For years it had been the custom for merchants to own their own ships: Marshall and Thompson already owned three vessels, the Pacific, the Amity, and the Courier, which they used for their own Atlantic cotton-shipping trade, and so they were personally well set: they did not have the problem afflicting many of their colleagues who could not find holds in which to ship goods. The particular stroke of genius of these two already highly successful businessmen, together with another Quaker shipowner, Isaac Wright—and which would ensure they were long remembered for their canny exploitation of a historically important business opportunity—was their decision to order still more ships, and to offer the space in these ships’ holds to any shipper who needed it. Further, and crucially, they sent those ships out across the ocean on a fixed and regular timetable, something that had never been done before: instead of the so-called tramp ships that had operated hitherto, and which left port when the skipper wished to, this brand-new idea of “square riggers on schedule” was offered instead.
Under this plan, a vessel of what would be called the Black Ball Line would leave New York at 10 A.M. on the fifth of every month, bound for Liverpool. A westbound ship would leave Liverpool for the uphill leg, on the first of every month. All ships carried freight of any kind, either in the hold or lashed to the decks, for any person who would pay. They also carried passengers—as many as twenty-eight in the early ships—in some fair degree of comfort.
They departed precisely on time, as advertised, whether their holds or their cabins were empty or full: they slipped their moorings in fair weather or foul, with getting there, and getting there fast, their singular priority. And in deference to the Post Office back in England, they would give to their vessels and their service the same name: they would be packet ships.
The first-ever Liverpool packet left Pier 23, in lower New York, on morning of January 5, 1818. If proof were needed that this new service was not to be dependent on the whim of weather, tide, or the master’s mood, and that it would indeed function in fair winds or foul, the 424-ton, three-masted James Monroe cast off her moorings in a howling nor’easter of a snowstorm, and the mobs of fascinated onlookers who cheered her into the gale—church bells rang out, and cannon were fired, too—soon lost sight of her in the froth of spindrift and blowing snow.
As she rounded the seamark of Sandy Hook, with New Jersey to her starboard side, Long Island to port, and with the land dropping away fast as she was carried out to sea, she unfurled her headsail—and in doing so displayed to all the other ships scurrying for shelter her new signature logo, a large black circle woven prominently into the canvas. She had the same symbol on the pennant flying from her mainmast: a brilliant red streamer with a black ball, dead center.
The James Monroe was built for speed—this, and her fixed schedule, were the principal bait for customers—and she owed much to refinements in naval architecture that American privateers had incorporated into their cargo ships during the war, to better outrun the British blockade. She was also quite capacious: she had room for 3,500 barrels of cargo—this was the principal measure for a ship’s hold in the early nineteenth century—though on this first voyage she was nowhere near full. There was, as has been noted, room for twenty-eight passengers, but only eight had signed on—at two hundred dollars for a one-way journey. Her manifest shows her holds echoing with space, since she was taking to England short commons indeed: merely a small cargo of apples from Virginia, some tubs of flour from the Midwest, fourteen bales of wool from Vermont, a smattering of cranberries from Maine, and some canisters of turpentine produced on the slave plantations in Florida. There were also ducks, hens, and a cow, allowing the obsequious stewards—mostly black men—to offer meat, fresh eggs, and milk to the understandably nervous clutch of civilian passengers. There were bales of Georgia cotton, too: the shipowners took good advantage of their own vessel to carry back to the textile mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire yet more supplies of the magical fiber from which they had first made their fortunes.
It took the James Monroe’s master, James Watkinson, twenty-eight days to reach the River Mersey, the ship tying up in Liverpool on February 2. Somewhere in mid-ocean she had passed (though never sighted) her sister ship, the Courier, battling along the uphill voyage—she took six weeks and suffered terribly. The James Monroe’s return was even less commercially convincing: she was damaged by a terrific storm in the Irish Sea and had to return to Liverpool for repairs. But back on New York’s Beekman Street, the three Quakers, Marshall, Thompson, and Wright, kept their north country nerve; and by 1820 all four of their vessels were making regular scheduled runs across the ocean, without major incident and with steadily increasing cargoes and steadily increasing rates to be charged. Two years later they could afford to build even bigger vessels to sail under the Black Ball flag: The Albion, the Britannia, the Canada, and the Columbia displaced five hundred tons and sported what were said to be the best crews on the ocean, and the slickest masters, whose keen need to hoist all sail under even the most dire conditions allowed them to make downhill passage as fast as possible.
Races were staged, not infrequently alarming the passengers, who had to watch, powerless, as sails were torn to shreds in the gales. The Canada once made the eastbound crossing in just fifteen days and eight hours, and even on her return made Sandy Hook just thirty-six days out from the Mersey. “Arise and shine for the Black Ball Line” became the watch-change cry on many of the competing transatlantic ships of the day—the implication being that laggardly behavior by the crew would ensure that a Black Ball ship would beat you into port. And since crews were paid upon arrival, this meant the Black Ballers were the first to be handed their envelopes of cash, making them the most envied men on the Atlantic waterfronts.
The captains, all of them hard, fierce, and wild men, driven by personal ambition and an utter devotion to their company timetables, soon became legends, their ships equally renowned as the most romantic of all the ocean greyhounds ever to gather in harbor. The crew were equally tough, known as packet rats, most of them Liverpool Irishmen with prodigious appetites for alcohol and worse, and invariably amiable scourges of the constabulary of any port in which they were given leave. But they were driven ceaselessly by their officers: one captain was known to sleep in a special cot bolted to the quarterdeck so that he could be sure no junior officer ever dared, while his skipper was sleeping below, to take in the sail during a storm and thus lose speed and risk delaying the schedule. It was a fierce business, entirely appropriate to the fierceness of the sea that the packets crossed and crossed again.
Before long, scores of other competitors were set up, and the shoreside streets of lower Manhattan became so crowded with waiting ships that, as Charles Dickens wrote, the packets’ bowsprits “almost thrust themselves into the windows” of the office buildings across from the piers, and street traffic moved to and fro underneath them like forest dwellers beneath a canopy of branches. The Black Ballers were soon joined at the quayside by ships of the Red Star Line, the Blue Swallow Line, the London Line, the Liverpool Line, the Union Line (direct to Havre in northern France), the Fyfe Line (to Greenock in Scotland), and the Dramatic Line (with all of its vessels named after actors and dramatists). There was also, despite protests, a quite separate and competing Black Ball Line established in Britain, which caused major confusion until the courts set things right. At any one time as many as five hundred sailing vessels might be crammed side by side along the Manhattan waterfront, their prows inward, their sterns backing out into the tides of the East River like so many waiting stallions.
The British Post Office soon afterward abandoned its own packet service, as the Black Ball founders had predicted, because in London it was soon fully accepted that the Americans were dominating transatlantic trade, with fast and reliable services springing up almost daily. And a new word soon crept into the lexicon: since all the vessels belonged to a company that sent—as the stagecoach companies were already doing, in their efforts to bring schedule
d order to the crossing of the country—a line of ships, one after another, out into the ocean, these new regular ships became known as liners. They were transatlantic liners—the first of a vast and varied company of commercial ships whose business has survived and prospered to this day.
Built in 1851 at the Webb shipyard in lower Manhattan, the great clipper ship Challenge was for a quarter of a century the apotheosis of the golden age of sailing, the exemplar of speed and grace at sea.
Only one year and five months after the James Monroe first departed New York, there was another, equally significant departure from another American port. She was the Savannah; and though she had been built in New York City, she sailed, on May 22, 1819, out of the port for which she was named, in Georgia, bound as most of the eastbound Atlantic ships of the time were, for Liverpool. What made the Savannah a memorable vessel—and what prompts America still today to celebrate, albeit notionally, her summertime date of departure as National Maritime Day—is that although she had the usual three masts of a seagoing clipper, she also had a funnel—bent at the top, like a drinking straw—and below, amidships, a 72-horsepower engine. She was the first oceangoing vessel to cross the Atlantic powered by steam.
Her engine, a quarter the size of most modern vehicle engines, was designed to drive an ingenious system of paddle wheels that were supported on the two ends of an axle that ran athwartships but could also be collapsed and folded away. And though she used her engine for only eighty hours of her first journey, she managed to cross from the Savannah River to the Irish coast in a perfectly respectable twenty-three days. But she was not economical: indeed, it would be some twenty more years before the efficiency of marine engines was tweaked to the point where it made good monetary sense to abandon for good the entirely free power of the winds. Yet even in 1819 the Savannah was recognized as the precursor of what would eventually become a whole new way of voyaging. She might have lumbered across the Atlantic in a less-than-spectacular twenty-three days, but a century and a quarter later, steamships not entirely unlike her would make that journey in little more than three.
5. THE PASSAGE OF INTELLIGENCE
Cargoes and peoples were not the only items, however, that the fast-modernizing world required to be sent across the ocean. The yawning expanse of water was increasingly seen as a highway for information—for the exchange between the peoples on the edges of the sea and well beyond, of intelligence, news, lovers’ declarations, birth announcements, reports of the passage of ships, the prices of stocks, the falls of governments, and the deaths of kings.
All of this was suddenly much needed. The world at the beginning of the nineteenth century was already changed and was well on its way to becoming the immense village it is today: the exchange of information between Philadelphia and Peterborough, or between Brazil and Belgium or Moscow and Montevideo, was every bit as important as once it had been between blacksmith and constable, or innkeeper and churchwarden. To function well, the interconnectedness of a community had always been vital: and with the world’s populations mixing and melding by a slew of migrations—not least across the nineteenth-century Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and Ellis Island—a sense of global community was building, too, requiring an ever-burgeoning flow of information and intelligence.
News of King George II’s death in 1760 took six wave-tossed weeks to reach her subjects in colonial America, demonstrating the desperately frustrating slowness of conveying information across the waters. Transmissions were not much faster a century later, during the Civil War, by which time the electric telegraph had been invented, easing the passage of communication across landmasses, where lines could be strung from poles. Getting the news across the sea required all manner of inventiveness: the London newspapers arranged for bulletins from North America to be sent to the outer capes of Newfoundland, for handwritten copies then to be rowed out to waiting eastbound steamboats and then hurried to the equivalent outer capes of northern Ireland, from where whaleboats would row them to the closest telegraph office for onward dispatch to London. This cumbersome process was not a huge improvement: it meant only that an item about Antietam or Gettysburg or Sherman’s march through Georgia could be read in Whitehall or the clubs of Pall Mall two weeks after it occurred.
Marginal speed increases were always noted: details of the July 4, 1864, battles in Virginia were published in the London Times just a fortnight later, on July 16. And when President Lincoln was shot dead in April 1865, the telegraphed news, also transcribed as a handwritten letter and placed in a sealed leather packet, went by way of the steamship the Nova Scotian, and was carried to the post office when the ship hove to off Donegal, from where it went off to be printed and the news distributed to a shocked and dismayed London—twelve days after the shooting.
Clearly a new and faster means of communication was needed, and the newly discovered telegraph would be the key. And the key place in the formulations that followed was a barely explored, windswept island distinguished only for being the fourth-largest in the Atlantic, after Greenland, Iceland, and Ireland—the British crown colony of Newfoundland. In the middle of the century, a small group of entrepreneurs wondering how to speed up transatlantic messaging began focusing on this island—and it did so because Newfoundland offered the closest points in North America to Europe: it was a mere 1,600 miles from the harbor opening at St. John’s to the cliffs of Connemara.
An undersea cable—for such had already been invented in Europe: a telegraph cable had been laid between Britain and France in August 1850, and soon afterward others were lowered into the seas between Britain and Holland, and between Scotland and Ireland—could perhaps be laid across the Cabot Strait, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. If then an array of landlines could connect this underwater cable to the cities of St. John’s and Halifax, and another line be laid to connect with Boston—why, it would need only a fleet of fast steamships to sail on a regular schedule between Newfoundland and Ireland, and messages could get from New York to London in as little as seven days.
It was at this point that the thirty-five-year-old Cyrus West Field, a wealthy scion of a paper-making family in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, stepped into this saga. The main backer of the Newfoundland plan had come to see him, in the hope of persuading him to invest. Field received the man courteously enough, said he’d think about it—and then, reading in his library that same evening, happened to turn a globe with his hands. It was moderately large globe, appropriate to a gentleman’s library—and Field noticed that he was able to span his hand both between Newfoundland and Ireland and between London and New York.
And then in an instant he realized that rather than building a cable through the wildernesses of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the hope of saving a couple of days’ transmission time for the telegraph, one could build a cable directly from Newfoundland to Ireland, under the narrowest point of the entire Atlantic Ocean. If he was able to do that, it would reduce the time for a message to pass between the two greatest cities in the nineteenth-century world from a matter of days to just a few seconds.
Field was neither technically minded nor an expert on the topography of the sea—but he immediately wrote to two men who were: Samuel Morse, who had invented the telegraphic code; and Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Navy, whose surveys of the Atlantic had established the existence of a vast mid-ocean plateau, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Both told Field that his idea could be made to happen: Morse had already experimented ten years previously, with cables running under New York harbor, and had written to the U.S. government to the effect that “a telegraphic communication on the electro-magnetic plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic”; Maury, though blissfully unaware that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was a range of peaks and canyons as sharp and vertiginous as the Rockies (over which one would hardly plan blindly to drop a telegraph cable from the air, say), had written that the “plateau . . . seems to have been placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of submarine
telegraph, and of keeping them out of harm’s way.”
The New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company was accordingly established in May 1854; two years later the Atlantic Telegraph Company67 was similarly established in London. Both were committed to raising funds for the project. The American firm’s chairman was Peter Cooper—founder of Cooper Union college in New York—a man who believed that what he was about do would “offer the possibility of a mighty power for the good of the world.”
The British government was especially excited by the plan and offered to survey the route, to perhaps even provide ships to help lay the cable, and to pay a fee—providing its official messages could be guaranteed priority over all others. The Americans debated the same matter very much more intensely.
Not everyone in the New World wanted such intimate contact with the Old. Thoreau, ever the grumpy misanthrope, remarked caustically that tunneling beneath the Atlantic, as he put it, to place a communications cable would hardly be a worthy exercise if the first news to reach America was merely “that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” And there was still a distinct mood of postrevolutionary, post-White-House-burning Anglophobia abroad, especially in the South, where anything English was widely loathed and despised. Nonetheless, after much hard lobbying in Congress, the requisite bills passed; and on the March day in 1857 before he handed over his office to James Buchanan, President Franklin Pierce signed into law an act offering precisely the same terms as been agreed in London. Construction—the most ambitious construction project then ever envisaged in the world—could now go ahead.