placed at our disposal. In so vast a subject, many interesting facts have had to be omitted, and a scanty treatment of others has been rendered unavoidable.

The number of steamships of 100 tons and upwards in the world to-day exceeds that of sailing craft of similar size. Taking the figures of 1898, we find that the steamers number 14,701, with an aggregate gross tonnage of 19,511,292. One half this aggregate is owned in the United Kingdom and the Colonies; the steamers owned in the United Kingdom number 6,783, with a tonnage of 10,547,355.

The discomforts which formerly surrounded those who went down to the sea in ships are almost wholly absent from the modern liner. The cuisine and the furniture of these vessels are equal to those of the very best hotels. Passengers are safer in a liner than in the streets of London. A big liner, worth perhaps nearly a million of money, will carry as many passengers as the population of many an English village. The new Oceanic has accommodation for over two thousand persons, divided into 350 saloon passengers, 275 second-class, 1,000 steerage, and a crew of 450. The liners cross the ocean with nearly the regularity of fast trains, travelling at speeds equal to about half the average of that of long-distance expresses. They are as safe as forethought, scientific skill, and lavish expenditure can make them; they are marvels of construction, navigation, and equipment, and are practically unsinkable. There are in truth few points in between the steamships of the present and the sailing-craft of the past. The Campania and the Lucania, the Oceanic, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, and their compeers mark the limit of the present stage of ocean passenger service. very important advance has been made during the last halfdozen years. Larger liners may yet be built, but it is open to question whether any materially higher speeds will be economically obtained by the present methods of propulsion. Since, therefore, the last decade of the nineteenth century marks the limit of a great wave of progress in ocean navigation, the subject may be deemed one suitable for review.

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The idea of ocean steam navigation, like many other modern developments of engineering enterprise, occupied the minds of men many years before it became commercially practicable. River steamers ploughed the Clyde, the Mississippi, and the St. Lawrence, and coasting steamers plied in the Old and the New World, long before any ventured to cross the Atlantic. The first steam vessel which achieved this memorable feat was the Savannah, which was dispatched in 1819 from Savannah to

Liverpool, and made the voyage in twenty-five days. In 1825 the Enterprise, a little steamship of only 122 feet in length, made the voyage from Calcutta to London in one hundred and thirteen days, ten of which were spent in stoppages. In 1833, fourteen years after the Savannah's voyage, a second vessel, the Royal William, crossed the Atlantic, this time from Quebec to London, in about forty days. Not until 1838 did the first passenger steamer make an outward trip from Liverpool to New York. She was followed in the same year by the Liverpool, which made several passages, averaging seventeen days out and fifteen home. As these vessels were owned in America, the honour of demonstrating the practicability of Atlantic steam navigation lies with the United States. The first English-owned steamer that crossed the Atlantic was the Sirius, of 703 tons, which left Queenstown on April 5th, 1838, for New York, arriving there eighteen and a half days later. The famous Great Western left Bristol on the 8th of the same month, and reached New York on April 23rd, a few hours after the Sirius, having occupied but thirteen and a half days in the passage.

The achievements of these vessels demonstrated beyond doubt the practicability of ocean steam navigation. Their performances elicited quite as much interest and wonder then as do the feats of the latest liners of to-day. Yet in the same year— 1838-in which these steamships were on the point of commencing their careers, Dr. Lardner was demonstrating at the Royal Institution at Liverpool that, as to the project which was announced in the newspapers of making the voyage directly from New York to Liverpool, it was, he had no hesitation in saying, perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making a voyage from New York to the moon.'

Even after the practicability of ocean navigation had been demonstrated, its commercial success was not assured. The clipper ships were to the pioneer steamships what the stagecoaches had been to the early railways. The speed of these clippers was very great. One of them, the Great Republic, an American four-master of 3400 tons, once covered the distance between New York and the Scilly Islands in thirteen days. Some few of the sailing clippers actually raced the early steam vessels, leaving port with, and arriving before them. In 1846 a sailing clipper-the Tornado, of the Niagara line-arrived in New York before a Cunard steamer, which had started with her, arrived in Boston. The permanence of an excellent tradition in the art of ship-building may perhaps partly explain the victories of American yachts in the competition for the international cup. But though the fast sailing ships strove thus to hold

their own against their unpopular rivals, the contest was unequal; for while the clippers embodied the last and highest efforts of the shipwright, the steamships-their contemporaries—were but the crude first-fruits of the labours of the marine engineer.

The greatest public interest has always followed the development of the Atlantic liners. Competition on this crowded highway has been keener than on the less frequented routes, and the ships that travel over it have naturally led the van of progress. There are no steamships in the world so huge as those which cross the Atlantic ferry, no engines so powerful, no floating populations so vast. These vessels are the Tritons of the sea, and the history of their growth is typical of that of the great ocean liners all the world over. We propose therefore first to epitomise the story of the Atlantic service.

The commercial success of this service was mainly due to the late Mr. Samuel Cunard, who had long cherished a dream of making ocean travel as regular as that by rail. Mr. Cunard was a Quaker, residing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and had indulged this idea for some years before the date when the voyages of the Sirius and the Great Western, though commercially unsuccessful, had demonstrated the possibility of ocean steam navigation. When in 1839 the Admiralty, which at that period arranged for the carriage of mails, issued circulars inviting tenders for a steamship mail service, Mr. Cunard, who had already acquired considerable experience in working the mail service between Boston, Newfoundland, and Bermuda, determined to undertake the job. By the influence of Mr. Burns, a shipping merchant, and others in Glasgow and Liverpool, a capital of 270,000l. was subscribed, and a seven years' contract with the Admiralty secured, stipulating for a fortnightly mail service between Liverpool and Halifax and Boston, at a subsidy of 60,000 per annum. From that year-1839-dates the beginning of the Atlantic steam mail service and of the Cunard line.

Four steamers were built by Mr. Cunard's company. The first of these, the Britannia, was launched on February 5th, 1840, and sailed for America on July 4th, a Friday, which, though regarded by sailors as an unlucky day, proved far otherwise in the case of this vessel and of the company of which she was the pioneer. The advent of these steamships was a remarkable event in the history of the Atlantic, and one of international interest. When Mr. Cunard arrived in Boston on the Britannia he received within twenty-four hours 1873 invitations to dinner. When, in the winter of 1844, the vessel was frozen up in Boston harbour, the citizens went to the enormous labour and expense of cutting her out, so that the mails should not be

delayed. Though this involved cutting a canal through seven miles of ice, ranging from two to seven feet in thickness, at a cost of 20,000 dollars, they declined to be reimbursed by the Post Office.

These early Cunarders were built of wood and propelled by paddles, and they carried first-class passengers only, of whom one hundred and fifteen could be accommodated, though there were seldom so many as one hundred on a trip. Poorer

emigrants, and many people of moderate means as well, had still to travel by the sailing clippers; for the steamship faresabout thirty to thirty-four guineas-ranged higher than they do now on the finest 'greyhounds' on the service. The time occupied in the passages varied much more widely than it does at present. The average was about fourteen days, or one half that generally occupied by the sailing vessels. Some passages were made even then in eleven days and a few hours, while others occupied sixteen and even seventeen days.

The early vessels of the Cunard line maintained a steady lead which has never been permanently lost by the Company during the sixty years of its history. Year by year additions were made to the fleet, with increase in capacity and power, but with retention nevertheless for a long time of the old models-the wooden hulls, the paddles, and Napier's famous side-lever engines. The initiative of 1840 was a bold one, but when success seemed assured rivals entered into the field. The proprietors of the Great Western built Brunel's historic Great Britain, a vessel which but for a mishap might have proved a formidable competitor. She was much larger and more powerful than any other steamer then afloat, being 322 feet long, and of 3270 tons, was constructed of iron, eleven years before that material was adopted by the Cunard Company, and was the first vessel of that class fitted with a screw. But like the Great Eastern subsequently, she was born before her time. Placed on the Atlantic service in 1845, she ended her connexion with it fourteen months later by being wrecked in Dundrum Bay. Floated at the end of a year, she subsequently had a chequered career, and was a few years since a coal hulk at the Falkland Islands. With her wreck, all serious competition from the port of Bristol ceased.

The first great rivalry with the Cunarders came from the American Collins line, which commenced its career in 1849. Then followed for a few years a race of giants. Advantage had been taken, in building the Collins' vessels, of the experience of their rivals. The company was moreover subsidised by Congress. Their ships gained in speed over the Cunarders Vol. 191.-No. 381.

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by a few hours on the passage, and freights also were cut down by nearly one-half. The Americans lost heavily in their endeavour to regain the prestige which had been wrested by steam from their Baltimore clippers. The Cunard Company, with a position financially strong, soon built more powerful vessels the Arabia and the Persia-the latter bringing the passage down to between nine and ten days. At last, in 1858, the unequal contest came to an end through the withdrawal of the Collins line. Besides having sunk large sums of money, they had most unfortunately lost two of their vessels-the Arctic, which was run down by the Vesta in 1854, with terrible loss of life; and the Pacific, of which nothing was ever heard after she sailed from Liverpool on June 29th, 1856, with two hundred and forty souls on board. From these losses and disasters the Company never recovered, and their rivals retained their leading position in the Atlantic trade. The Collins line left one permanent legacy-the barber's shop-which was unknown on Atlantic liners until introduced on their vessels.

In 1850, some time before the disappearance of this ill-fated company, the Inman-now the American and Red Star-line commenced its career. It is singular that, though a regular Atlantic steam service had then existed for ten years, Mr. Inman was the first to perceive the value of the emigrant service, and his vessels were the first which were built to accommodate second-class and steerage passengers, for which no provision had yet been made in the other lines. The experiment proved so remunerative that three years later it was followed by the Cunard Company. At the present time, all liners, with a few exceptions, carry more third-class emigrants than saloon passengers. Iron as a building-material, and the screw in place of paddles, were also first successfully employed on the Atlantic by the Inman line; for the unfortunate Great Britain, it must be remembered, had fallen early out of the running. Steam stearing gear was first adopted by the Inman Company on the City of Brussels in 1869, and this too was the first vessel which reduced the Atlantic passage to less than eight days.

This line proved a more formidable rival to the Cunard steamers than the Collins had been. But the rivalry between the Cunard and Inman vessels was never so bitter as that with the Collins line, and there was, moreover, ample room for each company, in view of the rapidly increasing volume of Atlantic trade. The Ocean 'tramps, designed solely for slow transit of cargo, now became enormously developed in capacity; and as a result of their competition for freights the passenger-carrying