THE HIGHWAY OF THE WATERS 



He had built experimental boats both at home and 

 abroad, was familiar with the principle of the screw 

 and the paddle-wheel, and had come to have absolute 

 confidence in the possibility of propelling boats at a 

 good rate of speed by the use of steam. When he be- 

 gan his now famous Clermont, in the spring of 1807, it 

 was not as an experimental skiff, but as a boat of one 

 hundred and fifty tons burden — half again the size of 

 the boats in which Columbus had discovered America 

 — ^to be placed in commission between Albany and 

 New York city. By August, this boat was completed, 

 and the engines in place, and, under her own steam, 

 the new boat was moved from the Jersey shipyard 

 where she was constructed, and tied up at a New York 

 dock. On August 7th, she started on her maiden trip 

 up the Hudson. To the astonishment of practically 

 every one of the persons in the great throng that had 

 gathered along the shores, she left her dock in due 

 course, and with wind and tide against her, steamed 

 up the river at the rate of about five miles an hour. 

 At this speed she covered the entire distance between 

 New York and Albany, settling forever the question 

 of the practicability of steam navigation. 



The impression this fire-belching monster made 

 upon the sleepy inhabitants as it passed along the river 

 can be readily imagined. An eye-witness account of 

 this first passage of the Clermont has been given by an 

 inhabitant at the half-way point near Poughkeepsie. 



"It was the early autumn in 1807," he wrote, "that 

 a knot of villagers was gathered on the high bluff just 

 opposite Poughkeepsie, on the west bank of the Hud- 



[71] 



