550 



HISTOPwY OF THE SEA. 



Rodgers, — the first that ever crossed the Atlantic, — arrived at 

 Liverpool in twenty-five days from Savannah, all well, to the 

 great astonishment of the people of that place. She worked 

 her engine eighteen days." The next record of her movements 

 is that she sailed in August for St. Petersburg, passing Elsinore 

 on the 13th, and that the British " wisely supposed her visit to 

 be somehow connected with the ambitious views of the United 

 States." She arrived back at Savannah in November, in fifty 

 days from St. Petersburg via Copenhagen and Arendal in Nor- 

 way, all well, and, in the language of Captain Rodgers, "with 

 neither a screw, bolt, or a rope-yarn parted, though she encoun- 

 tered a very heavy gale in the North Sea." She left Savannah 

 for Washington on the 4th of December, losing her boats and 

 anchors off Cape Hatteras. 



It is a singular fact, and one not creditable to the English, 

 that many of their works treating of inventions and the pro- 

 gress of the arts and sciences entirely overlook this voyage 

 out and back of the Savannah, and uniformly make the British 

 steamers Sirius and Great Western the pioneers, in 1837, in the 

 great work of ocean steam-navigation. The authors of these 

 works err either through design or ignorance, and in either 

 case display a marked unfitness for their vocation. Were they 

 to consult the London and Liverpool newspapers of the time, 

 they would find ample record of the accomplishment of a steam- 

 voyage nearly twenty years before the period to which they 

 assign it. We have said enough, however, to prove that the 

 first steam-vessel that crossed the ocean was built in New York, 

 and that Moses Rodgers, her captain, was an American citizen. 

 When we arrive at the year in which the two British steamers 

 inaugurated steam commercial intercourse between the hemi- 

 spheres, we shall record it, with due acknowledgment of its im- 

 portance ; but we repeat the assertion that, as the first river- 

 steamer was the Clermont, the first Atlantic steamer was the 

 Savannah : both one and the other were built in New York. 



