The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Even without maps based on scientific projections, great progress was made in charting coastal waters by cartographers centered in Antwerp and Amsterdam. In 1584, Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer published his Spieghel der Zeevaerdt (Mirror of navigation, or Mariner’s mirror), a collection of forty-four charts of northern European waters that focused on the contours of the coast (often out of scale to provide details of harbors), landmarks, profiles of the coast as seen from seaward, and depth of water. Waghenaer’s compilations were so popular that the English adopted the term “waggoner” to describe any collection of charts with accompanying descriptions of the coasts. Waghenaer’s methods were refined by Willem Blaeu, whose Het Licht der Zeevaerdt (The light of navigation, 1608) rendered coasts and harbors more accurately, among other improvements. In acknowledgment of his accomplishments, the VOC named Blaeu their chief examiner of pilots and chartmaker. Cartographers in other nations expanded the scope of waggoners and other pilot books to incorporate as much information as they could about all the major sea routes of the world, but institutionalization of the discipline proceeded fitfully. France established its Dépôt des Cartes et Plans in 1720; the English East India Company appointed Alexander Dalrymple their hydrographer in 1769, and he held the same position concurrently with the Royal Navy from 1795. Charting by navies, merchants, and explorers progressed in spite of this haphazard approach. Among the more notable accomplishments beyond European waters was the British charting of the St. Lawrence River during the Seven Years’ War by a team of surveyors including James Cook and Joseph F. W. Des Barres. Between 1774 and 1780, Des Barres published the Atlantic Neptune, the first comprehensive compilation of charts of the east coast of North America. In the next century, improvements in navigational instruments would be dwarfed by the invention of wholly new technologies for propulsion but there would be no comparable advances in navigation until the invention of sonar and radar, the gyroscopic compass, and global positioning systems in the 1900s.

  The scope of maritime trade and naval operations expanded dramatically in the eighteenth century. Voyages considered exotic or possibly fatal at the beginning of the century became commonplace and explorers opened previously remote lands and people to interaction with the rest of the world. New combinations of commercial and state power were in evidence, while countries with previously untapped or underdeveloped maritime resources like Russia and the United States were launching themselves on the world stage. Among the most far-reaching developments occurred in Asia, where Europeans had at long last succeeded in reshaping the ancient patterns and composition of trade. This was most evident in the English East India Company’s takeover of Bengal, which prefigured the British Raj in India, but also in the United States’ engagement in the fur trade between the Pacific Northwest and Canton, and the rapid growth of the China tea trade. In some respects, these were merely variations on trends one can trace from the end of the fifteenth century, and few if any people foresaw the enormous changes in the balance, reach, and pace of global power that would result from the technological and economic revolutions already under way on both sides of the Atlantic.

  a This conflict is also known as the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Palatine Succession, and, in North America, King William’s War.

  b The strait is named for the Spanish explorer Luis Baéz de Torres, who sailed through it in 1606.

  c Originally “brigantine” and “brig” were used interchangeably; in current usage, a brig is square-rigged on both masts.

  d Two-and three-masted schooners sometimes set square sails on the foremast. There was one seven-masted schooner, built in 1902.

  Chapter 18

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  “Annihilation of Space and Time”

  “Annihilation of Space and Time.” So trumpeted a newspaper headline announcing the arrival of the first commercially viable transatlantic steamship in New York on April 22, 1838, barely three decades after the inauguration of regular steamship service on the Hudson River. In an age of the jumbo jet and Internet, it is difficult to appreciate the staggering advance represented by the arrival of the Sirius and, the following day, the Great Western, after transatlantic crossings of eighteen and fifteen days, respectively. The best times under sail were three weeks eastbound and twice that westbound. Soon, steamships would routinely make the crossing in less than two weeks, and by the turn of the century the fastest ships easily crossed in fewer than six days. Yet the invention of the marine engine had global implications far beyond what its sea-minded developers could have imagined. Initially, the greatest impact was on coastal and short sea trades, but steam technology did as much to open continents as to connect them: steam shipping gave rise to an era of canal digging and other improvements to inland navigation that transformed landscapes, created opportunities for industrial and economic development in continental interiors, facilitated the movement of goods and people across the land, and thereby changed the tempo of life for people worldwide.

  The development of steam navigation cannot be separated from the rise of industrialization generally. This led to realignments in trade that favored states with flexible financial markets upon which to draw for investment in capital-intensive machinery. It also produced tensions between industrialists, merchants, and shippers, at one end of a widening economic spectrum, and laborers and seamen at the other. The financial division between rich and poor was not absolute and industrialism fostered the growth of a professional middle class whose bourgeois values gave rise to a humanitarian impulse characterized by a belief in fairness and social welfare. In Great Britain, the superpower of the nineteenth century, the same merchant marine that facilitated the growth of British economic and industrial power was at once an emblem of much that was wrong with unfettered capitalism and a vector for the reforms that mitigated its worst excesses.

  The Advent of Steam

  Inventors in England and France began experimenting with the application of steam power to mechanical ends in the seventeenth century. The most significant practical developments occurred at the end of the 1700s in England, at the hands of engine designer James Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton. Steam held obvious attractions for shippers, who had always depended entirely on expensive human energy or the fickle wind and tide. Mechanical power would liberate them from these physical constraints, open up new vistas, and create a wealth of new opportunities. But the obstacles to the adoption of steam were not only technological but also financial and political, and the first person to build a practical steamboat was a resounding commercial failure. In 1785, the hapless American inventor John Fitch petitioned the fledgling United States Congress for support of his “attempt to facilitate the internal navigation of the United States.” Propelled by a device that mimicked the action of canoe paddles, Fitch’s Steamboat logged two thousand miles in and around Philadelphia with paying passengers.a Although the New Jersey and Virginia legislatures gave him exclusive rights to all “water craft, which might be urged or impelled by the force of fire or steam” in their states, he was unable to fund his work and he died penniless and forlorn in 1798.

  It was not until the merging of Robert Fulton’s technological and entrepreneurial genius with the wealth and political connections of Robert Livingston that steam propulsion succeeded. The inaugural run of Fulton’s forty-five-meter-long side-wheel steamer, the North River Steam Boat, took place on the Hudson River between New York and Albany in 1807; after that there was no looking back. In less than a century, steam power would dominate global maritime commerce and naval warfare, although sail remained competitive in at least some markets into the 1900s. In the three decades between the North River Steam Boat’s debut and the arrival of the Sirius at New York, steam navigation had a tremendous impact on continental developments, especially in the United States. In 1809, Livingston and Fulton secured a monopoly over steam navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and engaged fellow inventor Nicholas Roosevelt to determine the feasibility of running steamboats the nineteen hund
red miles between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Two years later, Roosevelt’s side-wheeler New Orleans began service. As Fulton confided to a friend, “The Mississippi, as I before wrote you, is conquered; the steam boat which I have sent to trade between New Orleans and Natchez [Mississippi], carried 1500 barrels = 150 tons, from New Orleans to Natchez, against the current 313 miles, in 7 days, working in that time 84 hours.” By 1814, when the New Orleans sank, there were three more steamboats operating on the river—two in defiance of the Livingston-Fulton monopoly—and twenty-one arrivals were recorded at New Orleans. An early challenger was Henry Shreve, whose two-decked, shallow-draft sternwheeler Washington proved the forerunner of the classic Mississippi River steamboat, although stern wheels were not widely adopted until the 1860s. Twenty years later there were more than twelve hundred arrivals, and in 1840 New Orleans was the fourth busiest port in the world, thanks to its enormous cotton exports. By the end of the century more than four thousand steamboats would be built to ply the “Father of Waters.”

  As impressive as the growth in the sheer number of vessels were increases in speed and the length of the sailing season. The busiest route on the Mississippi-Ohio system was between New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky, 1,332 miles. Between 1815 and the 1850s, the average time for the northbound passage fell from twenty days to under seven, while the southbound passage was halved, to just over five days. Clearing rivers of tree trunks and other obstacles expanded the scope of operations. In the 1830s, Shreve designed a twin-hulled snagboat fitted with steam pulleys, cables, chains, and other devices to remove the “great raft,” a thicket of trees, mud, and other growth that choked two hundred miles of the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi that rises in the Texas panhandle. The Army Corps of Engineers took six years to clear the raft, and in 1839—two years after the Republic of Texas won its independence from Mexico, and six years before its annexation by the United States—the Red River was navigable for twelve hundred miles from the Mississippi to Fort Towson on the Oklahoma-Texas border.

  To the north, steam similarly expanded opportunities for Canadians and Americans living around the Great Lakes, yet the steamship’s utility and the profitability of western settlement were limited by the impossibility of reaching the upper lakes from the sea. Proposals for a canal between Lakes Ontario and Erie dated from the early eighteenth century but, as with steam power, overcoming the technological, geographical, and political obstacles required people of vision and connections. One such was Gouverneur Morris, who first imagined a canal—if later claims are credible—while stationed near Lake Champlain during the American Revolution. He did not actually set eyes on Lake Erie until 1800, whereupon he wrote a friend,

  At this point commences a navigation of more than a thousand miles.… [K]now then, that one-tenth of the expense borne by the British in the last campaign, would enable ships to sail from London through Hudson’s River into Lake Erie. As yet, my friend, we only crawl along the outer shell of our country. The interior excels the part we inhabit in soil, in climate, in everything. The proudest empire in Europe is but a bubble compared to what America will be, must be, in the course of two centuries.

  The federal government abandoned financial support for a westward canal and it fell to New York state to build, between 1817 and 1825, the Erie Canal between the Hudson and Lake Erie, a difference in elevation of 165 meters. As with the coming of the steamboat to the Mississippi, the benefits were immediately evident. The time needed for the 363-mile trip from Albany to Buffalo fell from thirty-two days to no more than six for a flatboat freighted with fifty tons of cargo. Shipping costs plummeted by as much as 95 percent—from 120 dollars to 6 dollars for a ton of grain carried from Buffalo to New York City. By seizing the initiative when the federal government balked, the state had earned for itself the first place in the competition for overseas trade, and New York became the primary port of entry for immigrants to the United States, taking the lead that Philadelphia had held throughout the eighteenth century. At the same time, Canada embarked on a parallel set of improvements. The fifteen-kilometer-long Lachine Canal, which bypasses the thirteen-meter drop of the Lachine Rapids on the St. Lawrence above Montreal, opened in 1825, and four years later, the forty-two-kilometer Welland Canal, parallel to the Niagara River, made it possible for ships to sail between the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario south to Lake Erie, a difference in elevation of a hundred meters.

  While few improvements to inland navigation had such immediate and dramatic effects as those in the Mississippi drainage or on the Great Lakes, similar efforts were by no means confined to the United States. Britain had more than 4,700 miles of canals by 1875, and the floating population was estimated at between eighty and a hundred thousand people, widely regarded as outcasts, living aboard twentyfive thousand barges. In the Netherlands, France, and Germany, the science of hydrology was usually directed at flood control and reclamation, and in some instances navigation was almost incidental to the main object. Such was the case with Johann Gottfried Tulla’s ambitious program to straighten the upper Rhine, which, he proposed, should be “directed into a single bed with gentle curves adapted to nature … or where it is practicable, a straight line.” Work on the Rhine started in the same year as the digging of the Erie Canal, and over the next six decades Tulla’s program of dike building, channel cutting, and removing islands shortened the distance of the Rhine between Basel and Worms from 200 to 160 miles—and pushed the problems of flooding downstream. More than a century and a half later, cities built on the once stable banks of the middle Rhine like Cologne are subject to periodic flooding as a result of the increased velocity of the upper river. Although the Rhine is now a major shipping corridor all the way to Switzerland and a crucial component of a trans-European system of rivers and canals that links the North Sea to the Main and Danube Rivers and the Black Sea, navigation was not part of Tulla’s plan and steamers did not reach the upper Rhine until 1831.

  “The Beginning of the New Age in Steam Power”

  Even as ground was being broken on the Erie Canal in 1817, a group of New York investors announced the establishment of the first regular transatlantic sailing ship service: “It is our intention that these Ships shall leave New York, full or not full on the 5th, and Liverpool on the 1st, of every Month throughout the year—and if it be necessary to employ a Steam Boat to tow them out of the River we wish it to be done.” The Black Ball Line’s offer of regularly scheduled sailings was a bold initiative and because of a shipping glut that depressed prices on the North Atlantic, a hangover from the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, it was not until 1821 that a competitor service was established. A more intractable problem faced by the sailing packets was the great difference in sailing times between passages to and from Europe, which in the Black Ball Line’s first year averaged about twentyfive days eastbound and forty-three days westbound. Steam power held the promise of equalizing the time at sea, but although a handful of ships crossed the Atlantic more or less under steam starting in 1819, it was not until the 1830s that the idea of building a steamship specifically for the purpose became practical. American entrepreneurs were especially eager to take the plunge, but credit for the first purpose-built transatlantic steamer ultimately fell to British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. When his company, the Great Western Railway, built a train line from London to Bristol, he is said to have suggested that the company extend the service to New York via a “steamboat.” Considerably larger than any vessel of its day, Brunel’s seventy-two-meter-long wooden-hulled Great Western was trussed with diagonals of wood and iron, the latter a relatively new material in shipbuilding. This internal strength helped accommodate the ship’s hundred-ton boilers and engine, which were supplemented by a four-masted rig. For her 150 passengers the Great Western also boasted a vast passenger saloon measuring twenty-three by thirty-four meters.

  In the meantime, firms in Liverpool, Britain’s second largest port and Bristol’s main rival, had entered the race to
be first to offer transatlantic steamship service. Realizing that they could not build a new ship before the Great Western sailed, the British & American Steam Navigation Company chartered and modified the Irish Sea steamer Sirius for the passage. Departing Cork, Ireland, on April 4, 1838, the Sirius entered New York Harbor on April 22 to garner the exultant headline from the New York Herald:

  Arrival of the Sirius Steamer in Seventeen Days from Cork.