American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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"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:

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