The Coming of Steam and Steel : 299 



to London. We should know that all these early passages of a steamer 

 were special one-way trips. In every case the vessel could wait for suit- 

 able weather and then at some risk scurry to the protected waters in 

 which it was to begin its regular operation. 



Up to this time no vessel on either side of the water had been 

 designed for operation at sea. The bold idea of putting a steam engine 

 in a seagoing vessel seems first to have been developed by a number 

 of prosperous businessmen in the city of Savannah, Georgia. Their 

 vessel, the Savannah, on May 24, 1819, commenced a passage to Liver- 

 pool which was completed in twenty-nine days and eleven hours. This 

 was an important passage. It demonstrated that a vessel equipped 

 with a steam engine and with paddle wheels could be driven across 

 the Atlantic Ocean. It was, however, far from being a crossing of the 

 Atlantic by a steam-driven vessel. Indeed the Savannah could be con- 

 sidered a large, fully equipped sailing vessel with the steam equip- 

 ment added. Her passage across the Atlantic took more than 700 

 hours of travel and during this time her engines could be operated for 

 only eighty hours. It is interesting to observe that this passage was 

 made almost entirely in the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift and 

 these, operating on her hull during 700 hours, probably aided her 

 progress as much as the engine did during the eighty hours of opera- 

 tion. 



In 1822 there occurred a remarkable voyage which illustrates not 

 only the increasing enterprise of steam vessels, but also the way in 

 which the patterns that were set on the Atlantic Ocean were gradu- 

 ally extended to other parts of the world. In this year an auxiliary 

 steamer called the Enterprise was built in England for the P. & O. 

 Steamship Company. She succeeded in making the passage around 

 the Cape of Good Hope and in getting to India. Thereafter, for many 

 years, she continued in operation between India and the Red Sea. This 

 made it possible for the company to send goods and passengers by ves- 

 sel through the Mediterranean and then to transport them overland 

 to the Red Sea where the Enterprise picked them up and continued 

 to India. Naturally this represented a great saving of time over the 

 passage around the cape either by sail or steam. Considering the inef- 

 ficiency of the early steamers and the enormous expenditure of coal, 

 the long trip of the Enterprise was a heroic adventure. The year that 

 she started her service in the Orient there were already 140 steamers 

 operating from British ports but nearly all of these were traveling on 

 canals or making short runs across the Channel or the Irish Sea, or 

 else serving as harbor tugs. Long passages were the exception, but in 



