The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships

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As Henry Bell had insisted about himself, these pioneers of Clyde steamboat building – from William Symington to Robert Napier – were not just self-taught engineers who worked simply by untutored intuition. They typically had mentors and family backgrounds in their fields. But most of their education did take place outside school, and the best of them then engaged in a continuous process of self-education all through their working lives. Immersed in such a bold new undertaking, they had to contrive their own patterns. They ‘read Nature’s laws (#litres_trial_promo) in their own fashion’, the Scottish naval architect Robert Mansel remarked after the younger Robert Steele’s death in 1879. ‘Admittedly they knew little or no Latin or Greek, and, on the whole, were decidedly averse to talking and talkers.’ Diligent and laconic in the Scots manner, they left terse, incomplete surviving records of what they did, and nothing whatever about their private thoughts and feelings. Any curiosity about such intimacies would have puzzled them. They poured themselves into their steamboats and steam engines – which also have not survived, except for a few stray shards. Entering their world now requires an act of imagination, with casual leaps over yawning gaps in the historical evidence.

So wedded to the progressive nineteenth century, their work helped change the world within their lifetimes. Whatever they may have thought about this grand transformation has been lost to history, except for off-hand hints. Robert Napier’s fine mansion at Shandon on the Gareloch preserved a lingering trace of the old world within its opulent outer walls. The house was built in successive additions around the original modest cottage. A visitor in 1855 marvelled at the many beautiful paintings and art objects in the plush outer rooms. David Elder, a music lover, had made his boss a waterpowered pump for the pipe organ in the main gallery. Napier, sixty-four years old in 1855, liked to show the treasures from his lifetime of collecting. At the core of the mansion, happy to remain behind in one of the old cottage’s small rooms, sat his wife, Isabella Napier Napier. ‘A very simple (#litres_trial_promo) and unaffected Scotch woman,’ the visitor surmised. The mother of seven children, five still living, she sat spinning by the fireplace, moving steadily to a rhythm older than steam on water. The great Steam Age roared on, around and past her.

PART TWO: The Era of Cunard Domination, 1840-1870 (#ulink_9371d13e-8212-5a3f-92ca-20cb929b3687)

3. Ships as Enterprise: Samuel Cunard of Halifax (#ulink_7df11805-4c5c-55cd-a725-58b4079a1a07)

The Samuel Cunard who appeared so mysteriously in Boston on his Britannia in 1840 had come from a tumultuous family history of upheaval and dislocation, of religious and political persecution, and then of neglect and alcoholism in his parents’ generation. In the absence of much given structure, he had attained a preternatural early maturity on his own. He essentially invented himself and then took on necessary paternal roles for his younger siblings. Having emerged from such an uncertain background, he might reasonably have wanted a safe future based on some dependable job that provided a secure living. Instead he dealt in ocean ships and shipments, with all their endemic risks and uncertainties. Cunard would spend his working life worrying about cargoes and profits, captains and crews, and an occasional overdue vessel plying the pitiless North Atlantic Ocean. ‘Those who have (#litres_trial_promo) the charge of ships,’ he wrote in old age, ‘are never free from anxiety.’

Sam Cunard was descended from a group of German Quakers who came to America in 1683. His great-great-grandfather, Thones Kunders (#litres_trial_promo), lived in the German town of Crefeld, on the lower Rhine River near the Dutch border. Kunders and his family were religious dissenters, first as Mennonites, then Quakers, at odds with local established church authorities. William Penn granted the Crefeld Friends about 18,000 acres in his Quaker haven of Pennsylvania. They sailed away from intolerance in July 1683, thirteen men with their families, thirty-three people in all: among the minority of immigrants to America who came not for economic opportunity but for reasons of conscience, to worship as they wished. The pilgrims from Crefeld landed in Philadelphia after a voyage of seventy-four days.

They settled an area to be known as Germantown, later incorporated into greater Philadelphia. For three years, until they put up a meetinghouse, the Crefeld Friends worshipped at the home of Thones Kunders. He worked as a textile dyer, his trade in the old country, and was appointed one of the local burgesses by William Penn. Kunders died in 1729, ‘an hospitable (#litres_trial_promo), well-disposed man, of an inoffensive life and good character’. At some point he had Americanized his name to Dennis Conrad. In 1710 his sixth child, Henry, married the daughter of another Crefeld colonist. They bought a farm of 220 acres in Montgomery County and had six sons, who later spelled their last name four ways. (With the trail thus obscured, the family line has puzzled genealogists.) Henry’s son Samuel took the name Cunrad. In turn, Samuel’s son Abraham, born in 1754, later switched two letters and came up with Cunard, where the matter finally rested.

According to an oral tradition (#litres_trial_promo) passed down within the family, Thones Kunders and his sons were ploughing a field one day when they turned up a bag of gold coins – perhaps a pirate’s loot, brought ashore and buried but never recovered. This windfall helped establish the family in America. The story, if true, marks the first hint of what afterwards was called ‘Cunard luck’ or the ‘luck of Cunards’. Four generations later, Sam Cunard’s good fortune in his ever-dangerous shipping business was sometimes ascribed – especially by frustrated competitors – not to alertness or hard work but to his unfair, unearned, uncanny luck.

The American Revolution, however, brought the family nothing but bad luck. As Quakers, the descendants of Thones Kunders could not support the revolutionary cause. The Quaker peace testimony prohibited any violent opposition to governments. Pennsylvania Friends felt no great loyalty to British authority; their pacifism simply made all wars untenable. The local rebels, mainly Presbyterians, took their opportunity to cut into the power of the more established Quakers. This complex internecine conflict, fuelled by both religion and politics, became quite bitter. The rebels would place candles in their windows at night to celebrate American victories; Quaker windows without candles might be broken. Friends who declined to join public fast days might have their businesses attached or lose blankets and horses to rebel army requisitions. Soldiers could be billeted in Quaker homes. Quakers could be fined for refusing muster duty or an oath of allegiance to the rebels. Some, like Abraham Cunard’s cousin Robert Cunard (#litres_trial_promo), were convicted of treason and had their property confiscated.

During the war, and especially after the final American victory, many Quakers (including Abraham Cunard) left for the Loyalist stronghold of New York. When New York in turn fell to the rebels, much of its swelling Loyalist community was banished to the British outpost of Nova Scotia. An elite group of Loyalists petitioned British colonial authorities for land grants and other privileges in their new Canadian home. Abraham Cunard joined a less well-connected group of nine hundred others bound for Nova Scotia in asking for their own considerations. ‘Chagrined as your (#litres_trial_promo) Memorialists are at the manner in which the late Contest has been terminated,’ they declared, ‘and disappointed as they find themselves in being left to the lenity of their Enemys…your Memorialists humbly implore redress from your Excellency and that enquiry may be made into their respective Losses Services Situations and Sufferings.’ Cunard sailed to Nova Scotia with a flotilla of Loyalists in the spring of 1783. Exactly one hundred years after his ancestors had come to America for religious freedom, political and religious strife now forced him to leave home for another new land in a wilderness.

Perched at the southeastern edge of Canada, technically a peninsula but actually more like an island, Nova Scotia in 1783 was a raw frontier territory. It had been lightly settled by immigrants from England, Scotland and Germany, and by Americans from nearby New England states. During the war it became a bristling garrison for British army and navy forces, who dominated the principal town of Halifax. The newly arrived Loyalists, lured by favourable reports, were generally disheartened by what they found. ‘All our golden (#litres_trial_promo) promises have vanished,’ said one Loyalist. ‘We were taught to believe this place was not barren and foggy, as had been represented, but we find it ten times worse.…It is the most inhospitable climate that ever mortal set foot on. The winter is of insupportable length and coldness, only a few spots fit to cultivate, and the land is covered with a cold, spongy moss, instead of grass, and the entire country is wrapt in the gloom of perpetual fog.’ Yet Nova Scotia was the most accessible place from New York still under British rule, closer than the West Indies or the Canadian interior, with rich fishery and timber resources and, at Halifax, one of the finest natural harbours in North America. By the end of 1783 some 20,000 Loyalist refugees had arrived, more than doubling the local population.

In these circumstances of widespread chaos and hardship, of overcrowding, high prices, and temporary shacks, Abraham Cunard found and married a wife. Margaret Murphy (#litres_trial_promo) was the daughter of Irish immigrants who had settled in South Carolina just before the war; her father joined the British forces and saw action in Georgia. The Murphys fled to Nova Scotia after the evacuation of Charleston in 1782. Abraham and Margaret were married on 22 June 1783; he was twenty-nine, she twenty-five. It was an odd match. The Murphys were Irish Catholics, had owned slaves in South Carolina, and did not share the pacifism, anti-slavery convictions, or abstemious habits of Quakers. This difficult marriage produced ten children over the next two decades. Samuel, the second child and oldest boy, was born on 21 November 1787, and named for his paternal grandfather.

Most of the Pennsylvania Loyalists settled in the new town of Shelburne, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia. Abraham Cunard – perhaps because of his rather heterodox marriage – instead went up to Halifax. The harbour town, less than forty years old, had been laid out on the slope of a steep hill that offered some protection from the northwest winter wind. Cunard found work as a foreman carpenter in the army’s timberyard at the docks. The Cunards lived near the water on Brunswick Street in the north end, a German section known as Dutchtown. Abraham and Margaret compromised their ancestral religious differences by joining an Anglican church. On his own time, Abraham bought vacant property and built houses for sale, turning good profits. He prospered enough to pay eight hundred pounds in cash (#litres_trial_promo), a substantial sum, for two waterfront land parcels in 1796 and 1798. He was also granted 1000 acres of timberland in northern Nova Scotia. At the yard he was promoted to master carpenter, earning nine shillings a day. As far as most outsiders could tell, the Cunards were doing well.

In private, the family was contending with an ongoing crisis caused by Margaret’s uncontrolled drinking. Years later, people told stories of her lying in the streets of Halifax, dead drunk, while her children went barefoot and sold produce from the family garden for a few coins. Abraham’s response is not known; his extended working hours, between his timberyard job and the houses he was building to sell, might have functioned as a refuge from his wife’s alcoholism – or perhaps a contributing factor to it. What seems clear is that Sam, as the oldest boy, had to assume early responsibilities. After a few years of grammar school, he started working for pay, wasting no time. Driving the cows home at night, he walked along knitting a bag to hold his money. He ran errands, picked dandelions and sold them at market, and purchased fish, potatoes and other goods at the wharves to sell door to door. At age fourteen he proudly bought a broadcloth suit, his first, with his own money.

Children from an alcoholic home may respond in wildly varying ways. In Sam Cunard’s case, he clamped a lifelong tight discipline on his emotions and pleasures. For a family of partly Quaker heritage, trying to make its way in a new and strange place, Margaret’s drinking was a shameful secret. But it could not really be kept hidden in a small town isolated by geography and circumstances. Gossips knew and talked about it. From this background, it seems, Sam developed his enduring habit of keeping himself under cover, of not giving public speeches or revealing much even in private letters. His own habits were notably ascetic; he associated heavy drinking with failure and embarrassment. When he later made such bald statements as ‘I have never (#litres_trial_promo) known an industrious sober man who has not succeeded’, he was referring obliquely to his mother’s losing struggle with rum.

From boyhood Sam toiled as a merchant, buying goods and selling them at a profit. He lacked the education for a professional career, like law or medicine, and had no taste for government or military positions, the other main avenues available to ambitious boys in Halifax. Living in a harbour town dominated by its waterfront commerce, he naturally turned to ships and shipping as the main medium for his business activities. On a typical working day he was up early and down to the docks, looking for deals, and finding them often enough to believe that his chosen field would reward hard effort and concentration. “Tis true (#litres_trial_promo) that the merchant does not always succeed,’ Cunard later reflected, ‘ – but with patient industry he generally does – there is one thing certain that no one succeeds without application and close attention to the business he is intended for.’

He worked under his father, then with him, and quickly moved beyond him.

Abraham got him his first real job, as a clerk in the naval dockyard’s engineer department, and next arranged for him to spend a few years down in Boston, working in a shipbroker’s office and learning that business. By the age of twenty-one, in 1809, Sam had returned to Halifax and talked his father into founding the firm of A. Cunard & Son, ship agents and general merchants in the West Indian trade. On his own he also bought two parcels of wilderness land in the lightly settled northern reaches of Nova Scotia, a total of 5000 acres – the first of many distant land speculations he would try for their potential rents, timber or minerals.

The prolonged Napoleonic wars and, in particular, the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States brought flush times to Halifax. It became the main staging area and supply depot for British army and navy forces in America. At the same time, it continued doing business with those New England states that opposed the conflict. Within three months of the American declaration of war, Sam Cunard was granted a licence to import certain goods from the states: flour, meal, corn, pitch, tar and turpentine, all of them in turn useful for the naval war against the United States. Halifax seized the fortunate (if unprincipled) opportunity to supply both belligerents against each other. Privateering and smuggling also flourished, as captured ships and cargoes were auctioned off at low prices. ‘As all around (#litres_trial_promo) me are smuggling,’ one Nova Scotian decided, ‘I am beginning to smuggle too.’ Tobacco, soap and candles could be hidden in hogsheads and puncheons of codfish and then unpacked in a back room, out of sight. The Cunards probably joined in this lucrative, illicit, barely policed ™ the profits were hard to resist. By the end of the war they were buying and selling not just cargoes but the ships themselves.

The windfalls of war made Sam rich enough to take a wife. On 4 February 1815, at the age of twenty-seven he married Susan Duffus (#litres_trial_promo), seven years his junior. She was the daughter of a dry goods merchant and tailor who had come to Halifax from Scotland as a young man. Sam settled his bride in a fine new house at 21 Brunswick Street, adjacent to the home of his parents. His changed circumstances, upwardly striving and soon to include children, pushed Sam into taking a definite step, both merciful and ruthless, about his poor, sodden mother.

In late June 1815, with Susan three months pregnant, he bought farmland out in Hants County, at Pleasant Valley. He had a house built (a better home than most in that area, including a butler’s pantry and a central chimney with four fireplaces) and sent his mother to live there, near some of her Murphy relatives. Perhaps, with their first child soon to arrive, Sam and Susan did not want the addled grandmother right next door, visiting and possibly endangering the baby. Sam added more land to the property a few weeks after his son Edward was born. According to the local folklore that persisted in Hants County even into the 1950s, Margaret Cunard was dispatched in order to control her rum supply and to limit social embarrassments in Halifax. She was, significantly, banished without her husband – but with, it seems, his willing assent. Abraham kept working as a master carpenter at the timberyard, too far from Pleasant Valley for commuting fifty miles a day on horseback. After Margaret died in 1821, he finally retired in his late sixties and went out to live alone in her house.

As this crisp transaction made clear, Sam in his late twenties was functioning as the head of the entire family. The firm of A. Cunard & Son really consisted of the son. Sam also assumed responsibility for the education of his three youngest brothers. He sent Henry and Thomas, eleven and ten years old, to a private school in Pictou, Nova Scotia. ‘If you think (#litres_trial_promo) it best, I have no objection to Henry & Thomas learning Latin,’ he wrote to the schoolmaster, Thomas McCulloch, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland. ‘The only reason I have for not requesting you to teach them Latin, namely that they are intended for business and that a plain English education answers the purpose. You will say that I have very contracted ideas and I must allow it. I shall feel much obliged if you will have the kindness to supply the little wants of the boys from time to time, they will require as the winter approaches worsted socks, and strong shoes which can be had at Pictou better than here.’

Sam was not satisfied with the educational progress of his brother John, fifteen years old, so McCulloch was given another charge. ‘The masters (#litres_trial_promo) under whose care he has been heretofore,’ Sam explained, ‘have paid but little attention to his improvement and what he learnt at school he has forgot within the last year.…I wish him taught what I requested you to teach the other boys, and I hope within one year (the time I propose leaving him with you) that he will have made considerable improvement. ’ Sam’s uncertain grasp of grammar and punctuation at times revealed the limits of his own education; he often neglected to end sentences with full stops and to start sentences with capital letters, and his spelling could be erratic. But he wanted more schooling for his brothers, despite his businesslike doubts about the real value of learning Latin, and was willing to pay for a privilege he himself had not enjoyed.

Halifax in these years had a population of about 15,000. Seen from the water, it looked like a giant rectangle laid sideways on the slope of a hill: six major streets running parallel to the harbour, intersected at right angles by ten smaller cross streets. Two miles long by a half mile wide, Halifax was capped by a fortress called Citadel Hill and a prominent tower displaying the town clock. Ships, docks and warehouses were ranged thickly along the waterfront. Only Water Street, closest to the harbour, was paved; the other streets were often muddy or dusty, and buried in deep snow from December to March. These conditions, along with the steepness of the hill, made carriages impractical. People got about on foot or horseback. The houses, built to no particular pattern, were mostly wooden, of one storey, and unpainted.

High society was divided between a small gentry class and a massive military presence. The old settlers and the Loyalists (#litres_trial_promo), initially at odds, by now had intermarried and merged their interests. The Loyalists had brought money, energy, and a new assertiveness to the small town. The oligarchy that dominated Halifax consisted essentially of the children of those Loyalists. Allegiances to the mother country still ran deep, in both politics and culture. Newcomers were struck by the pervading Englishness of the place. ‘Nova Scotia approaches (#litres_trial_promo) nearer, in most respects, to the customs and ideas most approved in England, than any other part of America,’ one British visitor noted. ‘The style of living, hours of entertainment, fashions, manners, are all English. Dress is fully as much attended to as in London.’

This Anglophilia was reinforced by British military power. Halifax was both a naval station and garrison town, its streets filled with soldiers and sailors. Three regiments lived in barracks on the north and south sides of Citadel Hill. Brunswick Street (#litres_trial_promo), running between the barracks, was littered with well-patronized grog shops, gambling dens and whorehouses. (The Cunards lived in a better section of Brunswick Street.) Returning to barracks at night, drunk and frisky, the soldiers and sailors would pick fights with each other and commit small vandalisms. Native Haligonians prudently stayed indoors, out of their way, at such times.

Military officers and the local oligarchy mingled at the Ionic-columned Province Building (#litres_trial_promo) in the centre of town, in the middle of a square enclosed by an iron railing. It was easily the most impressive structure in Halifax, 140 feet long by 70 feet wide by 45 feet high, built to last of locally quarried ironstone. Here met the meshed institutions of Nova Scotian government. The English monarch appointed a governor for the province, who appointed a Council which could amend or reject any bill passed by the Assembly, which was elected by male Nova Scotians who owned houses or land. The Council also designated sheriffs, coroners and school commissioners and could review some judicial decisions. Occasional democratic pressures from below were, as yet, easily stifled.

In sum: Halifax was a small but quite diverse place, from the deliberating chambers of the Province Building to the nearby dives along Brunswick Street. For a young man on the make like Sam Cunard, it had some of the fluidity of a frontier town, unformed and open to enterprising newcomers. But political power was mostly appointive, beyond any popular control; individual leaders of the oligarchy, in general, came from more privileged backgrounds than Cunard’s. Henry H. Cogswell, Richard J. Uniacke and Thomas Chandler Haliburton were college-educated lawyers. Joseph Howe, the crusading editor of the Halifax Novascotian, was the son of a postmaster general and king’s printer. The father of the three Bliss brothers was a Harvard graduate who served as attorney general and chief justice of New Brunswick; the Blisses would pepper their letters with French aphorisms and Greek quotations, in the original Greek. The two Young brothers were literate, well-educated lawyers and politicians from Scotland. Moving in such civilized, professional company, Cunard must at times have felt intimidated and culturally inadequate.

His career nonetheless flourished. Just after the war, he obtained his first royal mail contract: a foreshadowing of his later transatlantic steamship line. Given his command of ships and shipping, and useful contacts among the military authorities in Halifax, he was chosen to carry the mail between Boston, Halifax, and St John’s, Newfoundland; occasionally his sailing packets also took letters all the way to Bermuda. The steady performance of his mail ships, year after year, gave him a reliable reputation with British authorities that would help clinch subsequent dealings. ‘I have always (#litres_trial_promo) found the Government very liberal and reasonable, ’ he said later, ‘where the Contractor has endeavoured to fulfill his engagement I have never met with the least difficulty.’

After Abraham Cunard’s death early in 1824, Sam changed the name of his firm to Samuel Cunard & Company. The new name reflected the long-established reality. Sam took his brothers Edward and Joseph into the firm; his oldest brother, William, had recently died in a shipwreck. On formal occasions Sam now called himself Samuel Cunard, Esquire. The Cunard brothers built an imposing office and warehouse (#litres_trial_promo) on Water Street, on one of the waterfront plots their father had bought back in the 1790s: a four-storey stone fortress that stretched 110 feet along the street, with a large arched doorway in the middle giving secured access to the wharves. From this solid base, the family engaged in shipping, shipowning, shipbuilding, whaling, timber, iron and coal mining, landowning, property management and banking. Most of these enterprises succeeded, but ships were always at the base of everything else.

In 1825 Samuel Cunard obtained another crucial connection to British imperial power. The quite English province of Nova Scotia thirsted for real tea, which at the time was produced only in China. Lacking a consistent supply of the genuine article, people had to resort to peppermint, cloves, or aniseed – all deemed poor substitutes. Cunard sailed to London to petition the controlling East India Company for his own tea agency. ‘Our pretensions (#litres_trial_promo) are grounded upon our long residence in the Provinces,’ he wrote in one of his run-on sentences, ‘and a thorough knowledge of the Trade and People, we possess every convenience in Fireproof Warehouses and means to effect the intended object, we are ready to give such security in London…and should you think proper to appoint us to the Agency and management of the proposed Consignments and future business of the Hon. Company you may rely upon our zeal and attention thereto and we shall be happy to give such information’ – and so on. The besieged company granted him the agency.

The first tea ship (#litres_trial_promo) arrived in Halifax a year later, smelling like a gigantic teapot, with 6517 chests from Canton. Customers snapped them up in a public sale at the Cunard warehouse. For the next thirty-five years, quarterly tea auctions were held there, typically with Sam as the auctioneer. The East India commissions became his most reliable source of income; at times he would use the gross revenues, in the short term, to finance other enterprises and then later remit the balances due. Cunard’s coveted tea shipments also strengthened his ascending position in the Halifax oligarchy.

The principal merchants in town persuaded him, briefly, to stand for political office. In the spring of 1826 he agreed to run for an Assembly seat. On the day appointed for the candidates to declare their intentions at an Assembly session, he met with his committee in the morning. Everything seemed in order. He would even make a rare public address. In the Assembly chamber, he stood up, faced the audience, and took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘I also had intended (#litres_trial_promo) to have said a few words from the Hustings,’ he said, reading, ‘but recent considerations have induced me to alter my views.…I did not come forward to offer myself at the present Election of my own accord, but at the written request of the Merchants, and other respectable inhabitants. I had no ambitious views to gratify, no objects to attain, the good of the country was the sole consideration which induced me to assent to their request.’ And with that he withdrew his candidacy and sat down, having told no one in advance of his change of mind.

However startling to his supporters, this performance was quite in character. He invariably kept his own counsel, trusting and confiding in nobody outside his family. (‘I have always (#litres_trial_promo) been in the habit,’ he once said, ‘of looking after my own business.’) A politician would have to make regular speeches, a prospect that quite terrified him. Aside from his inherent shyness in front of an audience, public speaking and thinking on his feet could expose the awkward gaps in his education and the real limits of his verbal powers. ‘His conduct (#litres_trial_promo) is strange and has done him no good,’ noted the Halifax attorney William Blowers Bliss, as flabbergasted as anyone. Though Cunard had offered an implausible explanation, Bliss astutely guessed his actual reason for pulling out: ‘I believe the real cause to have been that he grew nervous and frightened and timidity got the better of his judgment.’

Cunard let his guard down, and relaxed, only at home. After the difficulties of his own childhood, and the inevitable uncertainties of a career in ships, and the watchful complexities of picking his way through the Halifax elite, he found a safe haven within his own expanding family circle. Sam and Susan had nine children in thirteen years. But Susan died in February 1828, at the age of thirty-two, a few days after the birth of her last child. A newspaper notice of her death – the main fragment of historical evidence about her – offered more than the usual conventional pieties: ‘Those only (#litres_trial_promo) who witnessed how intimately blended, in her Character, were the mild unassuming virtues of domestic life, with an amiable disposition, sound judgement and religious principle, can appreciate the loss that has been sustained by an attached husband, a numerous family of young children, and a large connection of relatives and friends.’

Sam was forty years old when she died. At the time, it was not uncommon for a woman to die from the complications of childbirth, often after having had many babies. The widower then usually married again and produced more children, especially if he commanded the wealth to support a second family. Sam never remarried; he remained permanently ‘attached’ to his dead wife. Susan’s mother took over the raising of her grandchildren. Sam sent his two sons, Edward and William, to King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia, the favoured school for scions of the Halifax oligarchy. Eventually Edward, called Ned, became his father’s closest business confidant, the only associate he truly trusted with his private plans and ambitions. He travelled with his older daughters, who presided over his homes. His family circle maintained a high wall between himself and the outside world. (On his own deathbed, thirty-seven years after Susan’s death, Sam would doze and wake up to speak about many things. At one point, with his sons on hand, he awoke with tears in his eyes. ‘I have been (#litres_trial_promo) dreaming about your dear mother,’ he said. ‘And a good woman she was.’)

In the early 1830s, Cunard took part in his first steamship venture, the Royal William, which became the first steam-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic from Canada to England. By its limited success and ultimate failure, this undertaking helped prepare him for his transatlantic steamship line.

The principal coastal ship traffic in eastern Canada ran northeasterly from Halifax, around the tip of Cape Breton Island, northwesterly through the Gulf of St Lawrence (perhaps stopping at Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick), and then southwesterly down the St Lawrence River to Quebec City and Montreal. It was an exceptionally dangerous course: whipped by strong, fickle winds and currents, studded with islands and land protrusions, and littered with ice and fog for much of the year. The river froze solid during the long winter. The run between Halifax and Quebec exacted a terrible annual toll in lost ships and men. Under sail, depending on the weather, the trip could take up to five weeks.

The Assembly of Lower Canada, which included Quebec, took steps towards adding steam power to the St Lawrence in the spring of 1825. For expertise they inevitably turned to the River Clyde in Scotland. Charles Wood of Port Glasgow (the son of John Wood, who had built Henry Bell’s Comet and other notable early steamboats) suggested a vessel of 500 tons and 100 horsepower, to cost between £10,000 and £12,000, and capable of running from Halifax to Quebec in a week or less. The Lower Canadian legislature offered a subsidy of £1500; the Assembly of Nova Scotia added another £750. In London, an ambitious prospectus was issued to raise £50,000 for the Halifax and Quebec Steam Boat Company. But the scheme attracted no additional support on either side of the Atlantic and went nowhere. ‘It does seem (#litres_trial_promo) a stain upon our enterprise, ’ said the Novascotian newspaper of Halifax, ‘that upon the harbours or estuaries of this Province we have yet received no advantage from the most gigantic improvement of modern times – navigation by steam.’

Sam Cunard was always cautious about new ship technologies. In his trips to England and down the American coast, he had seen steamboats and acquired some sense of the current state of the art. He was characteristically waiting for others to make the initial mistakes. In the autumn of 1829 some men in Pictou, Nova Scotia, tried to interest him in a steamboat scheme. ‘We are entirely (#litres_trial_promo) unacquainted with the cost of a Steam Boat,’ Cunard told them, ‘& should not like to embark in a business of which we are quite ignorant & must therefore decline taking any part in the one you propose getting up.’ But just a few months later, a local steam ferry (#litres_trial_promo) of thirty horsepower started running from Halifax across the bay to Dartmouth. After overcoming initial problems caused by salt water in her boilers, the ferry gave quick, reliable service. Cunard could watch her puffing back and forth every day, through any wind and weather, and count the additional paying customers she attracted. He began to see possibilities in steam on water.

Early in 1830, the Assembly of Lower Canada doubled its steam offer to £3000, and the Nova Scotian legislature again added its £750. In Halifax, Cunard formed a committee to solicit stockholders in the renewed steamboat company. At a meeting in March he adroitly manoeuvred himself into local leadership of the undertaking. Flourishing a list of 169 people who had promised to buy shares, he proposed a resolution that each subscriber – whether for £500 or £25 – would have just one vote in the proceedings, ‘thus depriving the intelligent and enterprising merchant,’ one high roller later objected, ‘of the proper control over his large advances and placing it at the disposal of a number of small shareholders, in most instances entirely unacquainted with the nature of the business.’ After his resolution passed, the seventy-six subscribers on hand, mostly small investors, elected Cunard as Halifax agent for the steamboat company, granting him the power of general management and control of funds.

Awkwardly balanced between directors in Halifax and Quebec, the company proceeded to build a steamship. The contract went to George Black, a shipbuilder in Quebec City, and his merchant associate John Saxton Campbell. The designer and construction foreman was James Goudie, a local boy who had been sent to Scotland in his mid-teens to apprentice under a Clyde shipbuilder, William Simmons of Greenock. As an assistant foreman to Simmons, Goudie had worked on four steamboats similar to the one he now laid out in Quebec. He had brought the plans back from Scotland in the summer of 1830. ‘As I had (#litres_trial_promo) the drawings and the form of the ship, at that time a novelty in construction,’ Goudie later recalled, ‘it devolved upon me to lay off and expand the draft to its full dimensions on the floor of the loft, where I made several alterations in the lines as improvements. Mr. Black, though the builder and contractor, was in duty bound to follow my instructions, as I understood it.’ When the keel was laid in September, young Goudie was still three months shy of his twenty-first birthday.

The Royal William, named after the reigning king of England, was a large steamship for the time, 160 feet long and 44 feet wide overall, with three masts in a schooner rig. The upper strakes of the hull were flared out to contain and protect the paddle wheels, perhaps with the St Lawrence River’s ice in mind; this bulging gave the vessel an inflated gross capacity of 1370 tons. After being launched in the spring of 1831, she was towed down to Montreal and fitted with a two-cylinder engine of 200 horsepower by Bennet and Henderson. (John Bennet, that firm’s senior partner, had apprenticed at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham.) The crankshafts were forged by Robert Napier at his Camlachie works in Glasgow. Goudie, Black, Campbell and Bennet were all of Scots background. The boat’s designs came from Scotland, as did her crankshafts. Previous accounts have neglected this point: the Royal William was actually a Scottish steamship, built and financed in Canada.

In August she left Quebec on her maiden voyage (#litres_trial_promo), carrying twenty cabin passengers (who paid six pounds, five shillings apiece, including meals and a berth), seventy in steerage, some freight, and 120 tons of coal. After stopping in New Brunswick, she reached Halifax in six and a half days from Quebec. ‘Her beautiful (#litres_trial_promo) fast sailing appearance,’ noted the Acadian Recorder, ‘the powerful and graceful manner in which her paddles served to pace along, and the admirable command which her helmsman had over her, afforded a triumphant specimen of what steam ships are.’ Sam Cunard visited her repeatedly, and no doubt proudly, asking questions and taking notes about her speed, coal consumption and sailing qualities. The Royal William made two more round-trips that year before ice closed the river. The proprietors thought about sending her to England (#litres_trial_promo) for the winter, to ply a coastal route there and earn back more of their investments, but instead she was laid up at Quebec.

She finished her first season amid anaemic receipts, and complaints about excessive charges for passengers and freight that scared business away. ‘While at this port (#litres_trial_promo) thousands of barrels, and scores of passengers, have been landing from Quebec and Halifax,’ a New Brunswick newspaper asked, ‘why has the Royal William been passing our wharves in want of both: as if by the splashing of her paddles, and the smoke of her furnace, she could forever bedim the vigilant eye of an interested public.’ At the start of the 1832 season, the Royal William offered sharply reduced rates (#litres_trial_promo) in order to draw more customers – but then ran into a cholera epidemic. She made only one trip to Halifax that year, was quarantined, and returned to Quebec after almost two months.

Over the winter, her disappointed owners fell to angry squabbling among themselves. The Quebec stockholders accused Sam Cunard (#litres_trial_promo) of claiming too large a fee for his services and of not working in harmony with the company. Cunard in turn charged the Quebec authorities with mistreating the Royal William during the previous season. ‘She was neglected (#litres_trial_promo) in the Winter,’ he maintained, ‘and the frost burst the Pipes & otherwise injured the Machinery by which means a great expense was incurred and the sailing of the Boat delayed until the 15th June whereas she should have made two or three trips before that period – this might have been guarded against by a little care on the part of the committee and having an agent in pay they can have no excuse for the neglect.’ The company was foundering in red ink and feuding leadership. The cholera epidemic of 1832, blamed ever since for the collapse of the enterprise, had merely delivered the final, mortal blow.

In the spring of 1833 the Royal William was sold at a sheriff’s auction in Montreal for £5000 – some £11,000 less than her initial cost only two years earlier. Her new owners tried a coastal voyage down to Boston and back, and then sent her off to England to be sold again. No steamship had ever tried to cross the North Atlantic from Canada to Europe; it was a voyage now conceived in financial desperation. She left Nova Scotia on 18 August 1833, with just seven bold passengers, 324 tons of coal, and a cargo of six spars, one box, one trunk, some produce, household furniture, a box of stuffed birds and a harp.

It was a perilous trip. ‘We were very (#litres_trial_promo) deeply laden with coal,’ the captain, John McDougall, said later, ‘deeper in fact than I would ever attempt crossing the Atlantic with her again.’ On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a gale knocked off the top of the foremast and disabled one of the engine’s cylinders. For a time they seemed to be sinking. But they ploughed ahead on the remaining cylinder, stopping the engine every fourth day to spend twenty-four hours cleaning seawater deposits from the leaky boilers. They proceeded under sail when the engine was down. After nineteen days they limped into Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, for repairs and a cosmetic paint job. They went on to London, where the Royal William was sold for £10,000 to the Portuguese government.

From this whole unlucky episode, Sam Cunard could draw two conclusions. Steamship technology did not, as yet, allow for routine, safe, profitable passages across the Atlantic – or even, for that matter, between Halifax and Quebec. And if he ever got involved in another steamship venture, he would need to run his own show, without having to clear his decisions through ranks of meddling associates. The Royal William experience ultimately reinforced his carefully guarded, self-contained ways.

The failure of his first steamship did Cunard no immediate harm in Halifax; the blame could be shifted elsewhere. Now entering middle age, he was reaching the peak of his local career. In the autumn of 1830, the governor of Nova Scotia had appointed him to the Council, the twelve-man body that served as the upper chamber of the Assembly. His appointment symbolized inclusion at the highest level of the Halifax elite. ‘We sincerely hope (#litres_trial_promo) that the same liberal and expansive views which have distinguished Mr. Cunard as a merchant,’ Joe Howe declared in his Novascotian, ‘may be observable in his legislative character. He is wealthy and influential – he need fear no man, nor follow blindly any body of men; and we trust that he will not disappoint the hopes which many entertain.’ He served on the Council for ten years, often displeasing the reformers.

On a social and cultural level, the entrenched Halifax oligarchs still saw him as slightly alien, not quite a peer. In 1831 the lawyer Lewis Bliss urged his brother Henry, who lived in London, to welcome Cunard on his next trip to England. Lewis admitted he did not know Cunard intimately, having dined at his home only once. ‘I think he (#litres_trial_promo) may be called a gentlemanly man,’ Bliss ventured, ‘– very polished he cannot be expected to be having I believe received rather a scanty education, and moved for the early part of his life not so much in the higher circles now thrown open to him.’ Yet Bliss guessed that Cunard owned, in whole or part, more than thirty ships, and probably cleared £2000 a year from his East India Company tea agency alone: the kind of wealth and imperial connections that could almost compensate for an ungentlemanly background. ‘He is the most (#litres_trial_promo) liberal as well as the most extensively engaged in business of all our Merchants,’ wrote Bliss. ‘He certainly is mild & pleasant in his manners – of an apparently equal temper, and possesses a gentle and not inharmonious voice – in short I look on him as a very good kind of man, and if not very pleasant & agreeable very far from the reverse.’ Furthermore, Cunard’s steady rise from humble origins to heady eminence had not caused any rude behaviour. ‘He may be said to be modest – free from pride & affectation, and I think ambition, or if ambitious, not manifesting it in his conduct at all turns & on all occasions.’

Though his careful manners concealed it, he in fact remained ferociously ambitious. During the 1830s he became a resident director of the Bank of British North America, served as the local agent of the London-based General Mining Association (in charge of coal mines in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island), and bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of timber and rental land on Prince Edward Island – all before the most ambitious act of his life. The Royal William did not entirely kill his interest in steam navigation, as he ran more modest steamboats in the local coastal traffic. At times he took extravagant risks, skirting financial ruin by moving fluid capital from one enterprise to launch yet another. Most of his undertakings, though, were apparently protected by the famous Cunard luck. On one occasion late in 1832, Haligonians waited anxiously for another overdue vessel to arrive. ‘As it is (#litres_trial_promo) one of Cunard’s ships,’ William Blowers Bliss mused, ‘I suppose she will get in at last, he is too lucky to lose her unless she be well insured.’

It was not only luck, of course. Nor, as far as Cunard was concerned, was it the guiding hand of Providence. In his letters he would make passing religious references. ‘If it should (#litres_trial_promo) please God that we should all live to see the next year,’ he might write, ‘…if I should be spared I hope I may yet be useful to our concern.’ But this was just obeisance to an expected form, perhaps inserted simply to please a pious correspondent. Cunard had no real religious convictions. On his deathbed, when his son Ned suggested the attention of a clergyman, Sam declared ‘that he did not (#litres_trial_promo) feel and admit and believe’ – a dying confession that told the stark if unwanted truth.

What he really believed in was himself, the hard, driving, ruthless, tireless engine at the core of his being. Over his lifetime, he lived out the story so beloved by minor novelists of the nineteenth century: the poor boy from the provinces who worked hard, curbed his vices, hoped for the best and took optimistic chances, came to the big city and made his deserving way, and finally seized the most coveted material rewards his society offered. He bridged several distinct eras, from a late-eighteenth-century colonial frontier to high Victorian London. Across these steadily more progressive times, Cunard was a quite modern personality, focused intensely and narrowly on the ongoing prosperity of his enterprises. He prudently adopted new technologies when they seemed useful, measuring his success by profits and numbers that he could see and weigh and count. He trusted nothing but his immediate family and his own unquenchable ambitions.

4. Ships as Engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel (#ulink_8e44a84e-0917-50af-9c90-f35fbfd1babb)

The dream of starting a transatlantic steamship line depended in equal measure on enterprise and engineering, or money and machinery. Engineering had to come first. Once it seemed that engines, boilers and ships had been improved enough to bear the overpowering demands of the North Atlantic Ocean, moneyed investors might come forth to launch the enterprise. Almost nothing in history is truly inevitable; any major event or turning point could have turned out quite differently if shaded by other twists of luck or contingency. But given the ongoing progress in steamship technology, the swelling commercial and political pressures for faster, surer links between Europe and America, and many interested parties on both sides of the ocean ready to invest in any plausible scheme, transatlantic steam seemed virtually certain. The only lingering questions were how soon and by whom. ‘Indeed, all things (#litres_trial_promo) considered, ’ said the Mechanics’ Magazine of London in 1837, ‘the strangest thing about the matter is, that the object should not have been effected many years ago.’

Ocean steamships became the largest, most complicated machines yet devised. As such, they drew on engineering developments in many different fields. British engineering in general was now approaching its nineteenth-century zenith, a dazzling peak moment of practical imagination, commercial success and global impact. British engineers were, for the time being, the best in the world. They had started the first Industrial Revolution and then provided the models for its cloning in Europe and North America. Great Britain was producing far more coal, iron, machinery and technological optimism than any other country. The earliest successful Atlantic steamships could not have come from anywhere else.

Engineering as an exact science was barely a century old. It had originated in France, before the advent of the steam engine, as a real-world application of the Age of Reason. The term ‘engineer’ traditionally meant someone who built only war machines and fortifications; ‘civil engineering’ thus came to mean similar pursuits carried out in peacetime. Influenced by then-current philosophical emphases on rationalist modes of thought, French engineers adapted new ideals of mathematical precision, measurability and experimentation to their practical building tasks. Such pioneers as Pierre Bouguer and Charles Augustin Coulomb invented the fields of structural analysis, applied mechanics and hydraulics. The first engineering schools appeared in eighteenth-century France and long remained the most exacting such institutions in the world.

In Great Britain, engineering at the outset was more intuitive and direct, neither assisted nor impeded by much conscious philosophical baggage. The first British civil engineers – John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, John Rennie – mainly worked with the traditional materials of wood, stone and masonry to build improved roads, bridges and harbours. In particular, they constructed canals, the prevailing transportation fad during the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. A canal, a water medium, had to remain as level as possible throughout its course. That meant rearranging the natural environment to an unprecedented degree: building up embankments, running high viaducts across valleys, bridging rivers, cutting down the smaller hills, and tunnelling through larger ones. The Sapperton Tunnel (#litres_trial_promo) on the Thames and Severn Canal, finished in 1789, was over two miles long – an amazing feat at the time. Humans were imposing their will on nature as never before, for all to see, and by their success were encouraged to entertain yet more Promethean ambitions for themselves. As civil engineering matured, it shed its original honest-workman’s aura, became a more socially acceptable career, and professionalized itself. The Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818, mainly by canal men. ‘Civil Engineering is (#litres_trial_promo) the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man,’ explained an ICE leader. ‘The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic.’

The next generation of British engineers typically adopted newer building materials and power, especially iron, coal and steam engines. The line between the two groups was not quite that stark; Telford and Rennie, from the first generation, had used cast iron in their bridges as early as the 1790s. The real demarcation came down to function. The founding civil engineers built objects that did not move. The later mechanical engineers, as they were called, built machines that snorted and clanked across the landscape. One was best known for canals and bridges, the other for railways and steam power. Many individuals continued to work at every type of engineering. But with the narrowing of newer specializations, and the relentless deepening of requisite knowledge in any given field, the civils and mechanicals diverged ever more sharply, sometimes feuding with each other. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, started in 1846 by railway men, gave this hardening division an organized boundary.

Most of the early British engineers, both civil and mechanical, came from Scotland and northern England. Telford and Rennie were Scotsmen who learned their crafts in Edinburgh, then migrated south to find work. Henry Maudslay (#litres_trial_promo), a noted steam engine builder and inventor of machine tools, was from a Lancashire family outside Liverpool. He grew up in his father’s carpentry shop but preferred working with iron, so he switched to blacksmithing. Wielding his hammer, file and chisel, he was a true artist, deft and inventive, utterly in his element. He moved to London and opened a workshop that became famous for its marine steam engines and general excellence. James Nasmyth, one of his many apprentices who went on to notable engineering careers, fondly recalled his first impression of Maudslay’s shop at Lambeth in 1829: ‘the beautiful machine (#litres_trial_promo) tools, the silent smooth whirl of the machinery, the active movements of the men, the excellent quality of the work in progress, and the admirable order and management that pervaded the whole establishment.’ Maudslay stressed simplicity and economy to his assistants, demonstrating the lesson by turning a rough piece of metal into a smooth, plane surface with just a few precise strokes of his file.

Civil and mechanical engineers jointly created their most significant early achievement, the steam railway. Mining operations had already produced the first small steam locomotives and had demonstrated the unmatchable rolling efficiency of iron wheels on iron tracks. Because the earliest railway locomotives lacked much pulling or braking power, the right-of-way had to avoid steep hills; that meant borrowing from the canal builders’ levelling techniques for tunnels, viaducts, embankments and cuttings. Mail coaches and coastal steamboat lines had shown the advantages of providing public transportation on set timetables at fixed fees. All these separate strands came together in tracks and trains. Because the Industrial Revolution had arrived so early in Britain, it happened there long before the railway – a sequence not repeated anywhere else. The iron horse then exploded on a society already well industrialized, quickly transforming everyday life in ways that steam-powered mines, mills and factories had not touched.

George Stephenson (#litres_trial_promo), the seminal British railway pioneer, was an illiterate engine mechanic born near Newcastle. He always spoke with a thick Northumbrian accent barely intelligible to southerners. After a delayed education, Stephenson built the initial two railways in England, the Stockton and Darlington (1825) and the Liverpool and Manchester (1830), designing the locomotives and rolling stock as well as laying down the track and its associated structures. The Liverpool and Manchester, the first line to run between major cities, was expected mainly to carry freight such as coal, cotton and timber between the port on the Mersey and the booming inland factory city. But passengers came forth in surprising numbers, so Stephenson started offering them fast trains on a regular schedule.

What the customers were buying was speed, achieved with a smoothness and consistency previously unknown. It seemed extraordinary that a businessman could leave Liverpool in the morning, travel thirty-three miles and spend his long workday in Manchester, and still return home by that night in reasonable fettle. A mail coach might average only about ten quite jostling miles an hour. A fast horse and rider at full gallop could reach up to forty miles an hour, but only in brief spurts, and with an exhausting clatter and commotion. Railway engines would match a galloping horse and maintain that speed serenely for hours, chuffing along in a steady rhythm with no apparent strain.

In the summer of 1830, the actress Fanny Kemble – fresh from her first great triumphs on the London stage – took an excited ride on a Liverpool and Manchester locomotive, with Stephenson himself driving. She felt inclined to pat the small iron horse, which consisted of just a boiler, stove, engine and gleaming steel pistons, a platform, bench, coals and a barrel of water. ‘How strange it seemed,’ she noted, ‘to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace.’ No horse, no sail; how did it move? They glided easily through cuttings, across bridges and a viaduct, along raised embankments, and over a swamp. Stephenson described the construction of his locomotive, which Kemble thought she understood (‘His way of explaining himself is peculiar, but very striking’). After taking on more water, he let out the throttle, pushing the engine to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour. Sensing the dramatic moment, Kemble stood up, took off her bonnet, and drank it in. The onrushing air pushed against her, forcing her eyelids down. It felt like flying, so fast and yet so smooth and free. ‘When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet, strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear.’

Fanny Kemble’s joyful initiation into railbound flight symbolized a turning point in material history. The triumphs of engineering now hooked the nineteenth century on an ongoing expectation of constant, unsatisfied acceleration: speed and progress, reaching into every area of life, ever faster, and regardless of the dangers. ‘Verily is ours (#litres_trial_promo) the age for invention,’ said the Illustrated London News in 1842. It was in many ways a Faustian contract, balanced uncertainly between gains and losses. Critics of modernity such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris played a steady minor-keyed threnody in the background as Victorian progress boomed inexorably along. A few dissenting engineers (#litres_trial_promo) did express timid misgivings about such headlong haste, and about the harrowing, infernal landscape of the Black Country of coal and iron mines in the industrial Midlands. But most practitioners, civils and mechanicals alike, shrugged off such criticisms. ‘If we would (#litres_trial_promo) credit these imbecile philosophers, the introduction of every machine is an injury rather than a benefit,’ one engineer bristled. ‘There can be no greater fallacy than this.’

Most engineers apparently believed their work would improve humankind – lightening its labour, speeding and easing travel, making life more comfortable and abundant. In any case, they devoted themselves to engineering for the more basic reason that they so enjoyed their craft. Engineers worked very hard, to the point in many cases of wearing themselves out at a premature age. R. A. Buchanan, the eminent historian of Victorian engineering, has suggested that they toiled such long hours mainly because they preferred it to any other possible activity. They didn’t socialize much, avoided religious and political strifes, and lived simply and quietly. In 1838 a young railway engineer, Daniel Gooch, made an expected appearance at a dinner party thrown by his boss’s family – but quickly escaped. ‘I believe (#litres_trial_promo) I did succeed in getting as far as the staircase,’ he scolded himself in his diary, ‘and left it disgusted with London parties, making a note in my memorandum-book never to go to another.’

Nestled into their workshops, pondering some engineering puzzle of agreeable difficulty, they found their truest happiness in making up a brand-new world. Henry Maudslay took obvious, extravagant pleasure in manipulating his tools, loving the work for its own sake as much as for its applied uses. It called on all the keenest faculties of mind, eye and hand. To plan their projects, engineers made careful drawings and crafted detailed models. ‘Drawing is (#litres_trial_promo) the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words,’ James Nasmyth insisted. ‘The language of the tongue is often used to disguise our thoughts, whereas the language of the pencil is clear and explicit.’ Fondling their raw materials on a workbench, shaping and pounding and drilling, the engineers absorbed cues and knowledge directly through their fingertips. Inspiration flowed from the head and eyes out through the hands to the work, and then back again, in a seamless, tactile circuit of material creation. At their peaks, they felt the exultation of artists.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a prime inventive force behind the three most innovative ocean steamships built before 1870. Yet he spent most of his career on other projects ashore; he was not a naval architect or shipbuilder or any sort of marine engineer. As a landlubber, prone to seasickness, he never even took a major ocean voyage until the last year of his life. His steamships seem still more imposing as the off-hand products of a very busy engineer usually focused in other directions. During his lifetime of great fame and achievement, brunel was often called a genius for the crunching power, range and originality of his mind. More successfully than any of his contemporaries, he straddled the widening split between civil and mechanical engineering, resisting the modernist specializing trend. He deplored ‘the benumbing effect (#litres_trial_promo) of rules laid down by authority’, as he put it, ‘this tendency to legislate and to rule, which is the “fashion” of the day’ No strict categories or conventions could ever contain him.

He made his first reputation as the engineer to the Great Western Railway. brunel surveyed its route – a winding course that ran 117 miles west from London to the port city of Bristol – and then planned every detail of its construction, from the locomotives and rolling stock down to the lamp-posts and stations. ‘No one can (#litres_trial_promo) fill up the details,’ he explained. ‘I am obliged to do all myself.’ He made lavish use of all the canal builders’ methods for remaking a resistant landscape, so levelling the grade that the line was known as ‘brunel’s billiard table (#litres_trial_promo)’. The Box Tunnel (#litres_trial_promo) east of Bath ran for 1.8 miles through an insurmountable hill, much of it solid rock. The digging and blasting on this single project engaged up to 4000 workmen and 300 horses at a time, consumed a weekly ton of gunpowder and ton of candles, and killed nearly 100 men in five years. On completion it was the longest railway tunnel in the world. (The rising sun is said to shine clear through the tunnel on one day of the year, 9 April, brunel’s birthday. Given the usual spring weather in southwest England, this intriguing legend can seldom be tested, which may explain its survival.)

Queen Victoria chose the Great Western for her first trip by railway. In June 1842, returning to London from a sojourn at Windsor Castle, she and Prince Albert boarded a special train at Slough. The royal party, in six carriages, was greeted at the station by the Great Western’s top brass, and brunel personally took charge of the locomotive. The train reached Paddington Station in twenty-five fast minutes. Victoria and Albert alighted on a crimson carpet that stretched across the platform, and were cheered by crowds at the station and along the avenue outside. ‘Free from (#litres_trial_promo) dust and crowd and heat,’ the queen noted of her railway baptism, ‘and I am quite charmed with it.’ A year later, Albert flew (#litres_trial_promo) from Bristol to London in just over two hours, averaging a breathtaking fifty-seven miles an hour. Nothing could have better advertised the Great Western Railway – and its chief engineer.

brunel became a celebrity, an engineering superstar at a time when the public works of engineers were remaking everyday life in large, visible ways and sparking the popular imagination as never before. ‘Even to shake (#litres_trial_promo) hands with one so remarkable,’ an acquaintance later wrote of meeting brunel, ‘was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime.’ He loved any spotlight, courting it and capering in it, presenting himself in dramatic ways. He was a small man, about five feet four (#litres_trial_promo) inches tall, with an olive complexion and blazing dark eyes under a strong brow. He moved about quickly under clouds of cigar smoke, vital and vigorous, gesturing expansively with his hands as he spoke. brunel worked killing hours, even by engineering standards, but maintained a boyishly playful disposition, fond of jokes and pranks (#litres_trial_promo). Regardless of any contrary fashions, he wore a tall, cylindrical silk hat everywhere, even in his own travelling carriage. He explained, perhaps seriously, that it would protect his head from any blow by collapsing before the skull was struck. ‘It is at once (#litres_trial_promo) warm and airy,’ he elaborated, ‘and you cannot improve upon it.’ (It also made him look taller.)

The extent of his fame was revealed in the spring of 1843 when, performing a coin trick for the children of a friend, he accidentally swallowed a half sovereign. It settled in his windpipe, causing pain in the chest and fits of coughing, and could not be dislodged. brunel designed an apparatus for holding himself upside down, hoping that gravity would help expel the coin. He was inverted and tapped on the back, causing such convulsive coughing that the experiment was abandoned. Sir Benjamin Brodie, a prominent physiologist and surgeon, was summoned. He performed a tracheotomy and poked around with his forceps, but without success. Newspapers issued regular bulletins. Even the august Times, which liked to define serious news coverage, kept its readers well informed. ‘Mr. brunel passed (#litres_trial_promo) a quiet night,’ The Times reported. Four days later: ‘He was able on Thursday to take a small quantity of fish.’ And three days more: ‘Mr. brunel is going on favourably.’ At last, after almost six weeks, he was again turned upside down, with the incision in his windpipe kept open. Hit gently between the shoulder blades, brunel coughed twice, and the coin dropped from his mouth. The Times published a detailed final report (‘And thus, under Providence, a most valuable life has been preserved’).

Over his career, brunel contrived great triumphs and equally great failures. Everything about him was exaggerated; he vividly displayed both the strengths and deficiencies of genius. He reasonably believed that he knew more, across a wider range of engineering fields, than almost anybody he encountered. Among railway men, only Robert Stephenson, the accomplished son of George Stephenson, was greeted as a peer. ‘Stephenson is (#litres_trial_promo) decidedly the only man in the profession that I feel disposed to meet as my equal, or superior, perhaps,’ brunel noted. ‘He has a truly mechanical head.’ Anyone else was expected to defer to brunel’s authority. His unorthodox mind and dead-sure tenacity pushed him through any obstacles into bold, original achievements – and also made him a quite difficult associate and boss. It was generally best not to resist or disagree with him. ‘Admit him (#litres_trial_promo) to be absolute,’ one colleague noticed, ‘and he was not only reasonable, but kind. Hint to him that you had rights, and he was inexorable.’

As an engineer, he most valued ‘usefulness (#litres_trial_promo)’, he insisted, ‘that characteristic of which we are most proud, and for which we have the vanity to think we are peculiarly distinguished.’ But ‘usefulness’ to brunel meant deploying the newest, strongest materials and methods, as called for by the most extravagant engineering standards available. The Great Western was the fastest, most solidly built railway of its time, but also the most expensive at £6.5 million, well over twice brunel’s initial estimate. He characteristically would brush aside budgets and spiralling expenses, preferring not to think about money, wanting only to be left free to do his finest work – thereby distressing his helpless financial associates, endangering and sometimes wrecking the whole enterprise. ‘He was the very (#litres_trial_promo) Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends,’ a harsh contemporary estimate in the Quarterly Review concluded. ‘He seemed to love difficulties so much that he not infrequently chose the most difficult manner of overcoming them. Whatever was fullest of engineering perils had the greatest charms for him. That which was easy was comparatively uninteresting.’ Despite his declared focus on usefulness, he was actually the purest of engineers: a demanding, relentless artist intent on finding the most elegant solution regardless of costs or circumstances.

None of his debacles ever impeded his uncanny ability to get jobs and attract new investors. He caught and embodied the relentless engineering optimism of his time. ‘The most useful (#litres_trial_promo) and valuable experience is that derived from failures and not from successes,’ he once wrote. ‘But what cannot (#litres_trial_promo) be done?’ When testifying before a board of directors or a committee of Parliament, he was a formidable advocate: overflowing with esoteric knowledge, diplomatic yet seemingly candid, speaking tersely to the point, and charming and witty when that seemed appropriate. He could usually persuade even the most sceptical listeners. He disliked writing and thought he had no talent for it, but his memoranda piled up compelling arguments by steady accretion. brunel was also a facile, accurate draughtsman, decorating his workbooks with fine small drawings tossed off for the apparent fun of it, and if necessary he could go to his workshop and make a skilful model of a design in wood or iron. With his command of speaking, writing, drawing and modelling, he had the rare capacity to explain himself with clarity and eloquence in four modes and three dimensions – a key to his overwhelming powers of persuasion.

Today brunel remains the only British engineer of his era with an enduring popular reputation. In Great Britain he is virtually a folk hero (#litres_trial_promo). Some of his notable engineering works have survived as reminders of his wide-ranging inventiveness. The Great Western Railway still runs across many of his bridges and through the Box Tunnel. At one end of the line, his station at Bristol Temple Meads still stands, though now reduced to a humble car park. At the other end, his Paddington Station in London encloses tracks and platforms in a space 700 feet long and 240 feet wide, under a vaulting roof of wrought-iron arched ribs covered with glass and corrugated iron. The Royal Albert Bridge, his greatest feat of bridge building, crosses the River Tamar near Plymouth in two spans of 455 feet each, an artful blend of arch and suspension techniques. With its approaches added, the Royal Albert traverses a total of almost 2200 feet. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, over the dramatically deep Avon gorge, was finished to his designs as a posthumous memorial. The Great Britain, his second ocean steamship, was improbably salvaged after a long, chequered career and was brought home to Bristol to be reconstructed and opened to the public.

Other brunel traces help keep his name alive. The reputations of historical figures often depend on the written footprints they happened to leave behind; brunel’s private papers and manuscripts, amounting to at least twenty-seven thick letterbooks and many other files, are housed at the University of Bristol and at the Public Record Office in Kew. Other brunel letters are scattered in a dozen archives across Great Britain. One of the fullest research troves available for any Victorian engineer, these materials allow historians an uncommonly rich record of his life. At Westminster Abbey, a brunel window in the south aisle memorializes him. A brunel statue stands on the Thames Embankment in London, looking upriver towards the Charing Cross site of his Hungerford pedestrian bridge, now long gone. At Paddington Station, another statue has him sitting down, looking thoughtful, holding his tall silk hat in one hand and a notebook in the other. In Bristol, a third statue presents him standing up, a jaunty hand in his waistband, gazing off towards the river and his preserved Great Britain steamship.

Brunel’s biography recapitulates the history of engineering in his time, from its French origins to its ultimate mid-Victorian feats in iron and steam. His father, Marc Isambard brunel, came from a family of tenant farmers in northern France, halfway between Paris and Rouen. Over his father’s opposition, Marc decided to be an engineer and spent six years in the French navy. Came the Revolution, and his Royalist sympathies exiled him to America, then to England, where he married an Englishwoman and settled into a picaresque engineering career. He always dressed and carried himself like a gentleman from the ancien régime, with its antiquated manners and costume. Once, in a British court proceeding, he was asked if he was a foreigner. ‘Yes, I am (#litres_trial_promo) a Norman,’ he replied, ‘and Normandy is a country from whence your oldest nobility derive their titles.’

Marc brunel met Henry Maudslay in 1799, two years after Maudslay had opened his own machinist’s workshop. Their complementary skills meshed well: the French-trained engineer explaining his concepts, the skilled British mechanic bringing them down to ground and to practical execution. brunel and Maudslay worked on projects together for the next twenty years. At the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, under the supervision of the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham they devised steam-powered machinery for making the wooden blocks (pulleys) used in great numbers by sailing ships, turning out a cheaper, more consistent product than by the old hand methods. From this first success, brunel went on to inventions for sawing and bending wood, making shoes and boots, and improving marine steam engines and steamboat paddle wheels. He never quite regained the early heights of his novel blockmaking machinery. Abstracted and absentminded, he would lose umbrellas and take the wrong coach, ending up somewhere out in the country. A financial innocent, at one point he spent three months in a debtors’ prison.

Marc’s greatest work was his son, Isambard, born at Portsmouth in 1806. The boy resembled his father in appearance – small, a large head, dark complexion and eyes – and in his apparently innate knack for drawing and machinery. Isambard grew up in Chelsea, swimming in the Thames and meeting a stream of famous visitors at home. He found his métier at the Maudslay workshop: ‘your firm (#litres_trial_promo),’ as he later wrote to the Maudslays, ‘with which all my early recollections of engineering are so closely connected and in whose manufactory I probably acquired all my early knowledge of mechanics.’ Sent off to school near Brighton, he wrote home that he had been making boats, thus injuring his hands, and asked for his father’s eighty-foot tape measure. He spent two years in Paris, studying maths and the French language, and apprenticing under a famous maker of chronometers and scientific instruments. Denied entrance to the elite Ecole Polytechnique because of his foreign birth, he returned to England in 1822 and went to work for his father.

Still a teenager, he had already accumulated a range of education and experience – from Marc, Henry Maudslay, and in France – that few British engineers of his generation could match. Bilingual, bicultural, he displayed a precocious sense of engineering theory and practice. His intellectual gifts were obvious. Marc fully recognized them and pushed his son onward. As Isambard’s career took flight, his immersion in real engineering projects eventually crowded out his more theoretical French background. ‘One sadly loses (#litres_trial_promo) the habit of mathematical reasoning,’ he noted. He became very much an Englishman, speaking with no French accent, and ever wary of continental tendencies. Later he advised a young man to spurn any writings by French engineers. ‘Take them (#litres_trial_promo) for abstract science,’ he suggested, ‘and study their statics dynamics geometry etc etc to your heart’s content – but never even read any of their works on mechanics any more than you would search their modern authors for religious principles. A few hours spent in a blacksmith’s and wheelwright’s shop will teach you more practical mechanics – read English books for practice. There is little enough to learn in them but you will not have to unlearn that little.’

In 1825 the brunels embarked on a daring, unprecedented project to build a 1200-foot carriage tunnel under the Thames. Nobody had ever run a tunnel beneath a navigable, tidal river. The watery riverbed overhead consisted of unpredictable mixtures of clay, sand, gravel and mud, and was constantly disrupted by tides and river traffic. For these daunting conditions, Marc invented a novel construction shield. It resembled a giant bookshelf, three men high and twelve men across. Each man stood in a separate compartment, digging with pick and shovel; as the ground was excavated, the shield was screwed forward; bricklayers came in behind and shored up the tunnel. The work inched along, beset by leaking water and lighting and ventilation problems. At times the men stood in black water up to their knees.

After a year of difficulties, Marc took sick and told Isambard, twenty years old, to take over. The response of the brawny workmen to their new boss – so young, small, and French-educated to boot – may be imagined. Given all the circumstances, he managed well enough. At one point, with water leaking into the tunnel again, he did not get to bed for five straight nights. ‘No one has (#litres_trial_promo) stood out like him!’ Marc wrote in his diary. Two hard years into the project, the river broke through from overhead in a gushing flood. Isambard descended on a rope to rescue a workman. For three weeks he could not plug the holes. Marc was harshly criticized (#litres_trial_promo) by the authoritative Mechanics’ Magazine of London for not accepting advice or taking responsibility for his crucial mistakes. The leaks were finally sealed and work resumed, but in a changed climate of watchful outside scepticism.

Isambard sought refuge in an extraordinary private journal, the most candid and searching self-appraisals he ever committed to paper. He recorded the details of his daily life, the tunnel work, sleeping five hours a night, and stray thoughts about girls. At twenty-one, despite his adult responsibilities in the tunnel, he was between adolescence and grownup-ness. Still under construction, he took an unsparing look at himself. ‘My self-conceit and love of glory or rather approbation vie with each other which shall govern me,’ he wrote. ‘I often do the most silly, useless things to appear to advantage… My self-conceit renders me domineering, intolerant, nay, even quarrelsome with those who do not flatter.…I am always building castles in the air, what time I waste.’ Yet that self-conceit had quite adequate cause; he fully appreciated his own special talents and sought fame and reputation. ‘My ambition, or whatever it may be called (it is not the mere wish to be rich) is rather extensive.’ So probably he should never marry. ‘For one whose ambition is to distinguish himself in the eye of the public, such freedom is almost indispensable.’ Or maybe he should. ‘Yet, in sickness and disappointment, how delightful to have a companion whose sympathy one is sure of possessing.’ In this journal, he is less the engineering wunderkind, more any young man in baffled turmoil about his future.

In January 1828 water again broke into the tunnel, more seriously this time. Six men were killed. Isambard was knocked down, suffered internal injuries, and barely escaped alive. It took him over three months to heal. The Mechanics’ Magazine, no fan of the brunels, praised his coolness (#litres_trial_promo) under pressure and brave concern for his men. But investors had lost confidence in the project, still only half completed. Work was stopped and the tunnel sealed. ‘Tunnel is now (#litres_trial_promo), I think, dead,’ Isambard later wrote in his diary. ‘This is the first time I have felt able to cry… However, nil desperandum [never despair] has always been my motto – we may succeed yet.’

At the time, he felt crushed by such a public defeat. The halting of the Thames Tunnel project did, however, free brunel from an endless, risky, dreadful burden – and from his father’s orbit – to pursue other work on his own. In Bristol, his designs for docks and the Clifton Suspension Bridge brought him to the attention of men involved in starting the Great Western Railway. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-six, he was entering the most successful decade of his career. (The Thames Tunnel project was later resumed, but without brunel fils. It opened in 1843 just for pedestrians, not carriages, and ultimately became part of the London Underground.)

In step with the general progression from civil to mechanical engineering, brunel’s attention moved from tunnels to railways. He took his first trip late in 1831, on the Liverpool and Manchester. The carriage shook too much for easy writing. ‘The time is not (#litres_trial_promo) far off,’ he decided, ‘when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 miles an hour – let me try.’ He got his chance with the Great Western, the longest railway yet conceived in Great Britain. Appointed its engineer in the spring of 1833, he threw himself into this new work with all the energy of a good engineer at play. He spent long days on horseback surveying and plotting its route, placating resistant landowners along the way, and stayed up late writing letters and reports. Against the advice of most railway men, he convinced his board to accept a broad gauge of seven feet, more than two feet wider than the tracks of existing lines: a bold departure, ultimately proven wrongheaded, but early evidence of brunel’s forceful persuasive gifts.

For two years he was too busy even to scribble in his diary. The day after Christmas in 1835, he finally sat down and took stock. ‘The most eventful (#litres_trial_promo) part of my life…emerging from obscurity,’ he wrote. ‘What a change – The Railway now is in progress. I am thus Engineer to the finest work in England…and it’s not this alone but everything I have been engaged in has been successful.’ (He was perhaps repressing any memories of the Thames Tunnel.) ‘And this at the age of 29 – Faith not so young as I always fancy tho’ really can hardly believe it when I think of it.…I don’t like it – it can’t last – bad weather must soon come.’ He moved into plusher quarters at 18 Duke Street in the Westminster area of London, with easy access to the corridors of influence at Parliament and Whitehall. It remained brunel’s home and office for the rest of his life. Resolving his earlier doubts about possible marital intrusions on those boundless ambitions, in July 1836 he took a trophy wife, a fabled beauty named Mary Horsley (#litres_trial_promo) whom he had known and intermittently courted for five years.

Marriage and, later, fatherhood did not affect his usual work habits. During the first four months (#litres_trial_promo) after his wedding, he made decisions about the brick-arched Maidenhead Bridge over the Thames, the Box Tunnel, the tile drains along the track, the heating and welding of iron bars, the sinking of bridge arches and the proper way of laying bricks, the ordering of four locomotives, the size of engine valves relative to piston area, the question of allowing Great Western work on Sundays, and the cheapest wood for posts. It was brunel’s line, all down the line. He installed his own methods for putting down the roadbed and securing the rails, served as architect for every station along the way, and even picked the names for the first locomotives. ‘It is an understood (#litres_trial_promo) thing,’ he wrote to one of his men, ‘that all under me are subject to immediate dismissal at my pleasure.’

brunel’s control of every aspect of the Great Western made him the culprit when anything went wrong. As construction took longer and longer, and costs more than doubled, directors in London and Liverpool started having doubts about their young engineer. ‘The Box Tunnel (#litres_trial_promo) is operating a good deal against the Great Western,’ noted George H. Gibbs, a London director. ‘Connecting it with the name of brunel, the difficulties of the Thames Tunnel are not unlikely to come into people’s mind.’ The first section of the line, from London to Maidenhead, was opened to passengers in June 1838. When trains did not run as fast or as smoothly as expected, brunel recommended reballasting the roadbed, replacing springs in the cars, and improving the locomotives. As the trading price of Great Western stock kept falling, shareholders in Liverpool moved to dismiss brunel. Even George Gibbs, who usually defended him, felt torn. ‘With all his (#litres_trial_promo) talent,’ Gibbs wrote of brunel, ‘he has shown himself deficient…in arranging his work in his own mind so as to enable him to proceed with it rapidly, economically and surely. There have been too many mistakes, too much of doing and undoing.’

Under fire, for a brief time brunel felt shattered, even unable to work. His creation, so subject to costly revisions, was mockingly called the Great Experimental Railway (#litres_trial_promo). Gibbs had a blunt conversation (#litres_trial_promo) with him; brunel promised to cooperate and retained the support of Gibbs and his faction. At a tense showdown during a meeting of the directors, brunel was again persuasive, defending himself with an even temper and compelling effect. The Liverpool contingent was outvoted, and brunel proceeded to finish the Great Western. Upon completion, it was acclaimed as the fastest, most strongly built railway in the world, and its engineer’s characteristic problems along the way were forgotten.

Brunel’s first steamship began with a famous jest in October 1835. At a Great Western directors meeting in London, someone objected to the unprecedented length of the line, planned to run all the way to Bristol through many expensive tunnels at the western end. Rising to the challenge and topping it, brunel replied with what he apparently meant as a joke: ‘Why not make (#litres_trial_promo) it longer, and have a steamboat to go from Bristol to New York?’ A director from Bristol, an engineer turned sugar refiner named Thomas R. Guppy, took the riposte seriously. He and brunel talked it over that night. brunel had almost no prior experience with steam on water, but he recognized few boundaries to his engineering skills. He brought in an acquaintance, a semi-retired Royal Navy officer named Christopher Claxton, whom he knew from his earlier work for the Bristol docks. The three men started an informal steamship committee.

Claxton and William Patterson, a local shipbuilder, toured the main steam ports of Great Britain and sailed on every coastal and channel steamboat line. ‘Great improvements (#litres_trial_promo) are being gradually introduced,’ they reported in January, ‘more particularly observable in the Clyde than elsewhere.’ For crossing the ocean, they recommended a much larger steamship than any yet built. They invoked a common principle, well known to shipbuilders of the time: that a vessel’s resistance as it moved through the water did not increase in direct proportion to its tonnage. As a measure of interior space, tonnage was computed from three dimensions. Resistance was then estimated from just two dimensions, the width and depth of the hull. Thus tonnage increased as the cube of the dimensions, resistance only as the square of them. A much larger ocean ship could therefore include the necessary space for coals and machinery, well beyond the capacity of a conventional ship, without requiring intolerable increases in power and fuel consumption to maintain adequate speed. Claxton and Patterson estimated that a steamship of 1200 tons and 300 horsepower, loaded with 580 tons of coal, would average between six and nine knots and cross the Atlantic in less than twenty days to the west, and just thirteen days to the east: roughly half the average voyages by sail.

The Great Western Steam Ship Company first planned to build two ships of that size, then decided on a single larger vessel of 1400 tons and 400 horsepower. Patterson – ‘known as a man (#litres_trial_promo) open to conviction,’ according to Claxton, ‘and not prejudiced in favour of either quaint or old-fashioned notions in ship-building’ – would build her in Bristol. As managing director of the new company, Claxton looked after day-to-day operations. The building committee of brunel, Guppy, Claxton and Patterson met about once a week, whenever railway business brought brunel to Bristol. In general, on this committee Patterson took charge of the ship, brunel of the engine. ‘Mr. Patterson drew (#litres_trial_promo) the lines,’ Claxton later recalled; ‘Mr. brunel, Mr. Guppy, and myself, often sat over them; Mr. Patterson got instructions and made his own calculations accurately; Mr. brunel made his also often by my side.’ Over the next two years, they planned and built the largest steamship yet, the first designed for regular crossings of the North Atlantic.

They were racing against a competing group in London organized by Junius Smith, an expatriate American businessman. His British and American Steam Navigation Company drew investors from both sides of the ocean. This final sprint to steam across the Atlantic came down to three separate but overlapping rivalries: Britain against America, Bristol against London, and the Clyde against the Thames (or the North against the South). Subtly complicated and multiply crosshatched, the contest was played out amid fierce regional loyalties for rich stakes of prestige and fortune.

The crucial technical questions involved engines and boilers. The two leading British builders of marine steam engines were Robert Napier of Glasgow and Maudslay, Sons and Field (#litres_trial_promo) of London. (Clyde and Thames.) After Marc brunel’s old friend Henry Maudslay died in 1831, the firm had passed on to his sons, Thomas and Joseph, and in particular to Joshua Field, a skilled engineer and manager. ‘No vessel ever (#litres_trial_promo) had a sufficient power yet,’ Field had declared in 1822. ‘There is a limit, but that limit has never yet reached its fullest extent.’ As horsepowers kept on growing, the upper border was continuously extended. Progress already seemed infinite. By the 1830s, both Napier and Field were intrigued by the potential honour of powering the first true Atlantic steamship. ‘I have not (#litres_trial_promo) the smallest doubt upon my own mind,’ Napier wrote in 1833, ‘but that in a very short time it will be one of the best and most lucrative businesses in the country.’ ‘The distance is limited (#litres_trial_promo),’ Field added a few years later, ‘only by the quantity of coal she can carry.’

By then both Scottish and English engineers had settled on the side-lever engine (#litres_trial_promo) as the best mechanism for an ocean steamship. Derived from Watt’s old overhead beam engine, it placed the main weight of the power source at the bottom of the ship, lowering its centre of gravity to limit rolling and pitching in heavy seas. A vertical engine cylinder drove a horizontal beam pivoted in the middle, with tandem connecting rods at its ends running downward to side levers, which drove a crank on the paddle shaft to turn the paddles. It was complicated and inefficient, moving massive weights up and down, with each stroke coming to a dead stop and then reversing. The bulky rods and levers added weight and took up precious cargo space. But the various parts were easily accessible and well balanced, minimizing friction and strain and needing less lubrication than other engine types. The piston’s long stroke made full use of steam in the cylinder. Confined to the ship’s closed hold, it was protected from foul weather and did not interfere with sailors moving about on the deck. Napier changed (#litres_trial_promo) the framing from cast to wrought iron, making it lighter and stronger. The side-lever engine was considered exceptionally rugged and reliable, important qualities for crossing 3000 miles of ocean.

The earliest marine boilers were kettle types, simply a drum of water heated by an external fire. Around 1830, Maudslay and others introduced a variation on the locomotive boiler, featuring an internal furnace that expelled its exhaust gases through long, narrow flues, making fuller use of the heat to produce more steam. But steamship boilers remained primitive and inconsistent, box-shaped and riddled with fragile seams. Each engine builder made his own boilers, using construction methods and metals of unpredictable quality. No one as yet dared push a seagoing boiler beyond a modest pressure of about five pounds per square inch. Lower pressure held down horsepower and made the engine use more coal, which limited the ship’s range and cargo capacity. More than any other technical factor, the state of boiler technology was keeping steamships off the Atlantic.

Several steamers had already crossed the ocean, but not under continuous power or as part of a regularly scheduled service. The American vessel Savannah (#litres_trial_promo) went from the United States to England in 1819, steaming only for about eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day passage. Over the next fourteen years, at least five other steamships (#litres_trial_promo) made an Atlantic crossing, down to the Scottish-Canadian Royal William in 1833, Samuel Cunard’s first venture into steam navigation. None of these ships could carry enough fuel to steam all the way. In any case, the salt water’s scaly deposits in the boilers had to be blown off or laboriously chipped out with hammer and chisel at frequent intervals; that meant stopping the engine for up to a day and proceeding under sail until the puny boilers could be cleaned, refilled, and get up steam again.