THE PORT OF LIVERPOOL 185 



station was that furnished by steamers carrying a 

 mail to the Isle of Man thrice a week in summer and 

 once a week in winter. The passage usually occupied 

 from eight to ten hours. But in another ten years 

 Samuel Cunard had appeared on the scene, and had 

 despatched his first contract mail-packet, the Britannia, 

 to New York. In 1851, when for the first time I stood 

 on the landing-stage and saw his vessels lying at anchor 

 in the Sloyne, he was in the full blast of competition 

 with the Collins Line. 



At this moment there are no fewer than forty-six 

 distinct lines of steamers — some under contract for 

 a term of years, some not — conveying letter mails, 

 or parcel mails, or both, from Liverpool to places 

 beyond sea, there being to North America alone eight 

 separate steam lines, the oldest of all taking its name 

 from the late Sir Samuel Cunard, of Halifax, Nova 

 Scotia. 



Around his slender figure clusters much of Liver- 

 pool's greatness— at least, of her ascendancy as a 

 Transatlantic mail-packet station. Nowhere is the 

 story told with greater fulness and vigour than in the 

 ' Life of Sir George Burns,' of the great Cunard 

 company which, from 1840 to the present day, has 

 sent its floating palaces weekly to the United States 

 with unfailing punctuality, unsurpassed speed, and 

 extraordinary immunity from accident and loss. 



It was not so with the ill-starred competing line 

 of Collins, which only lasted eight years, and sus- 

 tained great losses. Its operations were naturally 



