Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
steam packet services developed. These included a stagecoach connection to the shallow riverside quay at Dumfries for the steamer to Liverpool and services such as the Leith & Aberdeen Steam Yacht Company, and its steamer Tourist, running twelve-hour voyages between Leith and up to eight intermediate ports of call to Aberdeen from 1821 onwards. The Aberdeen, Leith & Clyde company commissioned the steamer Velocity for the same service shortly afterwards. The fare between Leith and Aberdeen was an expensive 21s saloon and 12s steerage as there was little viable alternative, with river crossings making the overland route much longer in miles than the journey by sea.
City of Edinburgh started running between Leith and London in 1821. Owned by the London & Edinburgh Steam Packet Company which was established by a group of local merchants, she was soon joined by Mountaineer, and a direct competitor, the steamer Brilliant. The competition was resolved when the Steam Packet Company bought Brilliant, placing the ship on Leith to Dundee and Aberdeen duties for which, in fact, she had originally been designed.
As the reliability of the coastal steamers increased, so merchants and passengers transferred their allegiance to the steamship. The fruits of the recent industrial revolution provided cargoes aplenty, with many goods destined for onward transhipment at the port of destination. Sail remained in use alongside steam, and the London & Edinburgh Shipping Company (rather than its former competitor the Steam Packet Company) commissioned a series of sailing ‘clippers’, built in Aberdeen, as late as the 1840s. The so called ‘Aberdeen Clippers’ replaced the old schooners; they had wonderful names such as Nonsuch, Rapid, Dart and Swift. Indeed, these magnificent little sailing ships were the forebears of the larger full-rigged ships that later undertook the tea races from the Far East.
The Dundee & Perth Shipping Company and the competing Dundee & Perth Union Shipping Company had twelve smacks trading to London, offering four regular sailings per week from 1824 onwards. The smacks reigned supreme until 1832 when two Glasgow-owned paddle steamers, Liverpool and Glasgow, appeared on the scene. A belated decision was made by the board of the Dundee, Perth & London Company to go into steam, and more immediately, to charter the paddler London Merchant to face the rivals head to head immediately. In so doing, the passage time was reduced to just thirty-eight hours.
The new purpose-built ships, predictably named Perth and Dundee, were initially the fastest and best-appointed on the east coast, the Dundee owners taking delight in overtaking rivals from Edinburgh and Aberdeen (the inaugural steam sailing between Aberdeen and London was taken by Queen of Scotland in 1827). The Perth, with its figurehead of the Fair Maid of Perth, and Dundee, with Neptune on the prow, initially called at the fishing ports of Great Yarmouth and Scarborough, but speed was all-important and these calls were dropped after 1836. The pair were ordered from Robert Napier with hulls built by John Wood and the saloons decorated by the celebrated artist Sir Horatio McCulloch. Napier lost heavily on the contract – a fixed price of £36,000 was inadequate for the work undertaken. They took nearly two years to build and were delivered in 1834. But even then, the steamship service was still discontinued in the winter months when the vessels were laid up and sailing ships resumed duty.
Steamer services from the east coast to destinations across the North Sea did not develop for some time. The Leith & Hamburg Shipping Company was created in 1816 with a fleet of sailing brigs. The successors of this company, eventually to become the Currie Line, did eventually promote steamers on its service to Hamburg, but not until 1848. The Leith, Hamburg & Rotterdam Shipping Company, managed by George Gibson, remained true to sail until 1850. James Rankine & Sons worked the Glasgow to Amsterdam route with schooners, until the steamer Therese was introduced on a new route between Grangemouth and Amsterdam in 1854. The sailing ships ceased on the Glasgow service in 1861, when a sharing arrangement was made with George Gibson on the Dutch sailings from Forth ports.
Further afield the concept of long-distance steamer voyages, or rather steam-assisted sail voyages, had been proven at a very early stage – not by the British but by the Americans. The first transatlantic crossing by a steamship took place in 1819 when Captain Moses Rogers sailed Savannah from New York to Liverpool and via various north European ports to St Petersburg and back to New York. Although designed as a sailing ship, she was bought on the stocks by the Savannah Steam Ship Company, inspired by the sight of pioneer paddle steamer, Charleston, steaming into port in 1817. Savannah took twenty-five days to cross the Atlantic. The little auxiliary steamer only used her engines for eight of them, as weather conditions prevented her from making better speed under sail with the paddles shipped inboard.
A second long-distance experiment followed in 1825 when the Honourable East India Company commissioned Enterprise for an experimental sailing from Falmouth to Calcutta. Their Lordships were not impressed by the 103-day passage time, hindered by gathering fuel on the way, which served only to reinforce their preference for the old-style wooden-walled sailing ships.
Scotland came back into the frame when Canadian Samuel Cunard visited the UK to articulate his vision of developing a regular transatlantic steamer service. Robert Napier agreed to build three wooden-hulled paddle steamers for Cunard for a total of £90,000, although Napier soon realised that larger and more powerful vessels would be needed to maintain the reliability of service stipulated by Cunard’s client, the Admiralty. Napier insisted that a four-ship service would be needed in order to satisfy the Admiralty requirements.
Samuel Cunard (1787–1865), founder of the British & North American Steam Packet Company.
George Burns (1795–1890), of G & J Burns, shipowners, a God-fearing man who was conferred a baronetcy a year before he died.
Introductions were made to George Burns and David MacIver in Glasgow who were soon able to guarantee Cunard 50 per cent of the enhanced capital outlay required for the four-ship service. £100 shares in units of £5,000 were offered to Glasgow businessmen, the first taker being Mr William Connal, who was persuaded by George Burns and responded simply by saying, ‘I know nothing of steam navigation, but if you think well of it I’ll join you’. A total of twenty-nine Glasgow businessmen invested in what became The Glasgow Proprietary in the British and North American Steam Packets. Samuel Cunard placed orders for the ships in May 1839 as specified and designed by Robert Napier, who in turn instructed four shipbuilders: Robert Duncan to build Britannia, John Wood, who had earlier built the hull of Comet, to build Acadia, Charles Wood, Caledonia and Robert Steele, Columbia.
The faith of Samuel Cunard and his client, the Admiralty, in the Scottish shipbuilders was rewarded by a reliable four-ship service to Halifax and Boston. The relationship between Cunard and its subsequent proprietors with Glasgow and the Clyde remained amicable throughout the entire existence of the Cunard Line, with many of its subsequent mainline steamers being Clyde-built. Indeed, the entire Cunard fleet was registered in Glasgow until 1878, when its business forced it to adopt Liverpool as its home port, Liverpool having become the company’s centre of operations.
Scottish shipowners did not enter the ‘long-haul’ steamer business until much later. For some it was the opening of the Suez Canal, which put steamships at an advantage over the sailing ships, that precipitated a move into steam, for others it was the increasing efficiency of steam propulsion which eroded the preference for sail. Examples of long-haul Scottish companies include the Donaldson Line, founded in 1855 by brothers William and John, with their straightforward vision of trading to South America with chartered sailing barques. Their first steamer was ordered in 1870, and shortly afterwards they changed allegiance to a new, more profitable service from the Clyde to Montreal and Quebec, although they retained an interest in the refrigerated meat trade from South America until the company’s demise. Thereafter the North American route became the core business and was operated in direct competition with the Allan Line (see chapter 12).
Patrick Henderson, with his three brothers from Pittenweem in Fife, founded P Henderson & Company