Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
wood and sail. With only one yard in America then capable of working iron into frames and hulls, and with virtually no capability of rolling iron into plate, the Americans had a steep learning curve to rematch British maritime engineering technology.
Hurd also provides a less than glamorous account of life at home as the Napoleonic wars came to an end and the steamship voyage began:
The country [UK] was still predominantly agricultural; its population since the days of Elizabeth had little more than doubled, and was still under 11 million. Most of what are now main roads were little better than earthen tracks, beaten more or less hard by traffic. The journey by coach from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow was still a matter of days. Though a beginning had been made on the construction of canals, the inland transport of goods was inefficiently carried on in the main by rough wagons or pack horses. The principle of the steam engine had been discovered, and the enormous possibilities of the latent coal and iron resources of the country had begun to draw on Man’s imagination, but the development of these, which the nineteenth century was still to witness, was still at the stage of infancy.
The Scottish coastal trades were maintained by cutter-rigged sailing packets and cargo smacks at the turn of the nineteenth century. The east coast packets were armed with carronades and pistols should they chance upon Napoleon’s raiders. The packet routes included the prestigious Leith to London service and services north to Wick, calling at ports large and small, and there were numerous west coast routes from Greenock to Ayr or west to Campbeltown and beyond to the wild and isolated Western Isles. The sailing schedules were haphazard and depended entirely on wind and weather; the sailing packets could not compete with the incoming stage coaches even though sea travel offered an easier journey, unless, of course, the weather was really severe. If only the timetabling and scheduling of the sailing packets could be regularised then they would be better placed to compete with the new overland routes. This was accomplished to a certain degree on the more prestigious routes, such as the east coast packet service to London, by providing standby vessels should the arrival of the packet be delayed. But this was an expensive practice that the passenger fares inevitably reflected.
On the sheltered waters of the Upper Clyde were the fly-boats. These were wherry rigged boats with four oars that could carry about eight tons. They had benches along the sides for the passengers, and an awning, or fly, aft to protect the lucky few from the rain. The fly-boats could take up to ten or twelve hours for the journey between Greenock, via the winding and undredged channel of the Clyde, up to the Broomielaw, hardly a satisfactory journey time with few passenger comforts on offer. Andrew Rennie, the town drummer at Greenock, was part-owner of a fly-boat and decided that he might speed things up by equipping a new boat with experimental side paddles that could be driven by hand. The drivers of the paddle wheels, it would seem, were to be driven on to greater effort by the beat of his drum. It worked, but was stopped by the lack of volunteers to turn the paddles, once the blisters had burst and the novelty had worn off.
Although a number of attempts had been made by Scottish engineers and designers to put the land engine onto a boat in order to propel it, the first acknowledged commercially successful steamship in the UK was Henry Bell’s Comet. Bell went to shipbuilder John Wood in Port Glasgow and together they conceived Comet which was launched with steam up in early August 1812, her brick-lined furnace supporting the boiler. It appears that thirteen-year-old David Hutcheson was present at the launch, inspiring the boy with the romance of the steamship, and no doubt inspiring him towards his destiny of champion, if not hero (certainly of the islanders), of steamer services to the West Highlands. David Hutcheson, of course, preceded David MacBrayne in this same role.
Robert Fulton’s Steam Boat or Clermont (1807), ‘which poured forth volumes of smoke in the day and showers of sparks at night, filling the minds of onlookers with apprehensive calamities’.
The Americans were slightly ahead of the game at this stage as they already had Steam Boat (sometimes referred to as Clermont) running on the Hudson River above New York from 1807, and the French were not far behind them. Back at home, William Symington had tried his luck earlier on the newly opened and sheltered waters of the Forth and Clyde Canal. Had it not been for vested interests, he should, by all rights, have taken the prize for the first commercially successful steamship; and that before the likes of Robert Fulton, John Stevens and others had set to work in New York and Bell in Glasgow. It appears that the committee of management, chaired by Lord Dundas, which was funding Symington’s experiments, recognised that its own towage fees and its herd of mighty horses that walked the towpaths were in serious jeopardy of being undercut on its own patch. But more seriously, there was also the issue of Symington spending the committee’s money without prior request – by all accounts Symington was a committed inventor but a poor communicator.
Comet was placed in service almost immediately after her trials, running down from the Broomielaw to Greenock and Helensburgh in just three and a half to four hours. Comet was really too small even for the Greenock to Helensburgh run, so Wood lengthened the little ship by twenty feet. Bell then took her via the Forth and Clyde Canal to Grangemouth to be reboilered and after a brief sojourn in the east Bell next spread his wings to the West Highlands. The problem was that others had seen the potential that Comet purveyed, and larger steamships were being commissioned for competitive service both on the Clyde and on the Forth.
Bell’s West Highland steamer service commenced in 1819 and was the pioneer coastal steamship service in Europe and it is this role for which Bell should rightly be remembered. When the little steamship was wrecked in December 1820 near Craignish, the larger steamer Highland Chieftain was brought in to take up the service.
The floating of the steam engine cured much of the uncertainty in sea travel and ensured greatly improved schedules for passenger and the mails. Geoffrey Body in his book British Paddle Steamers wrote:
The Comet had been followed by the steamers Elizabeth and Clyde and Glasgow in 1813. In 1814 came the first signs of a boom, with nine steamers being added to the Clyde fleet … The following year, 1815, Dumbarton Castle started on the Rothesay run and services were also extended from Dunoon to Inveraray. Between 1815 and 1819 a total of twenty-six vessels appeared on the Clyde waters while in the 1820s thirty-two steamers were built.
Meanwhile, just six steamers were registered in London during 1818, a further seven in 1819 and nine more in 1820. By the end of 1818 (all steamships had then to be registered) the aggregate tonnage of steamships on the Clyde amounted to some 3,000 tons burthen. There was a steamer service between Leith and Stirling by 1814, operated by Stirling, and the steamship service between Perth and Dundee commenced the following year. Even the Isle of Wight ferry out of Southampton remained subject to the vagaries of the weather until 1820, when the Solent’s first steamer, which had been built in Lincolnshire in 1817, was set to work between Southampton and Cowes. Where the Clyde shipowners led, it seems those on the Thames and elsewhere followed.
Many of the established shipowning companies resisted the newfangled steam technology to let others experiment with the over-complicated and expensive single-cylinder expansion engines. Others did champion the smoky wooden-hulled paddle steamers and soon took their sooty sails beyond their sheltered estuaries to the rougher seas of coastal voyaging. In those early days the steamers were laid up in the worst of the winter weather, awaiting the calmer days of spring – once again the sailing smacks would reign supreme. But it was not long before improved and more powerful engines were developed, allowing larger hulls to carry them. These in turn reduced the risk of being overwhelmed in a heavy sea so that the steamers eventually became all-weather boats.
A steamer service was inaugurated from the Clyde to Belfast from 1818 by David Napier’s Rob Roy. She was soon joined by the Clyde Shipping Company’s steamer Rapid, which was later sold in 1825 to the General Steam Navigation Company for service between London and the Continent. The link between Dublin and the Clyde was started only in 1823, when the St George Steam Packet Company managed the Emerald Isle on the route, basing her at Greenock.
Within a short time, a host