SS Clermont

“ Clermont at New York, and proved, by her performance in 1808 on the Hudson, that vessels propelled by steam could be made a source of profitable employment, they were increased with a rapidity and employed to an extent, especially during the first quarter of this century, far in excess of Great Britain. Besides the Clermont, launched in 1807, Mr. Charles Brown, an enterprising shipbuilder of New York, built in that year, also for the navigation of the Hudson, the Car of Neptune of 295 tons, and the Rareton, of 120 tons, named after the river on which she was employed. ”

“ He made the steamboat practicable, as Watt had the steam-engine. Above all, he was very fortunate; he found his countrymen ready to welcome the Clermont, and to fall in with his plans, an attitude which had not faced certain men in England and in France who had built similar boats earlier than Fulton. Some engineers have been tempted to call him a lucky amateur, a talented artist who happened to become interested in new methods of navigation. If one grants all this there is still the fact that it was the Clermont’s success that opened the watercourses of the world to steam. ”

“ But they spoke too soon, for after a little delay the wheels of the Clermont began to revolve, slowly and hesitatingly at first, but soon with more speed, and the boat steamed proudly off up the Hudson.
193As she moved forward, all along the river people who had come from far and near stood watching the strange sight. When boatmen and sailors on the Hudson heard the harsh clanking of machinery and saw the huge sparks and dense black smoke rising out of her funnel, they thought that the Clermont was a sea-monster. ”

“ But the long line of black smoke which they saw was only the breath of the dear old giant, Steam.
At last he had something to do.
This boat was called the Clermont.
It passed the city of New York.
It passed the beautiful Highlands of the Hudson.
It puffed patiently on until it reached Albany.
All along the shores people watched it breathlessly.
Everybody stopped sneering and cheered.
The Clermont had gone one hundred and fifty miles in thirty-two hours.
Except that the ocean steamships are larger, [36] handsomer, and more finely finished, they are much like Mr. Fulton's Clermont. ”

“ But the eyes of the whole community were now fixed upon the steamboat; and as all those of competent mechanical knowledge were, like Fulton himself, alive to the defects of the original vessel, his right to priority of invention of various important accessories has been disputed.
The winter of 1807-8 was occupied in remodelling and rebuilding the vessel, to which the name "Clermont" was now given. The guards and housings for the wheels, which had been but temporary structures, applied as their value was pointed out by experience, became solid and essential parts of the boat. ”

“ The Clermont became a regular passenger boat on the Hudson; and the progress of steam navigation continued to advance, until nearly all the navigable rivers of the world, and the great ocean itself, were covered with these clanking ships of commerce, which have added more to the comfort, the wealth, and the power of man—the power of doing good as well as evil—than the feeble human mind can conceive. ”

“ At first Fulton's Clermont alone steamed up and down the Hudson River. Soon, however, other steamboats were built to run in opposition to the sailing packets. Steamers began to ply on Lake Champlain and on the Delaware River. Three years after the first voyage of the Clermont, a steamboat was making three trips a week from New York to New Brunswick, New Jersey; here the traveler took stage for Bordentown on the Delaware River, whence another boat carried him to Philadelphia. Two years later steam ferryboats ran between New York and the Jersey shore. ”

“ What seemed strange in the vessel was the substitution of a lofty and strange black smoke-pipe rising from the deck, instead of the gracefully tapered masts that commonly stood on the vessels navigating the stream, and, in place of the spars and rigging, the curious play of the working beam and piston, and the slow turning and splashing of the huge and naked paddle-wheels, met their astonished gaze. The dense [34] clouds of smoke, as they rose wave upon wave, added still more to the wonder of the rustics. This strange-looking craft was the Clermont on her trial trip to Albany ”

“ Illustrations of what would now seem an incredible blindness to important events might be multiplied indefinitely. A New Yorker who wishes to find in old files a real account of the first trial of Fulton’s Clermont will search in vain. No report worthy of the name was written, the brief newspaper references being meager and unsatisfactory. Yet there was much interest in Fulton, and the Evening Post of July 22, sixteen days before the experiment with the steamboat, did give a good account of his successful effort in the harbor to use torpedoes. ”

“ Local skippers treated the Clermont in pretty much the same spirit as Papin’s poor ship had been welcomed by the local watermen, and the Hudson sailing-masters took a malicious delight in running foul of her whenever they thought they had the law on their side. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that Fulton, in writing to Captain Brink, whom he put in charge of her, commands him “run no risques of any kind when you meet or overtake vessels beating or crossing your way, always run under their stern if there be the least doubt that you cannot clear their head by 50 yards or more.” ”

“ This boat was 130 feet long and 18 feet wide, with a mast and a sail, and on each side a wheel 15 feet in diameter, fully exposed to view.
One morning in August, 1807, a throng of expectant people gathered on the banks of the North River at New York, to see the trial of the Clermont. Every [Pg 251] body was looking for failure. People had all along spoken of Fulton as a crack-brained dreamer, and had called the Clermont "Fulton's Folly." "Of course the thing would not move." "That any man with common-sense might know," they said. ”

“ The Clermont was soon afterwards lengthened and considerably improved in appearance and usefulness. Her hull was covered from stem to stern with a flush deck, beneath which two cabins were formed, surrounded by double ranges of berths, and fitted up with great regard to comfort. Her dimensions now were—length, 130 feet; breadth, 161⁄2 feet; diameter of paddle-wheels, 15 feet, the paddles dipping into the water 2 feet. Fulton afterwards built a number of steam-boats, and, it will be well understood, encountered a vast deal of opposition from the owners of sailing craft and ferry-boats. ”

“ Morrison points out, in his American Steam Navigation, that no single detail of the Clermont was invented by Fulton. As the North American Review of July, 1838, says, the "great and surpassing merit of Fulton consisted not so much in absolute originality as in the skill with which he availed himself of all the theoretic knowledge of the day, and applied it to practical purposes." His choice of location for the inauguration of steam navigation is to be noted, for New York and the Hudson afforded an amount of traffic perhaps more valuable than could have been found elsewhere for such a vessel. ”

“ How these three men managed to keep their secret so well is a mystery; but apparently they did, and when Fulton suddenly appeared on the Hudson with a steamboat named the Clermont for Mr. Livingston's country seat on the Palisades, the public was amazed. A model of the boat with a miniature engine had previously been tried out so the three promoters had little doubt that their project would work, and it did. As the new craft moved along without any sails to propel it the sensation it made was tremendous. People were divided as to whether to flee from it in terror or linger and marvel at it. ”

“ The steamboat was laid up in a creek at Bainsford, where it went to ruin, and the inventor himself died in poverty. Among those who inspected the vessel while at work were Fulton, the American artist, and Henry Bell, the Glasgow engineer. The former had already occupied himself with model steamboats, both at Paris and in London; and in 1805 he obtained from Boulton and Watt, of Birmingham, the steam-engine required for propelling his paddle steamboat on the Hudson. The Clermont was first started in August, 1807, and attained a speed of nearly five miles an hour. ”

“ The contrast between Fulton’s Clermont, or Bell’s Comet and the Atlantic Liner coursing over the sea at railway speed is very striking, and scarcely less remarkable the comparison of the river steamboat of [Pg 44] to-day with these early experiments. America has developed a type of steamboat, or rather types of steamboats, peculiarly its own. The light-draught Mississippi steamers [6] bear little resemblance to the Hudson River and Long Island Sound boats while the American steam ferry-boat is a thing certainly not of beauty, but unique. ”

“ But it was only the Clermont, Fulton's first steamboat, that had begun its trips between Albany and New York. The first voyage was made in about a day and a half; the sloops sometimes spent a week or two in getting to Hudson.
The advantage of a trade is that it exercises the body and makes the mind active. It produces a sound mind in a sound body. ”

“ In the winter-time, when thick ice-floes obstruct the Hudson and the bitter cold penetrates into the little wheel-house, there are more comfortable though less exciting avocations than those enjoyed by the commanders of these busy steam238 craft, which now carry on their work in such numbers where little more than a century ago Fulton’s Clermont was scorned and ridiculed by those who never thought that the river and harbour would ever see such steam-shipping. ”

“ The great new industry of the Ohio Valley was ruined.
78 By this time the successful voyage of Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, between New York and Albany, had demonstrated the possibilities of steam navigation. Not a few men saw in the novel craft the beginning of a new era in Western river traffic; but many doubted whether it was possible to construct a vessel powerful enough to make its way upstream against such sweeping currents as those of the Mississippi and the Ohio. ”

“ Speed was a question to which he devoted considerable attention, for he realised its importance, and nearly every vessel he turned out was an improvement upon its predecessor. The inventions and improvements which he introduced inaugurated a new era of steamboat construction. Of the fate which overtook some of these early vessels, it may be noted that the Clermont died of premature old age, the Car of Neptune was broken up, the Paragon went to the bottom, and the Hope, the Perseverance, the Firefly, and the Richmond were broken up. ”

“ Fulton had had the confidence and backing of R. R. Livingston and the firm of Fulton & Livingston was formed. This firm secured a monopoly for operating steam vessels in the waters of the state of New York. The first boat, the Clermont, named after Livingston’s estate on the Hudson River, was 130 feet long, 18 feet beam, and 7 feet deep, with a burden of 160 tons. The Boulton & Watt engine had been brought from England the year previous by Fulton and the boat built for it. ”

“ Admiral Campbell, "Hawke's right hand at Quiberon," who entered the service as a substitute for a pressed man, is another; and James Clephen, pressed as a sea-going apprentice, became master's-mate of the Doris, and taking part in the cutting out of the Chevrette, a corvette of twenty guns, from Cameret Bay, in 1801, was for his gallantry on that occasion made a lieutenant, fought at Trafalgar and died a captain. ”

“ Captain Clement was latterly employed on the Plymouth station, where he captured, in company with the Orestes brig, la Dorade French schooner privateer, of 10 guns and 43 men. May 9, 1810. He also re-captured several British merchantmen, destroyed some of the enemy’s coasting vessels, and on one occasion drove a convoy on shore in a bay near the Isle of Bas, under the fire of two batteries, and in the face of a national brig and schooner. As a reward for his active and unremitted services, he was advanced to post rank Aug. ”

“ I had the honour to inform you, by my letter of the 30th ult., that I had ordered Captain M‘Kerlie, with a gun-boat, and a strong division of row-boats, to proceed up the Weser to this place, for the purpose of seizing two corvettes building, as well as all other vessels, naval stores, &c. which he could find belonging to the enemy. I now beg to acquaint you, that I arrived here yesterday, and found that Captain M‘Kerlie had taken possession of the two corvettes, as also two gun-brigs, and several other vessels belonging to the enemy. ”

“ CLEGGETT did not fear (or rather, expect, since there was very little that Cleggett feared) an attack until well after nightfall. Nevertheless, he began to prepare for it at once. He called the entire ship's company aft, with the exception of Miss Medley, who was on duty with Giuseppe Jones.
"My friends—for I hope we stand in the relation of friends as well as that of commander and crew—I have every reason to expect that the enemy will make a demonstration in force sometime during the night," he said. "We have opposed to us the leader of a dangerous and powerful criminal organization. ”

“ The ship's company stepped forward as one man. As if by magic the atmosphere cleared.
"Now," said Cleggett, smiling back on the enthusiastic faces before him, but inexpressibly touched by the fineness of his crew's devotion, "to get to the point. There are seven of us, but there are at least a dozen of them. We have, however, the advantage in position, for we can find cover on the ship, whereas they must attack from the open. More than that, we will have the advantage in arms; here is a magazine rifle for each of you, while they, if I am not mistaken, will attack with pistols. ”