144 ALL AFLOAT 



her Spanish name of Isabella Segunda, she 

 made another record. When the British 

 Legion, under Sir de Lacy Evans, was attack- 

 ing the Carlists in the bay of St Sebastian, she 

 stood in towards the Carlist flank and there- 

 upon fired the first shot that any steam man-of- 

 war had ever fired in action. 



Strangely enough, she cannot be said to 

 have come to any definite end as an individual 

 ship. She continued in the Spanish service 

 till 1840, when she was sent to Bordeaux for 

 repairs. The Spaniards, who are notorious 

 slovens at keeping things shipshape, had 

 allowed her to run down to bare rot after her 

 Britisher-Canadian crew had left her. So the 

 French bought her for a hulk and left her 

 where she was. But the Spaniards took her 

 engines out and put them into a new Isabella 

 Segunda, which was wrecked in a storm on the 

 Algerian coast in i860. 



Her career of record-making is well worth a 

 general summary : the Royal William was the 

 first steamer built to foster inter-colonial trade 

 in Canada ; the first Canadian steamer specially 

 designed for work at sea; the first sea-going 

 steamer to enter a port in the United States 

 under the British flag ; the first steam transport 

 in Portugal ; the first steam man-of-war in 



