Читать книгу The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships - Stephen Fox, Stephen Fox - Страница 12

Samuel Cunard had a plan. He characteristically discussed it with nobody outside his family. Only his son Ned, now twenty-three years old and an active partner in the Cunard enterprises, knew what his father was up to. During his annual trips to England, Sam had observed the first efforts at transatlantic steam. Taking their measure, he thought he could do better. In January 1839 he boarded a sailing packet to England and embarked on his greatest gamble. As an outsider, he felt no hobbling allegiance to Bristol or London or Glasgow. Well connected to some British power brokers, yet with no loyalties or commitments to any steam builders, Cunard moved around quietly, asking questions and making judgments. ‘Altho I am a colonist,’ he later explained, ‘I have many friends in this country.’ The silent colonial attracted little attention; the real transatlantic action seemed to rest in other, more famous hands. Stealthy and independent, he found the right men for his ships and cut the deal of his life. Cunard got his boats built and running – and stole the game away from its earlier players. ‘The plan was entirely my own,’ he said later, ‘and the public have had the advantage of it.’

Cunard went to England early in 1839 because the British government had declared its intention to subsidize steam navigation between England and America, not to carry passengers or cargo (except incidentally) but mainly to transport the mail, that most essential tool of commerce and empire. The Great Western, by her five routine round-trip voyages in 1838, had shown the possibilities of regular transatlantic steam. Her performance highlighted the many inadequacies of the British Admiralty’s sail-powered mail boats, the ten-gun brigs that ran monthly and unpredictably between Falmouth and North America. In November 1838, rushing to catch up, the Admiralty invited hasty bids from British contractors to provide a monthly steamer mail service between England and Halifax, stipulating ships of at least 300 horsepower. The bids were due in only a month, and the service was to start by April – a schedule so tight that it restricted the field to existing vessels already built for other purposes.

At the time, the Great Western Steam Ship Company maintained a virtual monopoly on transatlantic steam. It had far outclassed the few competing ships, and Junius Smith’s overdue British Queen would not finally be ready until the following summer. Holding all the cards, the Bristol company proceeded to overplay its hand with the government. On 13 December, two days before the deadline, Christopher Claxton wrote to Charles Wood of the Admiralty that his company was interested but needed much more time. The last voyage of the Great Western, with a slow winter passage of nineteen days to New York, had shown (said Claxton) the need for specially constructed mail ships of 1200 tons and 450 horsepower, slightly smaller but more powerful than the Great Western. Claxton offered to build three such ships within eighteen to twenty-four months, and then to carry the mail once a month in each direction, for £45,000 annually under a seven-year contract.

The government wanted action in four months, not two years. The Great Western company ignored that urgency and rewrote the terms of the tender: in effect, instructing the Admiralty about the realities of steam on the North Atlantic. The company’s correcting tone may have annoyed the Admiralty (which believed it had some knowledge of steamships and oceans), and it compounded an earlier, related offence by Thomas Guppy. In the autumn of 1837, at a scientific meeting in Liverpool, Guppy – a founder and director of the Great Western company – had sharply criticized the Royal Navy’s steamship designs. ‘Many of the government vessels are of very bad forms; their power and size greatly disproportioned, ’ Guppy declared. ‘Whoever had seen the fine private steamers belonging to the ports of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol, and had then gone to view the government ones in Woolwich basin, must have been astonished at the extraordinary forms there collected; it would be well if a glass case could be constructed over the basin, to procure those curiosities of practical science, as exercised in our naval building yards.’ (The audience laughed at this sally.) Guppy did not just doubt the government ships; he mocked and made jokes of them. His remarks were published in the Nautical Magazine of London, which was carefully read at the Admiralty. And now his company had doubled the insult by turning the government’s urgent mail tender inside out. The Admiralty, no surprise, rejected the Great Western proposal on 10 January.

On that same day, across the ocean, the Halifax Novascotian printed its first announcement of the original Admiralty tender. (This delay of two months itself argued for adding steam power to the Atlantic mail.) In its headlong rush towards steam, the Admiralty was not allowing enough time for any proposals from the colonies. Sam Cunard nonetheless caught the next sailing packet from Halifax to England, unaware of recent developments. He did not yet know about the Great Western offer, its rejection by the government, or the expired deadline for other bids. He had only his own secret plan.

It was not, as it happened, the best time for Cunard to embark on a grand, risky new venture. The British economic crash of 1837 was still lingering over the country, tightening money markets, headed towards a major industrial depression. Cunard was himself overextended at home. George Renny Young, an influential lawyer and politician in Halifax, had drawn Cunard into a grandiose scheme to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres on Prince Edward Island. It brought him a touchy alliance with the Young family, leaders among the local oligarchs. (Agnes Renny Young, the family matriarch, warned her son George about Cunard’s ‘immense’ power: ‘People fear him so much that they keep quiet and submit. He never was friendly to our family and will give you a blow where he can.’) Sam took a one-third interest in the land company and soon fought with George Young over the appointment of a company attorney. Young wanted his brother Charles, and Sam favoured his son-in-law James Horsfield Peters, who had married his eldest daughter, Mary. Family loyalties, always a tugging allegiance for Cunard, quickly poisoned the venture. ‘You seem afraid that I intend making a family party of this,’ Cunard wrote to Young in August 1838. ‘I trust I am sufficiently well known in this community to be believed when I assert that I had no intention of taking advantage.…I must now decline any further correspondence on the subject.’ After Cunard pulled rank, James Peters got the job as attorney, but Young nursed the grievance. The quarrel was only resolved when Cunard bought out Young’s shares in the spring of 1839. That left Sam, at this crucial moment, heavily mortgaged and cash-poor for investing in any major new enterprise. (Young and his family became enemies with long memories and later found a damaging chance to strike back at the Cunards.)

What, then, was nonetheless drawing Cunard towards transatlantic steam? Fifty-one years old, still in his prime, he remained as active and ambitious as ever. After his long career in ships and shipping, and (since the Royal William) in steam vessels as well, he had in some ways outgrown Halifax and craved a larger arena. An Atlantic steamship line was a logical extension of his lifework. He knew from weary experience the limitations of the British government’s mail packets; he had been enduring their slow, precarious service for almost two decades. (On a trip to England in 1831, Cunard had fallen on a packet’s deck and broken his arm.) To compete with the fast New York packet lines, the government brigs had been redesigned for more speed. But that made the ships less stable and too prone to foundering at sea. ‘Almost every year, two hundred or three hundred people were lost in the mail packets, and at last they got the designation of “coffins”,’ Cunard said later. ‘I came home in those ships very frequently, and of course felt the danger and discomfort of coming in them, and I have lost a very great many friends in them.’ In January 1839, even as Cunard was crossing to England, that month’s westbound Falmouth packet sailed away and just disappeared. ‘I lost five or six intimate friends,’ Cunard recalled of that vanished ship. ‘They were never heard of.’ This latest packet disaster invested his mission with an immediate, sharper edge and made its own human case for adding steam’s protecting power to the ocean mail.

Along with these personal motives, in a larger sense Cunard was acting from patriotic or nationalist incentives. Given his American parentage and his years of business dealings down the coast of New England to New York, he had strong ties to some Yankee ports and individuals. Yet his family had, after all, been forced into unwanted exile by the American victors in the Revolution. He typically regarded his American commercial associates with a goading mixture of fear and respect; over his entire career, nothing else so motivated him as competing with Americans and striking back at them. The New York packet lines, faster and more reliable, had taken most of the transatlantic mail away from the Admiralty’s ships. At a time of strained relations between the two countries, British mail depended largely on American vessels: a galling vulnerability that in part explained the Admiralty’s sudden sprint towards steam. As a Canadian, British subject, and descendant of American Loyalists, Cunard inevitably savoured the prospect of taking the mail back from the aggressive Yankees.

Arrived in London, he took lodgings at a Piccadilly hotel and worked from a desk at the General Mining Association’s office in nearby Ludgate Hill. His GMA connections, his two decades of carrying the mail between Boston, Halifax and St John’s, Newfoundland, and his thriving agency for the East India Company’s tea trade in eastern Canada all eased his way through Whitehall and financial offices in the City. He also carried a useful letter of introduction from Sir Colin Campbell, the royally appointed lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. ‘I have always found him one of the firmest supporters of the measures of the Government,’ Campbell had written, ‘and his being one of the principal Bankers and Merchants and Agent of the General Mining Association, and also Commissioner of Light Houses, gives him a great deal of influence in this community.’

Cunard’s plan was simple and audacious: instead of a monthly mail service, he intended to run enough ships to maintain a weekly service across the ocean and thus cut more deeply, directly into the frequent sailings of the New York packets. He had taken the Admiralty’s tender and quadrupled it. Within days of his arrival in London, he was meeting with Charles Wood at the Admiralty and Francis T. Baring at the Treasury. ‘I submitted that by going once a week the whole of the letters would be taken by our steamers, and the American packet ships that had previously carried the letters would cease to carry them,’ Cunard explained later. Wood and Baring ‘entertained my plan; and they took a great deal of pains…spent many hours at different times in going through the calculations and routes with me.’ The three parties eventually split the difference between Cunard’s plan and the Admiralty tender by settling on a mail service to run twice a month at the outset.

Cunard’s formal proposal on 11 February committed to paper what they had already thrashed out in conversation. ‘I hereby offer to furnish Steam Boats of not less than three hundred Horse power,’ he wrote, ‘to convey the mails from a port in England to Halifax and back twice in each month.’ In addition, he would provide steamboats of half that power for carrying the mail between Halifax and Boston, connecting his service to the United States but saving the extra two hundred miles to continue to New York. ‘Should any improvements in Steam Navigation be made,’ he added, with a nod to the onrushing pace of technical progress, ‘…which the Lords of the Admiralty may consider as essential to the Service, I do bind myself to make such alterations and improvements as their Lords may direct.’ For these forty-eight annual transatlantic voyages he asked £55,000 a year. (The Great Western company had wanted £45,000 for twenty-four trips.) The Admiralty and Treasury moved quickly. Within two weeks of the formal proposal, long before any public announcement, word was passing around London’s political and financial circles that Samuel Cunard of Halifax had the contract.

Not quite; Cunard had skipped the thorny guesswork, which had so undone Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird, of predicting how soon his vessels would be built and available. To strengthen his case with the government, Cunard needed signed contracts for constructing his ships and engines. Still very much on his own, he appraised the feuding centres of British marine engineering. Because the Great Western company was already operating out of Bristol, and Smith and Laird out of London and Liverpool, Cunard’s search naturally drifted north to Glasgow. James C. Melvill, secretary to the East India Company, recommended the Glaswegians Robert Napier and John Wood, who had recently built the swift steamship Berenice for his company’s trade with India. In late February, two weeks after his successful proposal to the Admiralty, Cunard asked an intermediary in Glasgow to see what Napier and Wood would charge for one or two steamships of 800 tons and 300 horsepower, to be built and ready for sea in only twelve months. ‘I shall want these vessels to be of the very best description,’ he emphasized, ‘and to pass a thorough inspection and examination of the Admiralty. I want a plain and comfortable boat, but not the least unnecessary expense for show. I prefer plain work in the cabin, and it saves a large amount in the cost.’ Napier was at once quite interested, so Cunard went up to Glasgow to see him.

It is no hyperbole to say that their meeting in early March 1839 set the course of the Cunard Line for at least its first quarter-century. Napier had just finished his enormous engine for the British Queen, after embarrassing delays and relentless criticism from engineers on the Thames. He therefore welcomed another shot at building an Atlantic steamship engine. Cunard, still so unknown to most British commercial circles, needed Napier’s technical expertise and his reputation along the Clyde for shrewd business dealings. The two men were about the same age – Napier was four years younger – and of similar personalities: terse, contained, not given to public displays or extravagant statements, immersed in work, and sheltered by their families to unusual degrees. Each could recognize and (mostly) trust the other. Napier even brought Cunard home to meet his wife and children. Entrepreneur and engineer, the two formed a variation on those symbiotic partnerships that had driven the Industrial Revolution: a kind of Boulton and Watt for ocean steamships.

In Glasgow, Napier took Cunard to see his famous Vulcan Foundry and its redoubtable works manager, David Elder. The foundry sprawled across a large quadrangle on Washington Street, near the river. A sign at the gate advised, ‘No admittance except on business’, and the din and pace of work inside showed that Napier and Elder meant it. Operations were broken down into four specialized areas. In the casting house, furnaces melted raw metal to be poured into sand moulds in a pit. Some of the castings were quite large, up to a twenty-four-ton bedplate for a marine engine. This sector was relatively quiet, unlike the open area where boilers and funnels were pounded together. The steady, arhythmic jangling of hammers on rivets, iron meeting iron, pealed forth the raggedy music of the Industrial Age. It took 10,000 rivets to make an average boiler, each driven home by repeated metallic blows, all day long. The smithery joined the heat of the casting house to the hammered cacophony of the boilermakers: sweaty, muscular blacksmiths toiling over their anvils and forge fires, turning rough metal into finer pieces, with a small steam engine puffing away to force air into the forge fires. The engineering shops, the largest department, held various specialized lathes and boring and planing machines, all driven by steam-powered beltings overhead, to shape and finish to exact tolerances the cylinders, pistons, wheels, and smaller parts of a steam engine. Seven hundred men worked long days at the Vulcan, six days a week. When the noise stopped at closing time, the silence itself was deafening. Sam Cunard could only have been impressed.

As Napier and Cunard got down to the details, the size of the ships kept increasing, a process that would continue through months of revised contracts. They at first agreed on three ships, 200 feet long and 960 tons, of 375 horsepower, to cost £32,000 each. (A ship this size was still only half the tonnage of the British Queen.) Napier would build the engines, and his shipbuilding associate John Wood would provide the vessels, all by the spring of 1840. ‘He appears from the little I have seen of him to be a straight-forward business man,’ Napier noted of Cunard. ‘From the frank off-hand manner in which he contracted with me, I have given him the vessels cheap, and I am certain they will be good and very strong ships.’

Cunard returned to London, brought his first Napier contract over to the Admiralty and Treasury, and found them ‘highly pleased’. Reporting this news to Napier, Cunard invoked the regional engineering rivalries, then raging, to warn and inspire Napier to his best efforts and punctuality. ‘You have no idea of the prejudice of some of our English Builders,’ Cunard wrote, guileless in his guile. ‘I have had several offers from Liverpool and this place and when I have replied that I have contracted in Scotland they invariably say “You will neither have substantial work or completed in time.” The Admiralty agree with me in opinion the Boats will be as good as if built in this Country and I have assured them that you will keep to time.’ (An oblique reference to the British Queen and her delays.) Someone else had told him that Thames engines would use less coal per horsepower, but Cunard assured the man he was mistaken and pointedly reported the exchange to Napier: ‘The Admiralty cautioned me on this head therefore take good care that you bear me out in my assertions. ’ Cunard also pressed Napier and Wood to start building his ships (‘How is Mr Wood progressing – tell him I will be down upon him some of these mornings when he may not expect me’).

‘I am sorry that some of the British tradesmen should indulge in speaking ill of their competitors in Scotland,’ replied Napier, not surprised. ‘I shall not say more than court comparison of my work with any other in the kingdom.’ The two men, so new to each other, were still forming crucial first impressions by poking around and testing the other, gradually settling into what became the most important working relationship of their lives. Cunard sent along reports of the latest patented steam innovations; Napier, playing his expected engineering role, passed sceptical judgments and reassured the entrepreneur. ‘I was quite prepared for your being beset with all the schemers of every description in the country,’ he advised Cunard. ‘Every solid and known improvement that I am made acquainted with shall be adopted by me, but no patent plans.’

For his part, Cunard was having serious money problems. He still had no signed contract with the government. The first Napier deal was just with Cunard: he alone had to come up with a binder of £5000 and the first instalment of £5000 more. At the same time, precisely the wrong time, his falling out with George Renny Young forced him to find about £14,000 to complete his purchase of the Young family’s interest in the Prince Edward Island land company. Juggling the two enterprises, Cunard was caught without enough cash in England. When Napier took his first note from Cunard to the bank, it was accepted only after a suspicious delay and objections. Napier was surprised and dismayed. ‘The truth is,’ Napier warned Cunard, ‘had I not been completely satisfied beforehand from other trustworthy sources of your undoubted respectability and highly honourable character, my confidence in you would have been shaken.’

If this early crisis had turned a certain way, it could have killed the whole enterprise at the outset. Instead it turned another way and gave the scheme a wider, more secure base, transformed it, and set up the leadership structure that would run the Cunard Line for decades. Napier, now less sure of his new partner, felt obliged to protect his own local reputation for sound dealings. Stepping back, he went around Cunard and confided in Robert Rodger, the Glasgow banker who had doubted Cunard’s credit. ‘I have no wish to put you to the least trouble or inconvenience on my account,’ he assured Rodger. ‘The transaction with Mr Cunard is of such a magnitude that I must not have the least risk of trouble or anxiety about the money part of it.’ The two Glaswegians, acting in their respective self-interests, came up with a protective local solution. They invited other investors into the scheme to provide the cash cushion that was manifestly beyond Cunard’s overstretched resources.

As part of this manoeuvre, they also brought in local experts at running a steamship line, George Burns and the brothers David and Charles Mac Iver. Former rivals, for almost a decade these three men had together been operating profitable coastal steam packets between Glasgow and Liverpool. If Burns and the Mac Ivers were involved, Napier urged Cunard, ‘the vessels would be well and honestly managed, and save much trouble to all concerned and make money.’ Furthermore, though contrary to his usual practice, given their participation Napier might himself take ‘a small interest’ in the venture: a rippling expression of confidence sure to lure other investors in Glasgow. ‘I have several offers but am bound to no one,’ Cunard replied to Napier. ‘I should much like to have you and your friends with me.’ Within a few days, Napier and Burns found their partners (mainly interested businessmen in Glasgow), thus delivering the venture from the uncertainties of Cunard’s own money and – most significantly – binding its future to the Clyde. ‘I want to shew the Americans what can be done in Glasgow,’ Cunard reminded Napier, turning several screws, ‘and that neither Bristol or London boats can beat them.’

From that point, the pieces all fell into place quickly. In June 1839 Cunard, Burns and David Mac Iver signed the final revised contract with the Admiralty for the mail service. It called for four steamships of 400 horsepower, 206 feet long, and 1120 tons, sailing twice each month between Liverpool and Halifax, and then Halifax and Boston, for the government’s payment of £60,000 a year for seven years. (The designation of Liverpool, headquarters of the Mac Ivers’ coastal packets, reflected the transatlantic enterprise’s new ownership structure.) The first ships were to be ready for sea by May 1840. Napier would build the engines, and to meet the soon-looming deadline the ships’ construction was parcelled out to four different Clyde shipbuilders. (‘I dare say I get a good deal of credit for it, but I am not entitled to it,’ Cunard later said of his first steamships. ‘Any credit that there may be in fixing upon the vessels of proper size and proper power is entirely due to Mr. Napier, for I have not the science myself; he gave me the dimensions.’)

In the final partnership agreement, Cunard took the largest portion at £55,000. James Donaldson, the leading cotton broker in Glasgow, took the next biggest piece at £16,000, followed by eight others at £11,600. Napier threw in £6100, Burns £5500, and the Mac Ivers £4000 each. In all, thirty-three investors from Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester provided a total working capital of £270,000. Napier had brokered the whole deal and henceforth was deeply involved, in effect working for himself as both the engine builder and a part owner. Cunard remained the central figure, the founder and ultimate boss. ‘I had the whole interest for some time in the original contract,’ he later explained. ‘But circumstances turned up which made it necessary that I should part with some portion, and I did; but I have still the management.’ The official name was the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. From the start, it was known more simply as Cunard’s line or the Cunard Line.

The first four ships of the line were, as Cunard had directed, plain and comfortable, with no unnecessary expense for show. The keels were laid almost simultaneously within a small circle of shipbuilders along the Clyde. John Wood crafted and built the Acadia, the pattern for the others. His brother Charles Wood built the Caledonia; Robert Steele, the Columbia; and Robert Duncan, the Britannia. (The names of the ships made careful, portioned reference to Nova Scotia, Scotland, the United States and Great Britain, the four places that had launched and would then sustain the Cunard Line.) The ships had essentially identical dimensions, varying only in slight particulars: 207 feet long, 34 feet wide, and about 1150 tons. John Wood was well known for the grace and comely proportions of his wooden hulls. ‘Remarkable for the great refinement of his taste,’ the naval architect John Scott Russell, a noted contemporary, later said of Wood. ‘He was a consummate artist in shipbuilding, and every line was as studied and beautiful as fine art could make it.’ The Cunard ships were austere beauties, sleek and black, with just a few ornamental touches of gold and red in the paddle boxes and smokestack.

As expressions of steamship technology, they started a durable Cunard tradition of summarizing recent progress in the field and adding only small, careful improvements: advancing the art but not by any risky grand leaps. They embodied the habitual technological caution – ships as enterprise, not as engineering – of their two main creators. Sam Cunard had crossed on both the Great Western and British Queen, and Robert Napier knew the latter ship well from providing her engine. Traces of these transatlantic predecessors showed up in the Cunard vessels. They were lavishly trussed and bolted, like the Great Western, with (for example) ‘two strong bilge-pieces in the engine room’, as Napier’s contract with Cunard made explicit, ‘similar to what is in the “British Queen” steam ship and well bolted.’ To avoid the Great Western’s initial difficulties over retrieving coal from distant holds at the bow and stern, the Cunard ships carried their fuel in midship compartments lining the sides of the vessels, from which the coal simply descended by gravity to trapdoors near the furnaces. Ambient heat from the Great Western’s boilers had made nearby areas feel and smell uncomfortably cooked; so the Cunard ships included a thick, coarse woollen cloth underneath the cabin floors and on bulkheads around the engine rooms ‘secured by beams and knees’, the contract specified, ‘so arranged that a space can be left for air courses to ventilate and carry off the heated air and gases.’ The cycloidal Great Western paddle wheels devised by Joshua Field had not worked well; Napier gave the Cunard ships conventional paddles.

Designed to carry mail, not cargo, they were smaller than the Great Western and British Queen— but a bit faster, with slightly higher ratios of horsepower to tonnage. Napier’s newest engines squeezed more power from less fuel by almost doubling the Great Western’s boiler steam pressure, from five to nine pounds per square inch, which helped reduce average coal consumption from forty-four to thirty-eight tons a day. Within a year of the Britannia’s maiden voyage to Boston in July 1840, the Cunard ships had beaten the Great Western’s Atlantic records in both directions, achieving peak average speeds of almost ten knots out and eleven knots home, and cutting the best eastbound passage to just under ten days. Over the first two years, as a fleet they averaged thirteen days, six hours to Halifax and eleven days, five hours to Liverpool. The overmatched Great Western company, competing on its own with just one steamship against four newer, faster vessels backed by the authority and prestige of the government’s mail contract, began to lose passengers and profits to the Cunard Line.

Charles Dickens, impressed by what he had heard, took the Britannia to Boston in January 1842. His description of the voyage, soon published in his travel book American Notes, became the most famous – indeed notorious – account of a nineteenth-century transatlantic steamship trip. Dickens, about to turn thirty, had already achieved great success with the Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other novels. He went to tour America as a literary celebrity and was expecting an ocean passage that conformed with his status. At the Cunard agent’s office in London he had seen imaginatively embellished lithographs of the Britannia’s interiors. When he boarded ship, the actual accommodations caused his first disappointment. The main saloon, the grandest room on the ship, turned out to be ‘a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands’. The overhead racks for glassware ‘hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather’. Grimmer surprises awaited Dickens below. The ‘state-room’ specially reserved for Dickens and his wife was, alas, an ‘utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box’. It inspired another funereal reference: the bunk beds by their narrow dimensions and thin mattresses reminded Dickens of coffins, a most unfortunate association at the start of a long ocean voyage.

Once under way, he retreated during daylight hours to the ladies’ cabin, less noisy and smelly than the main saloon. The stewardess dispensed many tactful services and told ‘piously fraudulent’ stories of previous winter passages, always calm and pleasant. Everybody worried about the stability of their stomachs; at dinner, Dickens noticed the most coveted seats were those closest to the door. Afterwards he stayed out on deck till midnight, afraid to go below. Despite his frettings, he looked around and sensed the powerful mysteries of an oceangoing ship at night: ‘The gloom through which the great black mass holds its direct and certain course; the rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; the broad, white, glistening track that follows in the vessel’s wake; the men on the look-out forward, who would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars…the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain.’

Finally, too cold to avoid it any longer, Dickens took to his dubious berth. With hatches and portholes closed down for the night, he could fully savour ‘that extraordinary compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold’. All the woodwork creaked. The stateroom rose and fell with the waves. The night eventually passed. For the next two days, through fair winds and good weather, Dickens mostly stayed in bed, ate hard biscuits, and drank cold brandy and water in a resolute, hopeless effort to avoid sliding over from mere seagoing discomfort into full-blown seasickness.

Teetering on this agonizing edge – nauseous or not? – Dickens fell over hard when the third morning brought a winter gale worthy of the North Atlantic. He awoke to his wife’s screams. Objects were floating on the seawater that now covered the stateroom floor. The room pitched and tossed, seemingly standing on its head. ‘Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say “Thank Heaven!” she wrongs again.’ The ship ran on like a creature with broken knees, as it leaped and dived and somersaulted in jarring sequences and combinations. Dickens hailed a passing steward and asked what was the matter. ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir,’ came the reply, understated and unperturbed, ‘and a head wind.’ It continued for four days and nights of relentless motion and noise: wind, sea and rain, howling in concert; the heavy footfalls of sailors rushing about and shouting hoarsely to each other; high waves pounding over the gunwales and gurgling out through the scuppers, after landing on the wooden deck with the deep, ponderous sound of thunder heard within a confined space; blank, endless nights as the ship rolled to one side, dipping her masts, and then to the other side, and even seemed to stop dead in the water, staggering as though stunned, before ploughing onward. ‘All is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree… Only a dream can call it up again in all its fury, rage, and passion.’

The storm blew out, but the weather remained dark and cold. Settling into a determined daily routine, Dickens and his party would gather in the ladies’ cabin shortly before noon. Captain Hewitt, recently transferred to the Britannia and always in good humour, would drop by and predict better weather. (‘The weather is always going to improve tomorrow, at sea.’) At one o’clock a bell rang and the stewardess brought baked potatoes, roasted apples, and plates of cold ham, pig’s face, and salted beef. At last free of seasickness, and seeking any possible diversion, they ate with hearty appetites and dawdled over the task as long as they could. They read, dozed, and chatted away the afternoon, passing around and chewing over the few available wisps of shipboard gossip: one passenger has lost heavily at gambling, fourteen pounds in fact, and drinks a bottle of champagne a day though he is only a clerk; the head engineer has never seen such awful weather; the cook was found drunk and severely punished; all the stewards have fallen downstairs, and some are sorely injured; the cabins are all leaking. The dinner bell rang at five, announcing more potatoes (boiled this time), various meats (perhaps roast pig if one of the ship’s swine had been butchered), flowing wine and brandy, and rather mouldy apples, grapes and oranges for dessert. Then a game of whist, with the tricks placed securely in pockets instead of on the ever-agitated table, and an insistently cheerful good night from the captain.

Approaching Halifax on the fifteenth night, with a bright moon and calm sea, the local pilot – who was supposed to know the harbour so well – managed to run the Britannia aground on a mud bank. Everybody rushed up on deck. The engine, ‘which had been clanking and blasting in our ears incessantly for so many days,’ stopped suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving a dead stillness. Some of the sailors took off their shoes and jackets and made ready to jump overboard and swim ashore. (This did not inspire confidence among the passengers.) Distress rockets were fired into the night sky, to no point. In the general confusion and near-panic, Captain Hewitt remained calm and in command. The next high tide floated them free. After briefly stopping in Halifax, the Britannia took Dickens on to Boston. Wary of enduring another steamship voyage, when his American tour was over he caught a New York sailing packet home to England.

It was a gripping story, slightly exaggerated to improve the telling. The fame of its author and the popularity of American Notes ensured the Dickens account a wide, enduring audience – and a cautionary influence on uncounted potential Atlantic travellers. As a piece of historical evidence, though, it remains tendentious and limited, not trustworthy as a generalization about Cunard ships. Dickens described a westward passage in January: the more difficult direction for crossing the Atlantic, at the coldest, wildest time of year. The Britannia then steamed through an especially ferocious winter storm, the roughest on the North Atlantic in a long time. Its attendant miseries properly belonged to the indifferent ocean and could not be blamed on the particular ship and crew. The Britannia ran aground near Halifax because of mistakes by the local pilot, not the Cunard Line. Many of the problems on the voyage were not the steamship line’s fault. And, in general, Dickens had nothing to compare the voyage to because he had never been at sea before. As a transatlantic innocent, he had too readily believed – or so he implied – those alluring promotional lithographs at the Cunard agent’s office. His unrealistic expectations collided hard with the actual experience; he felt betrayed and vengeful, perhaps even embarrassed by his initial naïveté, and then took his overstated public revenge in print. (The book sold well but drew generally displeased, unconvinced reviews. ‘Sneers, vituperations, caustic sarcasms…a spirit of entire bad taste,’ said the Illustrated London News. This reviewer doubted in particular Dickens’s account of his trials on the Britannia: ‘Of course this is the mere nonsense of book-making exaggeration, written to kill time and tickle the reader.’)

A more balanced report on the first Cunard steamships required testimony from someone who had already crossed the North Atlantic by sailing ship and so could compare the passages. Fanny Appleton of Boston took the Columbia to Liverpool in May 1841, five and a half years after her tedious voyage to Le Havre by sailing packet (see pages 8-9). ‘Tho’ I miss of course the beautiful shiftings and exhilaration of a sailing vessel,’ she noted soon after the Columbia left Boston, ‘yet we bound over the waves with no little dignity and grace.’ Constant shipboard noises on the packet had kept her from reading and writing; her first surprise on the Cunard ship was the prevailing near-silences compared to what she had found on various sailing ships and American steamboats. ‘One thing excites my unbounded admiration – the marvellous quiet. There is none of the constant bawling of orders (the Capt’s are given sotto voce to a certain little “Mr. Finley” who, like a familiar, is ever at his elbow) nor racket of ropes, nor rushing about of sailors, nor even some creaking of masts as in a packet; neither the monotonous plunge of the engine as in our steamers. There is a slight trembling of course but not a sound from the machinery… The only sounds are the bells every hour, the bugle to summon us to meals, the slight sighing of the valves.’ Napier’s machinery was barely audible – and invisible as well, unlike the engines on American steamers, concealed below decks and propelling the ship into an ‘easy majestic motion’.

Eight days later, five days from Liverpool, Appleton was still surprised and pleased. ‘This steaming is all play-sailing compared to packet experience,’ she decided, ‘and the big Atlantic itself seems vastly shrunken and dwarfed to me now that we are rushing across it so comfortably, so independant of its head winds, so little wrenched from our equilibrium by its uneasy tossings and tumblings. I little thought I could prefer a steamer but so it is. We have no excuse for grumbling at anything.’ The passengers behaved well, not too numerous or drunk or talkative. Captain Charles H. E. Judkins, meticulously attentive to every detail, took a southerly course to avoid icebergs. (They still passed a group of ten icebergs about a mile away; the largest – eighty feet high and a quartermile long, greenish in the crevices and snowy at the top – resembled a ghostly steamship at that distance.) The Columbia’s food was bountiful and varied; the shipboard games, dances and concerts were all diverting. ‘Instead of finding a steam-ship a floating Pandemonium as I expected, it certainly puts packets to shame for comfort and luxury and slides me over the Atlantic’ Appleton was not even bored; ‘I feel almost sorry to quit the ship we are having such amusing times.’ They reached Liverpool in just half the duration of her packet voyage to Le Havre in 1835.

Appleton’s account carried its own bias. Instead of westbound in January, like Dickens, she was eastbound in May, through gentle weather. Her father and uncle, Nathan and William Appleton, were business associates of Sam Cunard’s in Boston, and when she went ashore in Halifax she was lavishly entertained by the Cunard family. Still, her description seems more believable than Dickens’s because their motives for writing were so different. He, a famous fiction writer, wanted to spin a good yarn for publication and to sell books, with the more dramatically harrowing details the better. She wrote her version in private, unpublished letters to her father and to her best friend, with no evident purpose except to report honestly on what she had found. (In general, the more confidential the historical source, the more truthful.) Both had brought unmet expectations to the voyage; he was then disappointed and terrified, she unexpectedly pleased. Revising themselves in opposite directions, they gave their accounts quite different tones. Where they disagreed on specific matters of fact – such as the engine’s constant noise level – Appleton had no reason to exaggerate, and Dickens did. So Fanny Appleton probably got it right.

The steamship President was the last chance for Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird. Designed by Laird with an almost desperate

audacity, built by Curling and Young in London, and engined by Fawcett and Preston in Liverpool, she marked new transatlantic extremes in size, power and luxury. At 2360 tons she was a third larger than the British Queen and twice the size of the Cunard ships. The first liner with three decks, she afforded passengers an open-air promenade on the spar deck in fine weather and a sheltered turn on the main deck below. An elaborate carved figurehead of George Washington thrust forward from the bow; the projecting stern included other carvings and large plate-glass windows. The engine room, with its ornamented pillars and arches and polished iron and brasswork, reminded visitors of a handsome Gothic chapel: a modernist shrine to steam power. The hull was divided into watertight compartments, like earlier ships designed by Laird, ‘so that the springing of a leak would be attended with comparatively little danger,’ it was explained, ‘and would be readily overcome.’

The opulent interior furnishings hardly hinted at the Smith line’s ongoing financial straits. The main saloon, some eighty feet long and thirty-four feet wide, was finished in a Tudor Gothic style of delicate colours and grained oak. Its four tables and embossed crimson velvet sofas could accommodate up to one hundred diners at once. A wide corridor with even plusher decorations ran from the saloon to staterooms at the stern. Ten oil paintings, executed on canvas to imitate old tapestries, depicted scenes from the life of Christopher Columbus. The corridor was said to resemble a picture gallery, or the upper storey of a first-class hotel. In flashing these historic references and touches of landed luxury, the President’s living quarters were intended to mask a passenger’s sense of crossing the ocean on the latest, yet-unproven steamship.

The money lavished on decorations might better have been applied to the engine. At 540 horsepower it was the most powerful on the ocean; but only a bit more so than the engine of the much smaller British Queen, which was itself underhorsed compared to the Great Western and the Cunard ships. That left the President a much lower ratio of horsepower to tonnage than any of the competing vessels. Some sceptics doubted the President’s stability, suspecting that the third deck might make her top-heavy and too prone to rolling on the North Atlantic’s mountainous swells. She was also shorter and broader than the British Queen, not a likely design for great speed. An undeniably impressive sight, the President was more notable for her cosmetic features than her basic engineering.

She turned out to be a big, gaudy turkey, and a steady disappointment to her owners. Her first two captains were blamed for slow passages and quickly relieved of duty. The President’s lumbering maiden run in the summer of 1840 took sixteen and a half days in each direction. Her second trip home was worse: fighting a heavy gale from the east, in four days from New York she managed only three hundred miles. At that rate she would run out of coal before reaching Liverpool, so she turned around and limped back to New York. Amply coaled up, and with fair winds, she finally arrived at the Mersey on 28 November, ten days overdue: a cause of great relief and rejoicing, since nobody in England knew that she had earlier been forced back to New York. (‘What on earth or water,’ Isambard brunel had asked in passing, ‘is the President about.’) Laid up for two months through the worst winter weather, and refitted at Plymouth after just two voyages across the ocean, she took three weeks to reach New York in February, her slowest time yet.

The President left New York for home on 11 March 1841, with about 110 passengers and crew. She was sailing low in the water because of heavy cargo and full coal bunkers. Stormy seas on previous voyages had weakened and twisted the wooden hull, perhaps fracturing the engine frame. (According to an oral tradition later passed down in the Laird family, shortly after her departure two people – the Smith line’s New York agent and the brother of her latest captain, Richard Roberts – had the same dream on the same night. They saw the President with a confused crowd on her deck and Captain Roberts on the bridge, giving orders. Then the ship suddenly, unaccountably disappeared.)

She steamed into a screeching winter storm. Towards the end of the second day, another ship’s captain sighted the President labouring through a dangerous area between the Nantucket Shoals and George’s Bank, where the Gulf Stream collides with shallow soundings, sometimes generating starkly vertical waves as high as a five-storey house. The other ship’s captain saw the President rising on top of an enormous swell, pitching and struggling violently. Then he lost sight of her. The captain later guessed that she was shipping heavy seas, perhaps to the point of snuffing her boiler fires and leaving her powerless in the storm.

Once again the President was late to Liverpool. Her belated but eventual appearance in the previous November restrained, for a time, the usual worries about an overdue ship. After a month The Times noted her tardiness amid stray rumours that she had been sighted here or there, or hit an iceberg, or come into Bermuda, or run ashore in Newfoundland, or suffered a mutiny, or fallen in with pirates. The line’s London office was besieged by friends and relatives of the missing, hoping for any trace of encouraging news. The late-ship deathwatch stretched on for another month, tighter and more hopeless as time passed to no definite resolution. Queen Victoria, on leaving Buckingham Palace for Windsor Castle, asked that a special messenger be sent to her with any news of the overdue ship. When Fanny Appleton sighted a large iceberg from the Columbia in May, she declared it the ghost of the President. ‘I do not altogether give up the President as lost,’ Junius Smith wrote on 14 May, trying to convince himself, ‘and yet I fear there is but slight ground for hope.’

The President had simply disappeared into the North Atlantic, taking 110 people down with her. It was the first transatlantic steamship disaster – and not the last time that the newest, biggest ship on the ocean would steam into a catastrophe.

The competition was dropping away, yet the Cunard Line was going broke. To get his contract, Sam Cunard had offered the government much better terms than the Great Western company’s – impossible terms, it turned out. Even before his ships started running, Cunard asked the Admiralty to halve his winter sailings to once a month. ‘At the time I entered into the Contract,’ he explained, ‘steam boats had not crossed during the Winter and I was therefore quite ignorant of the risk and danger I had to encounter indeed I was very hasty in making the arrangement.…In the Winter Season there is not much commercial interest, and no passengers and once a month may, I hope be considered by their Lordships sufficient to cross during the inclement Season of the year – I have not only to contend with the storms on this Coast and on the Atlantic but with the severe Winter weather on the coast of Halifax and Boston… These vessels have cost me nearly double the sum I originally expected and I find my Contract is by no means a favorable one, but I am determined to fulfill my engagements.’ The Admiralty agreed to a monthly schedule from November to February but cut £4000 from Cunard’s already-inadequate annual subsidy.

Back in the optimistic spring of 1839, Cunard when haggling with Napier had guessed that his line would run at an annual profit of almost £41,000. No doubt this figure was inflated to entice Napier and his Glasgow investors; but Cunard surely did not expect to operate at a loss. Over its first nine months, the Cunard Line ran £15,355 in the red. When added to his money problems at home, these losses threatened Cunard with financial ruin. He thought about asking the government for a more generous contract but then decided not even to make the request and perhaps to give up the whole, leaky enterprise.

At this bleak moment in the spring of 1841, his partner David Mac Iver replied to a gloomy letter from Cunard with a reassuring blend of caution and optimism. ‘The day must have been cold, I think, or the subject has had a chilling effect over your spirits,’ Mac Iver wrote. ‘It is incumbent on us as shrewd Merchants to have our eyes ever open to the dark side of our doings – there is so much of show, and of the imaginary, in the money matters of steamers… Our own doings, up till now, I rate the experimental; and not sound evidence of our true position or prospects. We have paid, like all beginners in new trades of magnitude, thro costly experience, and are now arrived at that point where we must turn this experience to profit.’ Their ships could not carry much cargo, Mac Iver noted, and only attracted such freight in the summertime. So their only way of increasing revenues was to raise fares; Mac Iver suggested new rates of thirty pounds from Boston and forty pounds, nineteen shillings from Liverpool. Drawing from his years of running a steamship line, and knowing the implacable cycles of that business, he counselled patience: wait for better times.

Cunard, having operated ships for three decades, got the point. He, Mac Iver and George Burns met in London to gather their ammunition. Cunard took the grim statistics of their initial operations over to Whitehall, urging that the contract be doubled to £120,000 a year. The Treasury, not persuaded, asked to see the line’s books; Cunard assented ‘with pleasure’. After the Treasury’s own inquiry and report, the government granted a new contract raising the annual subsidy to £80,000, with the added stipulation that the Cunard Line build a fifth steamship. ‘It would have been wrong to let so important a line drop for want of the necessary support,’ a Glasgow newspaper reported. ‘We have, moreover, reason to know that the Government complimented the contractors, not only for having acted up to the terms of the previous contract, but also for having far exceeded them.’

The new contract of 1841, much less than he wanted, did not ease Sam Cunard’s own financial crisis. He had risked his fortune to start the transatlantic line on terms soon revealed to be disastrous. He was the founder and leader, the man who handled those delicate negotiations with the government. In a humbling act that must have embarrassed him, he had to ask his Cunard Line partners for a personal loan. In September 1841 he borrowed £15,000 from them, offering some of his own shares as security, and promising repayment with interest in two years. By the end of the year, Cunard had spent the entire loan on various debts.

Aside from a depressed general cycle in shipping and shipbuilding, Cunard was saddled with wayward investments at home, especially the Prince Edward Island land company. The Young family, his associates-turned-enemies in that venture, were not friendly to Cunard. (At a London party in 1839, William Young and Cunard were dismayed to run into each other. ‘Sam and I exchanged very distant bows,’ Young noted in his diary.) As Cunard’s money crisis got tighter and more desperate, William and George Young – by a suspicious coincidence – turned up as the attorneys for his more anxious creditors. ‘They have been at different times employed by persons in England,’ Sam objected, ‘and they have resorted to every means in their power to injure me by arresting me and heaping costs upon me. You cannot imagine anything more unfeeling than their proceedings – they hesitate at no act if it will put a few pounds into their pocket.’

The Youngs were only seeking revenge. Cunard, fighting for his very survival, was equally ruthless, scratching for money anywhere he could find it. In Nova Scotia, he sold the house and land in Hants County where he had sent his late mother to spend her last days. He mortgaged his wharves and warehouses in Halifax. The Bank of Nova Scotia suspended a rule to loan him £45,000. All his enterprises were squeezed hard. As the largest landlord on Prince Edward Island, he had his agent (his son-in-law James Peters) extract every possible penny of rent from the immigrant tenants. One of them, a bard from the Isle of Raasay named MacLean, took refuge in a mournful song. Translated from the Gaelic:

We left there

and came out here

thinking we would receive consideration,

and that the rent would not be so exacting.

But Peters is oppressing us,

and, if he doesn’t die,

we must leave this place

and Cunard, himself a beast.

The beast had become the quarry. In the spring of 1842, he admitted to debts of £130,000 and mortgaged property worth £47,000, against claimed (and probably exaggerated) assets of £257,000. A Liverpool bank, trying to present a writ for £2000 against him, sent a sheriff’s officer to the chambers of Cunard’s lawyer in London; the lawyer hid Cunard in an adjoining room, and he escaped the process. A short while later, Cunard quietly scurried up to Liverpool and arranged another flight. He hid overnight in a cottage on the river below Eastham. Several writ servers, suspecting his intentions, waited for Cunard on one of his steamships until the last minute before departure. When they were finally sent ashore, the steamer weighed anchor and started out to sea. Cunard came alongside in a small boat; his ship slowed down and picked him up. The eminent founder and leader of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company stole furtively home to Halifax.

From that nadir, Cunard slowly recovered his fortunes. In 1843 he and his partners again asked the Admiralty for more money, claiming a loss in the previous year of almost £26,400. The Admiralty allowed them an additional £10,000 annually. Through all of Cunard’s own troubles, his ships steamed across the ocean ‘with regularity almost unexpected and wholly unsurpassed’, as a New York newspaper grudgingly admitted. As competing steamships receded from the Atlantic, the Cunard Line gained an essential monopoly and could raise its fares with impunity, up to forty-one pounds by 1846 for passage from Liverpool. His stock dividends and commissions gradually paid off Cunard’s loan to his partners. The shipping business in general cycled upwards again, and the Cunard Line started turning profits and paying more consistent dividends to stockholders. Sam Cunard’s financial crisis lifted.

The Cunard Line steamed towards solvency on its unmatched reputation for safety and order. That reputation – so coveted by passengers venturing forth on the dreaded North Atlantic – began with the first sailings in 1840. John Quincy Adams, a former president of the United States, and a man whose life was typically an exercise in rigid discipline and organization, took the Acadia from Boston to Halifax in September 1840. Adams approved of the captain, the food, the crockery and glassware, the cleanliness, and the neat finish to the iron, brass and woodwork. The Acadia was an uncommonly tight ship, Adams confided to his diary: ‘There is great order and discipline.’ Those qualities were associated with the Cunard Line ever after. Over the years, other Atlantic steamship lines would run ships that were bigger, faster, more luxurious, or with better service. Cunard ships retained their own unique, dominating cachet: they got you there alive.

No steamship line could entirely escape the North Atlantic’s rigours; Cunard always had its share of accidents. In the first eight years, Cunard ships ran aground at least nine times in dense fogs off Ireland and the Canadian and American coasts, and at least twice collided with smaller vessels, sinking them and killing eight of their crewmen. (Other collisions may have happened at night and gone unnoticed, at least officially, by the Cunarder.) Charles Dickens’s frightening experience on the Britannia was not so unusual. The most serious grounding was by the Columbia in July 1843. She had left Boston in a thick fog, picking her way carefully along the New England coast, and was pulled off course by an unusually swift current. Given the fog, the captain could not shoot the sun and take his bearings. Early in the afternoon, while running nearly full speed at ten knots, the Columbia struck a notorious reef called the Devil’s Limb, 11/2 offshore and about 150 miles southwest of Halifax. Despite desperate efforts, she could not be budged. A boat came out from a nearby island and plucked off the crew and all eighty-five passengers before the ship, buffeted by chopping waves, broke up and sank – the first Cunard steamship lost at sea.

The most remarkable aspect of these first eleven Cunard accidents is that nobody on the Cunard ship involved was killed. In fact, for the first seventy-five years of the line’s history no passenger in its North Atlantic traffic ever died from a shipwreck. Meantime all the other transatlantic steamship lines suffered terrible disasters, one after the other, typically causing hundreds of deaths each time. Only the Cunard Line escaped. Perhaps this was just Cunard luck again, over and over. Or perhaps it was how the line was run.

In the division of labour among the three founding partners, Sam Cunard with his sons Ned and William supervised the line’s offices in Canada and America, and Sam on his frequent trips to England represented the enterprise to the government. In Glasgow, George Burns looked after the construction and repair of the Cunard vessels by Robert Napier and various Clydeside shipbuilders. In Liverpool, David Mac Iver (and, after his death in 1845, his brother Charles) saw to the day-to-day management of the ships, keeping the captains and crews up to rigorous standards, making sure the vessels were well supplied and repaired and precisely on schedule both going and coming. These lines of authority at times became mingled; any one of the three founders might briefly take up any role, and major decisions emerged from polite, muted exchanges among all of them, with Cunard usually functioning as the first among equals.

If the safety record has a single overriding explanation, it was the Mac Ivers. Only twenty-eight years old in 1840, Charles stood at the top of the Cunard Line leadership for over forty years, even longer than Sam Cunard or George Burns. Nobody ever laboured harder, more persistently or effectively, to keep the line in its usual position of transatlantic supremacy. Almost every day, he went down to the Cunard wharves on the Mersey, watching and measuring, taking notes and giving orders. Quick and decisive, at times imperious, he had absolute confidence in his own judgments and opinions, seemingly never retreating from them once expressed. ‘Up to the last moment,’ a long-time Liverpool associate said later, ‘he will persist with all the energy of his nature in a course which his reason is gradually convincing him against his will to be erroneous…though even then he by some ingenious process satisfies himself and thinks he convinces others that he is not giving way at all.’

The Mac Iver brothers were sons of a Greenock sea captain who was washed overboard in 1812 in the Bay of Biscay. As a young man, Charles spent some time in the American port of Charleston, South Carolina, but he soon came home and joined David in their coastal steamship enterprises. In about 1833 he had an experience that, as he told the story, confirmed his core insistence on relentless standards and inspections for oceangoing vessels. He booked passage on a particular sailing ship because he knew the captain. Off the Azores they ran into a powerful gale that lasted twelve hours. The ship, nearly sunk, was damaged and obviously unsound. ‘When you go home you had better throw up command of this vessel,’ Mac Iver told the captain, ‘or you will lose your life.’ The captain did leave her, but her owners – in their ignorance or greed – sent her out again under another commander. She disappeared with all hands. Any reasonable inspection, Mac Iver concluded, ‘would have prevented that ship from going to sea.’

When the Cunard Line got under way, the Mac Ivers issued and enforced stringent regulations for their captains and crews. The two primary goals for the enterprise, speed and safety, were to some degree contradictory; to favour one could undermine the other. The Mac Ivers impartially emphasized both. ‘It will be obvious to you,’ they instructed the commanders of the Cunard ships in 1840, ‘that it is of first importance…that she attains a Character for speed and safety. We trust to your vigilance for this – good steering, good lookouts, taking advantage of every slant of wind, and precautions against fire, are principal elements. ’ At the start of the voyage, the ship was heavily loaded with coal, and the paddles were deeply immersed, not working at peak efficiency. As coal was consumed and the hull rose in the water, the boilers could be fully fired up and the engine pushed harder. But coal use was to be carefully monitored and recorded, along with other supplies in the engine room. Only stokers and trimmers were to carry coal from bunkers to boilers; the sailors up on deck, a separate breed, were not expected to help out.

The Mac Ivers established other rules for the passengers and stewards. ‘A cheerful acquiescence is expected in the following Regulations and Suggestions,’ they explained in 1840, ‘which, if in any instance at variance with the opinions, habits, or inclinations of the few, are framed with a regard to the comfort of the whole.’ The staterooms were to be swept and carpets taken out and shaken every morning after breakfast. As soon as passengers left their rooms in the morning, their bedding was turned over, beds were made, wash basins cleaned, and slops emptied. Bed linen was changed on the eighth day, and boots and shoes cleaned overnight and returned to the rooms every morning at eight o’clock. Two towels were provided for each passenger and changed every other day, or more often if requested. The wine and spirits bar, always a favourite part of any ocean voyage, closed for the night at eleven but reopened quite early, at six the next morning. Lights went out in the saloons at half past eleven, in the staterooms at midnight, with no exceptions allowed for late readers.

Other Atlantic steamship lines had similar rules. The difference, it seems, is that the Cunard Line extracted routine obedience to its regulations. In January 1847, Charles Mac Iver found that the officers’ mess in a recent transatlantic voyage had committed ‘wanton and extravagant waste of the Company’s victualling stores’, as he put it, and had subverted specific rules ‘which have for their object general comfort and good order’. Unable to discover the particular culprits, Mac Iver sent his prescribed bill of fare to all officers of the mess. ‘I shall be very happy to receive the resignation of any one who is not satisfied with it,’ he warned. ‘No man in this concern has had it in his power to say in truth that he has been otherwise than well treated, but wherever I find a set of men rating themselves only by what they can stow away in their bellies, I have prima facie evidence that they are not the men for the British & North American Royal Mail Service… Specific and known orders shall never be infringed with impunity or trampled upon.’ Was that sufficiently clear? (‘Mac Iver’s letters quite discompose one,’ an associate explained; ‘you must talk over the matter with him to understand what a fine fellow he is.’)

As time passed, Mac Iver’s directives became even more definite and specific. His orders to commanders in 1848 ran to eighteen handwritten pages. Each ship was to leave port with enough food and water for thirty days in summer and forty days in winter (though a typical passage took less than half that time). If a very long trip depleted the coal supply, the captain was to put aside enough fuel to run the engine for twenty-four hours and then proceed under sail alone until land was sighted; then the boilers would be fired so the ship could reach port under power. Furthermore: Keep the ship clean to control vermin. ‘Ventilate, Ventilate. ’ Only safely locked lanterns, no open flames, were allowed in the spirits room. No tobacco smoking was permitted anywhere below decks. ‘Want of cleanliness in the water closets is a constant cause of complaint, we shall be glad if you can take any measures to remedy this.’ Every Sunday at sea, the captain must limit unnecessary work and read aloud the Church of England service in the main saloon. Invite a passenger to read from a book of short sermons provided by the line. ‘If this does not meet with a favorable response, do not press it. Let your crew retire.’ Don’t be too friendly with any particular set of passengers, or make or permit generalizations about any national tendencies; Americans and perhaps Englishmen can be quite sensitive about such matters. ‘Card Playing on the part of the Captains on board ship has been the cause of so much dissatisfaction and trouble, that it cannot be longer tolerated.’ Nor should the captain allow card playing or gambling in his private quarters, or in the officers’ mess, or by any officers.

Year after year, voyage after voyage, life on a Cunard ship expressed the flinty personality of Charles Mac Iver. He resisted luxuries and any fancy touches in the food or furnishings or decorations. He most valued safe predictability: always the same procedures and standards, unchanged unless for a very compelling reason. When accidents at sea happened, the captain and crew followed a precise, well-practised drill, and so maintained order. The line’s amazing safety record was no coincidence. Behind it, sustaining it, was Mac Iver standing at the dock every day, getting ready to inspect another Cunard ship and her personnel, missing and excusing nothing. ‘The highest court to which you could bring me,’ he once told a parliamentary commission, ‘would be my own conscience.’

For Sam Cunard himself, the responsibility and success of his transatlantic steamship line made him a transatlantic citizen. He and his children were spending longer periods in England, bringing traces of English culture home to Halifax and setting themselves apart from their neighbours. When Fanny Appleton visited the Cunards in 1841, she noticed ‘the luxury of Mr. Cunard’s house contrasting with the shabbiness of the town’. One of Cunard’s six daughters presided at the meals, ‘a very elegant girl of pale complexion, regular features, very black hair and a fine figure who has been to London and did the honors of lunch and Dinner with quite a distingué air.’ Though Appleton was dressed only in her sailing costume, she was persuaded to stay for dinner, at which the Cunard daughters, ‘a l’Anglaise, arrayed themselves in full dress.’ At table the Cunard girls talked about parties and balls with a determined gaiety; it reminded Appleton of scenes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. ‘It all has the strangest Anglo-American aspect,’ she decided. ‘A tedious provincial life they must have of it.’ Eventually all the Cunard daughters but one married English army officers and left Halifax permanently.

For their father, the break was more difficult. ‘I have been backwards and forwards occasionally to England,’ he said in 1847, ‘but Halifax is my home.’ His wife and one of his children were buried there. His extensive business operations were still based in Nova Scotia, and – apparently for sentimental reasons – he held on to his local post as a commissioner of lighthouses despite his frequent absences. But his hometown was not keeping pace with the nineteenth century. ‘What a slow place it is!’ exclaimed an American visitor in the 1850s. An English tourist at about the same time chided ‘the lassitude and want of enterprise of the Nova-Scotians’, who seemed to be lagging behind other Canadians; ‘the Nova-Scotians appear to have expunged the word progress from their dictionary. ’ Cunard was a modern personality, permanently moored only to his family. He wanted the snap and zoom of modernity. His steamship line, steadily reducing and taming the unruly North Atlantic, imposing human will on nature, embodied the progressive faith of the age. As he shuttled back and forth across the ocean on his ships, he was increasingly drawn away from his fading colonial homeland and towards the ever-beckoning, up-to-date future that he found in commercial England.

He leased a country estate in Edmonton, eight miles north of London Bridge. Its seventy-four acres included a park, gardens, stables, and a greenhouse with grape vines and lemon trees. The house had plenty of room for visiting children and grandchildren. Playing a country squire, he developed interests in horticulture and joined the Royal Geographic Society. The prestige of his ties to the government and – in particular – the burgeoning fame of his eponymous steamship line eased his way into the higher reaches of London society, despite his usual reticent behaviour in public. The actress Fanny Kemble later remembered him as a ‘shy, silent, rather rustic gentleman’ at a party given by the celebrated hostess and writer Caroline Sheridan Norton. A major merchant prince, the man who had bridged the ocean, Sam Cunard still presented himself as an untalkative, unpolished colonial.

The success of his Cunard Line drove out its predecessors. Junius Smith’s enterprise went under soon after the President disappeared. The Great Western company’s profits peaked in 1839, before the maiden voyage of the Britannia, then declined in each of the next three years of competing with Cunard. In a last effort to save his company, in 1846 Christopher Claxton tried to pick off part of the Cunard mail contract. ‘We are quite aware of the excellent way in which Mr. Cunard performs the work,’ Claxton testified to a committee of Parliament; ‘no one knows it better than we do; we do not want to injure Mr. Cunard, but we want something to be done for ourselves.’ The government, well satisfied with the mail service, stuck with Cunard. A year later the Great Western, the first Atlantic steamship, was sold into service in the West Indies and South American trade. For the time being, the Cunard Line had transatlantic steam to itself.