Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
Edinburgh. Or so the Scots would have it – in reality the first commercial steamer service was in America and the first paddle steamer to venture on the high seas was American.
Typical of the fleet of the Clyde Shipping Company was the coastal passenger liner Rathlin (1905) which served her owners until 1933 when she was sold.
Steam-raising from coal was, of course, the driver behind the Industrial Revolution ashore, and Scotsman Henry Bell took the new steam technology to sea as a commercial venture aboard his Comet. The English engineer Isambard Brunel wryly observed that ‘Bell did what we engineers all failed in – he gave us the sea steamer; his scheming was Britain’s steaming’.
There are several good reasons why Scotland was the hub of maritime industry in the nineteenth century, and why it exerted its dominance in early marine engineering, in ship design, and even in the need to develop international trade. The first was the opening up of the Glasgow Coalfield. Shallow but rich seams of good-quality steam coal were extracted from workings beneath what is now Glasgow city, and the mines worked progressively eastwards into deeper reserves towards Monklands and beyond. The second was a pool of intelligent and innovative men who had been brought up on the technological race of the Industrial Revolution. Collectively, these men maintained the vision that steamships would take over from sail, and, unlike sailing ships, would run to an advertised timetable at regular intervals. They were capable of applying their vision equally to the practicalities of timber and of iron castings, and to the business of economics and company management.
Equally important were the inventors and designers who so rapidly drove the evolution of the steamship. They were quick to recognise, for example, that the earliest marine steam engines were over-complicated and constantly in need of adjustment, and so set about simplifying their designs to make the engines less prone to breakdown. Another element was a determination to travel and to trade, complemented by a ready-made skills base which excelled in seamanship. The seamen were the islanders who relied on the sea for food and contact with the mainland; the Hebrideans and Shetlanders took the lead here, and taught the lowland men how to navigate. And the final element was an entrepreneurial will in men who were keen to take risks, but who were also able to manage the risk-taking. Of course, once these skills had been set to work, and steamers set out from the Forth and the Clyde, the momentum generated by the new industry drove it forward with increasing confidence. The developing British Empire provided an ideal global context in which the Scots and their inventions could reach the ends of the earth.
The early steamers arrived in heady days when the wealth of the Industrial Revolution engendered some grand and ambitious designs. When the celebrated English engineer John Smeaton was invited to work on the Forth & Clyde Canal in the 1780s, the forces driving the construction of the canal were primarily in the east of Scotland. The main impetus came from the merchants of Edinburgh and various innovative manufacturers, such as the Carron Company of Falkirk. They saw the canal as a means of accessing the Glasgow Coalfield, its energy, industry and wealth. In later years, of course, coal-mining spread east as the deeper Central and even deeper Lothian coalfields were successively exploited, with the Longannet Colliery in Fife one of the very last survivors. The merchants and industrialists in the west of Scotland were not so interested in the new canal, but the shipowners were. The Greenock shipowners could see that the canal would at last give them a short cut to Europe and the Baltic, to the extent that, following the opening of the canal, a number of Glasgow- and Greenock-owned schooners were based at Grangemouth where they transhipped cargoes via the canal.
Dining saloon aboard the Carron Line steamer Forth (1887). (Linda Gowans collection)
The Carron Company, which was a shipowner in its own right for many years, is particularly significant in the development of the steam engine and of its going to sea. Owning iron ore and limestone quarries as well as coal mines, the company concentrated on iron castings as its main product. James Watt was a friend of Dr Roebuck, one of the founders of the Carron Company, and Roebuck agreed to oversee the making of the first castings for Watt’s revolutionary new steam engine back in 1789. The castings were made at the Carron Iron Works in Falkirk. The newfangled engine was assembled at Dr Roebuck’s home near Bo’ness and, following trials, was installed in a boat constructed by William Symington, which was then put to the test on the River Carron in 1790. The technology was revisited with sponsorship from Lord Dundas, which enabled the experimental stern wheeler Charlotte Dundas to be tried on the Forth & Clyde Canal between 1801 and 1803.
At that time the deep-sea merchant navy was essentially the Honourable East India Company, consolidated by Royal Charter in 1600. Big, heavy, and indeed heavily armed, sailing ships designed to trade to company outstations in the Far East were chartered by the company, although it also owned many ships in its own right. These outstations were themselves heavily defended by the East India Company’s own army. Colonisation and the development of Empire was well advanced even before the nineteenth century when the Scots were already prominent in the East India Company.
In the nineteenth century private companies, owning ships on the 64th share principle, began to take up trade wherever perishable cargoes needed to be transhipped and lucrative returns could be earned. Much still depended on sail. The ‘tea clippers’ raced home with their precious cargoes, so as to receive the premium fee for the first ship of the season into port. Thermopylae, built by Hood of Aberdeen in 1868, conjures up a vision of racing against Cutty Sark, both with a thousand tons of tea in their holds. Nearer to home, the ‘rantapike’ (literally, ‘a rakish young girl’) or coastal schooner sailed between the Clyde and Liverpool, and with a fair wind did this in surprisingly little time. Of course, there were no railways in the early nineteenth century, and the ‘fast’ roads used by the stagecoaches were indifferent at best. The highwaymen too were plentiful, so the option of a quick passage by a fast sailing boat was attractive, especially in fair weather.
One of the Aberdeen Line’s famous full-rigged ships, built by Walter Hood of Aberdeen, was Thermopylae (1868). In 1872 she beat Cutty Sark (1869) homeward to London from Shanghai.
But the new maritime industry of the early nineteenth century only carried low-volume, high-value goods, but high-volume, low-value goods such as coal also needed transporting. Before large deadweight vessels were available to undertake this work and before coal wagons set out on the new railways, the availability of local coal dictated where industry could develop, as it could then only be transported in bulk by canal and the local tramroads. Lowland Scotland was set to benefit; the Scottish stage was indeed set for the steamship – bringing raw materials to the factories and mills and taking finished goods to market. One of the more attractive markets was London; it had no coal, and it had little industry, but its people were occupied in traditional trades, in which buying and selling, even to this day, have been the key to money-making. Scottish merchants were keenly aware of this potential, and helped to promote seagoing vessels that would help them lay out their stalls in monied London.
The greatest obstacle to speedy development was that the early seagoing paddle steamers were small and capable of carrying only a small consignment of passengers and perhaps mails. As the wooden hulls grew in size to match the development of more powerful engines, so an increasing load of goods could be conveyed. Crews’ and owners’ wages could always be enhanced by towage, and the steamship was very adept at helping becalmed sailing ships into port or assisting ships against adverse wind and tide. The steamer soon came to be recognised as a threat to the sailing ship, but it was not until the 1850s that sailing ships were ousted from the express coasting trade, and it was the outbreak of the Great War that caused the deep-sea sailing ships to give up against the superior economics of steam. The major development in the ultimate demise of the sailing ship was the screw propeller as this promoted the carriage of heavy, bulk cargoes such as coal or grain. The propeller, being fully immersed, was much less affected by a change in draught than the surface effective paddle