Skip to main content

1838 One Hundred And Fifty Years Ago

March 2023
1min read

The Sirius steamed into New York Harbor early in the morning of April 23. Later that day thousands of curious onlookers thronged the Battery to see the British steamer that had dropped anchor near Castle Garden. Her epochal seventeen-day journey from Cork had halved the typical duration of Atlantic crossings. The era of transatlantic steam service had begun.

Six years before, a London-based American merchant by the name of Junius Smith had endured a monotonous fifty-four-day crossing from London to New York. When he returned to London, he tried to interest backers in the applications of steam power to sea voyages, with little initial success.

Although coastal and inland steam navigation was well established by the 1830s, many experts gravely doubted the practicability of ocean crossings by steam. On the high seas boilers rapidly became encrusted with salt and had to be scoured regularly to prevent corrosion. Oceangoing steam vessels could make only sparing use of their engines and had to rely mostly on their sails.

In 1834 the British inventor Samuel Hall perfected a new type of steam engine that recycled boiler exhaust. Hall’s surface condenser enabled ships to use fresh water in their boilers throughout an ocean voyage.

Two years later Junius Smith finally enlisted the aid of the shipbuilder and African explorer Macgregor Laird and formed the British & American Steam Navigation Company. They began work on the construction of a mammoth, seventeen-hundred-ton steamship to be called the British Queen .

In their wake rival steam navigation companies appeared in England. A group of investors in Bristol hired the engineer lsambard K. Brunei to build a 1,340-ton transatlantic steamer. As Brunei’s ship, the Great Western , raced toward completion, construction delays beset the builders of the British Queen. Determined to be first, Smith and Laird chartered the Sirius , a sailing packet, and converted her to steam.

The Sirius arrived in New York just eight hours before the Great Western , which had weathered a strike by the stoking crew, rampant seasickness among the passengers, and a boiler-room fire that almost killed Brunei, to complete her passage from Bristol—and to set the new record—in fourteen days.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1988"

Authored by: Ben Yagoda

Wherever you go in search of history, there’s a good chance the first thing you reach for will be a road map. And road maps have a history too.

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

The old school is alive with the memory of men like Lee, Grant, Pershing, and Eisenhower

Authored by: Wayne Fields

A hundred and fifty years ago, a sea of grass spread from the Ohio to the Rockies; now only bits and pieces of that awesome wilderness remain for the traveler to discover.

Authored by: Tamara Thornton

Living in, and with, the universal Midwestern latticework

Authored by: Joseph Monninger

It began with a few people trying to get hamburgers from grill to customer quicker and cheaper. Now it’s changed the way Americans live. And whether you like it or hate it, once you get on the road you’ll eat it.

Authored by: Sam Mckinney

The United States established its claim to the Pacific Northwest in 1792, when a fur trader named Robert Gray became the first man to sail up the Columbia River. Almost two centuries later the author made his own voyage of discovery.

Authored by: Nicholas Lemann

The modern city plays host to conventions and tourists, but it still retains the slightly racy charm that has always made it dear to its natives

Authored by: Tom D. Crouch

What the Wright brothers did in a wild and distant place made its name famous around the world. Their biographer visits the Outer Banks to find what remains of the epochal outpost.

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.