steamers.... We have not a single new Atlantic steamship on the stocks, while in Great Britain, there are 16,000 tons of new iron steamers building for the American trade.

From about 1800 to 1840, the United States, a new nation, had been able to challenge Britain's commercial supremacy. (An American steamship, the Savannah, which sailed from Savannah, Georgia, on May 22,1819, was the first ship to use steam in an Atlantic crossing.) As Morison points out, England won it back "in fair competition by the skill of her engineers and the sturdy courage of her shipbuilders. Civil war turned the Yankee mind to other objects; the World War revived the ancient challenge."