Abstract
The diffusion of steam into the transatlantic migration system of the nineteenth century, one of the most important developments in the history of human demography, is often explained by the technical progress of ships, which made the carrying of migrants under steam profitable. Existing historiography posits that early, basic paddle steamers were sustainable only with government mail contracts, whilst iron screw steamers later facilitated the emergence of a mass migrant trade. Data on steam company formation, durability and accounting for the mid-nineteenth century show that technical thresholds are not sufficient to explain the transfer to steam shipping of migrants. Determining factors were inter-regional relationships connecting engineering and demographic change, and, critically, the abandonment of capitalising novel steam lines. This article demonstrates that steam became usable because of endogenous transfer within well-established sailing services, a pivotal strategy adopted by those connected to centres of both innovation and migration.
Keywords
The use of steam shipping to transport migrants across the Atlantic was an epochal catalyst to international mobility. Steamships could carry more people than sailing vessels, but quite apart from that development, they were decisive in making the possibility of long-distance migration pervasive in European society. The technology made it possible to extend seasonal migration strategies throughout the Atlantic rim, and gave rise to an industry based on hugely expensive capital assets, driving the business of international mobility into every corner of Europe in search of custom and viable revenue streams. The result was the creation of a vast and dynamic labour exchange throughout the Atlantic World, and the permanent relocation of tens of millions of people from Europe to North and South America. These developments were necessarily dependent on demographic trends and the technical development of vessels. However, those developments alone do not explain diffusion, which is in itself a history of how the two phenomena were successfully stitched together. Technical ‘markers in the sand’ are an incomplete explanation for successful transition, the major developments being made in the 1830s, 1840s and 1860s, whilst transition in emigrant steerage is widely accepted to have taken place in between, during the 1850s. Data and evidence from both steam company accounting and the durability of steam lines in the mid-nineteenth century show that beyond technical changes, the viable diffusion of steam occurred because of personal relationships and local rivalries at nodal points in European transmigration, and, critically, because the individuals and companies involved integrated steam vessels into sailing fleets. These developments allowed proprietors to survive the loss of vessels and high running costs, providing a durability that had previously evaded the industry. In turn, integrated services created opportunity costs for fleets and ports without the technology, ensuring its take-off.
The micro-dynamics that initially transitioned Atlantic migration systems from sail to steam have largely evaded focused analysis because they exist at the confluence of historical sub-disciplines that, whilst related, rarely meet. Anglo-American historiography of steam on the Atlantic has been generated largely by maritime and economic historians. In Britain, the greater heritage of traditional maritime history (vessels) and the specific foci of British history have encouraged not only the study of ships and maritime engineering, but individual engineers or entrepreneurs (Cunard, Brunel, etc.) and imperial symbiosis, whether naval, mercantile or administrative, leaving Atlantic migration largely untouched. 1 And whilst economic study in the United States has given especial focus to the structure of the Atlantic passenger trade, economic and econometric analyses of the transition to steam have focused on passenger statistics, rather than initiations of change. 2 In English-language literature, there are two historiographical outliers. Torsten Feys has worked to tie the rise in migrant steam shipping to port competition and strategy in the early days of the technology, although with a greater overall focus on continental steam line management after diffusion. 3 For the early twentieth century, Drew Keeling has provided a full synthesis of the business, demography and politics shaping the industry of transatlantic steam. 4
Feys and Keeling owe their more complete appreciation and demonstration of maritime and migration connection to a grounding in continental research. Their broadly maritime business focus sits within a highly developed and extensive specialist literature dealing with the continental organisation of migration and shipping, from recruiting services to transmigration infrastructure to international regulation and policy, which offers a systematic analysis of the connection between migration and transit systems between mainland Europe and North America. 5 This tradition has no counterpart in Britain, despite the defining role of Britain in the Atlantic system. Thus, while continental scholarship long ago demonstrated that the annual value of British shipbuilding from 1870–1900 directly correlated with the emigrant trade, a recent historiographical survey of the significance of the early steamship for Britain does not reference long-distance migration. 6 Indeed, specific discussion of British shipping in any form in Atlantic migration has been largely intestate since Coleman’s original study in 1972. 7 If there is a ‘blue hole’ between the study of shipping and its broader socio-economic and transnational contexts, for Atlantic migration at least, it is a hole particularly evident in Anglophone maritime historiography. 8
The study of migration under steam on the Atlantic thus remains predominantly a study of the post-transition period (late nineteenth century), rather than transition itself, and predominantly a study of continental history. At a time when technologies of transport and mobility again seem poised for revolutionary change, understanding the how, why, when and where of previous system change (rather than changed systems) presents an important challenge to the historian. It is the purpose of this article to explore the transnational and trans-regional relationships that lay behind the initial diffusion of steam vessels into the Atlantic migrant trade, and the evolving business models that made physically capable ships into commercially viable capital. It demonstrates that creating novel firms to exploit steam technology retarded stability and diffusion, whilst integrating steam with sail provided stability and take-off, and that this development was contingent upon the transnational structure of the emigration industry. In order to do this, the article initially re-treads the well-known basic structure of transmigration and Atlantic departure from Europe, and initial iterations of steam technology, which developed away from migration routes and centres. It then explores the personal relationships and local rivalries that created convergence between the two, and the shifts in business strategy that allowed convergence to develop into diffusion during the mid-1850s.
The European migration system
In the three decades following the Napoleonic Wars, the principal transmigration routes from Europe to North America were established. They were the Irish Sea crossing to Liverpool, bringing Irish emigrants to Liverpool shippers; the North German route taking German migrants to Bremen and Hamburg; and the North Sea route, taking German migrants from Hamburg and Rotterdam to Hull, from where they crossed overland to the Mersey. Le Havre and its cotton trade with America was also initially significant, as were minor services from local ports, particularly around the Scottish and Irish coasts, which worked in timber trades with Canada, but these fell away as the migration grew, and technology began to advance. 9 As European emigration expanded, so did the regions drawn into the major routes: Scandinavian emigration joined the North Sea route, with recruiters working in Denmark, Norway and Sweden to channel migrants to Hull. 10 Liverpool continued to take the bulk of British and Irish migrants, whilst rising central and eastern European movement was channelled into Bremen and Hamburg respectively. Other peripheral services arose around the central core of Liverpool, Bremen and Hamburg, with Low Country ports handling approximately 20% of continental traffic in the final quarter of the century, and Italian ports – extensively served by British carriers – carrying Mediterranean migrants at its close. 11 Late in the century, Southampton also became significant. However, throughout the century, the Mersey, Weser and Elbe predominated in the industry of European departure.
The major routes attracted migrants for different reasons. Demographically, the early major outflows from Europe to America were dominated by Irish and German migrants. Liverpool captured both trades because of the frequency of shipping, and less stringent attitudes toward passenger regulations. The importance of Liverpool ships for U.S. trade ensured that contraventions of overcrowding and under-provisioning were not heavily penalised in American ports, for fear of loss of business. 12 Lack of entry barriers and regulation in Liverpool, alongside frequency of sailing, lowered both the cost of travel and time waiting in port: a major consideration for emigrants. Bremen famously owed its success to an opposite strategy of considered migrant care, with the trade managed around the generous space and provisions stipulated by the U.S. Passenger Act of 1819. 13 Hamburg, for many years uninterested in the trade, owed its rise to private enterprise, rather than city regulation, which sought to emulate the bremische model. 14 Of critical significance to the trade in each port was dependence on long-distance, trans-national networks. Brokers working on behalf of Liverpool shippers were prolific in Britain, Ireland, the German states and later Scandinavia. 15 On continental routes, bremische brokerages appeared in the German south from 1832 onwards, gradually spreading east. Hamburg was originally tied to the Liverpool trade, transiting emigrants through its port to Hull, and across to the Mersey, but became increasingly active in soliciting migrants for its own vessels from the 1840s onward. Brokerages were critical in helping migrants cross borders by meeting requirements in securities and tickets, and ultimately in funnelling emigrants to shipowners. 16
By the time steam shipping appeared on the Atlantic in the late 1830s, these methods and routes were largely clear. However, advances in vessel technology took place outside of this system, and profitable application eluded its early proprietors. Even as vessels evolved in design and capacity, early proprietors struggled to find viable operating models. They habitually capitalised new firms to deploy the technology, then found themselves critically exposed to the risk of lost or damaged assets, proving too financially fragile to sustain operations. These limitations were overcome by the emigration industry, the transnational character of which redefined not only the markets in which services were offered, but, critically, provided a business structure that could absorb losses, by integrating new technologies with mature sailing operations.
Early steam shipping on the Atlantic
In 1838 and 1839, the first successful Atlantic steam vessels were built in Bristol, London and Glasgow – none of which were well connected to Atlantic migration. The Glasgow vessels were immediately deployed from Liverpool, and the Bristol vessels latterly so, but the companies operating them did not offer services to emigrants. Even where steerage intentions were initially declared, as with the short-lived British & American Steam Navigation Company, which operated out of London and Southampton from 1839 to 1841, they were quickly abandoned in a period where pioneer proprietors lacked comprehension of, and connection to, the steerage trade. 17 Instead, operating models quickly coalesced around elite passenger custom and mail carriage. This is a well-trodden area of Atlantic history. The first Atlantic steam liners running regular services between Britain and the United States were wooden-hulled paddle steaming ships, able to depart and arrive on fixed timetables, whose history is associated with rivalry for prestige and government patronage. They are characterised as inherently unprofitable vessels, deployed only because government mail services could put them to use. Whilst limited, these ships were not unprofitable in the passenger trade. Critically, however, the business structures deployed to use them were unsustainable.
Wooden paddle steaming ships are historically represented as loss-makers because they burned a lot of coal relative to their internal space and carrying capacity, the latter being limited by their engine arrangement. Their advantages in speed and regularity over sail, however, ensured that customers (at a maximum of 100–120 at a time) with large disposable incomes, as well as government mail, sought their services. The only firm to deploy them and prove durable was the Cunard Line, which also received the first patronage for mail carriage on the North Atlantic. Simple conclusions can and have (dogmatically) been drawn from this correlation: paddle steamers were loss-making machines, and mail subsidies kept them running. This is not true. Well-built and well-run paddle steamers, operating a service for 1st and 2nd class passengers ‘in season’ (February–November), made a profit. 18 However, paddle steamers (those of Cunard) running all year round to carry mail made a loss, because passenger numbers were anaemic in winter, but mail contracts meant that crossings had to be made whether passengers were available or not. 19 Moreover, as mail subsidies grew, so the ships carrying mail became increasingly inefficient. 20 In terms of their use, the ships were thus profitable in the trade for which they were envisaged – passenger custom – and were increasingly unprofitable when they became encumbered by government contracts. Nonetheless, an orthodoxy has persisted that the vessels themselves were untenable, which is why the early firms operating them collapsed. 21
Insistence on technology as a source of failure has obscured the extent to which business models followed by early Atlantic steam proprietors were unsustainable. Early firms were uniformly capitalised by private share subscription as new, independent entities. They required massive outlays from shareholders to construct vessels, and were then dependent on those vessels alone for operating income. This was not a sustainable model. It often resulted in under subscription, and created a fatal level of exposure to the risks of accident and/or lost operating income, causing companies to consistently collapse. The first company to begin operating services on the Atlantic, the Great Western Steamship Company, of Bristol, used this model to launch itself, and its first vessel, the Great Western, in 1838. Despite the vessel being successful, the firm did not receive its targeted number of share subscriptions. 22 From a weak financial base, it ceased operating in 1846, after its second, highly expensive vessel, the Great Britain, ran aground. It is unclear whether its first rival, the British & American Steam Navigation Company, ever gained a full complement of share subscriptions, and it also ceased operating when its second, highly expensive vessel sank, in 1841. 23 The debut vessel of each firm was turning a profit when these events occurred. 24
No firm was immune to losing vessels on the Atlantic. The Cunard Line, which began operating in 1840, also lost one of its original steamers in 1843. Its continued operation, however, was primarily the product of the close relationship between Cunard and the British state, which encouraged investors – principally Cunard himself – to pour additional money into the business to prevent its collapse in the face of early operating and asset losses. 25 Government subsidies were then used to build highly inefficient vessels, especially after payments were increased in the late 1840s to ensure a British steam mail link with North America, which might otherwise have fallen to emerging American interests. 26 The long-term sustainability of the line was only achieved during the 1850s when the business diversified into unrestricted Mediterranean trade, and finally, at the end of the decade, by embracing emigrant shipping on newer vessels, eschewing its dependence on mail contracts. 27 Above all, the unique relationship between Cunard and state interests made the company a semi-governmental entity, and thus an outlier. All others continuing the high-risk strategy of capitalising novel steam lines collapsed, whether they had a mail contract or not. Cunard’s emergent American rival in the 1850s, the Collins Line, for example, had been capitalized by Edward Knight Collins and his associates on the back of a U.S. award for mail carriage, but operated at a loss from the outset. 28 Collins had liquidated all of his assets, including his successful sailing fleet, in order to finance a steam line that ultimately failed to turn a profit carrying mail and passengers on highly inefficient vessels. When vessels were lost to accident, Collins, predictably, was ruined.
The first dozen years of steam services on the Atlantic, from 1838 to 1850, were thus characterised by the high-risk strategy of capitalising novel firms to operate ships that were restricted to elite passenger custom, and which were often side-tracked by government contracts that enforced difficult conditions on proprietors. Other than the outlier of Cunard, no firm survived this approach. A number of developments were required to make steam passenger services more sustainable. The first and most obvious was a need for vessels that could cater to a larger market than the limited opportunity of first- and second-class passengers, which numbered barely 2,000 a year in the early 1840s. 29 Thus advances in ship configuration have been the oft-repeated focus of the history of steam on the Atlantic.
From 1845, larger vessels that could cater for steerage passengers became available, but they were not deployed in that trade for another half decade. A principal reason for this was that advances in ship construction continued to occur outside of the nodal points in the migration system. Nodal people – commercial figures linked to both engineering advances and the phenomenon of European migration – ultimately determined where and when the change in application occurred. Secondly, and crucially, those operators proved successful when they chose to turn away from the business structure of their unsuccessful forerunners in the 1830s and 1840s, and their unsuccessful rivals in the early 1850s. They were the firms that integrated steam vessels into existing sailing services – cargo, passenger or both – rather than firms that followed the prevailing pattern of capitalising new steam lines. These firms were far less exposed to operating risks, far more robust, and provided sustainable service, creating a tipping point in opportunity costs for rival shippers and ports during the mid-1850s. 30
Technological change
Adaptations made to steam vessels between 1845 and 1850 did not directly result in adaptations in their use. The decision of the Great Western Steamship Company to build its second vessel in iron, with a propeller system, ultimately generated the prototype for mass transfer on the Atlantic. When completed in 1845, the Great Britain vastly increased size limits on oceanic vessels, whilst theoretically offering far more efficient propulsion and internal space. 31 The Bristol firm, however, was dominated by an ageing class of former West Indian plantation owners and local merchants, with little connection to the North Atlantic economy. Thus, despite the company apparently being conceived on the concept of integrated rail and ocean transit, which, from the late 1840s, would become a linchpin of Atlantic migration, and despite deploying the new vessel from Liverpool, it continued to offer only limited cabin births, whilst continuing to chase government mail patronage. 32 Path dependencies, rather than physical capabilities, determined the ships’ operation. Having cost a huge sum to build, the ship did not prove profitable, and when stranded in Ireland in 1846, ultimately destroyed the company.
Others displayed similarly constrained approaches to the new technology. In 1847, an auxiliary screw steamer, the Sarah Sands, designed by the pioneering Liverpool iron shipbuilder John Grantham, went into service for local brokers Thomas and Joseph Sands as the second iron screw on the Atlantic. 33 Far smaller than the Great Britain, it nonetheless had a highly efficient engine arrangement, offering large cargo holds. Like all of its contemporaries on the Atlantic, it was marketed only to first- and second-class customers, whilst initially carrying fine goods and specie. Its returns from this model do not appear to have been sufficient for its owners, as after four journeys, it was offered for sale on the old sailing model of 64th shares, of which only 16 appear to have been transferred. 34 By 1848, under charter to the American Red Cross Line of sailing packets, the ship then began to offer steerage births. Operating between Liverpool and New York, it also carried large consignments of American wheat to Britain, a development that was ‘gratifying . . . during the present scarcity of that commodity’. 35 Operated by American interests, the vessel began to reflect the socio-economic pressures affecting the North Atlantic region in the late 1840s – food scarcity and emigration. However, by 1849, it had been pulled from Atlantic service and re-routed to Australia, a fleeting glimpse of contingent pressures on new technical possibilities.
Those pressures were not immediately brought to bear on the ‘compromise’ vessel City of Glasgow built in 1849 and launched in 1850, which, at 1,610 tons, lay between the Great Britain and Sarah Sands in size. 36 Much like Grantham’s predecessor, the City of Glasgow was the first effort of another well-established iron-hull builder to follow (and attempt to better) the Bristol prototype. Launched by its builders David Tod and John MacGregor as ‘the first ship intended to open up direct steam communication between Glasgow and New York’, the vessel followed a familiar pattern of operation. 37 Although it ‘could carry an immense number of steerage emigrants’ they were ‘not to be taken in the meantime’. 38 Instead, alongside ‘immense stowage for goods’, its passenger custom was, like its Bristol forerunner, for elite patronage only. 39 And just like its forerunners in ‘getting up’ steam enterprises on steam income alone, Tod and MacGregor found it impossible to maintain their fledgling firm. Thus it was announced in October 1850 that their efforts to ‘get up a company in this this city adequate to the complete development of so vast an undertaking have for the present failed’, and the vessel would be fatefully sold to Liverpool interests ‘to ply between that city and Philadelphia’. 40 Early screw steamers were thus not deployed in the trade to which they had natural advantages, and were not sustainably operated by their owners. The first issue would be addressed by individuals who, unlike the Bristol merchants or Glaswegian engineers, worked at the nodal points that connected the emigration system of Europe to technical developments in Britain. The second would be addressed by those among this group who departed from former practices by employing a cautious and competitive business model of integrated services.
Changing business structure
Despite the distinction often erroneously being afforded to the City of Glasgow, the first purpose-built emigrant steamship on the Atlantic was launched from Hamburg. It was commissioned and operated by Robert Miles Sloman, an Anglo-German merchant and emigrant broker in that city. Sloman had operated an Atlantic packet service since 1828, and an emigration business from Hamburg since 1836, the year that the city senate, after generations of hostility, began to make legal concessions to the trade. 41 Agents operating on Sloman’s behalf worked throughout the south western German regions in which Hanseatic rivals in Bremen had established ticketing offices in the early 1830s. 42 Most other Hamburg merchants catering to emigrants did so simply by offering trans-shipment to Britain. Sloman was also part of this system. From 1841 onwards, he ran two British-built paddle steamers between Hamburg and Hull, providing the mail service between the two ports. 43 In 1849, Sloman’s North Sea steamer, the iron-hulled Hamburg, initially operating in tandem with a British ship, was joined by a brand new iron-hulled sister, the Leipzig, built in Liverpool and registered in Grimsby. 44 By that stage, Sloman had also been joined by a new competitor on his direct services from Hamburg to New York. The Hamburg-amerikanische Packetfahrt Aktien Gesellschaft, (HAPAG) was founded in 1847, deploying four brand new sailing vessels built on the packet clipper model. Unlike other packet ships, these were to be offered to emigrants, 200 on each vessel, with only 20 cabin fares available. And because Hamburg failed to offer the protection to migrants offered by Bremen, driving emigrants largely to that port, the civic entrepreneurs behind HAPAG built the line to offer the best conceivable conditions to migrant customers, and regain trade. With a failing reputation for his unregulated sailing line, Sloman needed a way to compete. 45
An active customer of British yards, Sloman utilised his connections to, and knowledge of, British shipbuilding to try and gain this advantage. In 1849, he commissioned the Helena Sloman from Hull shipbuilders Thomas & Wakefield Pim. T. & W. Pim had introduced the propeller to the Hull shipbuilding industry in 1843, and it was an 800-ton iron screw that they produced for Sloman. Into this tonnage were to fit 42 first-class, 32 second-class and 236 steerage passengers. 46 Her maiden voyage – the first of a purpose-built transatlantic emigrant steamer – took place on 28 May 1850, with 191 passengers on board, of whom 145 were steerage. 47 The vessel was lost, however, on its third voyage, when its rudder, stern and propeller were damaged, causing a leak. All but nine passengers were rescued safely, but Sloman did not immediately return to steam services. As an individual operator, he did not have the capital to sustain a steam service. Whilst a broker of a sailing fleet, he was not an owner of the vessels in that fleet. Sloman had been well-placed to unite the German emigration stream with technological advances, as he operated at a nexus between the two developments, but he lacked the business structure to make a sustained effort. That distinction would go to a business partnership that, like Sloman, operated at a nexus between the social phenomenon of emigration and the engineering phenomenon of advances in shipping, but which, unlike Sloman, integrated steam, with additional investor support, into existing sailing ownership. As a result, it produced the first durable steam emigrant services on the Atlantic.
The firm to do so was famously the Liverpool-Philadelphia Steam Navigation Company, which had been formed to purchase the City of Glasgow from Tod and MacGregor. The purchaser of the ship at the end of 1850 was William Inman, whose name has become synonymous with the beginning of emigration by steam. Like Sloman, Inman was subject to influences from both rising emigration and changes in shipbuilding, and thus became – far more inadvertently than Sloman – a functional link, uniting the two. The formative commercial influence upon Inman came from the Richardson family, for whom he managed a transatlantic shipping service. This service was an offshoot of the Richardson family business in the linen trade. The Richardson’s were Quakers who had settled in Ulster in the seventeenth century, and had, by the early nineteenth century, created an international trade in linen fabrics, finished at their Irish manufactories. In order to furnish this trade, which exported goods to Britain and the United States, the firm had established a New York office in 1839, and immediately began acting as agents and brokers for sailing vessels to carry their goods between Belfast, Liverpool and New York. 48 In 1846, they then established shipping lines of their own: a New York line, running from 1846–48 out of Glasgow, and from 1848–51 out of Liverpool, and from 1847, a Liverpool–Philadelphia service. They also put a number of their ships into service for the Black Diamond Line from 1846 onwards. 49 In 1850, the Richardson’s hired Inman to act as chief broker for these shipping interests. 50 Inman was also a private customer of David Tod and John MacGregor, who had built him a small, propeller-driven iron yacht during 1848. Through his personal acquaintance with Tod and MacGregor, Inman thus procured the City of Glasgow for the Richardson’s fleet. On doing so, the group launched a new firm, the Liverpool-Philadelphia Steam Navigation Company – in reality a single steam vessel that sat within a large and well-established Atlantic trading company. A condition of the purchase was that the line would then acquire a second vessel of the same type, constructed by Tod and MacGregor. 51 This became the City of Manchester, which began operation in 1851. 52
Inman did not, however, wish to deploy the vessels for the carriage of steerage customers. As was typical, only cabin-class berths were offered, with the ‘immense holds’ well suited to the trading requirements of the parent firm. It would be John Grubb Richardson, patriarch of the linen firm, who instigated change. It has been intimated that, on account of Quaker values, and as an example of ‘doing well from doing good’ (the Richardson’s had established a model workers’ village in County Armagh in 1845), the City of Glasgow was put, at John Grubb Richardson’s bequest, into steerage service to allow emigrants a chance at a better crossing than those on wooden ‘coffin ships’. 53 The Richardson’s had been operating transatlantic steerage services for more than a decade. From the moment that they took charge of Atlantic trading vessels in 1839, they had offered steerage passage at £3 15s – a competitive rate – debarking 103 customers as early as May 1839. 54 When they took ownership of their own vessels from 1846, these were immediately offered for emigrant and passenger service, which ‘provided a lucrative opportunity to Richardson Brothers & Co.’. 55 The Richardson’s vessels were crowded, but within legal limits. The American Passenger Act of 1819, created to prevent the serious abuses that had been seen at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, stipulated that emigrant vessels should carry two passengers per five tons burthen, in order to ensure passage health. This was an unprecedented amount of space, and one with the potential to force ticket prices so high that, when briefly replicated in Britain in the 1820s, it caused outcry. 56 Consequently British legal standards oscillated between extreme measures and no measures at all, finally resting at one passenger per two tons by 1847. During the Irish famine, this was routinely ignored by many shippers, with the Richardson’s staying just to the right side of the legal minimum, frequently loading steerage at a ratio of slightly below one to every two tons. 57 The Richardson’s did not abuse emigrants, but operated practical, busy services as profitably as possible within the letter of the law.
John Grubb Richardson’s 1852 request that the firm’s two steamers be converted for steerage should be seen as a logical extension of a long existing business. The Richardson Brothers brokerage was perfectly positioned at the point of transhipment between Belfast and Liverpool, and was an established, well-connected Liverpool agent with offices in that city. The deployment of the City of Glasgow proved an immediate and famous success. The vessel offered births at £6 6s – almost double the standard steerage rate of £3 10s, and substantially more than the £1 12s-£2 offered on fishing and timber traders. 58 Despite the higher costs than on sailing vessels, the ship sailed with a full complement of 400 emigrants at the first offering, in conditions favourable for raised fares. Irish emigration peaked in 1852 as a result of the ‘relative and friends effect’ in which post-famine remittances fuelled a crest in subsequent departures. Recent catastrophe and the prospect of terminal decline created a structural context in which migrant networks had enormous pull, and they are an important consideration in assessing the relative reduction of cost barriers that might otherwise have been imposed when introducing new, higher cost services. It is questionable whether steam steerage, which was quickly settled across Europe at £6–8 a ticket, could have been fully competitive against sailing packets and cheap cargo ships up to the mid-1840s, but in densely-networked, post-1850 conditions, it was immediately so. Whilst cheaper sailing vessels continued to make competitive offers for several years, the emigration system itself helped to generate the market for viable steam steerage on a mass scale, by linking European customers to American purchasing power. With brokerages on both sides of the Atlantic, it is possible that the Richardson’s were cognizant of (and possibly cultivated) this development when their ships were converted. 59
By virtue of his position between the technical capacity of Tod and MacGregor, and the business links of the Richardson family, Inman found himself the agent of this transition in Britain, managing the new commercial offer of the City of Glasgow and City of Manchester. He was initially sceptical of the instruction from his partners. That scepticism was removed by his personal experience of an emigrant crossing in 1852, when he famously ‘learned to look upon them as the safest cargo . . . They made the ship buoyant and fire could not break out without some living person on board immediately knowing it’. 60 Inman has also been credited with the creation of a number of pioneering elements on board, including the separation of single male and female customers, and the banning of alcohol and gambling on well-provisioned, well-maintained crossings. It is here, however, that genuine Quaker influence might legitimately be seen, where the moral temperament of the Richardson Friends reflected on board the restraints and responsibilities placed upon their workers at home and in the factory. In 1850, the British emigration commission had also stipulated the separation of men and women as part of its newest passenger act reforms. Inman, for his part, was not enamoured of existing regulations, and repeatedly appealed to the emigration commission for the steam vessels he managed to be exempt, asking for clearance for 1,000 berths in the City of Glasgow (a ratio of 1-1.6), which was denied. 61
The projection of Inman as a visionary for steam on the Atlantic requires some tempering. 62 The decision to switch steerage business from sail to steam was that of the Richardson’s, and the orderliness and regulation of company vessels is more consistent with their precedent (and the prevailing trends of the state) than that of Inman himself. However, it was a hallmark of the Liverpool-Philadelphia line that it stayed within, and indeed enforced, the accepted regulations of the day, and that Inman brokered rapid, well-managed steerage transit. Consequently, the line was an instant success. In addition to the 1851 acquisition of the City of Manchester, the Liverpool-Philadelphia Co. took a third steam vessel, the City of Philadelphia, in 1854. In that year, the company lost two vessels. Famously, the City of Glasgow was lost and never seen again, and the City of Philadelphia was wrecked on the Canadian coast on its maiden voyage, with no loss of life, but leaving the firm with just one vessel. Unlike all firms that had preceded it, the loss of vessels did not cause the line to collapse. The entirely organic means by which it had come into being were critical to this. When it lost two ships, the Liverpool-Philadelphia line was not forced to sell its remaining assets or liquidate its operations, because those operations were part of a wider, interconnected business group, combining import-export and sailing operations. 63 Each steamship was well insured, and the loss of the vessels did not exhaust the financial position of the line. 64 At the end of 1854, a first replacement vessel was immediately acquired. 65
Having survived disaster, however, in 1856 the Richardson’s dissolved their interest in the business because of Inman’s desire to offer ships for Crimean War service. With his remaining investors, and free of Quaker ties, at the end of the war this left Inman to redeploy his vessels (including two new additions) to New York, allowing Liverpool steam steerage to enter the main thoroughfare of U.S immigration. It is here, in taking sole stewardship of the line, and further expanding it, that Inman’s position is most significant. The offer of an expanded service rapidly increased profits and set an industry precedent for frequent steam services. In 1860, long shorn of any association with sail, the line shared a dividend of £112,000. 66 By that point, many other shipping firms had followed the model of acquiring steam vessels piecemeal within existing business, creating a critical mass of services on key routes.
Sustaining steam
Inman reflected two key parts in the initial diffusion of steam into Atlantic migration: connection to both engineering changes and the emigration phenomenon, and integrating steam into existing Atlantic business. Others immediately followed this strategy, integrating emigrant steamers into general Atlantic trade and existing Atlantic emigrant sailing, the exemplar being HAPAG. This integrated model buffered the firm (and all who subsequently followed the model) from early losses. Established in 1847 as a sailing service, in 1854 HAPAG ordered its first two steam vessels. In a first example of the local and inter-port rivalry that would define diffusion, HAPAG announced this decision a day after Robert Sloman had announced he would be re-entering steam services. Despite overtures from Sloman for a joint steam venture, HAPAG clearly wished to establish itself as the singular force in the Hamburg emigrant trade, and went ahead alone. 67 Sloman then failed to re-enter the trade. HAPAG was also aware that port rivals on the North Sea, especially Bremen and Antwerp, had natural commercial and geographical advantages for emigrants. It thus sought to counter its local rival, and the inherent advantages of rival ports, with a concerted effort to integrate a superior offer of steamships. Its first two steamers, built by Caird & Co. of Greenock, were completed in the summer of 1855, but requisitioned from their British yards for Crimean service, eventually joining the HAPAG fleet in 1856.
One of the initial pair suffered several instances of damage in its first year. In 1857, two more steamers were added, one of which was infamously lost to fire within a year. However, repair costs and even lost vessels did not cause the HAPAG service to fold. As with the Liverpool-Philadelphia line, the risk of entering a market with expensive, novel vessels was mitigated by the fact that those vessels were not the sole source of operating income. HAPAG had a large fleet of sailing vessels (10) that provided continual income, and its ships were well insured. 68 The initial purchase of steam vessels had also spearheaded an increase in underlying share capital. HAPAG typified a new, robust approach entirely different to that adopted in the 1840s when firms capitalised new ventures solely to derive profits from steam, with some, like the Collins Line, selling off successful sailing fleets to finance the endeavour. Rather than risking their existing business, HAPAG added to it, and oversaw a managed transition to steam services, only winding up its sailing fleet in 1867. 69 Others adopted the same approach at precisely the same juncture.
Like HAPAG, the Canadian Allan Line ordered its first tranche of two screw steamers in 1854, to complement an existing sailing fleet. Offering a line from Liverpool to Quebec at 8 guineas (£8 2s), it opened a Glasgow-Montreal service in 1861. 70 Incredibly, by 1864, the firm had lost eight of its initial 12 steamers to accidents on the Canadian coast, and did not fail. Its continued use of sailing ships throughout this period (indeed until the 1890s) served as a buffer in operating incomes. 71 Once again the ability to derive operating profit from older technology eased the risks of transition to new. The situation was the same for one of the Allan Line’s early rivals, the Anchor Line. Anchor had its origins in merchant trading in 1838 and from 1852 it began ownership of its own sailing vessels. A modest steam vessel was added in 1856 and lost in 1857. With a second steamer requisitioned for service in India that year, the firm continued to deploy its sailing vessels and returned to the North Atlantic steam trade in 1859, developing into a major carrier, and another example of the benefits of an integrated approach. 72 The Anchor Line was also an exemplar in beginning to open new routes and services on the fringe of the emigration system, choosing not to compete for British and Irish or German migrants, whilst seeking markets in Scandinavia, and later the Mediterranean.
During the critical period of the early-mid 1850s, not all new proprietors in steam adopted the tactic of integrating steam and sail. Encouraged by the emergence of steerage operations on screw steamers, many more continued in the old pattern of capitalising new ventures to exploit a technological advance. Each continued to fail in short order, as all of their predecessors had done. In 1851, for example, the Glasgow & New York Steam Ship Company attempted to re-start the Clyde-New York steaming inaugurated by Tod and MacGregor. Using a second Tod and MacGregor vessel almost identical to the City of Glasgow, apparently laid down at the same time, and under the same brokers, the Clyde-New York initiative appeared to be a second attempt by all the initial parties who failed to ‘get up’ investment in 1850. 73 The re-started firm began offering steerage berths in 1853, but lost one of its three vessels in 1858, and in the typical industry pattern of sole-steam proprietors, failed shortly after. 74 At least five other firms emerged and disappeared on the old model in the years around 1854–56, each failing because of the loss of a vessel, demarcating a clear line between the robustness of firms who integrated steam into existing sailing, and could survive lost assets, and those with only steaming assets, which could not (see Figure 1).
Durability of steamship company lines.
Despite the proliferation of large capacity, technically profitable iron screw steamers after 1850, firms founded to exploit the technology past this point did no better than firms during its more experimental and limited iterations. As Figure 1 shows, of all the firms who provided steam services between 1835 and 1859 on the Atlantic, those who chose to launch solely steam endeavours lasted, on average, 23 years – a total that plummets to just 4.1 years without the outliers of Cunard and Nord Deutsche Lloyd, regardless of the state of the technology. Conversely, those who began with integrated services operated for an average of 75.2 years. In fact, outside of Cunard and Lloyd, no steam-only firm lasted more than eight years, whereas the shortest-lived integrated firm, NY-Le Havre, lasted 17 years. In a further caution against technological determinism, this firm did so by operating paddle steamers in conjunction with its sailing packets. 75
For its part, Lloyd was a reaction to the opportunity cost that had been created by the emergence of durable, mixed used lines, and a signal moment in diffusion. In Bremen, commercial life had, by the mid-1850s, become dependent on the emigrant trade, and developments in Hamburg required a response. In order to compete, Lloyd developed a new model: unlike the sustainable firms of the 1850–56 period, it was not an evolved sailing firm, but an entirely new steam line, whose financial origins reflected the changing circumstances and necessities of port competition. The uniformly failed approach of financing novel steam lines by private shareholding, typically leading to under-subscription and over-exposure to risk, was avoided in Bremen by the presence of banking investment that constituted 50 percent of Lloyd’s capitalisation. Almost 3 million Thaler in share capital was raised in 1856 and the first four steamers put into service in 1858. 76 As a line with extensive institutional backing, it was, like Cunard, an outlier among early firms.
The reaction to steam competition in Bremen, of an institutionally backed line, provided a new model for others seeking to successfully enter the trade. The Plate, Reuchlin & Co. Line in Rotterdam would become, in 1872, the Holland Amerika Line (HAL) thanks to the investment of the Rotterdam Trade Union and Rotterdam Bank, based on the success of its first two vessels. And in 1873, the Red Star Line, operating between Antwerp and Philadelphia, would finally give that European port the steam link it had coveted for a generation, thanks to the founding finance supplied by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The other firms of major consequence to join the trade, in 1866 and 1870 respectively, Guion and White Star, orchestrated the re-purposing of existing sailing firms for Atlantic steam steerage. 77 The emergence of this final quartet capped the completion of the steam revolution in the early 1870s, which had already gained a nine-tenths share of the emigrant trade. 78 From that point forwards, the story of steam on the Atlantic was one of market scale, not market capture. The creation of ever larger vessels and search for ever greater markets for custom led, by the late 1870s and early 1880s, to competition in vessel size, mass canvassing in new emigrant markets, and the final transition in financial models. 79 That transition saw the emergence of conferences, the cartels that formed among German-centred and British-centred lines to fix prices and ensure the viability of owning large capital assets that depended on a fluctuating migrant trade. 80
Diffusion
The diffusion of steam into Atlantic steerage markets thus went through three critical stages: the co-working of steamships and sailing vessels, which provided the first sustainable services; thereafter the increasing prevalence of institutional backing and re-purposing of lines, as other ports and businesses sought to compete; and then the emergence of cartels as the lines endeavoured to remain in business. With truly massive migrant numbers, and increasingly dominant cartel arrangements, the late nineteenth century witnessed dynamic growth, and it enjoys a well-developed historiography. The early period does not, being hostage to the connection between mail contracts and technical viability. The idea that mail contracts sustained early steam lines is apocryphal, born of the longevity of the Cunard Line. It helps to support the comfortable (but problematic) generalisation that viability in Atlantic steam existed either side of a technical line. With this orthodoxy in place, the historiography can (and does) dispense with close analysis of how, where, why and when change actually took place, focusing only upon effects after full-scale diffusion. In doing so, it obscures significant causal patterns.
The critical point at which commercial stability and therefore diffusion emerged was 1850–56. The durable steam lines of the nineteenth-century Atlantic emigrant trade were birthed during the peaks of Irish and German emigration in 1852 and 1854 respectively, when key figures such as Robert Sloman, John Grubb Richardson and Adolph Godeffroy of HAPAG tied emigration to steam services for the first time. The critical and immediate impact of sustainable operators such as Inman, HAPAG, Allan, and Anchor, is shown by passenger figures. Between 1855 and 1858, the number of passengers arriving by steam into the United States increased by 400% – the most rapid growth period in the century. In New York, the most important port of arrival, the proportion of passengers arriving by steam over the same four-year period rose from 7 to 33%. 81 In 1858, in these market conditions, Nord Deutsche Lloyd entered the trade. From this juncture, despite the impact of the American Civil War, which dampened both steerage numbers and ship investment, full market takeover occurred quickly. Estimates of market share for steam on the Atlantic passage in 1870 range from 86.4 to 95%, at which point the final major players entered the trade. 82 These events capped a process that had been decided not simply by technical capacity, but by a tipping point in commercial strategy a decade and a half before.
The transition from sail to steam in Atlantic steerage markets serves as an ideal example of Belich’s wider observations on nineteenth-century mass transfer, which was successful through the concomitant use of the ‘eo-technic’ (wind) and the ‘paleo-technic’ (machine). 83 For Atlantic steerage, mixed transition ensured sustainable growth and diffusion, and it occurred when attitudes toward risk in steam endeavours changed. Early, unsustainable endeavours of novel capitalisation were a product of the prestige that accompanied the achievement of steam. The desire to instantly create world-changing services consistently sprang, and failed, from this approach. Many were motivated by the prestige of being literal firsts, as with the early British & American Steam Navigation Co. and Great Western Steamship Company, which, like the Glasgow and New York Company, also sought to demonstrate world-changing engineering skill. Beyond these pioneers, others were ‘got up’ to exploit their technical innovations. Only when such appetite for risk was eschewed did steam prove sustainable. The success of early lines is consistently found among those who, far from wishing to be agents of revolution, were already operating in the Atlantic emigrant trade, were positioned to tie technology and markets together, and were prepared to integrate new technology piecemeal. They thus determined both the place and timing of diffusion, creating industry-wide transition by first doing so in their own operating structures. Their role – as connective nodal points and business practitioners that made technology viable – should not be lost to teleological interpretation. In the critical assessment of maritime technologies and associated system change, it was they who bridged the ‘blue hole’, as connective contingencies between developing maritime and socio-economic phenomena, and who thereby inaugurated further, exponential development in both.
Footnotes
1.
See Francis Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic 1840-1973: A History of Shipping and Financial Management (London, 1975); Stephen Fox, The Ocean Railway (London, 2003). Critical histories of British steam shipping, e.g. Don Legget and Richard Dunn, eds., Reinventing the Ship: Science, Technology and the Marine World, 1800-1918 (Farnham, 2012), Crosbie Smith, Coal, Steam and Ships (Cambridge, 2018), do not discuss the Atlantic passenger system. Indicatively, where work in Britain on transmigration and the British shipping industry has been published, it examines the c.5.3 million continental migrants passing through Britain in the nineteenth century, not the larger 13.3 million British and Irish total: see Nicholas J. Evans, ‘The Role of Foreign-born Agents in the Development of Mass Migrant Travel through Britain, 1851-1924’, in Torsten Feys, Lewis R. Fischer, Stephane Hoste and Stephen Vanfraechem, eds., Maritime Transport and Migration: The Connection Between Maritime and Migration Networks (St. John’s, Newfoundland, 2007), 49–62.
2.
The econometric approach has been adopted for the transitions from indenture to paid passenger trades, and the transition from sail to steam. Farley Grubb, German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709-1920 (New York, NY, 2011); on steam, Raymond Cohn, ‘The Transition from Sail to Steam in American Immigration’, Journal of Economic History, 65 (2005), 487–93.
3.
Torsten Feys, The Battle for the Migrants: The Introduction of Steam Shipping on the North Atlantic and its Impact on the European Exodus (St. John’s, Newfoundland, 2013), 11–66; Torsten Feys, ‘The Battle for the Migrants: The Evolution from Port to Company Competition, 1840-1914’, in Feys, et al., Maritime Transport, 27–38.
4.
Drew Keeling, The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the United States, 1900-1914 (Zurich, 2012).
5.
This historiography includes, inter alia, Rolf Engelsing, Bremen als Auswandererhafen 1683-1880 (Bremen, 1961); Sune Åkerman and Berit Brattne, ‘The Importance of the Transport Sector for Mass Migration’, in Harald Runblom and Hans Norman, eds., From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration (Minneapolis, 1976), 176–200; Hartmut Bickelman, ‘The Emigration Business’, in Günter Moltmann, ed., Germans to America: 300 Years of Emigration, 1683-1983 (Stuttgart, 1982); Michael Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung 1881-1914: Transitprobleme in Deutschland und Aufnahme in den Vereinigten Staaten (Stuttgart, 1988); Klaus Friedland, ed., Maritime Aspects of Migration (Cologne, 1989); Michael Just, Agnes Bretting and Hartmut Bickelmann, Auswanderung und Schiffahrtsinteressen/deutsche-amerikanische Gesellschaften (Stuttgart, 1992). More recent, increasingly specialised literature, includes Tobias Brinkmann, ed., Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigration from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany and Britain, 1880-1914 (New York, 2013); Rebekka Geitner, ‘Das größte Gasthaus der Welt? Die Auswandererhallen der HAPAG der Veddel in den Jahren von 1901 bis 1934’, in Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, Heiko Herold and Claudia Schnurmann, eds., Die hanseatisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen seit 1790 (Trier, 2017), 309–38.
6.
John Armstrong and David Williams, ‘British Steam Navigation, 1812 to the 1850s: A Bibliographical and Historiographical Review’, in John Armstrong and David Williams, eds., The Impact of Technological Change: The Early Steamship in Britain (St John’s, Newfoundland, 2012), 7–30, which extends analysis into the 1870s; Åkerman and Brattne, ‘Sweden’, 198, fig. 7.4 ‘British Ship-Building Related to Emigration Via British Ports, 1870-1913. Annual Figures’.
7.
Terry Coleman, Passage to America (Hutchinson, 1972); Edwin Guillet, The Great Migration (London, 1937) is an earlier precedent, dealing largely with Canada. Both end with the arrival of steam.
8.
Ingo Heidbrink, ‘Closing the “Blue Hole”: Maritime History as a Core Element in Historical Research’, International Journal of Maritime History, 29 (2017), 325–32.
9.
See, for example, Lucille H Campey, Fast-sailing and Copper-bottomed: Emigrant Sailing Ships and the Scots they Carried to Canada, 1774-1855 (Toronto, 2002).
10.
Kristian Hvidt, ‘Emigration Agents: The Development of a Business and Its Methods’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2 (1978), 178–202; Åkerman and Brattner, ‘Sweden’, 179–81.
11.
Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 48.
12.
See Feys, Battle, 38–9.
13.
Dirk Hoerder, ‘The Traffic of Emigration via Bremen/Bremerhaven: Merchants’ Interests, Protective Legislation and Migrants’ Experiences’, The Journal of American Ethnic History, 13 (1993), 68–101.
14.
Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 19–25.
15.
The most important Liverpool agency in the German states was that of Gustav Fӧbel, who also published the nationally significant emigration news sheet Allgemeine Auswanderungszeitung; Bernd Brunner, Nach Amerika (München, 2009), 64; see Åkerman and Brattne, ‘Transport’, 182–4 on the Larsson brothers and British shipping for Scandinavia.
16.
Feys, Battle, 16–20.
17.
The first prospectus of Junius Smith’s British & American Steam Navigation Co., circulated in 1835, included calculations for carrying 100 emigrants per crossing. E. Leroy Pond, Junius Smith: Pioneer Promoter of Transatlantic Steam Navigation [re-print] (Montana, 2010), 117.
18.
Taking the year 1840–41, for which all three early steam line companies declared, in varying forms, the financial positions of their vessels and operations, and imposing additional non-voyage related expenses on receipts, the indicated average profit per round journey of the Great Western paddle steamer (Great Western Steamship Co.) was £1,405, for the British Queen (British & American Steam Navigation Co.) £589. Brunel Institute (BI), DM1758/9/2/7, Annual Board Report of GWSSCo; Mechanics Magazine, 957, Dec 11, 1841, 464. (Fixed costs, including wharfage, insurance, New York coaling etc., imposed from GWSSCo accounting example to both vessels, which were of comparable size).
19.
In the period 1840–41, Cunard ships averaged a round trip loss of -£3,459, being -£959 after subsidy payments. Figures for Cunard are stated losses divided by number of round journeys during the accounting period (July 1840 to March 1841). The National Archives (TNA) Admiralty Papers (ADM), 12/387; TNA/ADM, 12/411 Statement of operating losses by Cunard to Admiralty.
20.
In 1852, the Admiralty noted that whilst it stipulated 400 horse power ships at c.£50,000 cost from Cunard, the line used ships that were in ‘power ranges from 700–1,000 horsepower, cost from £90,000 to £100,000 each, and consume[d] twice and three times the amount of coal’. Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Contract Packet Service, National Maritime Museum (NMM), TRNISM/5/3 276.
21.
On fuel efficiency and sustainability, the unsubsidised Great Western paddle steamer burned an average of 26 tons of coal a day, the later City of Glasgow screw steamer, lauded as an archetype of efficiency, 24.5. Both were initially deployed for cabin custom only, the former with far higher ticket fares, but lower cargo capacity. NMM, TRNISM/5/2, 129–159, [138; 144], Steam to the United States – Evidence of Captain Matthews on the Screw Propeller.
22.
In 1840, two years after the Great Western Steamship Co. launched the Great Western, it had received only £87,615 of a planned £250,000 in subscription. BI, DM1758/9/2/2.
23.
Feys states that both vessels of the British & American Line had been purchased by the Belgian Ambassador in London, Sylvain van de Weyer, just prior to this loss. Feys, Battle, 26.
24.
See above, note 14. Both companies were left in irrecoverable financial difficulties due to the cost of their experimental second vessels. The Great Britain, built at a cost of £117,000, was effectively uninsured at the time of its loss, and had to be sold for £18,000 in 1850, whilst the British & American Company, despite apparently receiving insurance for its lost vessel, had according to The Times incurred losses of more than £80,000 – effectively the cost of its two steamers, less insurance compensation. See Helen Doe, SS Great Britain (Stroud, 2019), 81–2; Smith, Coal, 110.
25.
In 1842–43, Cunard mortgaged more than £90,000 worth of his assets in order to do this, an action consistent with his commercial biography. As a resident of the cash-poor colonial outpost of Nova Scotia, Cunard had habitually turned official contracts paid in London sterling into extensive local assets. From junior military commissions to major monopoly services, ranging from postal contracts to the importation of East India Company tea, the transferal of metropolitan cash into colonial capital made him the richest member of the colony. The willingness of Cunard to mortgage a large proportion of those assets to protect his Atlantic subsidy reflects the extent to which business and official patronage were not just symbiotic, but effectively homogenous. See William M. Fowler Jr., Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic (New York, 2017), 72–3.
26.
The Cunard subsidy rose from £60,000 p.a. at the firm’s inception to £145,000 pa in 1846. See Smith, Coal, 107–19.
27.
Hyde, Cunard, 16–20, 58.
28.
See indicative operating figures per vessel in Fowler, Steam, 338–9.
29.
There were 1,945 combined passengers for steamships servicing U.S. ports in 1841 (first year of complete figures for multiple vessels) with vessels on average not carrying their full capacity. Massachusetts, Boston Passenger Lists, 1820–1891 (MBPL), Database with images. FamilySearch. 
: 1 September 2016. NARA microfilm publication M277. Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, Roll nrs. 13–15; New York Passenger List (NYPL), NARA M277 Roll nrs. 44–7.
30.
Feys, Battle, 87.
31.
See Paul Quinn, ‘I. K. Brunel’s Ships – First Among Equals?’, The International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology, 80 (2010), 80–99, on the girder-plate construction of the vessel floor, a precursor to Edward Harland’s doubled ‘box’ girder, later adopted by White Star.
32.
The company had made an unsuccessful tender for mail carriage – eventually won by Cunard – in 1839, and continued unsuccessfully to pursue government patronage throughout its lifetime. See House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online (PP), ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Halifax and Boston Mails’. The point is also rarely made that the company’s second vessel, too large to launch from Bristol, obviated its apparent founding rationale of linking London with New York via the London-Bristol Great Western Railway.
33.
Liverpool Mail, 15 August 1846.
34.
Liverpool Mail, 8 January 1848.
35.
Liverpool Mail, 10 April 1847.
36.
The former at 3,442 tons, the latter at 1,100. N.R.P. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway I (Jersey, 1975), 199.
37.
Glasgow Herald, 3 January 1850.
38.
Glasgow Herald, 3 January 1850.
39.
Glasgow Herald, 3 January 1850.
40.
Glasgow Herald, 7 October 1850.
41.
Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 19–30. An overview of Sloman’s career is provided by Ernst Hieke, Rob M. Sloman, Errichtet 1793 (Hamburg, 1968).
42.
Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration (Cambridge, MA 1964), 88–9.
43.
Hull Packet, 1 December 1843.
45.
Sloman was reportedly banned from selling tickets in Upper Franconia and the Palatinate during the 1840s. See Walker, Emigration, 88–9. In 1848, HAPAG had just 168 customers; in 1849 it had grown to 1,424, more than half of Sloman’s total of 2,784. Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 20.
46.
Joyce M. Bellamy, ‘A Hull Shipbuilding Firm: The History of C. & W. Earle and Earle’s Shipbuilding and Engineering Company Ltd’, Business History, 6 (1963), 28.
47.
Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway, 184–5.
48.
Richard S. Harrison, The Richardson’s of Bessbrook: Ulster Quakers in the Linen Industry, 1845–1921 (Dublin, 2008), 34.
49.
Harrison, Richardson’s, 52.
50.
N. R. P. Bonsor ‘Spectacular Rise of the Inman Line’, Sea Breezes, 28 (1959), 317.
51.
Glasgow Herald, 7 October 1850.
52.
Belfast Mercury, 19 July 1851.
53.
Fox, Ocean, 180–1.
54.
Harrison, Richardson’s, 34.
55.
Harrison, Richardson’s, 52.
56.
Guillet, Migration, 13.
57.
In 1846, the Richardson brothers sent the Remington Roy, registered at just 359 tons burthen, to New York with 153 passengers, a ratio of 1 to 2.34 tons; when its own line of packets to Philadelphia began in 1847, rates held around this mark. The firm’s largest vessel, the 810-ton William Penn, arrived in Philadelphia in June 1849 with 365 passengers, a ratio of 1 per 2.2 tons, whilst the 600-ton Helen McGaw arrived a month later with 242, a ratio of 1 to 2.48. Sometimes rates were far lower, however: a later sailing by the William Penn in that year carried only 129, at a ratio of 1 to 6.2. See NYPL, NARA M277 063/428; Pennsylvania Passenger Lists 1800-82 (PPL) NARA M277 068/375, 068/490, 069/181.
58.
Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, (New York, 1985) 197.
59.
Steam lines began to actively cultivate, organise and administer this business from the 1860s. See Jared N. Day, ‘Credit, Capital and Community: Informal Banking in Immigrant Communities in the United States, 1880–1914’, Financial History Review, 9 (2002), 66.
60.
Fox, Ocean, 181.
61.
Coleman Passage, 238.
62.
Bonsor ‘Spectacular’; Fox, Railway, 178–87.
63.
In 1851, the Liverpool branch of the Richardson business discontinued its advertising of sailing services, whilst Thomas Richardson, who ran the New York office, continued to operate some of the firm’s former Atlantic packets, as well as steamers, in American continental trade. Liverpool Mail, 9 September 1851; New York Herald, 24 March 1852.
64.
Ledgers for Inman vessels in the 1850s show an insurance value of £337,000 against total fleet costs of £356,000. Liverpool Archives (LA), 387 INM 11/4a.
65.
The Kangaroo was acquired from Australian Pacific Mail Steam Packet Co., in 1854; Bonsor, ‘Spectacular’, 319.
66.
LA, 387 INM 11/3.
67.
Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 20.
68.
Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 20.
69.
Just et al., Schiffahrtsinteressen, 26.
70.
C. R. Vernon Gibbs, Passenger Liners of the Western Ocean (London, 1957), 293.
71.
Gibbs, Passenger Liners, 293.
72.
R. S. McLellan, Anchor Line: 1856-1956 (Glasgow, 1956), 13–25.
73.
Gibbs, Passenger Liners, 125.
74.
Gibbs, Passenger Liners, 126.
75.
The firm folded as result of pressures on passenger numbers in the American Civil War, just as it planned to modernise its fleet. Gibbs, Passenger Liners, 126.
76.
Susanne Wiborg and Klaus Wiborg, 1847–1997, The World Is Our Oyster: 150 Years of Hapag-Lloyd (Hamburg, 1997), 31.
77.
Guion began as an emigrant brokerage – serving Thomas Richardson as early as 1850 – before brokering migrants for Cunard and finally overseeing the transition of the Liverpool & Great Western Steam Ship Company, initially operating under the Black Star Flag. The White Star Line originated as an Australian line of packets, before being taken over and repurposed by Thomas Ismay and Gustav Schwabe. Liverpool Mail, 9 September 1851; Gibbs, Passenger, 202–3; Fox, Ocean, 238–40.
78.
Cohn, ‘Transition’, 472; Hyde, Cunard, 91–2.
79.
On correlations in investment and recruiting, see James Boyd, ‘Initiating Mass Movement: Questions of Commercial Information in Atlantic Migration from Central Europe, 1870-1900’, Journal of Austrian-American History, 2 (2018), 31–50.
80.
Torsten Feys, ‘Prepaid Tickets to the New World: The New York Continental Conference and Transatlantic Steerage Fares 1885–1895’, Revista de Historia Economica, 26 (2008), 173–204.
81.
Cohn, ‘Transition’, 474; Fowler, Steam 169.
82.
Cohn, ‘Transition’, 472; Hyde, Cunard, 91–2.
83.
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford, 2008), 109.