SCENE IN TERRA DEL FUEGO.CHAPTER XLVII.THE TRANSPLANTATION OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE—THE VOYAGE OF THE BOUNTY—A MUTINY—BLIGH, THE CAPTAIN, WITH EIGHTEEN MEN, CAST ADRIFT IN THE LAUNCH—INCIDENTS OF THE VOYAGE FROM TAHITI TO TIMOR—TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS AND A MARVELLOUS ESCAPE—ARRIVAL OF THE MUTINEERS AT TAHITI—THEIR REMOVAL TO PITCAIRN's ISLAND—SUBSEQUENT HISTORY—VOYAGE OF VANCOUVER—ALGERINE PIRACY—BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA—PROUD POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES.In the year 1787, the merchants and planters of England, interested in his Majesty's West India possessions, petitioned the king to cause the bread-fruit tree to be introduced into these islands; and, in accordance with this request, the armed transport Bounty, of two hundred and fifteen tons, was purchased and docked at Deptford to be furnished with the proper fixtures. Lieutenant William Bligh, who had been round theworld with Cook, was appointed to command her. Her cabin was fitted with a false floor cut full of holes sufficient to receive one thousand or more garden-pots. She was victualled for fifteen months, and laden with trinkets for the South Sea Islanders. Her destination was Tahiti by way of Cape Horn. She sailed late in December, 1787.After a three months' tempestuous passage, she made the eastern coast of Terra del Fuego. She contended thirty days here with violent westerly gales, seeking either to thread the strait or double the cape. Finding either course impossible, Bligh ordered the helm to be put a-weather, having resolved to cross the South Atlantic and approach Tahiti from the westward,—a determination which was successfully executed.Bligh gave directions to all on board not to inform the natives of the object of their visit, lest, by the natural law of supply and demand, the price-current of bread-fruit trees should suddenly rise. He contrived to make the chiefs believe that he was doing them a favor in conveying specimens of their plants to the great King of England. A tent was erected on shore to receive the trees, some thirty of which were potted every day. On the 4th of April, 1789, the vessel set sail, with one thousand and fifteen roots in pots, tubs, and boxes.It was now that an event took place which rendered the cruise of the Bounty one of the most extraordinary in the annals of the sea. A mutiny, which had been planned in secrecy, broke out on the 27th. The whole crew were engaged in it, with the exception of eighteen men. Bligh, with these eighteen,—most of them officers,—was hurried into the launch, which was cut loose, with one hundred and fifty pounds of bread, twenty-eight gallons of water, a little rum and wine, with a quadrant and compass. A few pieces of pork, some cocoanuts, and four cutlasses, were thrown at them as they were cast adrift. Some of the mutineers laughed at the helpless condition of the launch; while others expressed their confidence in Bligh's resources by exclaiming,with oaths, "Pshaw! he'll find his way home if you give him pencil and paper!" "Blast him! he'll have a vessel built in a month!"Bligh was convinced that, defenceless and unarmed as they were, they had nothing to hope from the inhabited islands of the surrounding waters. He told the crew that no chance of relief remained except at Timor, where there was a Dutch colony, at a distance of three thousand five hundred miles. They all agreed, and bound themselves by a solemn promise, to live upon one ounce of bread and a gill of water a day. They then bore away across this unknown and barbarous sea, in a boat twenty-three feet long from stem to stern, deep-laden with nineteen men, and barely supplied with food for two. There is nothing in maritime annals more worthy of a place in a work treating of "Man upon the Sea" than is this marvellous voyage from Tahiti to Timor.The first thing done was to return thanks to God for their preservation and to invoke His protection during the perils they were to encounter. The sun now rose fiery and red, foreboding a severe gale, which, before long, blew with extreme severity. The sea curled over the stern, obliging them to bale without cessation. The bread was in bags, and in danger of being soaked and spoiled. Unless this could be prevented, starvation was inevitable. Every thing was thrown overboard that could be spared,—even to suits of clothes: the bread was then secured in the carpenter's chest. A teaspoonful of rum and a fragment of bread-fruit—collected from the floor of the boat, where it had been crushed in the confusion of departure—was now served to each man.They constantly passed in sight of islands, upon which they did not dare to land. They kept on, alternately performing prayers, dining on damaged bread, and sipping infinitesimal quantities of rum or other cordial. On grand occasions, Bligh served out as the day's allowance a quarter of a pint of cocoanut-milkand two ounces of the meat. One half of the men watched while the other half slept with nothing to cover them but the heavens. They could not stretch out their limbs, for there was not room: they became dreadfully cramped, and at last the dangers and pains of sleep were such that it became an additional misery in their catalogue of sorrows. A heavy thunder-shower enabled them to quench their thirst for the first time and to increase their stock of water to thirty-four gallons; but, in compensation, it wet them through and caused them to pass a cold and shivering night. The next day the sun came out, and they stripped and dried their clothes. Bligh thought the men needed additional creature comfort under these dismal circumstances, and issued to each an ounce and a half of pork, an ounce of bread, a teaspoonful of rum, and half a pint of cocoanut-milk. They kept a fishing-line towing from the stern; but in no one instance did they catch a fish.Bligh now became convinced that in serving ounces of bread by guess-work he was dealing out overmeasure, and that if he continued to do so his stores would not last the eight weeks he had intended they should. So he made a pair of scales of two cocoanut-shells, and, having accidentally found a pistol-ball, twenty-five of which were known to weigh a pound, or sixteen ounces, he adopted it as the measure of one ration of bread. The men were thus reduced from one ounce to two hundred and seventy-two grains. Another thunder-shower now came on, and they caught twenty gallons of water. The usual consolation of a thimbleful of rum was served when the storm was over, together with one mouthful of pork. The men soon began to complain of pains in the bowels; and nearly all had lost in a measure the use of their limbs. Their clothes would not dry when taken off and hung upon the rigging, so impregnated was the atmosphere with moisture. On the fifteenth day they discovered a number of islands, which, though forming part of the group of the New Hebrides, had been seen neither by Cooknor Bougainville, and thus, in the midst of their agonies, the barren satisfaction of contributing to geographical science was, as it were in derision, awarded to them. The men now clamored for extra allowances of pork and rum,—which Bligh sternly refused, administering his bullet-weight of bread with the severest ceremony."At dawn of the twenty-second day," says Bligh, "some of my people seemed half dead: our appearances were horrible, and I could look no way but I caught the eye of some one in distress. Extreme hunger was now too evident; but no one suffered from thirst, nor had we much inclination to drink,—that desire, perhaps, being satisfied through the skin. Every one dreaded the approach of night. Sleep, though we longed for it, afforded no comfort: for my own part, I almost lived without it." Bligh now examined the remaining bread, and found sufficient to last for twenty-nine days; but, as he might be compelled to avoid Timor and go to Java, it became necessary to make the stock hold out for forty days. He therefore announced that supper would hereafter be served without bread!A great event happened on the twenty-seventh day. A noddy—a bird as large as a small pigeon—was caught as it flew past the boat. Bligh divided it, with the entrails, into nineteen portions, and distributed it by lots. It was eaten, bones and all, with salt water for sauce. The next day a booby—which is as large as a duck—was caught, and was divided and devoured like the noddy, even to the entrails, beak, and feet. The blood was given to three of the men who were the most distressed for want of food. On the thirtieth day they landed upon the northern shore of New Holland, and gave thanks to God for his gracious protection through a series of disasters and calamities then almost unparalleled.They found oysters upon the rocks, which they opened without detaching them. A fire was made by the help of a magnifying-glass; and then, with the aid of a copper pot found in theboat, a delicious stew of oysters, pork, bread, and cocoanut was cooked, of which every man received a full pint. Spring water was obtained by digging where a growth of wire grass indicated a moist situation. The soft tops of palm-trees and fern-roots furnished them a very palatable addition to their mess: After laying in sixty gallons of water and as many oysters as they could collect, they re-embarked, after having slept two nights on land and having been greatly benefited thereby. Keeping to the northwestward, and coasting along the shore, they landed from time to time in search of food. On the 2d of June, the watch of the gunner, which had been the only one in the company successfully to resist the influences of the weather, finally stopped, so that sunrise, noon, and sunset were now the only definite points in the twenty-four hours. On the next day, having followed the northeastern shore of New Holland as far as it lay in their route, they once more launched into the open sea.On Thursday, the 11th, they passed, as Bligh supposed, the meridian of the eastern point of Timor,—a fact which diffused universal joy and satisfaction. On Friday, at three in the morning, the island was faintly visible in the west, and by daylight it lay but five miles to the leeward. They had run three thousand six hundred and eighteen miles in an open boat in forty-one days, with provisions barely sufficient for five. Though life had never been sustained upon so little nourishment for so long a time, and under equal circumstances of exposure and suffering, not a man perished during the voyage. Their wants were most kindly supplied by the Dutch at Coupang, and every necessary and comfort administered with a most liberal hand.On his return to England, Bligh published a narrative of his voyage and of the mutiny, which was soon translated into all the languages of Europe. He ascribed the revolt to the desire of the crew to lead an idle and luxurious life at Tahiti, though subsequent developments, and his own outrageous and brutal conductwhen Governor of New South Wales, proved quite conclusively that his cruelties and tyranny had rendered him odious and intolerable. The British Government could not allow such a transaction upon the high seas to pass unpunished, and despatched the frigate Pandora, Captain Edwards, to Tahiti in the month of August. Only ten of the mutineers were found, the rest having withdrawn to another island through fear of discovery, as we shall now relate, merely stating that the ten persons taken were conveyed to England, where they were tried and executed.COLONISTS OF PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.John Adams, one of the mutineers, being apprehensive that the English Government would make an attempt to punish the revolt, resolved to escape to some neighboring and uninhabited island, and there establish a colony. With eight Englishmen, one of whom was Christian, the ringleader in the mutiny, their Tahitian wives, and a few islanders of both sexes, he sailed in the Bounty to Pitcairn's Island, which had been lately seen by Carteret. They arrived there in 1790, and, having unladen the vessel, burned her. A settlement was formed, which prospered in spite of the continual quarrels between the males of the two races. This hostility resulted, in three years, in the extinction of the savages, leaving upon the island Adams, three Englishmen, ten women of Tahiti, and the children, some twenty in number. One of the Englishmen, having succeeded in distilling brandyfrom a root which grew in abundance, drank to excess and threw himself headlong from a rock into the sea. Another was slain for entertaining designs upon the wife of the only remaining Englishman except Adams. Thus, in 1799, Adams and Young were the only males of the original colony surviving. They began to reflect upon their duties toward their children and those of their companions: they commenced holding religious services morning and evening, and instructed the rising generation in such rudimental branches of education as their own learning would permit. Young died in 1801, and Adams became the administrator and patriarch of the colony. He was assisted by the Tahitian women, who showed a remarkable capacity for civilization and aptitude for refinement. An English frigate, the Briton, touched at Pitcairn in 1814, and her captain offered to take Adams back to England, promising him to procure his pardon from the king. But the forty-seven persons, women and children, forming the settlement, besought their patriarch not to leave them. In 1825, Captain Beechey visited the island, and found the population increased to sixty-six. Adams was sixty years old, but still vigorous and active. He begged Beechey to marry him, according to the rites of the English Church, to the woman with whom he had lived, and who was now infirm and blind. Beechey gladly acceded to the request. Soon after, an English missionary, named Buffet, went out to Pitcairn to assist Adams in the discharge of his duties and to succeed him upon his death. The latter event occurred in 1829. Vessels occasionally stopped at Pitcairn, and the English Government was thus kept informed of the progress of its interesting colony.In 1856, the descendants of the original settlers, having increased so much as to outgrow the resources of their sea-girt home, abandoned Pitcairn's Island, and transferred themselves, with their goods and chattels, to Norfolk Island, directly west and toward New South Wales. They numbered one hundredand ninety-nine in all, the oldest man being sixty-two, and the oldest woman eighty. Charles Christian is the grandson of Christian the ringleader. Their new home contains about fourteen thousand acres, and is well watered, fertile, and healthy, the soil producing abundantly both European and tropical fruits, vegetables, grains, and spices. The history of the present colony, the offspring in the third generation of European fathers and Tahitian mothers, is as remarkable as any tale in romance or any legend in mythology.In the year 1790,—to return to chronological order,—the British Government determined to make one more attempt to discover a channel of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific to the north of the American continent, and selected to command the expedition Lieutenant George Vancouver, who had accompanied Cook on his second and third voyages. He was raised to the rank of captain and placed at the head of an expedition consisting of the sloop-of-war Discovery and the armed tender Chatham. He left Falmouth on the 1st of April, 1791; and, as the Admiralty had designated no route by which to proceed to the Pacific, he decided to go by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived here without adventure in July, and, late in September, struck the southern coast of New Holland at a cape to which he gave the name of Chatham, from the President of the Board of Admiralty.The two vessels coasted to the eastward, surveying the indentations and giving names to all points of interest. A harbor being discovered, it received the name of King George the Third's Sound, and Vancouver took possession of the land in the name of his Gracious Majesty. A wretched hovel, three feet high, in the form of a bee-hive cut through the centre from the apex to the base, and constructed of slender twigs, here revealed the presence of inhabitants; while the singular appearance of the trees and the vegetation, which had evidently undergone the action of fire,—the shrubs being completely charredand the grass having been shrivelled by the heat,—showed that, miserable as they certainly were, they were acquainted with the uses and abuses of fire. At last they discovered a deserted village, consisting of some two dozen huts or hives, which had apparently been the residence of a considerable tribe. They gratified their curiosity by contemplating and investigating these humiliating efforts of human ingenuity.A DESERTED VILLAGE.Continuing to the eastward, Vancouver touched at New Zealand, and arrived at a spot where he had been with Cook eighteen years before. An inlet which Cook had been unable to explore, and which he had named in consequence "Nobody knows what," was explored by Vancouver and called by him "Somebody knows what." Running to the north, he discovered an island whose inhabitants spoke the language of the great South Sea nation and who seemed perfectly acquainted with the uses of iron, though they had little or none of that metal. A Sandwich Islander, whom Vancouver had brought from London as an interpreter, and who was named Towerezoo, was of very little assistance; for he had been so long absent that he now spoke English much better than his mother-tongue, and spoke the latter no better than Vancouver. The island appeared to go by the name of Oparo, by which Vancouver thought fit to distinguish it till it should be found more properly entitled to another. The two vessels arrived in December at Tahiti, and anchored in Matavai Bay. The chronometerswere landed, in order to correct them by the known longitude of the island; the sails were unbent, the topmasts struck, for a thorough examination of the rigging. The Discovery went by accident upon a rock, and was for a while in great danger. On Sunday, the 1st of January, 1792, every one had as much fresh pork and plum-pudding as he could eat, and a double allowance of grog was served in which to drink the time-honored toast. The formula, however, was slightly altered to suit the state of the case: the gunner of the Discovery being the only married man of the party, the toast given wasSweethearts and Wife!THE SHIP DISCOVERY ON A ROCK.On the 24th of January, the two ships turned their head to the northward, now for the first time commencing the voyage in view of which the expedition had been equipped. They ran the two thousand five hundred miles that lay between them and the Sandwich Islands in the space of five weeks, and anchored off Owhyhee on the 1st of March. They touched the American coast, or that part of it known as New Albion, in 39° north latitude, which Vancouver now explored and surveyed. In August he entered Nootka, where, in accordance with his instructions, he was to receive from the Spanish authorities the formal cession of the colony they had established. He found his Catholic Majesty's brig Active already there, commanded by Señor Don Juan Francisco de la Rodega y Quadra. The two commanders agreed to honor each other by a mutual saluteof thirteen guns, which was done; while other courtesies were cordially exchanged. The ceremony then took place. Vancouver now returned to Owhyhee, and the king, smitten by a sudden and vehement attachment for the English, proposed to make over the island to the dominion of the King of England. All the insular dignitaries assembled on the decks of the Discovery, and the surrender was made in the midst of speeches and cannonades. Vancouver did not seem to have been deeply impressed with the importance of this event. The solemnity of the transaction was not increased by the circumstance that it took place upon the spot where Cook had so recently been massacred.Returning to the north, Vancouver continued his surveys and explorations of the American coast as far as the fifty-sixth degree of latitude. He terminated his operations on the 22d of August, at Port Conclusion, where an additional allowance of grog was served, that the day might be celebrated with proper festivity. He returned to Europe with the certitude that no passage existed from the North Pacific across the American continent into the Atlantic. His surveys remain as a monument of his activity, skill, and perseverance. The present charts of the coast of North America upon the Pacific are based upon them. More than nine thousand miles of shore, with its headlands, capes, rivers, bays, promontories, and labyrinths of islands, had been carefully explored by surveying parties in boats, in superintending which Vancouver injured his health and brought on the decline which terminated in his death, in the year 1798, at the early age of forty-eight.We have now to record the remarkable series of acts by which the United States of America, in the twenty-fifth year of their existence as a nation, put an end to a humiliation to which the commercial powers of Europe had submitted for centuries. From the time when the Spanish Moors, driven out of Granada by Ferdinand the Catholic, settled on the oppositecoast and commenced the practice of piracy, the Barbary States, Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, had been united against all Christian commerce in the Mediterranean. Emboldened by impunity, they extended their operations into the Atlantic, seizing the vessels of all nations who did not pay them tribute. England under Cromwell, and France under Louis XIV., however, caused their flags to be respected. The Dutch, Danes, and Swedes, by paying an annual tax, purchased exemption from seizure,—thus giving the sanction of a treaty to the outrage and consenting to wear an odious badge of servitude. Russia and Austria were protected by special agreements.During the early years of the American Republic, Tripoli intimated to the Government the propriety of paying tribute. Jefferson replied, in 1800, by declaring war against Tripoli, and sent out an armed naval force under Commodore Dale. This officer, with two frigates and a sloop-of-war, blockaded Tripoli, preventing the cruisers from getting to sea, and thus protecting our commerce. Commodore Preble followed with seven vessels in 1803. In October, one of his ships,—the Philadelphia, Captain Bainbridge,—engaged in reconnoitring the harbor of Tripoli, grounded and was forced to surrender. The officers were treated as prisoners of war, the sailors as slaves. The vessel was floated and moored in the harbor, strongly manned by Tripolitans, whose naval force was thus unexpectedly augmented.The American squadron rendezvoused at Syracuse, in Sicily,—somewhat over a day's sail from Tripoli. A young lieutenant under Preble, named Decatur, formed a plan for destroying the Philadelphia and thus reducing the Tripolitans again to their ordinary naval strength. Preble consented to the scheme, and Decatur armed a ketch which he had captured, and with it entered, in February, 1804, under cover of the night, the harbor of Tripoli. He had with him an old pilot who spoke the Tripolitan language. On approaching the Philadelphia, theywere challenged; but the pilot replied that he had lost his anchor and merely wished to fasten his vessel to the frigate till morning. A boat was sent ashore by the Tripolitans to ask permission, and then Decatur and his men leaped upon the deck. They rushed upon the affrighted corsairs, fifty in number, and drove them into the sea. They set fire to the Philadelphia, and, by the light of the blaze, escaped without the loss of a single man. One sailor was wounded by receiving upon his arm a blow from a sabre with which the turbaned pirate meant to decapitate Decatur.The Tripolitans were enraged at the loss of their prize, and treated Bainbridge and his enslaved crew with greater severity than ever. Three times did Preble enter the harbor of Tripoli with his fleet and open his broadsides against the town, destroying some of the shipping, but making no material impression. At last, a series of brilliant actions upon land under General Eaton, whose army consisted of nine Americans, twenty Greeks, and five hundred Egyptians, and the arrival of the frigate Constitution in June, 1805, forced the Bashaw of Tripoli to come to terms; and he released his prisoners and abandoned forever the levying of tribute upon American ships. Peace was at once concluded.In 1812, the United States being at war with England, the Dey of Algiers thought our Government would be unable to cope with two enemies upon the ocean, and determined to resume piracy on our vessels. He pretexted the unsatisfactory quality of a cargo of military stores furnished by our Government, and ordered the American agent to leave the capital. Depredations were immediately recommenced: our vessels were plundered and confiscated and their crews enslaved. The President suggested the importance of taking measures of prevention, in his message to Congress in December, 1814, and, after the signing of the treaty of peace with England, despatched two squadrons to the Mediterranean, under Decatur and Bainbridge, both now commodores. The former captured, in June, an Algerine frigate of forty-four guns and a brig of twenty-two. He then sailed for Algiers. The American navy had earned an enviable distinction in the war with England, and the sight of our gallant fleet inspired the Dey with a salutary terror. He consented to the terms imposed by Decatur, which were to give up all captured men and property, to pay six million dollars for previous exactions, and to exempt our commerce from tribute for all time to come. A treaty was signed on the 4th of July,—an auspicious date for so honorable an achievement.BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA.The proud position thus attained by the United States attracted the attention of Europe. Our Government had extorted expressions of submission from the corsairs such as no other power had ever obtained. The Congress of Vienna discussed the subject, and it was resolved that from that time forward Christian slavery in Algiers was suppressed. The English sent Lord Exmouth to bombard that city, and compelled the dey to submit to conditions like those imposed by Decatur. The Algerines were not yet broken, however. They placed their city in a formidable state of defence, and then proceeded to intercept the trade of the French. The French Government declared war,—a measure which resulted in the capture of Algiers in 1830 and in the seizure of Abd-el-Kader in the winter of 1847-48. These events have led to the colonization of the territory by the French and to the partial extinction of the Algerine people. Piracy in the Mediterranean may safely be said to be at an end forever.THE CLERMONT: THE FIRST STEAMBOAT.CHAPTER XLVIII.APPLICATION OF STEAM TO NAVIGATION—ROBERT FULTON-CHANCELLOR LIVINGSTON—LAUNCH OF THE CLERMONT—SHE CROSSES THE HUDSON RIVER—HER VOYAGE TO ALBANY—DESCRIPTION OF THE SCENE—FULTON'S OWN ACCOUNT—LEGISLATIVE PROTECTION GRANTED TO FULTON—THE PENDULUM-ENGINE—CONSTRUCTION OF OTHER STEAMBOATS—THE STEAM-FRIGATE FULTON THE FIRST—THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER, THE SAVANNAH—ACCOUNT OF HER VOYAGE—MISAPPREHENSIONS UPON THE SUBJECT.In the year 1807, a new agent was introduced into the science of navigation,—one which was destined to effect as great a change in the duration of a voyage at sea as the compass had effected in its practicability. Steam was applied to a boat upon the Hudson, and the Clermont, propelled by wheels, steamed from Jersey City to Albany. Though this was an event that immediately concerned river-navigation, and though twelve years were to elapse before the accomplishment of the first ocean steam-voyage, we cannot with propriety omit an account of the conception, construction, and success of the first river-steamboat.Robert Fulton was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in the year 1765. He manifested a genius for mechanics at an early age, though portrait-painting was his first profession. Hespent many years in England and France, and conceived the idea of a vessel propelled by steam in 1793. He received no countenance from Napoleon, and returned to the United States in December, 1806. His mind was now occupied with two projects,—the invention of submarine explosives and the construction of a steamboat. He published a work entitled "Torpedo War," with the motto, "The liberty of the seas will be the happiness of the earth." He renewed his acquaintance with Chancellor Livingston, whom he had known when ambassador to Paris. This gentleman had long had entire faith in the practicability of steam-navigation, and as early as 1798 had obtained from the Legislature of New York a monopoly of all such navigation upon the waters of the State, provided he would within twelve months build a boat which should go four miles an hour by steam. When they met in America, in 1806, the two entered into a partnership and commenced the construction of a boat. Finding the expenses unexpectedly heavy, they offered to sell one-third of their patent; but no one would invest in an enterprise universally deemed hopeless. The boat was nevertheless launched, in the spring of 1807, from the ship-yard of Charles Brown, on the East River. She was supplied with an engine built in England, and was driven by steam, in August, from the New York side to the Jersey shore. The incredulous crowd who had assembled to laugh stayed to wonder and applaud.The Clermont soon after sailed for Albany, her departure having been announced in the newspapers as a grand and unequalled curiosity. "She excited," says Colden, in his Life of Fulton, "the astonishment of the inhabitants of the shores of the Hudson, many of whom had not heard even of an engine, much less of a steamboat. There were many descriptions of the effects of her first appearance upon the people of the bank of the river: some of these were ridiculous, but some of them were of such a character as nothing but an object of realgrandeur could have excited. She was described, by some who had indistinctly seen her passing in the night, as a monster moving on the waters, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke. She had the most terrific appearance from other vessels which were navigating the river when she was making her passage. The first steamboat—as others yet do—used dry pine wood for fuel, which sends forth a column of ignited vapor many feet above the flue, and whenever the fire is stirred a galaxy of sparks fly off, and in the night have a very brilliant and beautiful appearance. This uncommon light first attracted the attention of the crews of other vessels. Notwithstanding the wind and tide, which were adverse to its approach, they saw with astonishment that it was rapidly coming toward them; and when it came so near that the noise of the machinery and paddles was heard, the crews—if what was said in the newspapers of the time be true—in some instances shrunk beneath their decks from the terrific sight and left their vessels to go on shore, whilst others prostrated themselves and besought Providence to protect them from the approaches of the horrible monster which was marching on the tide and lighting its path by the fires which it vomited."Fulton himself wrote the following account of the trip up the river and back, and published it in the American Citizen:—"I left New York on Monday at one o'clock, and arrived at Clermont, the seat of Chancellor Livingston, at one o'clock on Tuesday: time, twenty-four hours; distance, one hundred and ten miles. On Wednesday, I departed from the chancellor's at nine in the morning, and arrived at Albany at five in the afternoon: time, eight hours; distance, forty miles. The sum is one hundred and fifty miles in thirty-two hours,—equal to near five miles an hour."On Thursday, at nine o'clock in the morning, I left Albany, and arrived at the chancellor's at six in the evening: I started from thence at seven, and arrived at New York at four in theafternoon; time, thirty hours; space run through, one hundred and fifty miles,—equal to five miles an hour. Throughout my whole way, both going and returning, the wind was ahead: no advantage could be derived from my sail: the whole has therefore been performed by the power of the steam-engine."In a letter to one of his friends, Fulton wrote:—"I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. The morning I left New York there were not perhaps thirty persons who believed that the boat would even move one mile an hour, or be of the least utility; and while we were putting off from the wharf, which was crowded with spectators, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors.... Although the prospect of personal emolument has been some inducement to me, yet I feel infinitely more pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantage that my country will derive from the invention."The Clermont was now advertised as a regular passenger-boat upon the Hudson. She met with numerous accidents during the season; and her obvious defects would have been remedied by the application of as obvious improvements by Fulton himself, had not other persons anticipated him by taking out patents for improvements which they themselves proposed. They thus caused him infinite annoyance, and even contested his right as an inventor. Shipmasters, too, who looked upon his boat as an intruder upon their domain, ran their vessels purposely foul of her on more than one occasion. The Legislature saw fit to counteract the effects of this hostility by passing an act prolonging Livingston and Fulton's privilege five years for every additional boat established,—the whole time, however, not to exceed thirty years. It also made all combinations to destroy the Clermont offences punishable by fine and imprisonment.Thus protected, the Clermont ran throughout the season, always well laden with passengers. In the winter she was enlarged and improved. The wheel-guards were strengthened, and became a prominent and essential feature of the boat. The rudder was replaced by one of much larger dimensions, and a steering-wheel towards the bow was substituted for the ordinary tiller. The accommodations for passengers were made much more comfortable,—luxurious even,—and the public taste was consulted in the application of numerous coats of rather gaudy paint. She then commenced her trips for the season of 1808. She started regularly at the appointed hour,—at first much to the discontent of travellers who had before been waited for by both sloops and stages. At the end of the season the Clermont was altogether too small for the crowds who thronged to take passage. Two boats, the Car of Neptune and the Paragon, were therefore soon added to the line.Fulton, menaced by constant contestation of his rights, took out a patent in 1809 from the General Government, and another, for improvements, in 1811. His system was so simple—the adaptation of paddle-wheels to the axle of the crank of Watt's engine—that it seemed then, as it has proved since, almost impossible by any specifications effectually to protect it. The famous Pendulum Company caused Fulton for a time much trouble. They built a boat the wheels of which were to be moved by a pendulum. While she was upon the stocks and the wheels were resisted only by the air, the labor of a few men made them turn regularly and rapidly; but when she was launched, and the pendulum encountered the resistance of the water, neither pendulum, wheels, nor boat would stir. The Pendulum Company were aghast at this phenomenon, and clearly saw that if the boat was to be moved by the wheels, and the wheels by the pendulum, something must be devised of sufficient power to move the pendulum. There was nothing, evidently, but the steam-engine; and so they copied Fulton's. Lawsuits followed;and in his argument in behalf of Fulton Mr. Emmet thus spoke of the Pendulum gentlemen:—"They are men who never waste health and life in midnight vigils and painful study; who never dream of science in the broken slumbers of an exhausted mind; who bestow upon the construction of a steamboat just as much mathematical calculation and philosophical research as on the purchase of a sack of wheat or a barrel of ashes." Fulton gained his cause, and the boat which was to go by clock-work was prohibited from going even by steam.In 1812, Fulton built the Fire-Fly; and, as the town of Newburgh, half-way to Albany, offered sufficient traffic to support at least one boat, she was placed upon that route. In the same year he constructed two ferry-boats for crossing the Hudson, making them with rudder and bow at either end. He also contrived floating docks for their reception, and a method of stopping them without concussion. In 1813, he built a steam-vessel of four hundred tons and unusual strength, to ply in Long Island Sound between New York and New Haven. She was the first steamboat constructed with a round bottom. We quote a passage referring to her from a work published in 1817:—"During a great part of her route she would be as much exposed as she could be on the ocean: it was therefore necessary to make her a perfect sea-boat. She passes daily, and at all times of the tide, the dangerous strait of Hell-Gate, where for the distance of nearly a mile she often encounters a current running at the rate of at least six miles an hour. For some distance she has within a few yards of her, on each side, rocks and whirlpools which rival Scylla and Charybdis even as they are poetically described. This passage, previously to its being navigated by this vessel, was always supposed to be impassable except at certain stages of the tide; and many a shipwreck has been occasioned by a small mistake in the time. The boat passing through these whirlpools with rapidity, while the angry waters are foaming against her bows and appear toraise themselves in obstinate resistance to her passage, is a proud triumph of human ingenuity. The owners, as the highest tribute they had in their power to offer to his genius, and as an evidence of the gratitude they owed him, called her the Fulton."Early in 1814, the United States and England being at war, Fulton conceived the idea of a steam vessel-of-war, capable of carrying a strong battery, with furnaces for red-hot shot, and sailing four miles an hour. Congress authorized the construction of such a floating battery, and the keel was laid on the 18th of June. The vessel was launched on the 27th of October the same year, in the midst of excited and applauding throngs. Before she sailed, however, her engineer and builder had been removed to another sphere: Fulton died on the 24th of February, 1815. The Legislature paid an unusual tribute to his memory: they resolved to wear mourning for three weeks. This manifestation of regret for the loss of a man who had never held office nor served his country in any public capacity was entirely unprecedented.On the 4th of July, the steam-frigate made a trial trip, and, with her engines alone, sailed fifty-three miles in eight hours and twenty minutes. The following description of the Fulton the First, as she was called, is given by the committee appointed to examine her in behalf of Congress:—"She is a structure resting on two boats and keels separated from end to end by a channel fifteen feet wide and sixty-six feet long. One boat contains the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam; the cylinder of iron, its piston, lever, and wheels, occupy part of the other. The water-wheel revolves in the space between them. The main or gun deck supports the armament, and is protected by a parapet, four feet ten inches thick, of solid timber, pierced by embrasures. Through thirty port-holes as many thirty-two pounders are intended to fire red-hot shot, which can be heated with great safety and convenience. Her upper or spar deck, upon which several thousand men might parade, is encompassedby a bulwark, which affords safe quarters: she is rigged with two stout masts, each of which supports a large lateen yard and sails: she has two bowsprits and jibs, and four rudders, one at each extremity of each boat, so that she can be steered with either end foremost: her machinery is calculated for the addition of an engine which will discharge an immense column of water, which it is intended to throw upon the decks and through the port-holes of an enemy and thereby deluge her armament and ammunition. If in addition to all this we suppose her to be furnished, according to Mr. Fulton's intention, with hundred-pound Columbiads, two suspended from each bow so as to discharge a ball of that size into an enemy's ship ten or twelve feet below her water-line, it must be allowed that she has the appearance, at least, of being the most formidable engine for warfare that human ingenuity has contrived."Such was the first step towards the establishment of a steam-navy. Forty years afterwards, George Steers built the propeller-frigate Niagara; and the reader, by comparing the two vessels, will have an adequate idea of the immense strides made in naval mechanics and engineering during the lapse of less than half a century. In Europe the size and qualities of the Fulton the First were at the time ludicrously exaggerated, as will be seen from the following passage from a Scotch treatise on steamships. After magnifying her proportions threefold, the author continues:—"The thickness of her sides is thirteen feet of alternate oak plank and cork wood: she carries forty-four guns, four of which are hundred-pounders; quarterdeck and forecastle guns, forty-four-pounders; and, further to annoy an enemy attempting to board, can discharge one hundred gallons of boiling water in a minute, and, by mechanism, brandishes three hundred cutlasses with the utmost regularity over her gunwales, works also an equal number of heavy iron spikes of great length, darting them from her sides with prodigious force and withdrawing them every quarter of a minute!"The frigate made a second experimental trip, on the 11th of September, with her armament and stores on board, her draught of water being eleven feet. She changed her course by reversing the motion of her wheels. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, and performed manœuvres around the United States frigate Java. The machinery was not affected in the slightest degree by the detonation of her guns. Her average speed was five and a half miles an hour,—Fulton having contracted to obtain three miles an hour only. The city of New York now felt itself invulnerable; but the cessation of hostilities, which occurred soon after, precluded the necessity of employing her as a means of defence. It is probable that such a contrivance, even in the present advanced state of naval warfare, would be found useful in protecting the mouths of harbors,—not as a frigate, but as a floating battery or movable fortress. The fact that this vessel was built by Fulton makes him the father not only of steam-navigation, but of the steam-navies of the world as well. We shall have occasion to chronicle at intervals, as we progress in our record, the successive steps of improvement in the science, till we arrive at the era of steam floating palaces upon American rivers, of steam pleasure-yachts owned by American merchants, of commercial steam-leviathans, American and English, bearing the names of continents and oceans, and of the peerless steam-frigate to which we have already alluded,—"a noble ship with a noble name, bound, in 1857, upon the noblest of missions."The history of the first ocean-steamer is very incompletely and unsatisfactorily told in the annals of the time. The following is the substance of all that has been preserved of the first transatlantic steam-voyage on record:The Savannah, a steamer of three hundred and fifty tons, intended to ply between New York and Liverpool, under the command of Captain Moses Rodgers, was launched at New York on the 22d of August, 1818. She made a preliminaryvoyage to the city whose name she bore, in April, 1819, where she arrived in seven days, after a very boisterous passage. She was several times compelled to take in her wheels—having machinery for the purpose—and rely upon her sails, which was done with all the promptitude and safety anticipated. This trial trip left no doubt that she would successfully accomplish the object for which she was built. She left Savannah for Liverpool soon after, and the New York newspapers of the second week in June announced that she had been spoken at sea, all well. In the log-book of the Pluto, which arrived soon after at Baltimore from Bremen, occurred the following passage:THE SAVANNAH: THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER."June 2.—Clear weather and smooth sea: lat. 42°, long. 59°, spoke and passed the elegant steamship Savannah, eight days out from Savannah to St. Petersburg by way of Liverpool. She passed us at the rate of nine or ten knots; and the captain informed us she worked remarkably well, and the greatest compliment we could bestow was to give her three cheers, as the happiest effort of mechanical genius that ever appeared on the Western ocean. She returned the compliment."Niles' New York Register of the 21st of August contains the following paragraph in italics at the head of its column of foreign news:—"The steamship Savannah, Captain MosesRodgers,—the first that ever crossed the Atlantic,—arrived at Liverpool in twenty-five days from Savannah, all well, to the great astonishment of the people of that place. She worked her engine eighteen days." The next record of her movements is that she sailed in August for St. Petersburg, passing Elsinore on the 13th, and that the British "wiselysupposed her visit to besomehowconnected with the ambitious views of the United States." She arrived back at Savannah in November, in fifty days from St. PetersburgviâCopenhagen and Arendal in Norway, all well, and, in the language of Captain Rodgers, "with neither a screw, bolt, or a rope-yarn parted, though she encountered a very heavy gale in the North Sea." She left Savannah for Washington on the 4th of December, losing her boats and anchors off Cape Hatteras.It is a singular fact, and one not creditable to the English, that many of their works treating of inventions and the progress of the arts and sciences entirely overlook this voyage out and back of the Savannah, and uniformly make the British steamers Sirius and Great Western the pioneers, in 1837, in the great work of ocean steam-navigation. The authors of these works err either through design or ignorance, and in either case display a marked unfitness for their vocation. Were they to consult the London and Liverpool newspapers of the time, they would find ample record of the accomplishment of a steam-voyage nearly twenty years before the period to which they assign it. We have said enough, however, to prove that the first steam-vessel that crossed the ocean was built in New York, and that Moses Rodgers, her captain, was an American citizen. When we arrive at the year in which the two British steamers inaugurated steam commercial intercourse between the hemispheres, we shall record it, with due acknowledgment of its importance; but we repeat the assertion that, as the first river-steamer was the Clermont, the first Atlantic steamer was the Savannah: both one and the other were built in New York.
SCENE IN TERRA DEL FUEGO.CHAPTER XLVII.THE TRANSPLANTATION OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE—THE VOYAGE OF THE BOUNTY—A MUTINY—BLIGH, THE CAPTAIN, WITH EIGHTEEN MEN, CAST ADRIFT IN THE LAUNCH—INCIDENTS OF THE VOYAGE FROM TAHITI TO TIMOR—TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS AND A MARVELLOUS ESCAPE—ARRIVAL OF THE MUTINEERS AT TAHITI—THEIR REMOVAL TO PITCAIRN's ISLAND—SUBSEQUENT HISTORY—VOYAGE OF VANCOUVER—ALGERINE PIRACY—BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA—PROUD POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES.In the year 1787, the merchants and planters of England, interested in his Majesty's West India possessions, petitioned the king to cause the bread-fruit tree to be introduced into these islands; and, in accordance with this request, the armed transport Bounty, of two hundred and fifteen tons, was purchased and docked at Deptford to be furnished with the proper fixtures. Lieutenant William Bligh, who had been round theworld with Cook, was appointed to command her. Her cabin was fitted with a false floor cut full of holes sufficient to receive one thousand or more garden-pots. She was victualled for fifteen months, and laden with trinkets for the South Sea Islanders. Her destination was Tahiti by way of Cape Horn. She sailed late in December, 1787.After a three months' tempestuous passage, she made the eastern coast of Terra del Fuego. She contended thirty days here with violent westerly gales, seeking either to thread the strait or double the cape. Finding either course impossible, Bligh ordered the helm to be put a-weather, having resolved to cross the South Atlantic and approach Tahiti from the westward,—a determination which was successfully executed.Bligh gave directions to all on board not to inform the natives of the object of their visit, lest, by the natural law of supply and demand, the price-current of bread-fruit trees should suddenly rise. He contrived to make the chiefs believe that he was doing them a favor in conveying specimens of their plants to the great King of England. A tent was erected on shore to receive the trees, some thirty of which were potted every day. On the 4th of April, 1789, the vessel set sail, with one thousand and fifteen roots in pots, tubs, and boxes.It was now that an event took place which rendered the cruise of the Bounty one of the most extraordinary in the annals of the sea. A mutiny, which had been planned in secrecy, broke out on the 27th. The whole crew were engaged in it, with the exception of eighteen men. Bligh, with these eighteen,—most of them officers,—was hurried into the launch, which was cut loose, with one hundred and fifty pounds of bread, twenty-eight gallons of water, a little rum and wine, with a quadrant and compass. A few pieces of pork, some cocoanuts, and four cutlasses, were thrown at them as they were cast adrift. Some of the mutineers laughed at the helpless condition of the launch; while others expressed their confidence in Bligh's resources by exclaiming,with oaths, "Pshaw! he'll find his way home if you give him pencil and paper!" "Blast him! he'll have a vessel built in a month!"Bligh was convinced that, defenceless and unarmed as they were, they had nothing to hope from the inhabited islands of the surrounding waters. He told the crew that no chance of relief remained except at Timor, where there was a Dutch colony, at a distance of three thousand five hundred miles. They all agreed, and bound themselves by a solemn promise, to live upon one ounce of bread and a gill of water a day. They then bore away across this unknown and barbarous sea, in a boat twenty-three feet long from stem to stern, deep-laden with nineteen men, and barely supplied with food for two. There is nothing in maritime annals more worthy of a place in a work treating of "Man upon the Sea" than is this marvellous voyage from Tahiti to Timor.The first thing done was to return thanks to God for their preservation and to invoke His protection during the perils they were to encounter. The sun now rose fiery and red, foreboding a severe gale, which, before long, blew with extreme severity. The sea curled over the stern, obliging them to bale without cessation. The bread was in bags, and in danger of being soaked and spoiled. Unless this could be prevented, starvation was inevitable. Every thing was thrown overboard that could be spared,—even to suits of clothes: the bread was then secured in the carpenter's chest. A teaspoonful of rum and a fragment of bread-fruit—collected from the floor of the boat, where it had been crushed in the confusion of departure—was now served to each man.They constantly passed in sight of islands, upon which they did not dare to land. They kept on, alternately performing prayers, dining on damaged bread, and sipping infinitesimal quantities of rum or other cordial. On grand occasions, Bligh served out as the day's allowance a quarter of a pint of cocoanut-milkand two ounces of the meat. One half of the men watched while the other half slept with nothing to cover them but the heavens. They could not stretch out their limbs, for there was not room: they became dreadfully cramped, and at last the dangers and pains of sleep were such that it became an additional misery in their catalogue of sorrows. A heavy thunder-shower enabled them to quench their thirst for the first time and to increase their stock of water to thirty-four gallons; but, in compensation, it wet them through and caused them to pass a cold and shivering night. The next day the sun came out, and they stripped and dried their clothes. Bligh thought the men needed additional creature comfort under these dismal circumstances, and issued to each an ounce and a half of pork, an ounce of bread, a teaspoonful of rum, and half a pint of cocoanut-milk. They kept a fishing-line towing from the stern; but in no one instance did they catch a fish.Bligh now became convinced that in serving ounces of bread by guess-work he was dealing out overmeasure, and that if he continued to do so his stores would not last the eight weeks he had intended they should. So he made a pair of scales of two cocoanut-shells, and, having accidentally found a pistol-ball, twenty-five of which were known to weigh a pound, or sixteen ounces, he adopted it as the measure of one ration of bread. The men were thus reduced from one ounce to two hundred and seventy-two grains. Another thunder-shower now came on, and they caught twenty gallons of water. The usual consolation of a thimbleful of rum was served when the storm was over, together with one mouthful of pork. The men soon began to complain of pains in the bowels; and nearly all had lost in a measure the use of their limbs. Their clothes would not dry when taken off and hung upon the rigging, so impregnated was the atmosphere with moisture. On the fifteenth day they discovered a number of islands, which, though forming part of the group of the New Hebrides, had been seen neither by Cooknor Bougainville, and thus, in the midst of their agonies, the barren satisfaction of contributing to geographical science was, as it were in derision, awarded to them. The men now clamored for extra allowances of pork and rum,—which Bligh sternly refused, administering his bullet-weight of bread with the severest ceremony."At dawn of the twenty-second day," says Bligh, "some of my people seemed half dead: our appearances were horrible, and I could look no way but I caught the eye of some one in distress. Extreme hunger was now too evident; but no one suffered from thirst, nor had we much inclination to drink,—that desire, perhaps, being satisfied through the skin. Every one dreaded the approach of night. Sleep, though we longed for it, afforded no comfort: for my own part, I almost lived without it." Bligh now examined the remaining bread, and found sufficient to last for twenty-nine days; but, as he might be compelled to avoid Timor and go to Java, it became necessary to make the stock hold out for forty days. He therefore announced that supper would hereafter be served without bread!A great event happened on the twenty-seventh day. A noddy—a bird as large as a small pigeon—was caught as it flew past the boat. Bligh divided it, with the entrails, into nineteen portions, and distributed it by lots. It was eaten, bones and all, with salt water for sauce. The next day a booby—which is as large as a duck—was caught, and was divided and devoured like the noddy, even to the entrails, beak, and feet. The blood was given to three of the men who were the most distressed for want of food. On the thirtieth day they landed upon the northern shore of New Holland, and gave thanks to God for his gracious protection through a series of disasters and calamities then almost unparalleled.They found oysters upon the rocks, which they opened without detaching them. A fire was made by the help of a magnifying-glass; and then, with the aid of a copper pot found in theboat, a delicious stew of oysters, pork, bread, and cocoanut was cooked, of which every man received a full pint. Spring water was obtained by digging where a growth of wire grass indicated a moist situation. The soft tops of palm-trees and fern-roots furnished them a very palatable addition to their mess: After laying in sixty gallons of water and as many oysters as they could collect, they re-embarked, after having slept two nights on land and having been greatly benefited thereby. Keeping to the northwestward, and coasting along the shore, they landed from time to time in search of food. On the 2d of June, the watch of the gunner, which had been the only one in the company successfully to resist the influences of the weather, finally stopped, so that sunrise, noon, and sunset were now the only definite points in the twenty-four hours. On the next day, having followed the northeastern shore of New Holland as far as it lay in their route, they once more launched into the open sea.On Thursday, the 11th, they passed, as Bligh supposed, the meridian of the eastern point of Timor,—a fact which diffused universal joy and satisfaction. On Friday, at three in the morning, the island was faintly visible in the west, and by daylight it lay but five miles to the leeward. They had run three thousand six hundred and eighteen miles in an open boat in forty-one days, with provisions barely sufficient for five. Though life had never been sustained upon so little nourishment for so long a time, and under equal circumstances of exposure and suffering, not a man perished during the voyage. Their wants were most kindly supplied by the Dutch at Coupang, and every necessary and comfort administered with a most liberal hand.On his return to England, Bligh published a narrative of his voyage and of the mutiny, which was soon translated into all the languages of Europe. He ascribed the revolt to the desire of the crew to lead an idle and luxurious life at Tahiti, though subsequent developments, and his own outrageous and brutal conductwhen Governor of New South Wales, proved quite conclusively that his cruelties and tyranny had rendered him odious and intolerable. The British Government could not allow such a transaction upon the high seas to pass unpunished, and despatched the frigate Pandora, Captain Edwards, to Tahiti in the month of August. Only ten of the mutineers were found, the rest having withdrawn to another island through fear of discovery, as we shall now relate, merely stating that the ten persons taken were conveyed to England, where they were tried and executed.COLONISTS OF PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.John Adams, one of the mutineers, being apprehensive that the English Government would make an attempt to punish the revolt, resolved to escape to some neighboring and uninhabited island, and there establish a colony. With eight Englishmen, one of whom was Christian, the ringleader in the mutiny, their Tahitian wives, and a few islanders of both sexes, he sailed in the Bounty to Pitcairn's Island, which had been lately seen by Carteret. They arrived there in 1790, and, having unladen the vessel, burned her. A settlement was formed, which prospered in spite of the continual quarrels between the males of the two races. This hostility resulted, in three years, in the extinction of the savages, leaving upon the island Adams, three Englishmen, ten women of Tahiti, and the children, some twenty in number. One of the Englishmen, having succeeded in distilling brandyfrom a root which grew in abundance, drank to excess and threw himself headlong from a rock into the sea. Another was slain for entertaining designs upon the wife of the only remaining Englishman except Adams. Thus, in 1799, Adams and Young were the only males of the original colony surviving. They began to reflect upon their duties toward their children and those of their companions: they commenced holding religious services morning and evening, and instructed the rising generation in such rudimental branches of education as their own learning would permit. Young died in 1801, and Adams became the administrator and patriarch of the colony. He was assisted by the Tahitian women, who showed a remarkable capacity for civilization and aptitude for refinement. An English frigate, the Briton, touched at Pitcairn in 1814, and her captain offered to take Adams back to England, promising him to procure his pardon from the king. But the forty-seven persons, women and children, forming the settlement, besought their patriarch not to leave them. In 1825, Captain Beechey visited the island, and found the population increased to sixty-six. Adams was sixty years old, but still vigorous and active. He begged Beechey to marry him, according to the rites of the English Church, to the woman with whom he had lived, and who was now infirm and blind. Beechey gladly acceded to the request. Soon after, an English missionary, named Buffet, went out to Pitcairn to assist Adams in the discharge of his duties and to succeed him upon his death. The latter event occurred in 1829. Vessels occasionally stopped at Pitcairn, and the English Government was thus kept informed of the progress of its interesting colony.In 1856, the descendants of the original settlers, having increased so much as to outgrow the resources of their sea-girt home, abandoned Pitcairn's Island, and transferred themselves, with their goods and chattels, to Norfolk Island, directly west and toward New South Wales. They numbered one hundredand ninety-nine in all, the oldest man being sixty-two, and the oldest woman eighty. Charles Christian is the grandson of Christian the ringleader. Their new home contains about fourteen thousand acres, and is well watered, fertile, and healthy, the soil producing abundantly both European and tropical fruits, vegetables, grains, and spices. The history of the present colony, the offspring in the third generation of European fathers and Tahitian mothers, is as remarkable as any tale in romance or any legend in mythology.In the year 1790,—to return to chronological order,—the British Government determined to make one more attempt to discover a channel of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific to the north of the American continent, and selected to command the expedition Lieutenant George Vancouver, who had accompanied Cook on his second and third voyages. He was raised to the rank of captain and placed at the head of an expedition consisting of the sloop-of-war Discovery and the armed tender Chatham. He left Falmouth on the 1st of April, 1791; and, as the Admiralty had designated no route by which to proceed to the Pacific, he decided to go by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived here without adventure in July, and, late in September, struck the southern coast of New Holland at a cape to which he gave the name of Chatham, from the President of the Board of Admiralty.The two vessels coasted to the eastward, surveying the indentations and giving names to all points of interest. A harbor being discovered, it received the name of King George the Third's Sound, and Vancouver took possession of the land in the name of his Gracious Majesty. A wretched hovel, three feet high, in the form of a bee-hive cut through the centre from the apex to the base, and constructed of slender twigs, here revealed the presence of inhabitants; while the singular appearance of the trees and the vegetation, which had evidently undergone the action of fire,—the shrubs being completely charredand the grass having been shrivelled by the heat,—showed that, miserable as they certainly were, they were acquainted with the uses and abuses of fire. At last they discovered a deserted village, consisting of some two dozen huts or hives, which had apparently been the residence of a considerable tribe. They gratified their curiosity by contemplating and investigating these humiliating efforts of human ingenuity.A DESERTED VILLAGE.Continuing to the eastward, Vancouver touched at New Zealand, and arrived at a spot where he had been with Cook eighteen years before. An inlet which Cook had been unable to explore, and which he had named in consequence "Nobody knows what," was explored by Vancouver and called by him "Somebody knows what." Running to the north, he discovered an island whose inhabitants spoke the language of the great South Sea nation and who seemed perfectly acquainted with the uses of iron, though they had little or none of that metal. A Sandwich Islander, whom Vancouver had brought from London as an interpreter, and who was named Towerezoo, was of very little assistance; for he had been so long absent that he now spoke English much better than his mother-tongue, and spoke the latter no better than Vancouver. The island appeared to go by the name of Oparo, by which Vancouver thought fit to distinguish it till it should be found more properly entitled to another. The two vessels arrived in December at Tahiti, and anchored in Matavai Bay. The chronometerswere landed, in order to correct them by the known longitude of the island; the sails were unbent, the topmasts struck, for a thorough examination of the rigging. The Discovery went by accident upon a rock, and was for a while in great danger. On Sunday, the 1st of January, 1792, every one had as much fresh pork and plum-pudding as he could eat, and a double allowance of grog was served in which to drink the time-honored toast. The formula, however, was slightly altered to suit the state of the case: the gunner of the Discovery being the only married man of the party, the toast given wasSweethearts and Wife!THE SHIP DISCOVERY ON A ROCK.On the 24th of January, the two ships turned their head to the northward, now for the first time commencing the voyage in view of which the expedition had been equipped. They ran the two thousand five hundred miles that lay between them and the Sandwich Islands in the space of five weeks, and anchored off Owhyhee on the 1st of March. They touched the American coast, or that part of it known as New Albion, in 39° north latitude, which Vancouver now explored and surveyed. In August he entered Nootka, where, in accordance with his instructions, he was to receive from the Spanish authorities the formal cession of the colony they had established. He found his Catholic Majesty's brig Active already there, commanded by Señor Don Juan Francisco de la Rodega y Quadra. The two commanders agreed to honor each other by a mutual saluteof thirteen guns, which was done; while other courtesies were cordially exchanged. The ceremony then took place. Vancouver now returned to Owhyhee, and the king, smitten by a sudden and vehement attachment for the English, proposed to make over the island to the dominion of the King of England. All the insular dignitaries assembled on the decks of the Discovery, and the surrender was made in the midst of speeches and cannonades. Vancouver did not seem to have been deeply impressed with the importance of this event. The solemnity of the transaction was not increased by the circumstance that it took place upon the spot where Cook had so recently been massacred.Returning to the north, Vancouver continued his surveys and explorations of the American coast as far as the fifty-sixth degree of latitude. He terminated his operations on the 22d of August, at Port Conclusion, where an additional allowance of grog was served, that the day might be celebrated with proper festivity. He returned to Europe with the certitude that no passage existed from the North Pacific across the American continent into the Atlantic. His surveys remain as a monument of his activity, skill, and perseverance. The present charts of the coast of North America upon the Pacific are based upon them. More than nine thousand miles of shore, with its headlands, capes, rivers, bays, promontories, and labyrinths of islands, had been carefully explored by surveying parties in boats, in superintending which Vancouver injured his health and brought on the decline which terminated in his death, in the year 1798, at the early age of forty-eight.We have now to record the remarkable series of acts by which the United States of America, in the twenty-fifth year of their existence as a nation, put an end to a humiliation to which the commercial powers of Europe had submitted for centuries. From the time when the Spanish Moors, driven out of Granada by Ferdinand the Catholic, settled on the oppositecoast and commenced the practice of piracy, the Barbary States, Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, had been united against all Christian commerce in the Mediterranean. Emboldened by impunity, they extended their operations into the Atlantic, seizing the vessels of all nations who did not pay them tribute. England under Cromwell, and France under Louis XIV., however, caused their flags to be respected. The Dutch, Danes, and Swedes, by paying an annual tax, purchased exemption from seizure,—thus giving the sanction of a treaty to the outrage and consenting to wear an odious badge of servitude. Russia and Austria were protected by special agreements.During the early years of the American Republic, Tripoli intimated to the Government the propriety of paying tribute. Jefferson replied, in 1800, by declaring war against Tripoli, and sent out an armed naval force under Commodore Dale. This officer, with two frigates and a sloop-of-war, blockaded Tripoli, preventing the cruisers from getting to sea, and thus protecting our commerce. Commodore Preble followed with seven vessels in 1803. In October, one of his ships,—the Philadelphia, Captain Bainbridge,—engaged in reconnoitring the harbor of Tripoli, grounded and was forced to surrender. The officers were treated as prisoners of war, the sailors as slaves. The vessel was floated and moored in the harbor, strongly manned by Tripolitans, whose naval force was thus unexpectedly augmented.The American squadron rendezvoused at Syracuse, in Sicily,—somewhat over a day's sail from Tripoli. A young lieutenant under Preble, named Decatur, formed a plan for destroying the Philadelphia and thus reducing the Tripolitans again to their ordinary naval strength. Preble consented to the scheme, and Decatur armed a ketch which he had captured, and with it entered, in February, 1804, under cover of the night, the harbor of Tripoli. He had with him an old pilot who spoke the Tripolitan language. On approaching the Philadelphia, theywere challenged; but the pilot replied that he had lost his anchor and merely wished to fasten his vessel to the frigate till morning. A boat was sent ashore by the Tripolitans to ask permission, and then Decatur and his men leaped upon the deck. They rushed upon the affrighted corsairs, fifty in number, and drove them into the sea. They set fire to the Philadelphia, and, by the light of the blaze, escaped without the loss of a single man. One sailor was wounded by receiving upon his arm a blow from a sabre with which the turbaned pirate meant to decapitate Decatur.The Tripolitans were enraged at the loss of their prize, and treated Bainbridge and his enslaved crew with greater severity than ever. Three times did Preble enter the harbor of Tripoli with his fleet and open his broadsides against the town, destroying some of the shipping, but making no material impression. At last, a series of brilliant actions upon land under General Eaton, whose army consisted of nine Americans, twenty Greeks, and five hundred Egyptians, and the arrival of the frigate Constitution in June, 1805, forced the Bashaw of Tripoli to come to terms; and he released his prisoners and abandoned forever the levying of tribute upon American ships. Peace was at once concluded.In 1812, the United States being at war with England, the Dey of Algiers thought our Government would be unable to cope with two enemies upon the ocean, and determined to resume piracy on our vessels. He pretexted the unsatisfactory quality of a cargo of military stores furnished by our Government, and ordered the American agent to leave the capital. Depredations were immediately recommenced: our vessels were plundered and confiscated and their crews enslaved. The President suggested the importance of taking measures of prevention, in his message to Congress in December, 1814, and, after the signing of the treaty of peace with England, despatched two squadrons to the Mediterranean, under Decatur and Bainbridge, both now commodores. The former captured, in June, an Algerine frigate of forty-four guns and a brig of twenty-two. He then sailed for Algiers. The American navy had earned an enviable distinction in the war with England, and the sight of our gallant fleet inspired the Dey with a salutary terror. He consented to the terms imposed by Decatur, which were to give up all captured men and property, to pay six million dollars for previous exactions, and to exempt our commerce from tribute for all time to come. A treaty was signed on the 4th of July,—an auspicious date for so honorable an achievement.BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA.The proud position thus attained by the United States attracted the attention of Europe. Our Government had extorted expressions of submission from the corsairs such as no other power had ever obtained. The Congress of Vienna discussed the subject, and it was resolved that from that time forward Christian slavery in Algiers was suppressed. The English sent Lord Exmouth to bombard that city, and compelled the dey to submit to conditions like those imposed by Decatur. The Algerines were not yet broken, however. They placed their city in a formidable state of defence, and then proceeded to intercept the trade of the French. The French Government declared war,—a measure which resulted in the capture of Algiers in 1830 and in the seizure of Abd-el-Kader in the winter of 1847-48. These events have led to the colonization of the territory by the French and to the partial extinction of the Algerine people. Piracy in the Mediterranean may safely be said to be at an end forever.
SCENE IN TERRA DEL FUEGO.
SCENE IN TERRA DEL FUEGO.
SCENE IN TERRA DEL FUEGO.
THE TRANSPLANTATION OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE—THE VOYAGE OF THE BOUNTY—A MUTINY—BLIGH, THE CAPTAIN, WITH EIGHTEEN MEN, CAST ADRIFT IN THE LAUNCH—INCIDENTS OF THE VOYAGE FROM TAHITI TO TIMOR—TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS AND A MARVELLOUS ESCAPE—ARRIVAL OF THE MUTINEERS AT TAHITI—THEIR REMOVAL TO PITCAIRN's ISLAND—SUBSEQUENT HISTORY—VOYAGE OF VANCOUVER—ALGERINE PIRACY—BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA—PROUD POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES.
In the year 1787, the merchants and planters of England, interested in his Majesty's West India possessions, petitioned the king to cause the bread-fruit tree to be introduced into these islands; and, in accordance with this request, the armed transport Bounty, of two hundred and fifteen tons, was purchased and docked at Deptford to be furnished with the proper fixtures. Lieutenant William Bligh, who had been round theworld with Cook, was appointed to command her. Her cabin was fitted with a false floor cut full of holes sufficient to receive one thousand or more garden-pots. She was victualled for fifteen months, and laden with trinkets for the South Sea Islanders. Her destination was Tahiti by way of Cape Horn. She sailed late in December, 1787.
After a three months' tempestuous passage, she made the eastern coast of Terra del Fuego. She contended thirty days here with violent westerly gales, seeking either to thread the strait or double the cape. Finding either course impossible, Bligh ordered the helm to be put a-weather, having resolved to cross the South Atlantic and approach Tahiti from the westward,—a determination which was successfully executed.
Bligh gave directions to all on board not to inform the natives of the object of their visit, lest, by the natural law of supply and demand, the price-current of bread-fruit trees should suddenly rise. He contrived to make the chiefs believe that he was doing them a favor in conveying specimens of their plants to the great King of England. A tent was erected on shore to receive the trees, some thirty of which were potted every day. On the 4th of April, 1789, the vessel set sail, with one thousand and fifteen roots in pots, tubs, and boxes.
It was now that an event took place which rendered the cruise of the Bounty one of the most extraordinary in the annals of the sea. A mutiny, which had been planned in secrecy, broke out on the 27th. The whole crew were engaged in it, with the exception of eighteen men. Bligh, with these eighteen,—most of them officers,—was hurried into the launch, which was cut loose, with one hundred and fifty pounds of bread, twenty-eight gallons of water, a little rum and wine, with a quadrant and compass. A few pieces of pork, some cocoanuts, and four cutlasses, were thrown at them as they were cast adrift. Some of the mutineers laughed at the helpless condition of the launch; while others expressed their confidence in Bligh's resources by exclaiming,with oaths, "Pshaw! he'll find his way home if you give him pencil and paper!" "Blast him! he'll have a vessel built in a month!"
Bligh was convinced that, defenceless and unarmed as they were, they had nothing to hope from the inhabited islands of the surrounding waters. He told the crew that no chance of relief remained except at Timor, where there was a Dutch colony, at a distance of three thousand five hundred miles. They all agreed, and bound themselves by a solemn promise, to live upon one ounce of bread and a gill of water a day. They then bore away across this unknown and barbarous sea, in a boat twenty-three feet long from stem to stern, deep-laden with nineteen men, and barely supplied with food for two. There is nothing in maritime annals more worthy of a place in a work treating of "Man upon the Sea" than is this marvellous voyage from Tahiti to Timor.
The first thing done was to return thanks to God for their preservation and to invoke His protection during the perils they were to encounter. The sun now rose fiery and red, foreboding a severe gale, which, before long, blew with extreme severity. The sea curled over the stern, obliging them to bale without cessation. The bread was in bags, and in danger of being soaked and spoiled. Unless this could be prevented, starvation was inevitable. Every thing was thrown overboard that could be spared,—even to suits of clothes: the bread was then secured in the carpenter's chest. A teaspoonful of rum and a fragment of bread-fruit—collected from the floor of the boat, where it had been crushed in the confusion of departure—was now served to each man.
They constantly passed in sight of islands, upon which they did not dare to land. They kept on, alternately performing prayers, dining on damaged bread, and sipping infinitesimal quantities of rum or other cordial. On grand occasions, Bligh served out as the day's allowance a quarter of a pint of cocoanut-milkand two ounces of the meat. One half of the men watched while the other half slept with nothing to cover them but the heavens. They could not stretch out their limbs, for there was not room: they became dreadfully cramped, and at last the dangers and pains of sleep were such that it became an additional misery in their catalogue of sorrows. A heavy thunder-shower enabled them to quench their thirst for the first time and to increase their stock of water to thirty-four gallons; but, in compensation, it wet them through and caused them to pass a cold and shivering night. The next day the sun came out, and they stripped and dried their clothes. Bligh thought the men needed additional creature comfort under these dismal circumstances, and issued to each an ounce and a half of pork, an ounce of bread, a teaspoonful of rum, and half a pint of cocoanut-milk. They kept a fishing-line towing from the stern; but in no one instance did they catch a fish.
Bligh now became convinced that in serving ounces of bread by guess-work he was dealing out overmeasure, and that if he continued to do so his stores would not last the eight weeks he had intended they should. So he made a pair of scales of two cocoanut-shells, and, having accidentally found a pistol-ball, twenty-five of which were known to weigh a pound, or sixteen ounces, he adopted it as the measure of one ration of bread. The men were thus reduced from one ounce to two hundred and seventy-two grains. Another thunder-shower now came on, and they caught twenty gallons of water. The usual consolation of a thimbleful of rum was served when the storm was over, together with one mouthful of pork. The men soon began to complain of pains in the bowels; and nearly all had lost in a measure the use of their limbs. Their clothes would not dry when taken off and hung upon the rigging, so impregnated was the atmosphere with moisture. On the fifteenth day they discovered a number of islands, which, though forming part of the group of the New Hebrides, had been seen neither by Cooknor Bougainville, and thus, in the midst of their agonies, the barren satisfaction of contributing to geographical science was, as it were in derision, awarded to them. The men now clamored for extra allowances of pork and rum,—which Bligh sternly refused, administering his bullet-weight of bread with the severest ceremony.
"At dawn of the twenty-second day," says Bligh, "some of my people seemed half dead: our appearances were horrible, and I could look no way but I caught the eye of some one in distress. Extreme hunger was now too evident; but no one suffered from thirst, nor had we much inclination to drink,—that desire, perhaps, being satisfied through the skin. Every one dreaded the approach of night. Sleep, though we longed for it, afforded no comfort: for my own part, I almost lived without it." Bligh now examined the remaining bread, and found sufficient to last for twenty-nine days; but, as he might be compelled to avoid Timor and go to Java, it became necessary to make the stock hold out for forty days. He therefore announced that supper would hereafter be served without bread!
A great event happened on the twenty-seventh day. A noddy—a bird as large as a small pigeon—was caught as it flew past the boat. Bligh divided it, with the entrails, into nineteen portions, and distributed it by lots. It was eaten, bones and all, with salt water for sauce. The next day a booby—which is as large as a duck—was caught, and was divided and devoured like the noddy, even to the entrails, beak, and feet. The blood was given to three of the men who were the most distressed for want of food. On the thirtieth day they landed upon the northern shore of New Holland, and gave thanks to God for his gracious protection through a series of disasters and calamities then almost unparalleled.
They found oysters upon the rocks, which they opened without detaching them. A fire was made by the help of a magnifying-glass; and then, with the aid of a copper pot found in theboat, a delicious stew of oysters, pork, bread, and cocoanut was cooked, of which every man received a full pint. Spring water was obtained by digging where a growth of wire grass indicated a moist situation. The soft tops of palm-trees and fern-roots furnished them a very palatable addition to their mess: After laying in sixty gallons of water and as many oysters as they could collect, they re-embarked, after having slept two nights on land and having been greatly benefited thereby. Keeping to the northwestward, and coasting along the shore, they landed from time to time in search of food. On the 2d of June, the watch of the gunner, which had been the only one in the company successfully to resist the influences of the weather, finally stopped, so that sunrise, noon, and sunset were now the only definite points in the twenty-four hours. On the next day, having followed the northeastern shore of New Holland as far as it lay in their route, they once more launched into the open sea.
On Thursday, the 11th, they passed, as Bligh supposed, the meridian of the eastern point of Timor,—a fact which diffused universal joy and satisfaction. On Friday, at three in the morning, the island was faintly visible in the west, and by daylight it lay but five miles to the leeward. They had run three thousand six hundred and eighteen miles in an open boat in forty-one days, with provisions barely sufficient for five. Though life had never been sustained upon so little nourishment for so long a time, and under equal circumstances of exposure and suffering, not a man perished during the voyage. Their wants were most kindly supplied by the Dutch at Coupang, and every necessary and comfort administered with a most liberal hand.
On his return to England, Bligh published a narrative of his voyage and of the mutiny, which was soon translated into all the languages of Europe. He ascribed the revolt to the desire of the crew to lead an idle and luxurious life at Tahiti, though subsequent developments, and his own outrageous and brutal conductwhen Governor of New South Wales, proved quite conclusively that his cruelties and tyranny had rendered him odious and intolerable. The British Government could not allow such a transaction upon the high seas to pass unpunished, and despatched the frigate Pandora, Captain Edwards, to Tahiti in the month of August. Only ten of the mutineers were found, the rest having withdrawn to another island through fear of discovery, as we shall now relate, merely stating that the ten persons taken were conveyed to England, where they were tried and executed.
COLONISTS OF PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.
COLONISTS OF PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.
COLONISTS OF PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.
John Adams, one of the mutineers, being apprehensive that the English Government would make an attempt to punish the revolt, resolved to escape to some neighboring and uninhabited island, and there establish a colony. With eight Englishmen, one of whom was Christian, the ringleader in the mutiny, their Tahitian wives, and a few islanders of both sexes, he sailed in the Bounty to Pitcairn's Island, which had been lately seen by Carteret. They arrived there in 1790, and, having unladen the vessel, burned her. A settlement was formed, which prospered in spite of the continual quarrels between the males of the two races. This hostility resulted, in three years, in the extinction of the savages, leaving upon the island Adams, three Englishmen, ten women of Tahiti, and the children, some twenty in number. One of the Englishmen, having succeeded in distilling brandyfrom a root which grew in abundance, drank to excess and threw himself headlong from a rock into the sea. Another was slain for entertaining designs upon the wife of the only remaining Englishman except Adams. Thus, in 1799, Adams and Young were the only males of the original colony surviving. They began to reflect upon their duties toward their children and those of their companions: they commenced holding religious services morning and evening, and instructed the rising generation in such rudimental branches of education as their own learning would permit. Young died in 1801, and Adams became the administrator and patriarch of the colony. He was assisted by the Tahitian women, who showed a remarkable capacity for civilization and aptitude for refinement. An English frigate, the Briton, touched at Pitcairn in 1814, and her captain offered to take Adams back to England, promising him to procure his pardon from the king. But the forty-seven persons, women and children, forming the settlement, besought their patriarch not to leave them. In 1825, Captain Beechey visited the island, and found the population increased to sixty-six. Adams was sixty years old, but still vigorous and active. He begged Beechey to marry him, according to the rites of the English Church, to the woman with whom he had lived, and who was now infirm and blind. Beechey gladly acceded to the request. Soon after, an English missionary, named Buffet, went out to Pitcairn to assist Adams in the discharge of his duties and to succeed him upon his death. The latter event occurred in 1829. Vessels occasionally stopped at Pitcairn, and the English Government was thus kept informed of the progress of its interesting colony.
In 1856, the descendants of the original settlers, having increased so much as to outgrow the resources of their sea-girt home, abandoned Pitcairn's Island, and transferred themselves, with their goods and chattels, to Norfolk Island, directly west and toward New South Wales. They numbered one hundredand ninety-nine in all, the oldest man being sixty-two, and the oldest woman eighty. Charles Christian is the grandson of Christian the ringleader. Their new home contains about fourteen thousand acres, and is well watered, fertile, and healthy, the soil producing abundantly both European and tropical fruits, vegetables, grains, and spices. The history of the present colony, the offspring in the third generation of European fathers and Tahitian mothers, is as remarkable as any tale in romance or any legend in mythology.
In the year 1790,—to return to chronological order,—the British Government determined to make one more attempt to discover a channel of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific to the north of the American continent, and selected to command the expedition Lieutenant George Vancouver, who had accompanied Cook on his second and third voyages. He was raised to the rank of captain and placed at the head of an expedition consisting of the sloop-of-war Discovery and the armed tender Chatham. He left Falmouth on the 1st of April, 1791; and, as the Admiralty had designated no route by which to proceed to the Pacific, he decided to go by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived here without adventure in July, and, late in September, struck the southern coast of New Holland at a cape to which he gave the name of Chatham, from the President of the Board of Admiralty.
The two vessels coasted to the eastward, surveying the indentations and giving names to all points of interest. A harbor being discovered, it received the name of King George the Third's Sound, and Vancouver took possession of the land in the name of his Gracious Majesty. A wretched hovel, three feet high, in the form of a bee-hive cut through the centre from the apex to the base, and constructed of slender twigs, here revealed the presence of inhabitants; while the singular appearance of the trees and the vegetation, which had evidently undergone the action of fire,—the shrubs being completely charredand the grass having been shrivelled by the heat,—showed that, miserable as they certainly were, they were acquainted with the uses and abuses of fire. At last they discovered a deserted village, consisting of some two dozen huts or hives, which had apparently been the residence of a considerable tribe. They gratified their curiosity by contemplating and investigating these humiliating efforts of human ingenuity.
A DESERTED VILLAGE.
A DESERTED VILLAGE.
A DESERTED VILLAGE.
Continuing to the eastward, Vancouver touched at New Zealand, and arrived at a spot where he had been with Cook eighteen years before. An inlet which Cook had been unable to explore, and which he had named in consequence "Nobody knows what," was explored by Vancouver and called by him "Somebody knows what." Running to the north, he discovered an island whose inhabitants spoke the language of the great South Sea nation and who seemed perfectly acquainted with the uses of iron, though they had little or none of that metal. A Sandwich Islander, whom Vancouver had brought from London as an interpreter, and who was named Towerezoo, was of very little assistance; for he had been so long absent that he now spoke English much better than his mother-tongue, and spoke the latter no better than Vancouver. The island appeared to go by the name of Oparo, by which Vancouver thought fit to distinguish it till it should be found more properly entitled to another. The two vessels arrived in December at Tahiti, and anchored in Matavai Bay. The chronometerswere landed, in order to correct them by the known longitude of the island; the sails were unbent, the topmasts struck, for a thorough examination of the rigging. The Discovery went by accident upon a rock, and was for a while in great danger. On Sunday, the 1st of January, 1792, every one had as much fresh pork and plum-pudding as he could eat, and a double allowance of grog was served in which to drink the time-honored toast. The formula, however, was slightly altered to suit the state of the case: the gunner of the Discovery being the only married man of the party, the toast given wasSweethearts and Wife!
THE SHIP DISCOVERY ON A ROCK.
THE SHIP DISCOVERY ON A ROCK.
THE SHIP DISCOVERY ON A ROCK.
On the 24th of January, the two ships turned their head to the northward, now for the first time commencing the voyage in view of which the expedition had been equipped. They ran the two thousand five hundred miles that lay between them and the Sandwich Islands in the space of five weeks, and anchored off Owhyhee on the 1st of March. They touched the American coast, or that part of it known as New Albion, in 39° north latitude, which Vancouver now explored and surveyed. In August he entered Nootka, where, in accordance with his instructions, he was to receive from the Spanish authorities the formal cession of the colony they had established. He found his Catholic Majesty's brig Active already there, commanded by Señor Don Juan Francisco de la Rodega y Quadra. The two commanders agreed to honor each other by a mutual saluteof thirteen guns, which was done; while other courtesies were cordially exchanged. The ceremony then took place. Vancouver now returned to Owhyhee, and the king, smitten by a sudden and vehement attachment for the English, proposed to make over the island to the dominion of the King of England. All the insular dignitaries assembled on the decks of the Discovery, and the surrender was made in the midst of speeches and cannonades. Vancouver did not seem to have been deeply impressed with the importance of this event. The solemnity of the transaction was not increased by the circumstance that it took place upon the spot where Cook had so recently been massacred.
Returning to the north, Vancouver continued his surveys and explorations of the American coast as far as the fifty-sixth degree of latitude. He terminated his operations on the 22d of August, at Port Conclusion, where an additional allowance of grog was served, that the day might be celebrated with proper festivity. He returned to Europe with the certitude that no passage existed from the North Pacific across the American continent into the Atlantic. His surveys remain as a monument of his activity, skill, and perseverance. The present charts of the coast of North America upon the Pacific are based upon them. More than nine thousand miles of shore, with its headlands, capes, rivers, bays, promontories, and labyrinths of islands, had been carefully explored by surveying parties in boats, in superintending which Vancouver injured his health and brought on the decline which terminated in his death, in the year 1798, at the early age of forty-eight.
We have now to record the remarkable series of acts by which the United States of America, in the twenty-fifth year of their existence as a nation, put an end to a humiliation to which the commercial powers of Europe had submitted for centuries. From the time when the Spanish Moors, driven out of Granada by Ferdinand the Catholic, settled on the oppositecoast and commenced the practice of piracy, the Barbary States, Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, had been united against all Christian commerce in the Mediterranean. Emboldened by impunity, they extended their operations into the Atlantic, seizing the vessels of all nations who did not pay them tribute. England under Cromwell, and France under Louis XIV., however, caused their flags to be respected. The Dutch, Danes, and Swedes, by paying an annual tax, purchased exemption from seizure,—thus giving the sanction of a treaty to the outrage and consenting to wear an odious badge of servitude. Russia and Austria were protected by special agreements.
During the early years of the American Republic, Tripoli intimated to the Government the propriety of paying tribute. Jefferson replied, in 1800, by declaring war against Tripoli, and sent out an armed naval force under Commodore Dale. This officer, with two frigates and a sloop-of-war, blockaded Tripoli, preventing the cruisers from getting to sea, and thus protecting our commerce. Commodore Preble followed with seven vessels in 1803. In October, one of his ships,—the Philadelphia, Captain Bainbridge,—engaged in reconnoitring the harbor of Tripoli, grounded and was forced to surrender. The officers were treated as prisoners of war, the sailors as slaves. The vessel was floated and moored in the harbor, strongly manned by Tripolitans, whose naval force was thus unexpectedly augmented.
The American squadron rendezvoused at Syracuse, in Sicily,—somewhat over a day's sail from Tripoli. A young lieutenant under Preble, named Decatur, formed a plan for destroying the Philadelphia and thus reducing the Tripolitans again to their ordinary naval strength. Preble consented to the scheme, and Decatur armed a ketch which he had captured, and with it entered, in February, 1804, under cover of the night, the harbor of Tripoli. He had with him an old pilot who spoke the Tripolitan language. On approaching the Philadelphia, theywere challenged; but the pilot replied that he had lost his anchor and merely wished to fasten his vessel to the frigate till morning. A boat was sent ashore by the Tripolitans to ask permission, and then Decatur and his men leaped upon the deck. They rushed upon the affrighted corsairs, fifty in number, and drove them into the sea. They set fire to the Philadelphia, and, by the light of the blaze, escaped without the loss of a single man. One sailor was wounded by receiving upon his arm a blow from a sabre with which the turbaned pirate meant to decapitate Decatur.
The Tripolitans were enraged at the loss of their prize, and treated Bainbridge and his enslaved crew with greater severity than ever. Three times did Preble enter the harbor of Tripoli with his fleet and open his broadsides against the town, destroying some of the shipping, but making no material impression. At last, a series of brilliant actions upon land under General Eaton, whose army consisted of nine Americans, twenty Greeks, and five hundred Egyptians, and the arrival of the frigate Constitution in June, 1805, forced the Bashaw of Tripoli to come to terms; and he released his prisoners and abandoned forever the levying of tribute upon American ships. Peace was at once concluded.
In 1812, the United States being at war with England, the Dey of Algiers thought our Government would be unable to cope with two enemies upon the ocean, and determined to resume piracy on our vessels. He pretexted the unsatisfactory quality of a cargo of military stores furnished by our Government, and ordered the American agent to leave the capital. Depredations were immediately recommenced: our vessels were plundered and confiscated and their crews enslaved. The President suggested the importance of taking measures of prevention, in his message to Congress in December, 1814, and, after the signing of the treaty of peace with England, despatched two squadrons to the Mediterranean, under Decatur and Bainbridge, both now commodores. The former captured, in June, an Algerine frigate of forty-four guns and a brig of twenty-two. He then sailed for Algiers. The American navy had earned an enviable distinction in the war with England, and the sight of our gallant fleet inspired the Dey with a salutary terror. He consented to the terms imposed by Decatur, which were to give up all captured men and property, to pay six million dollars for previous exactions, and to exempt our commerce from tribute for all time to come. A treaty was signed on the 4th of July,—an auspicious date for so honorable an achievement.
BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA.
BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA.
BURNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA.
The proud position thus attained by the United States attracted the attention of Europe. Our Government had extorted expressions of submission from the corsairs such as no other power had ever obtained. The Congress of Vienna discussed the subject, and it was resolved that from that time forward Christian slavery in Algiers was suppressed. The English sent Lord Exmouth to bombard that city, and compelled the dey to submit to conditions like those imposed by Decatur. The Algerines were not yet broken, however. They placed their city in a formidable state of defence, and then proceeded to intercept the trade of the French. The French Government declared war,—a measure which resulted in the capture of Algiers in 1830 and in the seizure of Abd-el-Kader in the winter of 1847-48. These events have led to the colonization of the territory by the French and to the partial extinction of the Algerine people. Piracy in the Mediterranean may safely be said to be at an end forever.
THE CLERMONT: THE FIRST STEAMBOAT.CHAPTER XLVIII.APPLICATION OF STEAM TO NAVIGATION—ROBERT FULTON-CHANCELLOR LIVINGSTON—LAUNCH OF THE CLERMONT—SHE CROSSES THE HUDSON RIVER—HER VOYAGE TO ALBANY—DESCRIPTION OF THE SCENE—FULTON'S OWN ACCOUNT—LEGISLATIVE PROTECTION GRANTED TO FULTON—THE PENDULUM-ENGINE—CONSTRUCTION OF OTHER STEAMBOATS—THE STEAM-FRIGATE FULTON THE FIRST—THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER, THE SAVANNAH—ACCOUNT OF HER VOYAGE—MISAPPREHENSIONS UPON THE SUBJECT.In the year 1807, a new agent was introduced into the science of navigation,—one which was destined to effect as great a change in the duration of a voyage at sea as the compass had effected in its practicability. Steam was applied to a boat upon the Hudson, and the Clermont, propelled by wheels, steamed from Jersey City to Albany. Though this was an event that immediately concerned river-navigation, and though twelve years were to elapse before the accomplishment of the first ocean steam-voyage, we cannot with propriety omit an account of the conception, construction, and success of the first river-steamboat.Robert Fulton was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in the year 1765. He manifested a genius for mechanics at an early age, though portrait-painting was his first profession. Hespent many years in England and France, and conceived the idea of a vessel propelled by steam in 1793. He received no countenance from Napoleon, and returned to the United States in December, 1806. His mind was now occupied with two projects,—the invention of submarine explosives and the construction of a steamboat. He published a work entitled "Torpedo War," with the motto, "The liberty of the seas will be the happiness of the earth." He renewed his acquaintance with Chancellor Livingston, whom he had known when ambassador to Paris. This gentleman had long had entire faith in the practicability of steam-navigation, and as early as 1798 had obtained from the Legislature of New York a monopoly of all such navigation upon the waters of the State, provided he would within twelve months build a boat which should go four miles an hour by steam. When they met in America, in 1806, the two entered into a partnership and commenced the construction of a boat. Finding the expenses unexpectedly heavy, they offered to sell one-third of their patent; but no one would invest in an enterprise universally deemed hopeless. The boat was nevertheless launched, in the spring of 1807, from the ship-yard of Charles Brown, on the East River. She was supplied with an engine built in England, and was driven by steam, in August, from the New York side to the Jersey shore. The incredulous crowd who had assembled to laugh stayed to wonder and applaud.The Clermont soon after sailed for Albany, her departure having been announced in the newspapers as a grand and unequalled curiosity. "She excited," says Colden, in his Life of Fulton, "the astonishment of the inhabitants of the shores of the Hudson, many of whom had not heard even of an engine, much less of a steamboat. There were many descriptions of the effects of her first appearance upon the people of the bank of the river: some of these were ridiculous, but some of them were of such a character as nothing but an object of realgrandeur could have excited. She was described, by some who had indistinctly seen her passing in the night, as a monster moving on the waters, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke. She had the most terrific appearance from other vessels which were navigating the river when she was making her passage. The first steamboat—as others yet do—used dry pine wood for fuel, which sends forth a column of ignited vapor many feet above the flue, and whenever the fire is stirred a galaxy of sparks fly off, and in the night have a very brilliant and beautiful appearance. This uncommon light first attracted the attention of the crews of other vessels. Notwithstanding the wind and tide, which were adverse to its approach, they saw with astonishment that it was rapidly coming toward them; and when it came so near that the noise of the machinery and paddles was heard, the crews—if what was said in the newspapers of the time be true—in some instances shrunk beneath their decks from the terrific sight and left their vessels to go on shore, whilst others prostrated themselves and besought Providence to protect them from the approaches of the horrible monster which was marching on the tide and lighting its path by the fires which it vomited."Fulton himself wrote the following account of the trip up the river and back, and published it in the American Citizen:—"I left New York on Monday at one o'clock, and arrived at Clermont, the seat of Chancellor Livingston, at one o'clock on Tuesday: time, twenty-four hours; distance, one hundred and ten miles. On Wednesday, I departed from the chancellor's at nine in the morning, and arrived at Albany at five in the afternoon: time, eight hours; distance, forty miles. The sum is one hundred and fifty miles in thirty-two hours,—equal to near five miles an hour."On Thursday, at nine o'clock in the morning, I left Albany, and arrived at the chancellor's at six in the evening: I started from thence at seven, and arrived at New York at four in theafternoon; time, thirty hours; space run through, one hundred and fifty miles,—equal to five miles an hour. Throughout my whole way, both going and returning, the wind was ahead: no advantage could be derived from my sail: the whole has therefore been performed by the power of the steam-engine."In a letter to one of his friends, Fulton wrote:—"I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. The morning I left New York there were not perhaps thirty persons who believed that the boat would even move one mile an hour, or be of the least utility; and while we were putting off from the wharf, which was crowded with spectators, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors.... Although the prospect of personal emolument has been some inducement to me, yet I feel infinitely more pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantage that my country will derive from the invention."The Clermont was now advertised as a regular passenger-boat upon the Hudson. She met with numerous accidents during the season; and her obvious defects would have been remedied by the application of as obvious improvements by Fulton himself, had not other persons anticipated him by taking out patents for improvements which they themselves proposed. They thus caused him infinite annoyance, and even contested his right as an inventor. Shipmasters, too, who looked upon his boat as an intruder upon their domain, ran their vessels purposely foul of her on more than one occasion. The Legislature saw fit to counteract the effects of this hostility by passing an act prolonging Livingston and Fulton's privilege five years for every additional boat established,—the whole time, however, not to exceed thirty years. It also made all combinations to destroy the Clermont offences punishable by fine and imprisonment.Thus protected, the Clermont ran throughout the season, always well laden with passengers. In the winter she was enlarged and improved. The wheel-guards were strengthened, and became a prominent and essential feature of the boat. The rudder was replaced by one of much larger dimensions, and a steering-wheel towards the bow was substituted for the ordinary tiller. The accommodations for passengers were made much more comfortable,—luxurious even,—and the public taste was consulted in the application of numerous coats of rather gaudy paint. She then commenced her trips for the season of 1808. She started regularly at the appointed hour,—at first much to the discontent of travellers who had before been waited for by both sloops and stages. At the end of the season the Clermont was altogether too small for the crowds who thronged to take passage. Two boats, the Car of Neptune and the Paragon, were therefore soon added to the line.Fulton, menaced by constant contestation of his rights, took out a patent in 1809 from the General Government, and another, for improvements, in 1811. His system was so simple—the adaptation of paddle-wheels to the axle of the crank of Watt's engine—that it seemed then, as it has proved since, almost impossible by any specifications effectually to protect it. The famous Pendulum Company caused Fulton for a time much trouble. They built a boat the wheels of which were to be moved by a pendulum. While she was upon the stocks and the wheels were resisted only by the air, the labor of a few men made them turn regularly and rapidly; but when she was launched, and the pendulum encountered the resistance of the water, neither pendulum, wheels, nor boat would stir. The Pendulum Company were aghast at this phenomenon, and clearly saw that if the boat was to be moved by the wheels, and the wheels by the pendulum, something must be devised of sufficient power to move the pendulum. There was nothing, evidently, but the steam-engine; and so they copied Fulton's. Lawsuits followed;and in his argument in behalf of Fulton Mr. Emmet thus spoke of the Pendulum gentlemen:—"They are men who never waste health and life in midnight vigils and painful study; who never dream of science in the broken slumbers of an exhausted mind; who bestow upon the construction of a steamboat just as much mathematical calculation and philosophical research as on the purchase of a sack of wheat or a barrel of ashes." Fulton gained his cause, and the boat which was to go by clock-work was prohibited from going even by steam.In 1812, Fulton built the Fire-Fly; and, as the town of Newburgh, half-way to Albany, offered sufficient traffic to support at least one boat, she was placed upon that route. In the same year he constructed two ferry-boats for crossing the Hudson, making them with rudder and bow at either end. He also contrived floating docks for their reception, and a method of stopping them without concussion. In 1813, he built a steam-vessel of four hundred tons and unusual strength, to ply in Long Island Sound between New York and New Haven. She was the first steamboat constructed with a round bottom. We quote a passage referring to her from a work published in 1817:—"During a great part of her route she would be as much exposed as she could be on the ocean: it was therefore necessary to make her a perfect sea-boat. She passes daily, and at all times of the tide, the dangerous strait of Hell-Gate, where for the distance of nearly a mile she often encounters a current running at the rate of at least six miles an hour. For some distance she has within a few yards of her, on each side, rocks and whirlpools which rival Scylla and Charybdis even as they are poetically described. This passage, previously to its being navigated by this vessel, was always supposed to be impassable except at certain stages of the tide; and many a shipwreck has been occasioned by a small mistake in the time. The boat passing through these whirlpools with rapidity, while the angry waters are foaming against her bows and appear toraise themselves in obstinate resistance to her passage, is a proud triumph of human ingenuity. The owners, as the highest tribute they had in their power to offer to his genius, and as an evidence of the gratitude they owed him, called her the Fulton."Early in 1814, the United States and England being at war, Fulton conceived the idea of a steam vessel-of-war, capable of carrying a strong battery, with furnaces for red-hot shot, and sailing four miles an hour. Congress authorized the construction of such a floating battery, and the keel was laid on the 18th of June. The vessel was launched on the 27th of October the same year, in the midst of excited and applauding throngs. Before she sailed, however, her engineer and builder had been removed to another sphere: Fulton died on the 24th of February, 1815. The Legislature paid an unusual tribute to his memory: they resolved to wear mourning for three weeks. This manifestation of regret for the loss of a man who had never held office nor served his country in any public capacity was entirely unprecedented.On the 4th of July, the steam-frigate made a trial trip, and, with her engines alone, sailed fifty-three miles in eight hours and twenty minutes. The following description of the Fulton the First, as she was called, is given by the committee appointed to examine her in behalf of Congress:—"She is a structure resting on two boats and keels separated from end to end by a channel fifteen feet wide and sixty-six feet long. One boat contains the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam; the cylinder of iron, its piston, lever, and wheels, occupy part of the other. The water-wheel revolves in the space between them. The main or gun deck supports the armament, and is protected by a parapet, four feet ten inches thick, of solid timber, pierced by embrasures. Through thirty port-holes as many thirty-two pounders are intended to fire red-hot shot, which can be heated with great safety and convenience. Her upper or spar deck, upon which several thousand men might parade, is encompassedby a bulwark, which affords safe quarters: she is rigged with two stout masts, each of which supports a large lateen yard and sails: she has two bowsprits and jibs, and four rudders, one at each extremity of each boat, so that she can be steered with either end foremost: her machinery is calculated for the addition of an engine which will discharge an immense column of water, which it is intended to throw upon the decks and through the port-holes of an enemy and thereby deluge her armament and ammunition. If in addition to all this we suppose her to be furnished, according to Mr. Fulton's intention, with hundred-pound Columbiads, two suspended from each bow so as to discharge a ball of that size into an enemy's ship ten or twelve feet below her water-line, it must be allowed that she has the appearance, at least, of being the most formidable engine for warfare that human ingenuity has contrived."Such was the first step towards the establishment of a steam-navy. Forty years afterwards, George Steers built the propeller-frigate Niagara; and the reader, by comparing the two vessels, will have an adequate idea of the immense strides made in naval mechanics and engineering during the lapse of less than half a century. In Europe the size and qualities of the Fulton the First were at the time ludicrously exaggerated, as will be seen from the following passage from a Scotch treatise on steamships. After magnifying her proportions threefold, the author continues:—"The thickness of her sides is thirteen feet of alternate oak plank and cork wood: she carries forty-four guns, four of which are hundred-pounders; quarterdeck and forecastle guns, forty-four-pounders; and, further to annoy an enemy attempting to board, can discharge one hundred gallons of boiling water in a minute, and, by mechanism, brandishes three hundred cutlasses with the utmost regularity over her gunwales, works also an equal number of heavy iron spikes of great length, darting them from her sides with prodigious force and withdrawing them every quarter of a minute!"The frigate made a second experimental trip, on the 11th of September, with her armament and stores on board, her draught of water being eleven feet. She changed her course by reversing the motion of her wheels. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, and performed manœuvres around the United States frigate Java. The machinery was not affected in the slightest degree by the detonation of her guns. Her average speed was five and a half miles an hour,—Fulton having contracted to obtain three miles an hour only. The city of New York now felt itself invulnerable; but the cessation of hostilities, which occurred soon after, precluded the necessity of employing her as a means of defence. It is probable that such a contrivance, even in the present advanced state of naval warfare, would be found useful in protecting the mouths of harbors,—not as a frigate, but as a floating battery or movable fortress. The fact that this vessel was built by Fulton makes him the father not only of steam-navigation, but of the steam-navies of the world as well. We shall have occasion to chronicle at intervals, as we progress in our record, the successive steps of improvement in the science, till we arrive at the era of steam floating palaces upon American rivers, of steam pleasure-yachts owned by American merchants, of commercial steam-leviathans, American and English, bearing the names of continents and oceans, and of the peerless steam-frigate to which we have already alluded,—"a noble ship with a noble name, bound, in 1857, upon the noblest of missions."The history of the first ocean-steamer is very incompletely and unsatisfactorily told in the annals of the time. The following is the substance of all that has been preserved of the first transatlantic steam-voyage on record:The Savannah, a steamer of three hundred and fifty tons, intended to ply between New York and Liverpool, under the command of Captain Moses Rodgers, was launched at New York on the 22d of August, 1818. She made a preliminaryvoyage to the city whose name she bore, in April, 1819, where she arrived in seven days, after a very boisterous passage. She was several times compelled to take in her wheels—having machinery for the purpose—and rely upon her sails, which was done with all the promptitude and safety anticipated. This trial trip left no doubt that she would successfully accomplish the object for which she was built. She left Savannah for Liverpool soon after, and the New York newspapers of the second week in June announced that she had been spoken at sea, all well. In the log-book of the Pluto, which arrived soon after at Baltimore from Bremen, occurred the following passage:THE SAVANNAH: THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER."June 2.—Clear weather and smooth sea: lat. 42°, long. 59°, spoke and passed the elegant steamship Savannah, eight days out from Savannah to St. Petersburg by way of Liverpool. She passed us at the rate of nine or ten knots; and the captain informed us she worked remarkably well, and the greatest compliment we could bestow was to give her three cheers, as the happiest effort of mechanical genius that ever appeared on the Western ocean. She returned the compliment."Niles' New York Register of the 21st of August contains the following paragraph in italics at the head of its column of foreign news:—"The steamship Savannah, Captain MosesRodgers,—the first that ever crossed the Atlantic,—arrived at Liverpool in twenty-five days from Savannah, all well, to the great astonishment of the people of that place. She worked her engine eighteen days." The next record of her movements is that she sailed in August for St. Petersburg, passing Elsinore on the 13th, and that the British "wiselysupposed her visit to besomehowconnected with the ambitious views of the United States." She arrived back at Savannah in November, in fifty days from St. PetersburgviâCopenhagen and Arendal in Norway, all well, and, in the language of Captain Rodgers, "with neither a screw, bolt, or a rope-yarn parted, though she encountered a very heavy gale in the North Sea." She left Savannah for Washington on the 4th of December, losing her boats and anchors off Cape Hatteras.It is a singular fact, and one not creditable to the English, that many of their works treating of inventions and the progress of the arts and sciences entirely overlook this voyage out and back of the Savannah, and uniformly make the British steamers Sirius and Great Western the pioneers, in 1837, in the great work of ocean steam-navigation. The authors of these works err either through design or ignorance, and in either case display a marked unfitness for their vocation. Were they to consult the London and Liverpool newspapers of the time, they would find ample record of the accomplishment of a steam-voyage nearly twenty years before the period to which they assign it. We have said enough, however, to prove that the first steam-vessel that crossed the ocean was built in New York, and that Moses Rodgers, her captain, was an American citizen. When we arrive at the year in which the two British steamers inaugurated steam commercial intercourse between the hemispheres, we shall record it, with due acknowledgment of its importance; but we repeat the assertion that, as the first river-steamer was the Clermont, the first Atlantic steamer was the Savannah: both one and the other were built in New York.
THE CLERMONT: THE FIRST STEAMBOAT.
THE CLERMONT: THE FIRST STEAMBOAT.
THE CLERMONT: THE FIRST STEAMBOAT.
APPLICATION OF STEAM TO NAVIGATION—ROBERT FULTON-CHANCELLOR LIVINGSTON—LAUNCH OF THE CLERMONT—SHE CROSSES THE HUDSON RIVER—HER VOYAGE TO ALBANY—DESCRIPTION OF THE SCENE—FULTON'S OWN ACCOUNT—LEGISLATIVE PROTECTION GRANTED TO FULTON—THE PENDULUM-ENGINE—CONSTRUCTION OF OTHER STEAMBOATS—THE STEAM-FRIGATE FULTON THE FIRST—THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER, THE SAVANNAH—ACCOUNT OF HER VOYAGE—MISAPPREHENSIONS UPON THE SUBJECT.
In the year 1807, a new agent was introduced into the science of navigation,—one which was destined to effect as great a change in the duration of a voyage at sea as the compass had effected in its practicability. Steam was applied to a boat upon the Hudson, and the Clermont, propelled by wheels, steamed from Jersey City to Albany. Though this was an event that immediately concerned river-navigation, and though twelve years were to elapse before the accomplishment of the first ocean steam-voyage, we cannot with propriety omit an account of the conception, construction, and success of the first river-steamboat.
Robert Fulton was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in the year 1765. He manifested a genius for mechanics at an early age, though portrait-painting was his first profession. Hespent many years in England and France, and conceived the idea of a vessel propelled by steam in 1793. He received no countenance from Napoleon, and returned to the United States in December, 1806. His mind was now occupied with two projects,—the invention of submarine explosives and the construction of a steamboat. He published a work entitled "Torpedo War," with the motto, "The liberty of the seas will be the happiness of the earth." He renewed his acquaintance with Chancellor Livingston, whom he had known when ambassador to Paris. This gentleman had long had entire faith in the practicability of steam-navigation, and as early as 1798 had obtained from the Legislature of New York a monopoly of all such navigation upon the waters of the State, provided he would within twelve months build a boat which should go four miles an hour by steam. When they met in America, in 1806, the two entered into a partnership and commenced the construction of a boat. Finding the expenses unexpectedly heavy, they offered to sell one-third of their patent; but no one would invest in an enterprise universally deemed hopeless. The boat was nevertheless launched, in the spring of 1807, from the ship-yard of Charles Brown, on the East River. She was supplied with an engine built in England, and was driven by steam, in August, from the New York side to the Jersey shore. The incredulous crowd who had assembled to laugh stayed to wonder and applaud.
The Clermont soon after sailed for Albany, her departure having been announced in the newspapers as a grand and unequalled curiosity. "She excited," says Colden, in his Life of Fulton, "the astonishment of the inhabitants of the shores of the Hudson, many of whom had not heard even of an engine, much less of a steamboat. There were many descriptions of the effects of her first appearance upon the people of the bank of the river: some of these were ridiculous, but some of them were of such a character as nothing but an object of realgrandeur could have excited. She was described, by some who had indistinctly seen her passing in the night, as a monster moving on the waters, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke. She had the most terrific appearance from other vessels which were navigating the river when she was making her passage. The first steamboat—as others yet do—used dry pine wood for fuel, which sends forth a column of ignited vapor many feet above the flue, and whenever the fire is stirred a galaxy of sparks fly off, and in the night have a very brilliant and beautiful appearance. This uncommon light first attracted the attention of the crews of other vessels. Notwithstanding the wind and tide, which were adverse to its approach, they saw with astonishment that it was rapidly coming toward them; and when it came so near that the noise of the machinery and paddles was heard, the crews—if what was said in the newspapers of the time be true—in some instances shrunk beneath their decks from the terrific sight and left their vessels to go on shore, whilst others prostrated themselves and besought Providence to protect them from the approaches of the horrible monster which was marching on the tide and lighting its path by the fires which it vomited."
Fulton himself wrote the following account of the trip up the river and back, and published it in the American Citizen:—"I left New York on Monday at one o'clock, and arrived at Clermont, the seat of Chancellor Livingston, at one o'clock on Tuesday: time, twenty-four hours; distance, one hundred and ten miles. On Wednesday, I departed from the chancellor's at nine in the morning, and arrived at Albany at five in the afternoon: time, eight hours; distance, forty miles. The sum is one hundred and fifty miles in thirty-two hours,—equal to near five miles an hour.
"On Thursday, at nine o'clock in the morning, I left Albany, and arrived at the chancellor's at six in the evening: I started from thence at seven, and arrived at New York at four in theafternoon; time, thirty hours; space run through, one hundred and fifty miles,—equal to five miles an hour. Throughout my whole way, both going and returning, the wind was ahead: no advantage could be derived from my sail: the whole has therefore been performed by the power of the steam-engine."
In a letter to one of his friends, Fulton wrote:—"I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. The morning I left New York there were not perhaps thirty persons who believed that the boat would even move one mile an hour, or be of the least utility; and while we were putting off from the wharf, which was crowded with spectators, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors.... Although the prospect of personal emolument has been some inducement to me, yet I feel infinitely more pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantage that my country will derive from the invention."
The Clermont was now advertised as a regular passenger-boat upon the Hudson. She met with numerous accidents during the season; and her obvious defects would have been remedied by the application of as obvious improvements by Fulton himself, had not other persons anticipated him by taking out patents for improvements which they themselves proposed. They thus caused him infinite annoyance, and even contested his right as an inventor. Shipmasters, too, who looked upon his boat as an intruder upon their domain, ran their vessels purposely foul of her on more than one occasion. The Legislature saw fit to counteract the effects of this hostility by passing an act prolonging Livingston and Fulton's privilege five years for every additional boat established,—the whole time, however, not to exceed thirty years. It also made all combinations to destroy the Clermont offences punishable by fine and imprisonment.
Thus protected, the Clermont ran throughout the season, always well laden with passengers. In the winter she was enlarged and improved. The wheel-guards were strengthened, and became a prominent and essential feature of the boat. The rudder was replaced by one of much larger dimensions, and a steering-wheel towards the bow was substituted for the ordinary tiller. The accommodations for passengers were made much more comfortable,—luxurious even,—and the public taste was consulted in the application of numerous coats of rather gaudy paint. She then commenced her trips for the season of 1808. She started regularly at the appointed hour,—at first much to the discontent of travellers who had before been waited for by both sloops and stages. At the end of the season the Clermont was altogether too small for the crowds who thronged to take passage. Two boats, the Car of Neptune and the Paragon, were therefore soon added to the line.
Fulton, menaced by constant contestation of his rights, took out a patent in 1809 from the General Government, and another, for improvements, in 1811. His system was so simple—the adaptation of paddle-wheels to the axle of the crank of Watt's engine—that it seemed then, as it has proved since, almost impossible by any specifications effectually to protect it. The famous Pendulum Company caused Fulton for a time much trouble. They built a boat the wheels of which were to be moved by a pendulum. While she was upon the stocks and the wheels were resisted only by the air, the labor of a few men made them turn regularly and rapidly; but when she was launched, and the pendulum encountered the resistance of the water, neither pendulum, wheels, nor boat would stir. The Pendulum Company were aghast at this phenomenon, and clearly saw that if the boat was to be moved by the wheels, and the wheels by the pendulum, something must be devised of sufficient power to move the pendulum. There was nothing, evidently, but the steam-engine; and so they copied Fulton's. Lawsuits followed;and in his argument in behalf of Fulton Mr. Emmet thus spoke of the Pendulum gentlemen:—"They are men who never waste health and life in midnight vigils and painful study; who never dream of science in the broken slumbers of an exhausted mind; who bestow upon the construction of a steamboat just as much mathematical calculation and philosophical research as on the purchase of a sack of wheat or a barrel of ashes." Fulton gained his cause, and the boat which was to go by clock-work was prohibited from going even by steam.
In 1812, Fulton built the Fire-Fly; and, as the town of Newburgh, half-way to Albany, offered sufficient traffic to support at least one boat, she was placed upon that route. In the same year he constructed two ferry-boats for crossing the Hudson, making them with rudder and bow at either end. He also contrived floating docks for their reception, and a method of stopping them without concussion. In 1813, he built a steam-vessel of four hundred tons and unusual strength, to ply in Long Island Sound between New York and New Haven. She was the first steamboat constructed with a round bottom. We quote a passage referring to her from a work published in 1817:—"During a great part of her route she would be as much exposed as she could be on the ocean: it was therefore necessary to make her a perfect sea-boat. She passes daily, and at all times of the tide, the dangerous strait of Hell-Gate, where for the distance of nearly a mile she often encounters a current running at the rate of at least six miles an hour. For some distance she has within a few yards of her, on each side, rocks and whirlpools which rival Scylla and Charybdis even as they are poetically described. This passage, previously to its being navigated by this vessel, was always supposed to be impassable except at certain stages of the tide; and many a shipwreck has been occasioned by a small mistake in the time. The boat passing through these whirlpools with rapidity, while the angry waters are foaming against her bows and appear toraise themselves in obstinate resistance to her passage, is a proud triumph of human ingenuity. The owners, as the highest tribute they had in their power to offer to his genius, and as an evidence of the gratitude they owed him, called her the Fulton."
Early in 1814, the United States and England being at war, Fulton conceived the idea of a steam vessel-of-war, capable of carrying a strong battery, with furnaces for red-hot shot, and sailing four miles an hour. Congress authorized the construction of such a floating battery, and the keel was laid on the 18th of June. The vessel was launched on the 27th of October the same year, in the midst of excited and applauding throngs. Before she sailed, however, her engineer and builder had been removed to another sphere: Fulton died on the 24th of February, 1815. The Legislature paid an unusual tribute to his memory: they resolved to wear mourning for three weeks. This manifestation of regret for the loss of a man who had never held office nor served his country in any public capacity was entirely unprecedented.
On the 4th of July, the steam-frigate made a trial trip, and, with her engines alone, sailed fifty-three miles in eight hours and twenty minutes. The following description of the Fulton the First, as she was called, is given by the committee appointed to examine her in behalf of Congress:—"She is a structure resting on two boats and keels separated from end to end by a channel fifteen feet wide and sixty-six feet long. One boat contains the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam; the cylinder of iron, its piston, lever, and wheels, occupy part of the other. The water-wheel revolves in the space between them. The main or gun deck supports the armament, and is protected by a parapet, four feet ten inches thick, of solid timber, pierced by embrasures. Through thirty port-holes as many thirty-two pounders are intended to fire red-hot shot, which can be heated with great safety and convenience. Her upper or spar deck, upon which several thousand men might parade, is encompassedby a bulwark, which affords safe quarters: she is rigged with two stout masts, each of which supports a large lateen yard and sails: she has two bowsprits and jibs, and four rudders, one at each extremity of each boat, so that she can be steered with either end foremost: her machinery is calculated for the addition of an engine which will discharge an immense column of water, which it is intended to throw upon the decks and through the port-holes of an enemy and thereby deluge her armament and ammunition. If in addition to all this we suppose her to be furnished, according to Mr. Fulton's intention, with hundred-pound Columbiads, two suspended from each bow so as to discharge a ball of that size into an enemy's ship ten or twelve feet below her water-line, it must be allowed that she has the appearance, at least, of being the most formidable engine for warfare that human ingenuity has contrived."
Such was the first step towards the establishment of a steam-navy. Forty years afterwards, George Steers built the propeller-frigate Niagara; and the reader, by comparing the two vessels, will have an adequate idea of the immense strides made in naval mechanics and engineering during the lapse of less than half a century. In Europe the size and qualities of the Fulton the First were at the time ludicrously exaggerated, as will be seen from the following passage from a Scotch treatise on steamships. After magnifying her proportions threefold, the author continues:—"The thickness of her sides is thirteen feet of alternate oak plank and cork wood: she carries forty-four guns, four of which are hundred-pounders; quarterdeck and forecastle guns, forty-four-pounders; and, further to annoy an enemy attempting to board, can discharge one hundred gallons of boiling water in a minute, and, by mechanism, brandishes three hundred cutlasses with the utmost regularity over her gunwales, works also an equal number of heavy iron spikes of great length, darting them from her sides with prodigious force and withdrawing them every quarter of a minute!"
The frigate made a second experimental trip, on the 11th of September, with her armament and stores on board, her draught of water being eleven feet. She changed her course by reversing the motion of her wheels. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, and performed manœuvres around the United States frigate Java. The machinery was not affected in the slightest degree by the detonation of her guns. Her average speed was five and a half miles an hour,—Fulton having contracted to obtain three miles an hour only. The city of New York now felt itself invulnerable; but the cessation of hostilities, which occurred soon after, precluded the necessity of employing her as a means of defence. It is probable that such a contrivance, even in the present advanced state of naval warfare, would be found useful in protecting the mouths of harbors,—not as a frigate, but as a floating battery or movable fortress. The fact that this vessel was built by Fulton makes him the father not only of steam-navigation, but of the steam-navies of the world as well. We shall have occasion to chronicle at intervals, as we progress in our record, the successive steps of improvement in the science, till we arrive at the era of steam floating palaces upon American rivers, of steam pleasure-yachts owned by American merchants, of commercial steam-leviathans, American and English, bearing the names of continents and oceans, and of the peerless steam-frigate to which we have already alluded,—"a noble ship with a noble name, bound, in 1857, upon the noblest of missions."
The history of the first ocean-steamer is very incompletely and unsatisfactorily told in the annals of the time. The following is the substance of all that has been preserved of the first transatlantic steam-voyage on record:
The Savannah, a steamer of three hundred and fifty tons, intended to ply between New York and Liverpool, under the command of Captain Moses Rodgers, was launched at New York on the 22d of August, 1818. She made a preliminaryvoyage to the city whose name she bore, in April, 1819, where she arrived in seven days, after a very boisterous passage. She was several times compelled to take in her wheels—having machinery for the purpose—and rely upon her sails, which was done with all the promptitude and safety anticipated. This trial trip left no doubt that she would successfully accomplish the object for which she was built. She left Savannah for Liverpool soon after, and the New York newspapers of the second week in June announced that she had been spoken at sea, all well. In the log-book of the Pluto, which arrived soon after at Baltimore from Bremen, occurred the following passage:
THE SAVANNAH: THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER.
THE SAVANNAH: THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER.
THE SAVANNAH: THE FIRST OCEAN-STEAMER.
"June 2.—Clear weather and smooth sea: lat. 42°, long. 59°, spoke and passed the elegant steamship Savannah, eight days out from Savannah to St. Petersburg by way of Liverpool. She passed us at the rate of nine or ten knots; and the captain informed us she worked remarkably well, and the greatest compliment we could bestow was to give her three cheers, as the happiest effort of mechanical genius that ever appeared on the Western ocean. She returned the compliment."
Niles' New York Register of the 21st of August contains the following paragraph in italics at the head of its column of foreign news:—"The steamship Savannah, Captain MosesRodgers,—the first that ever crossed the Atlantic,—arrived at Liverpool in twenty-five days from Savannah, all well, to the great astonishment of the people of that place. She worked her engine eighteen days." The next record of her movements is that she sailed in August for St. Petersburg, passing Elsinore on the 13th, and that the British "wiselysupposed her visit to besomehowconnected with the ambitious views of the United States." She arrived back at Savannah in November, in fifty days from St. PetersburgviâCopenhagen and Arendal in Norway, all well, and, in the language of Captain Rodgers, "with neither a screw, bolt, or a rope-yarn parted, though she encountered a very heavy gale in the North Sea." She left Savannah for Washington on the 4th of December, losing her boats and anchors off Cape Hatteras.
It is a singular fact, and one not creditable to the English, that many of their works treating of inventions and the progress of the arts and sciences entirely overlook this voyage out and back of the Savannah, and uniformly make the British steamers Sirius and Great Western the pioneers, in 1837, in the great work of ocean steam-navigation. The authors of these works err either through design or ignorance, and in either case display a marked unfitness for their vocation. Were they to consult the London and Liverpool newspapers of the time, they would find ample record of the accomplishment of a steam-voyage nearly twenty years before the period to which they assign it. We have said enough, however, to prove that the first steam-vessel that crossed the ocean was built in New York, and that Moses Rodgers, her captain, was an American citizen. When we arrive at the year in which the two British steamers inaugurated steam commercial intercourse between the hemispheres, we shall record it, with due acknowledgment of its importance; but we repeat the assertion that, as the first river-steamer was the Clermont, the first Atlantic steamer was the Savannah: both one and the other were built in New York.