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The Germanic Hero Politics and Pragmatism in Early
Medieval Poetry 1st Edition Brian Murdoch Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Brian Murdoch
ISBN(s): 9781441174659, 1441174656
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 9.62 MB
Year: 2003
Language: english
THE GERMANIC
HERO
Politics and Pragmatism
in Early Medieval Poetry
This page intentionally left blank
THE GERMANIC
HERO
Politics and Pragmatism
in Early Medieval Poetry

BRIAN MURDOCH

THE HAMBLEDON PRESS

LONDON AND RIO GRANDE

 Brian Murdoch 1996

Published by The Hambledon Press 1996

102 Gloucester Avenue, London NWI SHX (UK)
P.O. Box 162, Rio Grande, Ohio 45674 (USA)

A description of this book is available from the British Library and from
the Library of Congress

ISBN i 85285 143 o

Typeset by Carnegie Publishing Ltd, 18 Maynard St, Preston

Printed on acid-free paper and bound in Great Britain by
Cambridge University Press
 Contents
Preface vii

1 About Heroes: Otto, Sigurðr, Hamðir and Byrhtnoð i

2 Coping with Necessity: Hildebrand, Gunnarr

and Völundr 33

3 Youth, Education and Age: Beowulf, Ernst of

Bavaria and Heinrich of Kempten 61

4 In the Hands of the Church: Waltharius the

Visigoth and Louis of the West Franks 89

5 Shifting Perspectives: Roland 118

6 Damage and Damage Limitation:

The Nibelungs, Hilde and Kudrun 147

Bibliography of Primary Texts 176

Index to Secondary Literature 182

Index i86
This page intentionally left blank
 Preface

T hese chapters were originally given as the Waynflete Lectures

at Magdalen College, Oxford in the Michaelmas Term, 1994;
I have tried to preserve the immediacy of the lecture form whilst
expanding and providing the text with notes and references—
although such is the bulk of secondary literature in this area that
no claims to complete familiarity with it could possibly be made.
The aim was to try to examine for a non-specialist audience (hence
I have translated all quotations) the literary presentation of the early
Germanic hero—a restriction which was itself partly pragmatic—as
a warrior characterised by the political constraints in which he
operated. He was not a miles gloriosus, still less a sword-wielding
barbarian concerned solely with how to establish a reputation for
himself. We do sometimes meet apparent heroes that seem to come
into that category, but these are not really heroes as such: the hero
is defined by the way in which his res gestae arise from, and are
determined within a political construct, not by his acts of inviduality.
Prowess is not enough.
The Waynflete Lectures were in their turn based on material
offered over a period of many years at Stirling, in which period I
also translated Kudrun and Waltharius, as well as some of the shorter
poems, realising in the process that this remains one of the best
ways of getting to know a medieval text. I have to acknowledge
with gratitude the Sabbatical Committee of Stirling University and
more particularly the German Department and its head, Dr Bruce
Thompson, for allowing me a sabbatical. I am especially grateful,
too, of course, to the President and Fellows of Magdalen College
for a Visiting Fellowship and for the invitation to give the lectures.

vii
 The Germanic Hero

I benefitted enormously from the period in Oxford, and from

discussion with colleagues in German studies and at Magdalen. I
hope that those I do not name will forgive me if I mention my
particular gratitude to Professor Nigel Palmer, Dr Almut Suerbaum,
Dr Annette Volfing and Mr Seb Coxon, as well as Mrs Olive
Sayce—an enthusiastic and hospitable group of specialists in medieval
German studies. At the equally hospitable Magdalen College, thanks
are due to Dr Ralph Walker and Dr Richard Sheppard in particular.
I remain grateful, finally, for the contact over the years not only
with students, but with other scholars in the field. Most notable
amongst these (and on various continents) are Professors Ute
Schwab, George Gillesp^e and Winder McConnell, and Dr Rod
Fisher, to all of whom I offer thanks for many kindnesses, and
apologies (to these and to those named already) if my views are
too divergent from their own. The fine modern poem with which
I opened the lectures, Thermopylae 1941' by J. E. Brookes, is
quoted by kind permission of the Salamander Oasis Trust and the
poet.

Stirling, July 1995

viii
'Weland gave the Sword! The Sword gave the
Treasure, and the Treasure gave the Law. It's as
natural as an oak growing.'
Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill
This page intentionally left blank
 I

About Heroes
Otto, Sigurdr, Ham5ir and Byrhtnod

I t seems appropriate to open a consideration of the early medieval

Germanic hero in literature with a poem in a Germanic language—
in this case modern English—which alludes to a classical hero. John
Brookes's Thermopylae 1941'—one of the finest poems of the
Second World War—has a British soldier deposited in Greece just
before the Germans invaded, and he is well aware of the historical
implications of his present situation, one of which is that he and his
colleagues are at best a rearguard.1 He recalls Leonidas at the first
battle of Thermopylae, and he tells an Australian colleague about him:
I said to Blue,
my Aussie mate, There was this famous chap
Leonidas, he was the Spartan who
defended it with just 300 men
against an army'.

1 The poem, written on 25 August 1941, is in the Oasis anthology Poems

of the Second World War, ed. Victor Selwyn (London: Dent, 1985), pp.
178-81, and also in the most recent anthology from the Salamander Oasis
Trust, The Voice of War, ed. Victor Selwyn (London: Michael Joseph,
1995), PP- 120-23.1 am indebted to Victor Selwyn for information and
comments on the poem. The image of Thermopylae was used in a more
predictable manner in earlier war poems, of course: see Joachim Freiherr
von der GolB, Deutsche Sonette (Berlin: Cassierer, 1916), p. n ('Leoni-
das'). There the German soldier is ordered to face death nobly, washed
and garlanded in the dark hour of death.

i
 The Germanic Hero

The pragmatic Australian is unimpressed, however:

Bluey took a draw

upon his cigarette. 'Well stuff 'im then!'
A pungent comment on the art of war.
Later, but still with the image of dead Leonidas in his mind, the
narrator tells Bluey how Leonidas and his men wore flowers in
their long hair to show that they were free men. Bluey, however,
is not only pragmatic, but bald, and dismisses them as:
'a load of bloody poufdahs!' Thus he laid the ghost
of brave Leonidas.
All through the poem the heroism and implicitly the apparent
foolhardiness of Leonidas run side by side until, at the last moment,
when the narrator is already preparing to meet death as bravely as
possible, like Leonidas, the British troops are withdrawn. The
narrator experiences relief, while Bluey is annoyed that the orders
didn't come sooner so that they need not have dug a trench; the
final lines are revealing:
But as we drove away I must confess
It felt like a desertion. Those few men
With flowers in their hair were heroes! Yes!
There are various points here: our narrator has one view of
Leonidas, and Bluey is allowed to voice another. Were they heroes
or were they fools? For the narrator there is no certainty, even after
the relief of the withdrawal, that it might not have been better to
be a hero. John Brookes's poem has, however, a number of other
implications. Leonidas was indeed killed, so that in effect his grand
gesture was worthy of Bluey's dismissal, even if the comments on
his presumed sexual preferences were less relevant. The strategic
withdrawal of the Allied troops from Greece in 1941 was in military
terms the better idea, and in a way it, too, is celebrated in the
poem. However, for all that the Persians were in a military sense
the victors at Thermopylae, Leonidas did conquer something: death.
One of the points of John Brookes's poem is that the narrator (and
then, of course, his Aussie mate) had heard of Leonidas, so that the

2
 About Heroes

Spartan leader's act did live on in this poem as well as countless

earlier ones. Thus it could (and here does) function as an inspiration.
In historical-political terms, finally, the sacrifice of Leonidas managed
to allow for the escape and regrouping of the rest of his army.
Various perceptions are possible.
The aim of these studies is to look at the presentation and
reception of the hero, looking not at classical figures like Leonidas,
but at heroes who have a Germanic origin in common, to try and
see how the hero was presented, what his role was, and how that
role depended upon a broader scheme of things. The emphasis will
be on the political implications of heroic literature to a large extent,
because Germanic heroic literature is largely political (though not
all critics have accepted the point); but although I am much
concerned, too, with the hero as a literary phenomenon, I shall
not be looking at heroic poetry as using (or indeed defined by the
use of) an oral-formulaic style or the ring-composition which has
been the focus of attention for scholars such as Milman Parry, Albert
Lord and more recently Alain Renoir.2 I am concerned here not
with heroic poetry, in fact, but with the hero in poetry. The aim
is to try to present the Germanic hero—a restriction which is itself
pragmatic and by no means teutonicising, by the way—in the hope
that common traits will emerge which can then be reused to confirm
what I would see as a preliminary rough definition: that the early
medieval Germanic hero is a warrior in a realistic context, who is
characterised in literature by the part he plays within a set of
predetermined political and social constraints. Although concerned
with the preservation of his reputation (something which interacts
with the literary presentation of the hero), he is not a sword-wielding
barbarian concerned solely with how to establish his own fame.

2 The most succinct work on formulaic composition remains Albert B.

Lord's The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960). This
refers in detail to his work with Milman Parry. There is a Germanic
focus in Alain Renoir, A Key to Old Poems: The Oral-Formualic Approach
to the Interpretation of West-Germanic Verse (University Park and London:
Pennsylvania State UP, 1987), for which Albert Lord provided a
foreword. On ring-composition, see for example Bernard Fenik, Homer
and the Nibelungenlied (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986).

3
 The Germanic Hero

We do sometimes—rarely—meet heroes who seem to come into

that category, but even though these may indeed include one or
two of the most famous medieval warrior-figures of all, it can be
argued that such fame-seekers fall outside the definition of the
Germanic hero, the value of whose res gestae, whose acts of fame,
are given meaning only within a political construct. Individual
prowess is not enough. The hero must conquer the blows that fate
aims against his own person because he is committed, too, to the
conquest of chaos. Over all else in Germanic writings about the
hero is the acknowledgement of a need for stability, for the impo-
sition (and in a warrior society, or indeed any society except in
Plato's ideal republic, it is an imposition) of law and order, of
control. Often this implies what looks like an aggressive Realpolitik.
Going outside the Germanic world for a moment, a useful distinc-
tion has been drawn between the Greek hero represented by Achilles
as a seeker after personal glory, and the Roman Aeneas, who needs
to be part of a society.3 Although Germanic writings present us
with a whole range of very different heroes, so that one would
hardly be able to establish a norm, they do seem to fit—with a
very few exceptions—into the latter pattern.
Although I have tried to include as wide a range of works as
possible I have still had to neglect the (mostly later) Middle High
German Dietrich epics on the one hand and the Icelandic prose sagas
on the other. I have concentrated upon early poetic texts, in most
of which the heroes themselves are not necessarily aware that they
are heroes in any modern sense. Indeed, most of the languages
concerned have no absolutely clear word for that state. I do not
intend to enter upon an etymological investigation of, or even
to speculate upon the word hero, which might be, indeed, a
somewhat Germanic approach, and which has in any case been done
more thoroughly, most recently by Klaus von See in a paper
with the intriguing title 'Held und Kollektiv' [Hero and Collective].4

3 R. Deryck Williams, Aeneas and the Roman Hero (London: Macmillan,

1973), pp. 28-30.
4 Klaus von See, 'Held und Kollektiv'. Zeitschnftfur deutsches Altertum 122
(1993), 1-35-

4
 About Heroes

It is probably more useful to keep in mind the fact that the mod-
ern German word Held, for example, has a medieval equivalent—helt
in Middle High German—which is invariably contextualised, and
means simply 'warrior'. If it needs to be made clear that the warrior
is a particularly brave one, then he will be described in Middle High
German, for example, as ein helt guot, 'a noble warrior', whilst a
hero-king may well be praised in Old English for his special achieve-
ments with some equally thin-looking formula, such as Pat wees god
cynyng.5 For the Germanic helt, to be a good warrior is simply to do
his appointed task properly, and he cannot (or at least he ought not
to) set out to be a hero in more recent senses of the word. The hero
is placed in the literary foreground because of some notable action,
and if he is to be dealt with at all in literature he will have certain
powers and be of a certain stature in any case; but for the Germanic
hero, any special fame (rather than just the maintaining of his good
reputation) is an end-effect rather than an aim.6 Glory is something
which happens to a warrior, and this is the real and still not always
recognised difference from the central figure in the romance, in which
the knight may deliberately set out on a quest for fair fame. The
central figure in the romance (we now use the word 'hero' very
loosely in that literary sense, too) may seek glory. The Germanic
hero is concerned with the preservation of his reputation; naturally he
is pleased if he knows that after his death songs will be sung about
him. But his concern is usually expressed negatively: that the wrong
songs are not sung about him.
In the present age, the word 'hero' has broadened semantically,
sometimes, though not necessarily, being weakened or amended in

5 There are intensifications, and of course there are other similar words.
This is documented in Eva-Maria Woelker, Menschengestaltung in vorhofi-
schen Epen des 12. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1940; repr. Nendeln/Liechten-
stein: Kraus, 1969).
6 The point is summed up very clearly by Markus Diebold, Das Sagelied
(Berne and Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1974), p. 80. 'Heldentum um seiner
selbst Willen ist der heroischen Dichtung fremd . . . Die Helden setzen
sich mit ihren ausserordentlichen Fahigkeiten fur eine ganz bestimmte
Aufgabe ein'. [Heroism for its own sake is foreign to heroic poetry . . .
a hero sets out upon a quite specific task, using his own special
capabilities].

5
 The Germanic Hero

the process.7 The word has descended more recently, too, to the
subculture of popular entertainment—Superman is a name of some
interest, and so is Captain Marvel—and indeed, the very word
'hero' has been subjected to such visible devaluation that the term
'super-hero' has entered this albeit limited vocabulary. The use of
the word for film and later pop stars has helped its degeneration.
Modern political hero-cults have also made us wary, but we are
certainly more familiar with Wilfred Owen's statement that his
poetry of the First World War was 'not about heroes'. The literature
of the First World War did indeed demythologise the facile notion
of the hero found in German, for example, in overused and sanitising
compounds such as Heldentod, 'a hero's death'. That notion of the
warrior hero, already obsolescent at Bull Run, was surely blown
out of existence at the Somme. In a sense this is true, but it was
really only one particular view of the hero that was destroyed, and
it was a view that was less medieval than Victorian, elevated to a
kind of social norm by Carlyle. In its popular form it conflated the
medieval warrior-hero with the fame-seeker of the romance and
added a dash of miles gloriosus, taken at face value rather than as the
satirical figure that he always was. What Wilfred Owen and others
rightly set out to demythologise was a specific, distorted and dis-
honest idea of heroism imposed uncomprehendingly and unrealis-
tically from outside, not the inner desire by an individual to keep
his own reputation, to do his duty as he saw it when in extremis,
to keep faith with his origins (family or country) and his political
allegiance, and make no disgrace for his posterity. That Hollywood

7 There is a concise survey of the development of the word and its

ramifications by Morton W. Bloomfield in his essay 'The Problem of
the Hero in the Later Medieval Period', in Concepts of the Hero in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Norman T. Burns and Christopher
Reagan (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976), pp. 27-48. See also
von See, 'Held und Kollektiv'. We might now include under the
heading of heroism, for example, the passive virtues of the saint (which
causes some problems of overlap in medieval genres, too): fortitude in
the sense of bearing suffering with patience, rather than in the sense of
simple strength, fortitudo in a classical sense. Germanic heroes have to
suffer the blows of fate, but they also react, and their suffering is not usually
passive.

6
 About Heroes

has re-mythologised that particular distortion of the warrior-hero in

the figure of Rambo is unfortunate. Far more in accord with the
medieval Germanic hero are the words of a private soldier in the
First World War, who promised in a letter home just before his
death in 1915 that he would take care of himself to an extent
'consistent, as I have said before with my duty'.8 This externally
generated imperative, coupled with a clear denial of overt glory-
seeking, is a central and defining feature of the medieval Germanic
hero.9
The history and geography of the early medieval heroic world
are at least realistic, even if things are sometimes adapted so that
Theoderic the Goth can serve at the court of a king who died the
year before he was born, or so that you can see Mount Etna from
Devon. We may range historically into an almost mythical past in
the story of Wayland, into Germanic tribal history in Beowulf, into
more recent (but still very clearly past) history in some texts, and
be faced with contemporary or near-contemporary events in others.

8 The letter from a soldier named Harvey Steven is cited by Hilda D. Spear,
'A City at War: Dundee and the Battle of Loos', in Intimate Enemies, ed.
Franz Karl Stanzel and Martin Loschnigg (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993),
pp. 149—63 (citation on p. 162). In terms of film, probably the only
modern echo of the medieval hero is to be found in the Western; there
is case to be made for viewing High Noon as an heroic narrative. The
point has been touched on occasionally: see D. G. Mo watt and Hugh
Sacker, The Nibelungenlied: An Interpretative Commentary (Toronto: To-
ronto University Press, 1967), p. 26 and Winder McConnell, 'Death in
Kudrun,' Fifteenth-Century Studies 17 (1990), 229-43. On Hollywood
films and the hero, see von See, 'Held und Kollektiv'.
9 See for example on the hero in general H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age
(Cambridge: CUP, 1912); C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London: Mac-
millan, 1952); Jan de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, trans. B. J.
Timmer (London: OUP, 1963); Gwyn Jones, Kings, Beasts and Heroes
(London: OUP, 1972); W. H. T. Jackson, The Hero and the King (New
York: Columbia UP, 1982). See more recently the chapter by Roberta
Frank on 'Heroic Ideals and Christian Ethics', in the Cambridge Companion
to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Gooden and Michael Lapidge
(Cambridge: CUP, 1991). It is hardly necessary to note that these are just
a few examples from a very large secondary literature. Other indispensable
works in the study of the heroic epic in general are aimed in the first
instance at specific texts—such as Tolkien on Beowulf-—and will be noted
as appropriate, as will be older studies like those of W. P. Ker.

7
 The Germanic Hero

All this imposes upon us differences in the way in which we can

or should approach (or utilise) the historical backgrounds of such
divergent texts. All of them show us, however, the acts of important
figures within Germanic social units—the res gestae populi Germanid.
The defining quality in the different varieties of classical historio-
graphy—I quote Charles Fornara—was the 'direct concern with
the description of res gestae, man's actions in politics, diplomacy and
war, in the far and near past'.10 This could even serve as a definition
for the literature of the Germanic hero.
It is especially difficult with works that are in essence historical
to determine how and whether they can or should be interpreted
in accordance with the history they contain, with the history
of the period in and perhaps for which they were written, or
from a contemporary viewpoint. It has been argued that modern
moral values should not even be applied to the heroic warrior,
and that although war is a political device in the works con-
cerned, our twentieth-century experience of war has distorted
the perception of medieval fighting to the point of unrecog-
nisability. The manifold pitfalls of the intentionalist fallacy, of
an excessively Whig historiography or of anachronistic expecta-
tions have to be avoided with care, but the works in question
sometimes appear surprisingly modern, both on the personal
level—as in Hildebrand's existential dilemma of finding himself
unable to prove who he is—and on the broader political front.
In fact, most of the works present situations (rather than models)
with political and ethical implications which can be related to our
own times just as much as to the time in which the work was
written or even (in so far as it is identifiable) the age in which
the work is set.

10 For further material in this direction, see the useful historiographic

summary by Charles William Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient
Greece and Rome (Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1983).
The quotation is from p. 3. On history and literature, see George M.
Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse (London: Longmans, 1914) and C. V. Wedge-
wood, Truth and Opinion (London: Collins, 1960). A final and thought-
provoking text in this area is Helen Cam's essay on Historical Novels
(London: Historical Association, 1961).

8
 About Heroes

The wide range of different situations set up in Germanic heroic

literature remains essentially realistic, and because of that its messages
are applicable on a wider scale. But Clio is, and always was a muse,
and the literary aspects remain important, too. Oh yes, heroic
literature tells a story. Except with those heroic poems which present
very recent actions (and sometimes even then) it is usually unhelpful
to dwell too much on the history that lies behind the literary hero.
Equally, the texts we have must stand as we have them; the vigorous
literary search for an ur-text is rarely very productive. Studies of
Kudrun, a fine work as it stands, sometimes postulate an original in
which Kudrun did not herself appear, and this has always seemed
to be somewhat unhelpful in critical terms.
Concentrating on the hero as such means that we are not limited
to what is usually seen as 'the heroic epic',11 and in any case,
to insist on too rigid a canon always means that a great deal
is lost. My corpus will be broader, though I am not sure that anyone
would get away with insisting on a general term like 'medieval
Germanic political novel in verse', even though Staatsroman is
sometimes encountered. In the introductory paper in a volume
devoted to the concept of the hero, Bernard Huppe declared in
1970 that Germanic heroes, especially in the early period, were
very few and far between. Thus he dismissed out of hand Waltharius,
as 'an academic exercise which cannot seriously be considered as a
work of art', the Ludurigslied as 'far from being either heroic or a
work of art' and the Hildebrandslied as a 'mere scrap'. Since Huppe
did allow the Battle of Maldon, which is also a fragment, perhaps he
meant 'scrap' in a different sense.12 I have to confess, however, that
I propose to examine all of those works in some detail. Germanic

11 As a matter of fact even the validity of concepts like 'germanisches

Heldenlied', [Germanic heroic poem] has been called into question: see
Werner Schroder, '1st das germanische Heldenlied ein Phantom?'.
Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum 120 (1991), 249-56.
12 Bernard F. Huppe, The Concept of the Hero in the Early Middle Ages',
in Burns and Reagan, The Concept of the Hero, pp. 1-26 (see esp. p. i).
Huppe seems not to be interested in Old Norse. It is comforting, of
course, if not surprising, that other critics do accept precisely this range
of works as 'hero-stories': T. A. Shippey, Old English Verse (London:
Hutchinson, 1972), p. 26.

9
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 OCEAN STEAMSHIPS

A POPULAR ACCOUNT OF THEIR CONSTRUCTION

DEVELOPMENT, MANAGEMENT
AND APPLIANCES
 BY

F. E. CHADWICK, U. S. N.
J. D. J. KELLEY, U. S. N.
RIDGELY HUNT, U. S. N.
JOHN H. GOULD
WILLIAM H. RIDEING
A. E. SEATON

WITH NINETY-SIX ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1891

Copyright, 1891, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
 CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STEAMSHIP 1

BY COMMANDER F. E. CHADWICK, U. S. NAVY.

Slow Growth of the Idea of Steam Propulsion—Models Shown at the Liverpool

Exhibition in 1886—Claims of Precedence in the Invention of Steamboats—What
Fulton Accomplished—The Clermont—The Voyage of the Savannah in 1819—The
First War Steamer—The Atlantic Crossed by the Sirius and Great Western in
1838—Founding of the Cunard Company—Invention of the Screw Propeller—Its
Application to the Archimedes and the Great Britain—Early Fleet of the Cunard
Company—American Enterprises—The Screw Steamer Princeton—Establishment
of the Pacific Mail—The Collins Line—Its Success and Ultimate Failure—The
Great Eastern—Beginning of Great Rivalry in Speed—Triple Expansion Engines—
Important Changes in Design.
57
SPEED IN OCEAN STEAMERS
BY A. E. SEATON.

The Viking’s Craft and the Modern “Greyhound”—Problems of Inertia and

Resistance—Primary Condition for High Speed—What is Meant by “Coefficient
of Fineness” and “Indicated Horse-Power”—Advance in Economical Engines—
What the Compound Engine Effected—A Comparison of Fast Steamers from 1836
to 1890—Prejudice Against Propellers and High Pressures—Advantages of more
than One Screw Propeller—Attempts at Propulsion by Turbine Wheels,
Ejections, and Pumps—The Introduction of Siemens-Martin Steel in 1875 the
Chief Factor in the Success of Modern Fast Steamers—Decrease in Coal
Consumption—Importance of Forced Draughts—The Problem of Mechanical
Stoking—Possibilities of Liquid Fuel—Is the Present Speed Likely to be
Increased?
91
THE BUILDING OF AN “OCEAN GREYHOUND”
BY WILLIAM H. RIDEING.

The Cost of an Ocean Racer—Intricate “Financing” of Such an Undertaking—The

Contract with the Ship-builders—The Uncertain Element in Designing—Great
Ship Yards along the Clyde—The Plans of a Steamer on Paper—Enlargement of
 Plans in the “Mould Loft”—What is Meant by “Fairing the Ship”—The “Scrive
Board”—Laying down the Keel—Making the Huge Ribs—When a Ship is “in
Frame”—Shaping and Trimming the Plates—Riveting and Caulking—Ready for
Launching—The Great “Plant” which is Necessary for the Building of a Ship—
Description of a Typical Yard—Works Covering Seventy-four Acres—Where the
Shaft is Forged—The Lathes at Work—The Adjustment of Parts—Seven
Thousand Workmen.
112
OCEAN PASSENGER TRAVEL
BY JOHN H. GOULD.

The First Ocean Race—Passenger Traffic in the Old Clipper Days—State-rooms

and Table Fare in Early Days—The First Ocean Mail Contract—Discomforts
Fifty Years Ago—American Transatlantic Lines—Government Subsidies—
Novelties on the Collins Line—When Steerage Passengers were Allowed on
Ocean Steamships—Important Changes in the Comfort of Passengers Wrought by
the Oceanic in 1870—The Present Era of Twin-screw Ships—Their Advantages—
The Fastest Voyages East and West—Records of the Great Racers—Modern
Conveniences and Luxuries—The Increase in the Number of Cabin Passengers
from 1881 to 1890—How the Larder is Supplied—Electric Lights, Libraries,
and Music-rooms—Customs Peculiar to the French, German, and British Lines—
Life in the Steerage—Immigration Statistics—Government Regulations.

149
THE SHIP’S COMPANY
BY LIEUTENANT J. D. JERROLD KELLEY, U. S. NAVY.

Has Steam Ruined the Genuine Sailors of Story and Song?—Hauling a Liner out of
the Liverpool Docks—The Traits of Master-mariners—Education of Junior
Officers—A Fire Drill—Stowing the Cargo—Down the Channel in a Fog—The
Routine Life at Sea—The Trials of Keeping Watch—A Bo’s’n’s Right to Bluster
—Steering by Steam—Scrubbing the Decks in the Middle Watches—Formalities
of Inspection—The Magic Domain of the Engine-room—Picturesqueness of the
Stoke-hole—Messes of the Crew—The Noon Observation—Life among the Cabin
Passengers—Boat Drill—Pleasures toward the End of the Voyage—The Concert
—Scenes in the Smoking-room—Wagers on the Pilot-boat Number—Fire Island
Light, and the End of the Voyage.
185
SAFETY ON THE ATLANTIC
BY WILLIAM H. RIDEING.
The Dangers of the Sea—Precautions in a Fog—Anxieties of the Captain—Creeping
up the Channel—“Ashore at South Stack”—Narrow Escape of the Baltic—Some
Notable Shipwrecks—Statistics since 1838—The Region of Icebergs—When They
Are most Frequent—Calamities from Ice—Safety Promoted by Speed—Modern
Protection from Incoming Seas—Bulkheads and Double Bottoms—Water tight
Compartments—The Special Advantage of the Longitudinal Bulkhead—The Value
of Twin Screws—Dangers from a Broken Shaft—Improvements in the Mariner’s
Compass, the Patent Log, and Sounding Machine—Manganese Bronze for
Propellers—Lights, Buoys, and Fog Signals—The Remarkable Record of 1890.
217
THE OCEAN STEAMSHIP AS A FREIGHT CARRIER
BY JOHN H. GOULD.

Revenue of the Ship’s Cargo—Amount of Freight Carried by Express Steamships—

Gross Tonnage of Important Lines Running from New York—The Merchant
Marine of the United States—The “Atlantic Limited”—The Sea Post-office—In
the Specie Room—Enormous Refrigerators—The New Class of “Freighters”—
Large Cargoes and Small Coal Consumption—The Ocean “Tramp”—Advantages of
the “Whaleback”—Vessels for Carrying Grain—Floating Elevators—The Fruit
Steamship—Tank Steamships for Carrying Oil—Peculiarities of their
Construction—The Molasses Ship—Scenes on the Piers when Steamships are
Loading—Steam Hoisting Apparatus—How the Freight is Stowed—Coaling—The
Loading of Cattle Ships—“Cowboys of the Sea”—Ocean Traffic the Index of a
Nation’s Prosperity.
253
STEAMSHIP LINES OF THE WORLD
BY LIEUTENANT RIDGELY HUNT, U. S. NAVY.

Important Part Taken by the United States in Establishing Ocean Routes—Rivalry

in Sailing Vessels with England—Effect of the Discovery of Gold in California
—The Cape Horn Route—Australian Packet Lines—The Problem of a Short
Route to India—Four Main Routes of Steamship Traffic—Characteristics of the
Regular Service between Europe and the East—Port Said and the Suez Canal—
Scenes at Aden and at Bombay—The Run to Colombo, Ceylon—Some of the By-
ways of Travel from Singapore—The Pacific Mail—From Yokohama to San
Francisco—Two Routes from Panama to New York—South American Ports—
Magnificent Scenery of the Magellan Straits—Beauties of the Port of Rio—The
Great Ocean Route from London to Australia.
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
A Drama of the Sea, Frontispiece
Specifications of Early Patents taken out in England, 15
The Etruria, 37
Triple-expansion Engine of the Aller, Trave, and Saale, 41
The Giovanni Bausan, of the Italian Navy, 49
The North German Lloyd Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II., 65
The White Star Steamer Majestic, 75
The Inman Line Steamer City of Paris, 81
General View of the Frames of the City of New York—June 25, 1887, 99
In the Grand Saloon of an Inman Steamer, 115
The End of the Voyage, 139
In the Steerage, 145
On the Bridge in a Gale, 161
“Muster, all Hands,” 167
Night Signalling, 177
Out of Reckoning.—A Narrow Escape, 187
Landing Stages at Liverpool, 191
At Close Quarters, Among the Icebergs, 201
The Deep-sea Sounding Machine at Work, 207
Loading Grain from a Floating Elevator, 221
Unloading and Loading a Coastwise Steamer by Electric Light, 227
The “Whaleback” Steamship for Grain and other Freight, 235
Unloading a Banana Steamship, 241
A Cattle Steamship at Sea, 249
Chart of the World, Showing the Principal Steamship Routes, 257
Deck Quoits on a P. and O. Liner, 261
Entrance to the Suez Canal at Port Said, 267
The Port of Valparaiso in a Norther, 285

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT.

The Great Western, from an Old Painting, 10

Cross-Section of the Great Western, 11
The Great Britain, 13
Plan of the Hibernia and Cambria, 22
Model of the Persia and Scotia, 31
Longitudinal Section of the Warship Duilio, 33
The Britannic, 34
Cross-section of the Oregon, 40
Cross-section of the Servia, 40
Longitudinal Section of the Champagne, 42
The Chilian Cruiser Esmeralda, 47
The Belted Cruiser Orlando, with Twin Screws, 51
The City of Rome, 54
H. B. M. S. Polyphemus at Full Speed—185⁄8 Knots, 59
The Impérieuse going at Full Speed, 64
Passenger Steamer Princesse Henriette at Full Speed—241⁄2 Miles per

Hour, 69
Engines of the Comet, 70
Passenger Steamer Duchess of Hamilton at Full Speed—21 Miles per Hour, 71
Passenger Steamer Columba at Full Speed—21 Miles per Hour, 72
The Twin Screws of the City of New York, 84
The Propeller of the North German Lloyd Steamer Havel, 85
Recent Naval Engine, 87
Italian Cruiser Piemonte at Full Speed—22.3 Knots = 253⁄4 Miles per

Hour, 89
The Umbria just before Launching, 94
Frames of the City of New York, looking aft—July 19, 1887, 102
Frames of the City of New York, looking forward—July 19, 1887, 103
The Manganese Bronze Propeller-Blade of the Wrecked Steamer Mosel,
after it had Beaten upon a Reef, 106
A Stern View, Showing Twin Screws, 108
The City of New York ready for Launching, 109
Model of a Steamer Designed to Cross the Atlantic in Five Days, 110
The Steamer’s Barber-shop, 121
More Comfortable on Deck, 123
A Quiet Flirtation, 125
Smoking-room of a French Liner, 127
The Gang Plank—Just before Sailing, 132
The Saloon of a Hamburg Steamer, 134
The Pilot Boarding, 135
Revenue Officer Boarding, New York Bay, 142
Down the Channel in a Fog—A Narrow Escape, 157
The Skipper, 158
The Deck Lookout—“Danger Ahead,” 160
The Boatswain’s Whistle, 164
The Cook, 165
Washing Down the Decks, 169
The Stoke Hole, 172
In the Fo’castle, 174
Watching for the Sun on a Cloudy Day, 176
The Deck Steward, 180
Captain’s Breakfast, 181
The Night Signal of a Disabled Steamer, 183
Eddystone Lighthouse, English Channel, 194
A Whistling Buoy, 195
Lighthouse, Atlantic City, N. J., 197
A Bell Buoy, 199
Lighthouse, Sanibel Island, Fla., 205
Off Fire Island, New York, 210
Gedney’s Channel, outside New York Harbor, at Night, 211
The Lightship, off Sandy Hook, 213
Broken Bow of La Champagne, after her Collision outside New York
Harbor, December, 1890, 214
A Sunken Schooner, 215
The Specie-room of a Passenger Steamship, 232
Cross-section of a Tank Steamship, showing the Expansion Tank, 244
Loading a Tank Steamship with Oil, by Force Pumps, 245
The Port of Aden, Arabia, 270
A Deck-bath in the Tropics, 271
Promenade Deck of an Orient Liner, 274
Landing Passengers at Natal, South Africa, 279
Steamer at Anchor, Simon’s Bay, Cape of Good Hope, 291
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STEAMSHIP.

By COMMANDER F. E. CHADWICK, U. S. NAVY.

Slow Growth of the Idea of Steam Propulsion—Models Shown at the

Liverpool Exhibition in 1886—Claims of Precedence in the Invention of
Steamboats—What Fulton Accomplished—The Clermont—The Voyage of
the Savannah in 1819—The First War Steamer—The Atlantic Crossed by
the Sirius and Great Western in 1838—Founding of the Cunard Company
—Invention of the Screw Propeller—Its Application to the Archimedes
and the Great Britain—Early Fleet of the Cunard Company—American
Enterprises—The Screw Steamer Princeton—Establishment of the Pacific
Mail—The Collins Line—Its Success and Ultimate Failure—The Great
Eastern—Beginning of Great Rivalry in Speed—Triple Expansion Engines
—Important Changes in Design.

I T is a wonderful fact in the swift expansion of mechanical

knowledge and appliances of the last hundred years that while for
unknown ages the wind was the only propelling force used for
purposes of navigation, apart from the rude application of power
through oars worked by men, the whole scheme of steam transport
has grown, practically, to its present wonderful perfection within the
lifetime of men yet living.
Of course, the idea, as is that of all great inventions, was one of
slow growth. It cropped up at various stages through the eighteenth
century, and there are faint evidences of gropings in this direction in
the latter part of the seventeenth; but these latter were not much
more definite than the embodiment of the idea of the telegraph in
Puck’s girdle round the earth, and the evidence that men really
thought of propelling boats by steam is very meagre until we come
to the pamphlet written by Jonathan Hulls, in 1737, in which he gave
utterance to a very clear and distinct idea in the matter. It struggled
through a very backward infancy of fifty years and more, certain
memorable names appearing now and then to help it along, as that
of Watt (without whose improvements in the steam-engine it must
still have remained in swaddling-clothes), Fitch, De Jouffroy,
Rumsey, Symington, and finally Fulton, who, however much he may
have learned from his predecessors, has unquestionably the credit of
putting afloat the first commercially successful steamboat. He is thus
worthy of all the honor accorded him; much of it came too late, as
he died at the comparatively early age of fifty, after passing through
the harassments which seem naturally to lie in the path of the
innovator.

A graphic history of the wonderful changes wrought in this great

factor of the world’s progress was set forth during the summer of
1886, at the International Exhibition at Liverpool, where, by model
and drawing, the various steps were made more completely visible
and tangible than, perhaps, ever before. True, the relics of the
earlier phases of the steamship age, when its believers were but few
and generally of small account, were sparse, but the exhibits of later
models, from the date of the inception of transatlantic traffic,
preparations for which were begun in earnest by laying down the
steamship Great Western in 1836, were frequent enough, and the
whole of the steps in the development of the means of ocean traffic
from then till now were sufficiently well shown.
The exhibition, of course, did not confine itself to the steam era
alone. It even had a model of an Egyptian vessel, which was
exhibited by the Liverpool Library Society, as taken from Thebes, and
estimated to date about 1,500 years b.c., and which Moses himself
might thus have seen. It was a long stretch, however, to the next in
date, as no others antedated 1700 a.d. There were many of the
handsome and dignified eighteenth-century men-of-war, built at a
time when men began to preserve a record of their work in the
miniature ships which are now esteemed an essential addition to
almost every vessel of importance put afloat. Firms now exist whose
only business it is to make the various minute fittings—the ports,
chains, anchors, blocks, etc.—of the Liliputian craft, so that every
detail of the original is given with an exact verisimilitude in very
often most beautiful and elaborate work.
It would have been very interesting had the early struggles of the
steamboat been thus illustrated in extenso, but there is nothing of
its concrete history earlier than a small model of the original Comet,
built by Henry Bell, at Glasgow, in 1812, and so named because of
the extraordinary comet of that year, and the engines of her
successor, built in 1820. These recall, however, the vessel which was
the first steamer engaged in passenger traffic in Europe, and are
thus worthy of honor.
In looking over the beautiful array of models then exhibited, which
thus represented almost every stage of progress in British steamship
building, from the Comet onward, one could not help regretting that
an effort had not been made by our government to bring together
models, of which there must have been some, at least, available,
illustrative of our earlier practice, particularly as there is much in it
peculiar to us, and which would have been most interesting to the
great public which visited the exhibition. Models of the Clermont; of
the Stevens experimental screw boat; a later Mississippi steamer;
the Savannah—the first vessel using steam which ever crossed the
Atlantic; the Washington, the pioneer of regular transatlantic steam
traffic under our flag; the Adriatic; the Hudson River and great
Sound steamers of to-day, would, apart from any war-ship models of
interest which could have been sent, have made a most interesting
and attractive collection. The only things, however, which were
visible were the drawings of a New York ferry-boat (the type of
which, by the way, we owe to Fulton), so placed as to be scarcely
discoverable. These boats are so typical, so different from anything
found in Europe, and so interesting to any student of steam ferriage
as a thorough adaptation of means to an end, that a complete
model of the boat and its ferry slip would have been a most
satisfactory addition.
It must be remembered that the steamboat had in its earlier days
a much greater extension in America than elsewhere. Our great
rivers were an especially attractive field for its use. The Mississippi
had but lately come under our control, and the beginning of the
great tide of Western emigration and exploration was almost
coincident with the steamboat’s advent, so that through these
favoring conditions it had a much more rapid growth among us than
elsewhere.
The display, however, of British models was as complete as it
could well be made. Private owners and builders, the Admiralty, and
Lloyds’ Registry, united to make the collection a very complete and
perfect one. Of continental European exhibits, that of the Italian
Government, which sent a very splendid collection of models of its
great war-ships, was the most important. Associated with it was the
exhibit of the Fratelli Orlando of Leghorn, who have done much of
both the public and private building of Italy. The only French exhibit
was that of the Bureau Veritas, which followed the example of its
English rival, Lloyds, in making a very striking and instructive show.
The only exhibits of modern war-ships were those of England and
Italy, unless we except the numerous vessels built for foreign powers
by English builders. The remainder of the display was chiefly
connected with the strife of commerce, and in this it is likely to
remain as complete and comprehensive as can be made in some
time to come. It was one also in which Britain might well take pride,
as, however great the United States were as pioneers or as more
than equals in the beginning of the race, we have long since been
distanced by our kinsmen, and we must refer, for some years at
least, to Great Britain to study the principal changes in hull and
machinery of the last half-century, though the great strides of the
last six years, accomplished through our war-ship construction, bid
fair to once more put us in our old and honorable place.
The Liverpool exhibition was the forerunner of a number of others
of like character, which have culminated in the “Naval Exhibition” of
1891 in London, which, however, is more concerned with war than
was its predecessor, and does not enter so fully into the details of
early practice.
 It is useless to draw comparisons between the value of claims of
precedence in the history of steam navigation. The fact that Fulton’s
efforts finally started the world to building steamboats for actual
service is indisputable. All preceding cases were simply sporadic, and
had none of the contagious power possessed by the experiments on
the Hudson. Fulton himself had already built six steamboats before
one was built elsewhere than in America. His boats, from the
beginning, were of practical value, and not small experiments, the
Clermont herself being 136 feet long, 18 feet broad, 7 feet deep, of
160 tons; and the diameter of her wheels was 15 feet.
In 1809 the first steamboat, the Accommodation, was seen on the
St. Lawrence, and in 1811 the first (built at Pittsburgh) appeared on
the Mississippi. A year after this the Comet, already alluded to, was
put upon the Clyde by Henry Bell. She was only 40 feet long on the
keel, and 101⁄2 broad, with two small paddle-wheels on each side,
driven by a gearing which geared into a wheel on the axle of each
set of paddle-wheels. Her original engines are still in existence, and
are deposited in the Museum at South Kensington, where they were
set up by the same engineer (Mr. John Robertson) who placed them
in the Comet.
Fulton also has the honor of being the first to design and build a
war steamer, which for her time was a most remarkable production,
and by far the largest steam vessel built before 1838. She was a
fitting monument to the genius of the man who unfortunately did
not live to see her completion and successful trials.
The Demologos, or Fulton the First, was laid down June 20, 1814,
and launched October 29th of the same year. “Her dimensions were:
length, 150 feet; breadth, 56 feet; depth, 20 feet; water-wheel, 16
feet diameter, length of bucket 14 feet, dip 4 feet; engine, 48-inch
cylinder, 5 feet stroke; boiler length 22 feet, breadth 12 feet, and
depth 8 feet; tonnage, 2,475.”
The commissioners appointed to examine her say in their report:
 “She is a structure resting upon two boats, keels separated from
end to end by a canal 15 feet wide and 66 feet long. One boat
contains the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam. The vast
cylinder of iron, with its piston, levers, and wheels, occupies a part
of its fellow: the great water-wheel revolves in the space between
them: the main or gun deck supporting her armament is protected
by a bulwark four feet ten inches thick of solid timber. This is pierced
by 30 port-holes, to enable as many 32-pounders to fire red-hot
balls.
… She is rigged with 2 short masts, each of which supports a large
lateen yard and sails. She has 2 bowsprits and jibs, and 4 rudders, 2
at each extremity of the boat, so that she can be steered with either
end foremost. Her machinery is calculated for the addition of an
engine which will discharge an immense column of water, which is
intended to throw upon the decks and through the ports of an
enemy.” She was also intended to carry four 100-pounders.
She made her first trial on June 1, 1815, and on the Fourth of July
she steamed outside of Sandy Hook and back, a distance of 53
miles, in 8 hours and 20 minutes. She was then supposably light, as
it is stated that she was again tried September 11, 1815, with 26 of
her guns on board, and ammunition and stores to bring her down to
nearly 11 feet draught. She steamed from 41⁄2 to 5 miles an hour,
Fulton having only promised 3, and may certainly be considered to
have been a success. She was never commissioned, but was used as
a receiving ship at New York until June 4, 1829, when she
accidentally blew up.
The general slowness with which men in the early part of the
century received the idea of the mighty changes impending may be
recognized when we look over the few publications connected with
navigation then published. Mind seemed to move more slowly in
those days; communication was tedious and difficult. Edinburgh was
as far from London in length of time taken for the journey as is now
New York from New Orleans; few papers were published; there were
no scientific journals of value; no great associations of men given to
meeting and discussing scientific questions excepting the few
ponderous societies which dealt more in abstract questions than in
the daily advances of the mechanical world. It was thus that the
steam vessel came slowly to the front, and that it took more than a
third of the whole time which has elapsed since Fulton’s successful
effort to convince men that it might be possible to carry on traffic by
steam across the Atlantic. Dr. Lardner is almost chiefly remembered
by his famous unwillingness to grant the possibility of steaming
directly from Liverpool to New York; and by his remark, “As to the
project, however, which was announced in the newspapers, of
making the voyage directly from New York to Liverpool, it was, he
had no hesitation in saying, perfectly chimerical, and that they might
as well talk of making a voyage from New York or Liverpool to the
moon.”1 He strongly urged dividing the transit by using Ireland as
one of the intermediate steps, and going thence to Newfoundland.
He curiously limited the size of ships which might be used, and their
coal-carrying powers. Though a philosopher, he did not seem to
grasp that if the steamship had grown to what it was in 1835 from
the small beginnings of 1807 it might grow even more, and its
machinery be subject to development in later times as it had been in
the earlier. Lardner seems to have typified the general state of mind
when in 1836 the Great Western Steamship Company was formed,
from which really dates transatlantic traffic.
A slight retrospect is necessary to enable us to understand the
status of steam at the time. Little really had been done beyond the
establishment of coast, river, and lake navigation in the United
States and coastwise traffic in Great Britain; a few small vessels had
been built for the British navy. In 1825 the Enterprise (122 feet
length of keel and 27 feet beam) had gone to Calcutta from London
in 113 days, 10 of which had been spent in stoppages; and steam
mail communication with India was about being definitely
established when the keel of the Great Western was laid.
Up to this time America had undergone much the greater
development, both in number of steam vessels and tonnage.
 In 1829 our enrolled tonnage was 54,037 tons, or rather more
than twice that of the United Kingdom. Charleston and Savannah
had regular steam communication with our northern ports. A few
years later, in 1838, returns show that the former had 14 steamers,
the largest being of 466 tons; Philadelphia had 11, the largest being
of 563 tons; New York had 77, of which 39 were of a large class,
exceeding generally 300 tons—the largest was the President, of 615
tons, built in 1829. Liverpool had at this date 41 steamers; the
largest was of 559 tons, 4 others exceeded 200 tons, and all the
others were much smaller. London had 169, of which the largest was
the British Queen, just built, of 1,053 tons; the next largest was of
497 tons. Glasgow and Belfast had been in regular steam
communication since 1818; Glasgow and Liverpool, London and
Leith, since 1822. The first ferry-boat on the Mersey, it may be
noted, the Etna, 63 feet long, with a paddle-wheel in the centre,
began her trips in 1816.

In 1819 the Atlantic was first crossed by a ship using steam. This
was the Savannah, of 380 tons, launched at Corlear’s Hook, New
York, August 22, 1818.2
She was built to ply between New York and Savannah as a sailing-
packet. She was, however, purchased by Savannah merchants and
fitted with steam machinery, the paddle-wheels being constructed to
fold up and be laid upon the deck when not in use, her shaft also
having a joint for that purpose. She left Savannah on the 26th of
May, and reached Liverpool in 25 days, using steam 18 days. The
log-book, still preserved, notes several times taking the wheels in on
deck in thirty minutes.
In August she left Liverpool for Cronstadt. An effort was made to
sell her to Russia, which failed. She sailed for Savannah, touching at
Copenhagen and Arendal, and arrived in 53 days. Her machinery
later was taken out, and she resumed her original character as a
sailing-packet, and ended her days by being wrecked on the south
coast of Long Island.
 But steam-power had by 1830 grown large enough to strike out
more boldly. The Savannah’s effort was an attempt in which steam
was only an auxiliary, and one, too, of a not very powerful kind. Our
coastwise steamers, as well as those employed in Great Britain, as
also the voyage of the Enterprise to Calcutta in 1825 (though she
took 113 days in doing it), had settled the possibility of the use of
steam at sea, and the question had now become whether a ship
could be built to cross the Atlantic depending entirely on her steam
power. It had become wholly a question of fuel consumption. The
Savannah, it may be said, used pitch-pine on her outward voyage,
and wood was for a very long time the chief fuel for steaming
purposes in America. How very important this question was will be
understood when it is known that Mr. McGregor Laird, the founder of
the Birkenhead firm, in 1834, laid before the Committee of the
House of Commons on Steam Navigation to India the following
estimate of coal consumption:
Under 120 horse-power, 101⁄ lbs. per horse-power.
2
160 „ 1
9 ⁄2 „ „
200 „ 8 1⁄ 2 „ „
240 „ 8 „ „

Or more than four times what is consumed to-day in moderately

economical ships. In other words, to steam at her present rate
across the Atlantic the City of New York, of 18,000 horse-power,
would need to start with something like 7,500 tons of coal on board
were her consumption per indicated horse-power equal to that of
the best sea practice of that date, which could hardly have been
under 6 pounds per indicated horse-power per hour.
This may be said to have been the status of affairs when, in 1836,
under the influence of Brunei’s bold genius, the Great Western
Steamship Company was founded as an off-shoot of the Great
Western Railway, whose terminus was then Bristol. Brunel wished to
know why the line should not extend itself to New York, and the
result of his suggestion was the formation of the steamship company
and the laying down at Bristol of their first ship, the Great Western.
Brunel’s large ideas were shown in this ship, though in
comparatively a less degree, as well as in his later ones. She was of
unprecedented size, determined on by Brunel as being necessary for
the requisite power and coal-carrying capacity. The following were
her principal dimensions: Length over all, 236 ft.; length between
perpendiculars, 212 ft.; length of keel, 205 ft.; breadth, 35 ft. 4 in.;
depth of hold, 23 ft. 2 in.; draught of water, 16 ft. 8 in.; length of
engine-room, 72 ft.; tonnage by measurement, 1,340 tons;
displacement at load-draught, 2,300 tons.

The Great Western, from an old painting.

Larger image (136 kB)

Dimensions of engines: Diameter of cylinders, 731⁄2 in.; length of

stroke, 7 ft.; weight of engines, wheels, etc., 310 tons; number of
boilers, 4; weight of boilers, 90 tons; weight of water in boilers, 80
tons; diameter of wheel, 28 ft. 9 in.; width of floats, 10 ft.
Her engines (side-lever) were built by the great firm of Maudslay
& Field, who had been for some time one of the most notable
marine-engine building firms of the period in Great Britain. They
had, up to 1836, built 66 engines for steamers; the first being in
1815, when they built those of the Richmond, of 17 horse-power.
The indicated power of the Great Western was 750; and a notable
measure of the stride which steam has taken in the half-century
since they undertook this contract is that they have since
constructed twin-screw engines from which they have guaranteed to
produce 19,500 horse-power. These drive a great armor-clad, which
has six times the displacement of the Great Western and twice her
ordinary speed.
The Great Western was launched on July 19, 1837, and was towed
from Bristol to the Thames to receive her machinery, where she was
the wonder of London. She left for Bristol on March 31, 1838; and
arrived, after having had a serious fire on board, on April 2d.
In the meantime others had been struck with the possibility of
steaming to New York; and a company, of which the moving spirit
was Mr. J. Laird, of Birkenhead, purchased the Sirius, of 700 tons,
employed between London and Cork, and prepared her for a voyage
to New York. The completion of the Great Western was consequently
hastened; and she left Bristol on Sunday, April 8, 1838, at 10 a.m.
with 7 passengers on board, and reached New York on Monday, the
23d, the afternoon of the same day with the Sirius, which had left
Cork Harbor (where she had touched en route from London) four
days before the Great Western had left Bristol. The latter still had
nearly 200 tons of coal, of the total of 800, on board on arrival; the
Sirius had consumed her whole supply, and was barely able to make
harbor.
 Cross-section of the Great Western.

It is needless to speak of the reception of these two ships at New

York. It was an event which stirred the whole country, and with
reason; it had practically, at one stroke, reduced the breadth of the
Atlantic by half, and brought the Old and New World by so much the
nearer together. The Great Western started on her return voyage,
May 7th, with 66 passengers. This was made in 14 days, though one
was lost by a stoppage at sea. Her average daily run out was 202
miles, or about 81⁄2 knots per hour; in returning she made an
average of close upon 9. Her coal consumption to New York was 655
tons, though in returning it was 392 tons—due no doubt to the aid
from the westerly winds which generally prevail in the North Atlantic
in the higher latitudes. She made in all, between 1838 and 1843, 64
voyages across the Atlantic, her average time from Bristol or
Liverpool to New York, with an average distance of 3,0621⁄2 knots,
being 15 days 12 hours, and from New York eastward, over an
average distance of 3,105 knots, 13 days 6 hours. Her fastest
westward passage was in 12 days 18 hours; her longest in 22 days 6
hours. Her fastest eastward was in 12 days 71⁄2 hours; and longest,
in 15 days. The largest number of passengers carried was 152, and
she averaged throughout 85. In 1847 she was sold to the West India
Steam Packet Company, and in 1857, about the time that Mr. Brunel
was launching his last and greatest ship, she was broken up at
Vauxhall; and her final province no doubt was to feed the drawing-
room fires of the West End of London, a fate to which many a worn-
out wayfarer of the seas is yearly devoted.

The Great Britain.

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Steam communication between England and America had thus
been demonstrated as possible beyond a doubt, and others were not
slow to make the venture. The Great Western Company themselves
determined to lay down a second ship; and it having been quickly
seen that the mails must be henceforth carried by steam, a
gentleman from Halifax, Nova Scotia, appeared upon the scene, who
was destined to connect his name indelibly with the history of steam
upon the Atlantic. This was Mr. Samuel Cunard, who had nursed the
idea of such a steam line for some years, and who now, with Mr.
George Burns, of Glasgow, and Mr. David McIver, of Liverpool,
founded the great company known by Mr. Cunard’s name. The
establishment of this line and the building of the Great Britain by the
Great Western Company are two most notable events in steam
navigation the one putting the steam traffic between the two
countries on a firm and secure basis; the other marking a notable
step in the revolution in construction and means of applying the
propelling power, destined before many years to be completely
accepted to the exclusion of the wooden hull and the paddle-wheel.
It is not fair to speak of the use of iron in the Great Britain for the
hull, in a general way, as the beginning of the change; she was only
the first large ship to be built of this material. The credit of the
introduction of iron is largely to be awarded to Mr. John Laird, of
Birkenhead, who in 1829 built a lighter 60 feet long, 13 feet 4 inches
in breadth, and 6 feet depth of hold; and in 1833, a paddle-wheel
steamer, the Lady Lansdowne, of 148 tons, 133 feet long, 17 feet
broad and 9 feet 6 inches deep. “In the following year Mr. Laird
constructed a second paddle-steamer, for G. B. Lamar, Esq., of
Savannah, United States, called the John Randolph. This was the
first iron vessel ever seen in American waters. She was shipped in
pieces at Liverpool, and riveted together in the Savannah River,
where for several years afterward she was used as a tug-boat.”
Though Mr. Laird was the ablest upholder of iron as a material for
ship-building, and was the largest builder in it, the idea existed
before him—Richard Trevithick and Robert Stevenson so early as
1809 proposing iron vessels, “and even suggested ‘masts, yards, and
spars to be constructed in plates, with telescope-joints or screwed
together; and in 1815 Mr. Dickenson patented an invention for
vessels, or rather boats, to be built of iron, with a hollow water-tight
gunwale” (Lindsay, vol. iv., p. 85). But nothing came of these
proposals, and the first iron vessel mentioned was built in 1818 by
Thomas Wilson, near Glasgow—the first steam vessel being the
Aaron Manby, “constructed in 1821 at Horsley” (Lindsay). “Up to
1834, Mr. Laird had constructed six iron vessels altogether;” the
largest of these was the Garryowen, of 300 tons, for the City of
Dublin Steam Packet Company. Others of considerable size by the
same builder followed, and the material began to come into use
elsewhere. In 1837 the Rainbow, of 600 tons, by far the largest iron
steamer which had yet been built, was laid down at Birkenhead. It
will thus be seen how bold was the step taken by Mr. Brunel when,
in 1838, he advised the Great Western Company to use iron as the
material for their new ship, which was to be of the startling size of
3,443 tons displacement. Nor were his innovations to stop with size
and material. On his earnest recommendation to the company it was
decided, in 1839, to change from the first design of the usual
paddle-wheels to a screw.

Ericsson’s First Arrangement of Underwater Propeller (Oct. 10,

1834).

Ericsson’s Propeller (July 13, 1836).

 Smith’s Amended Specification
(May 18, 1839).

Smith’s Specification (May 31, 1836).

 Cammerow’s Specification (Dec. 10, 1828).

Specifications of Early Patents taken out in England.

Three years before (in 1836), a Swede, whose name was destined
to become much more famous in our own land, had successfully
shown the practicability of screw propulsion, in the Francis B. Ogden,
on the Thames. “She was 45 feet long and 8 feet wide, drawing 2
feet 3 inches of water. In this vessel he fitted his engine and two
propellers, each of 5 feet 3 inches diameter” (Lindsay). She made
ten miles an hour, and showed her capabilities by towing a large
packetship at good speed. There was no question of the success of
this little vessel, which was witnessed on one occasion by several of
the lords of the admiralty. Notwithstanding her unqualified success,
Ericsson had no support in England. It happened, however, that
Commodore Stockton, of our navy, was then in London; and
witnessing a trial of the Ogden, ordered two small boats of him.
One, the Robert F. Stockton, was built, in 1838, of iron, by Laird—63
feet 5 inches in length, 10 feet in breadth, and 7 feet in depth. She
was taken—April, 1839—under sail, to the United States by a crew of
a master and four men. This little vessel was the forerunner of the
famous Princeton, built after the designs of Ericsson, who had been
induced by Commodore Stockton to come to America as offering a
more kindly field for his talents.
In the same year with Ericsson’s trial of the Ogden, Mr. Thomas
Pettit Smith took out a patent for a screw; and it was by the
company formed by Smith that the screw propeller was first tried on
a large scale, in the Archimedes, of 237 tons, in 1839. Of course the
names mentioned by no means exhaust the list of claimants to this
great invention. Nor can it be said to have been invented by either of
these two, but they were the first to score decisive successes and
convince the world of its practicability.
In 1770, Watt wrote to Dr. Smalls (who, a Scot, was at one time a
professor at William and Mary College, in Virginia, but returned to
England in 1785) regarding the latter’s experiments in relation to
canal navigation, asking him, “Have you ever considered a spiral oar
for that purpose, or are you for two wheels?” In the letter is the
sketch, a fac-simile of which is here shown:

Dr. Smalls answers that, “I have tried models of spiral oars, and
have found them all inferior to oars of either of the other forms”
(Muirhead’s “Life of Watt,” p. 203).
Joseph Bramah, in 1785, took out a patent for propelling vessels
by steam, wherein, after describing the method figured in his
specification of using a wheel at the stern of a vessel, in which he
places the rudder at the bow, he proceeds as follows:
“Instead of this wheel A may be introduced a wheel with inclined
fans, or wings, similar to the fly of a smoke-jack, or the vertical sails
of a wind-mill. This wheel, or fly, may be fixed on the spindle C
alone, and may be wholly under water, when it would, by being
turned round either way, cause the ship to be forced backward or
forward, as the inclination of the fans, or wings, will act as oars with
equal force both ways; and their power will be in proportion to the
size and velocity of the wheel, allowing the fans to have a proper
inclination. The steam-engine will also serve to clear the ship of
water with singular expedition, which is a circumstance of much
consequence.”
Bramah thus very clearly describes the screw, and in so doing
must unquestionably be numbered as one of the many fathers of
this system of propulsion. Fitch, as before stated, is recorded, on
most trustworthy evidence, to have been another: and Mr. Stevens,
of Hoboken, not only carried out successful experiments with the
screw in 1804, at New York, but even experimented with twin
screws. Charles Cummerow, “in the City of London, merchant,”
patented, in 1828, “certain improvements in propelling vessels,
communicated to me by a certain foreigner residing abroad,” in
which the screw is set forth in a manner not to be questioned. Who
the “certain foreigner” was, who communicated the invention to Mr.
Cummerow, has not come down to us.
It had, however, like the steamboat as a whole, to wait for a
certain preparedness in the human intellect. Invention knocked hard,
and sometimes often, in the early years of the century, before the
doors of the mind were opened to receive it; and too frequently then
the reception was but a surly one, and attention deferred from
visitor to visitor until one came, as did Fulton, or Ericsson, who
would not be denied.
The transfer of Ericsson to America left an open field for Mr. Pettit
Smith, and the experiments carried out by the Screw Propeller
Company had the effect of permanently directing the attention in
Great Britain of those interested in such subjects. The screw used in
the Archimedes “consisted of two half-threads, of an 8 feet pitch, 5
feet 9 inches in diameter. Each was 4 feet in length, and they were
placed diametrically opposite each other at an angle of about 45
degrees on the propeller-shaft” (Lindsay). She was tried in 1839,
and in 1840 Mr. Brunel spent some time in investigating her
performance. His mind, bold and original in all its own conceptions,
was quick to appreciate the new method; and, although the engines
of the Great Britain were already begun, designed for paddle-wheels,
he brought the directors of the company, who had undertaken the
building of their own machinery, to consent to a change. The
following details of the ship are taken from the “Life of Brunel:” Total
length, 322 ft.; length of keel, 289 ft.; beam, 51 ft.; depth, 32 ft. 6
in.; draught of water, 16 ft.; tonnage measurement, 3,443 tons;
displacement, 2,984 tons; number of cylinders, 4; diameter of
cylinder, 88 in.; length of stroke, 6 ft.; weight of engines, 340 tons;
weight of boilers, 200 tons; weight of water in boilers, 200 tons;
weight of screw-shaft, 38 tons; diameter of screw, 15 ft. 6 in.; pitch
of screw, 25 ft.; weight of screw, 4 tons; diameter of main drum, 18
ft.; diameter of screw-shaft drum, 6 ft.; weight of coal, 1,200 tons.
“In the construction of the Great Britain, the same care which had
been spent in securing longitudinal strength in the wooden hull of
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