This magnificent ship has been the wonder of all who have seen her. Not only is she the largest of her class afloat, but her model may be said to be the original of a new idea in naval architecture. She is longer and sharper than any other vessel of the merchant service in the world, while her breadth of beam and depth of hold are designed with special reference to stability. Every element in her has been made subservient to speed; she is therefore her builder’s beau ideal of swiftness; for in designing her, he was not interfered with by her owners.… Her model must be criticized as an original production, and not as a copy from any class of ships or steamers.
Stag Hound’s route was typical of many ships in the California trade. American merchants had been trading to China since just after the Revolution, and the trade expanded following Britain’s victory in the First Opium War of 1839–42. Rather than sail out and back to Asia, ships generally circumnavigated the globe from east to west, sailing via Cape Horn to California, China, and, frequently, London. The average clipper could sail from New York to San Francisco in about 120 days, the fastest could make the passage in under 100, and the record was shared by the Flying Cloud and Andrew Jackson, both of which completed the run in 89 days—the Flying Cloud twice. No sailing vessel of any kind bettered this time until 1989 when the high-tech racing yacht Thursday’s Child covered the distance in under eighty-one days and in 2008 the Gitana 13 made the passage in forty-three. However, these carried no cargo. That it took 130 years to register a 10 percent gain in speed testifies to the genius of the clipper builders.
Like any thoroughbred, clippers were too refined for more ordinary pursuits, and after the initial excitement of the gold rush passed a new breed of American square-rigger emerged, known as the medium clipper or Down Easter, the latter name deriving from the fact that many were built in Maine, downwind and east of Boston. Although Down Easters were built for capacity, the spirit of experiment and improvement that informed the clipper age was not forgotten and they had relatively fine lines. Such changes in ship design were not unique to the United States, and they enabled square-riggers of wood and later iron and steel construction to compete in a number of long-distance trades into the twentieth century. California grain, Chinese tea, Australian grain and wool, British coal, jute from India, and guano from Peru’s Chincha Islands were among the cargoes carried in square-rigged ships and barks worldwide.
The deepwater sailing ship more than held its own until the 1880s. Many of the period’s technological advances benefited both sail-and steam-powered ships, and sail gained a few advantages of its own. In Britain a great hurdle was overcome when the Merchant Shipping Act of 1836 revised the tonnage measurement rules in force since 1773. Because tonnage is the basis on which port dues are charged, measurement rules tend to produce vessels of similar design as people seek to take advantage of them. The crude, earlier formula used as its only variables a ship’s length and beam, and as a result British shipbuilders produced “the most unsightly and unmanageable ships in Europe”—short, deep in proportion to beam, with flat sides and bottoms, and said to be “built by the mile and served out by the yard.” The new rules were not made mandatory until 1855, and progress was slow in the intervening years, but British sailing ships tended to develop finer lines, which made them faster and handier. Shipbuilders also took advantage of the increasingly widespread use of iron and steel for hulls. Because these required less material for a given size, an iron or steel ship had more cargo space than a wooden ship of the same dimensions. At the same time, steel rigging, chain, and labor-saving winches and capstans reduced the number of crew needed. By the 1870s, the better sailing ships had twice the capacity of older, wooden ships of comparable tonnage and carried crews one-third the size. Sail had three further economic advantages: steamships needed more engineers and stokers than sailing ships needed sailors, which made their manning costs higher; sailing ships had no fuel costs; and steamers cost more to build. Overall, the registered tonnage of the British merchant marine grew more than 80 percent between 1850 and 1880. Sailing ship tonnage increased through the 1860s and although it declined in the next decade, sailing ships still accounted for more than 60 percent of Britain’s merchant tonnage in 1880.
The Opening of China and Japan
The end of the Napoleonic Wars freed European powers to leverage their naval and commercial superiority in ways that represented a fundamental break with the accommodations reached by the majority of European and Asian merchants since the sixteenth century. This shift began in India in the 1750s and around the turn of the century in China. Two factors drove the British, the need to diminish their silver exports to pay for tea, and a desire to displace the Chinese as the dominant commercial carriers in East and Southeast Asia. Between 1805 and 1820, there were an estimated eighty-five thousand tons of Chinese shipping (about three hundred junks) operating in East and Southeast Asia, and nearly three times that under the flag of the East India Company.
By the 1820s, virtually the only product the East India Company imported from China was tea, and duties amounted to nearly 10 percent of the British government’s total revenue. As British and other foreigners had little the Chinese wanted in exchange, they were forced to pay silver for tea. The pressing need for bullion to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and for the pacification and administration of India had forced the East India Company to search for an alternative to silver, which took the form of Bengal opium. So successful was the company’s cultivation of China’s appetite for opium that it was able to stop carrying silver to China in 1805, and two years later it was actually importing Chinese silver. The problem with this trade was that it was illegal in China, where the first laws proscribing opium for nonmedicinal purposes were enacted in 1729. Opium consumption had moral and economic consequences the Chinese could ill afford. Trade in daily goods declined as addicts devoted more and more of their income to the drug, and bullion outflows from China had a direct impact on the imperial treasury.
In 1839, the emperor’s imperial commissioner at Canton, Lin Zexu, destroyed about twenty-one thousand chests of opium.c In response, the East India Company dispatched a force of four thousand soldiers and sixteen ships to demand satisfaction. At the outset of the conflict, the British blockaded Canton and a number of ports as far as the Yangzi. The emperor lost faith in Lin Zexu, but his replacement proved little better and was likewise cashiered for apparently ceding Hong Kong to the British. Yet there was little anyone could do in the face of Britain’s technological advantage. The Treaty of Nanking forced China to pay twenty-one million dollars in restitution, opened the “treaty ports” of Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai to British traders, abolished the Canton system, and allowed the British to trade wherever they wanted and to occupy Hong Kong. The French and the Americans obtained comparable concessions in 1844, and they were followed by the Germans, Russians, and Italians. The First Opium War may have illustrated China’s technological and cultural decline under the Qing Dynasty, but the “unequal treaties” undermined any prospect that China would attain its former stature as a regional hegemon or that it would be viewed as an equal partner on the world stage. The drug-induced malaise fueled by opium contributed to the collapse of the Celestial Kingdom and the turbulent decades of civil war and oppressive communist rule that ensued; China only began to find its way again at the end of the twentieth century.
Having prised open the trade of China, westerners next looked to Japan, where restrictions on the movements of official emissaries, shipwrecked foreigners, and even repatriated Japanese castaways were severe. American whalers marooned in Japan were typically rounded up and mistreated, and Japanese blown offshore and returned by foreign ships could be imprisoned for their misfortune. Calling at the island of Kunashir in 1811, the Russian surveyor Vasilii M. Golovnin and six of his crew were imprisoned for two years, while the Japanese rebuffed the attempts of Stamford Raffles to send ships to Japan from British-occupied Java during the Napoleonic Wars. But it was concern for the sa
fety of their whalers and their interest in Pacific trade generally that prompted the United States to take the lead in opening Japan. On the third visit of an American naval squadron, in 1854, Matthew Calbraith Perry convinced the shogun to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened the ports of Shimoda (southwest of Tokyo) and Hakodate (near the southern tip of Hokkaido) to American ships. By the next year, Britain, Russia, and the Netherlands had obtained trading privileges along the same lines.
Despite some resistance by traditionalists, Japan quickly shucked off two centuries of Tokugawa isolationist policy. Reformers may have feared that if they did not learn from China’s lesson the Japanese might suffer a similar humiliation at the hands of westerners. Following the shogun’s ouster, the emperor took the reign name Meiji, meaning “enlightened ruler,” and the Charter Oath drafted in 1868 by leaders of the restoration included as its fifth and final point, “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.” Although the United States had initiated contact, it was soon preoccupied with civil war and Japan turned to Britain and France for help in modernizing its economy and navy. The country’s transformation was astonishing. The value of its foreign trade rose from less than two million dollars in 1859, when the Peninsular and Orient Line established bimonthly steamer service between Yokohama and Shanghai, to more than twenty-eight million dollars seven years later. The western expatriate community grew to several thousand, although the Chinese outnumbered Europeans, just as they had at Manila, Batavia, and other Asian entrepôts. In 1875, Yataro Iwasaki founded the Mitsubishi Mail Steamship Company (forerunner of the modern Mitsubishi companies and now part of the NYK Line) and introduced a Japanese-run service to Shanghai. Iwasaki also took over the government shipyard at Nagasaki—later the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company—founded with Dutch help in the 1850s, and started turning out steamships, thus setting the country on the path to becoming one of the premier shipbuilders in the world.
Suez, Compound Engines, and the Telegraph
Contact between Europe and maritime Asia was made immeasurably easier following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. With their dominance of major Mediterranean trade routes and proximity to Egypt, the French not unreasonably believed that they would profit most from a shortcut to the Indian Ocean, and eagerly subscribed to the Suez Canal Company (Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez), founded by Ferdinand de Lesseps with the support of his friend and patron, Said Pasha, Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. The canal was 192 kilometers long from Port Said (named for the viceroy) to Port Suez (the ancient Clysma) and, as built, 22 meters wide on the bottom, between 60 and 90 meters across on the surface, and 8 meters deep.d While the French viewed the canal as a means to counter British dominance of ocean trade, and the British government resolutely defied British shipowners to oppose any efforts to plan or construct a canal, the canal confounded virtually all expectations. Mediterranean countries did not reap a windfall from the canal’s opening; rather, as The Economist presciently observed in 1869, the canal was “cut by French energy and Egyptian money for British advantage.” (In fact the engineering was French, but the energy was provided by Egyptians, 120,000 of whom died in the eleven years it took to dig the canal—“all for the advantage of the ‘barbarian,’ ” as an oracle had warned Necho II in the sixth century BCE.) Among Britain’s considerable advantages were strong capital markets to draw on for shipbuilding, longer experience of building iron steamships, and the best engines and steamship coal in the world. British tonnage comprised 60 percent of the total transiting the canal in its first year, three times that of French ships; twenty years later Britain’s share was three-quarters of the total and France’s was only 8 percent. In 1910, British tonnage still made up more than 60 percent and the German merchant marine accounted for 16 percent.
By 1875, the government of Said Pasha’s successor had rung up a massive debt and, now convinced of the canal’s importance to Britain, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli arranged to buy out his share in the Suez Canal Company for £4 million in return for a controlling interest. The next year, Egyptian finances were put under Anglo-French control, and in 1882 the British bombarded Alexandria and seized the canal to begin a forty-year occupation of Egypt. To preserve appearances, the Suez Canal Convention of 1888 guaranteed that “The Suez Maritime Canal shall be always free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag.… The canal shall never be subjected to the exercise of the right of blockade.” Needless to say, these principled sentiments were inevitable casualties of war.
The canal was first and foremost a steamship thoroughfare and it might have failed were it not for the development of the high-pressure compound marine engine by the Liverpool shipowner and engineer Alfred Holt, founder of the Ocean Steam Ship Company, better known as the Blue Funnel Line. Holt’s shipping career began when he inaugurated steam service from Liverpool to the West Indies, and to Brazil and the river Plate, and a monthly service between Jamaica and New York. In 1863, he and his brother decided that there was too much competition in the Atlantic trades and launched a steamer service to China. Holt claimed that the switch was prompted by a colleague’s remark that “ ‘Steamers may occupy the Mediterranean, may tentatively go to Brazil and the River Plate, but China is at least safe for sailing vessels.’ I suppose the fiend made me say, ‘Is it?’ ” In the 1850s, John Elder had developed a high-pressure, compound engine that reduced coal consumption by more than half, and in 1866 Holt fitted three Blue Funnel ships with compound engines for service to the Orient. Thanks to their dramatically greater efficiency, these could steam eighty-five hundred miles nonstop before taking on coal at Mauritius and continuing onward to Penang, Singapore, and China.e The opening of the Suez Canal made uninterrupted passages of eight thousand miles unnecessary, but without the efficiencies realized by the compound engine it is thought that no steamship could have afforded to reach India, much less China, even via Suez.
The gains realized by Elder’s compound engine were eclipsed in the 1880s by the invention of the triple-expansion engine, which uses steam at high, intermediate, and low pressure, and is about a third more efficient than a compound engine. More efficient still was the steam turbine, perfected for use in ships by Charles A. Parsons, who built a six-horsepower steam turbine in 1884 and quickly realized that it would be well suited to driving ships. One problem to overcome was the phenomenon of cavitation, the result of a vacuum forming around a propeller screw turning at high speed. When Parsons finally hit on the correct configuration of screws and shafts, in trials his 31.5-meter Turbinia attained speeds of thirty-four knots.
Parsons labored in relative obscurity until the international naval review held to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in June 1897. Turbinia romped through the anchored fleet with breathtaking agility and easily outran her pursuers in a dramatic demonstration of the new technology. Shortly thereafter he founded the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company, the prospectus of which clearly enunciated the benefits of his engine: “Increased speed, increased carrying power of vessel, increased economy in steam consumption, reduced initial cost, reduced weight of machinery, reduced cost of attendance on machinery, diminished cost of upkeep of machinery, largely reduced vibration, and reduced size and weight of screw propeller and shafting.” The Admiralty ordered turbine engines for a torpedo-boat destroyer in 1899 and a light cruiser in 1903, but the technology received its greatest boost in 1905 when First Lord of the Admiralty John A. “Jackie” Fisher decided to install them in HMS Dreadnought. Commercial interests were somewhat slower to embrace the new technology, but in the same year Cunard chose turbines for the Mauretania and Lusitania, whose seventy-thousand-horsepower engines were three times more powerful than those of the Dreadnought.
Just as the compound engine helped ensure the success of the Suez Canal, the submarine telegraph contributed significantly to the expansion of merchant shipping in the age o
f the steamship. The overland telegraph had achieved commercial practicality by the end of the 1830s, and within twenty years insulated submarine cables had been laid across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. In 1866, the Great Eastern ran a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland. The third of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s innovative ships, the iron-hulled Great Eastern measured more than 211 meters long and nearly nineteen thousand gross tons, and no vessel of greater length or tonnage would be built for forty years. Propelled by paddle wheels and a single screw, with five funnels and six masts, the Great Eastern never entered the Australia trade for which she was originally intended. Proving too big for economical transatlantic service, the ship went on to lay five transatlantic cables, as well as one between Suez, Aden (which Britain occupied as a coaling station in 1839), and Bombay. Just as telegraph lines on land tended to follow railway lines, submarine cables followed shipping lines, and by the 1870s Bombay was connected to Australia and there were direct links from continental Europe to the United States and Brazil. Transpacific lines were not laid until the early twentieth century, from the United States to the Philippines via Hawaii and from Canada to New Zealand and Australia.
The telegraph contributed to the growth of British ports, but the real winners were the burgeoning industries of continental Europe, whose buyers, no longer reliant on ships to convey their wishes, could now order raw materials directly from their overseas suppliers. British ships captured an increasingly large share of the trade even to continental ports, and in 1870 the British merchant marine comprised 43 percent of the world’s total tonnage (as indicated in ship registers); thirty years later this figure was 51 percent. Overall, the annual value of international trade grew an estimated 30 percent in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, to about £400 million. By 1870, it was worth £2 billion, and by the eve of World War I it had reached £6 billion—a twentyfold increase in just over a century. Part of this growth was related directly to the overseas migration of millions of Europeans, among others, and the increasingly strong ties between the resulting expatriate communities and their homelands.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 73