The night before Thanksgiving Mr. Ackerman and Dick arrived at Coventry and it was difficult to believe the change wrought in the New York boy. Not only was his face round, rosy and radiant with happiness but along with a new manliness had stolen a gentler bearing and a courtesy that had not been there when he had set forth to school.
"Why, you must have put on ten pounds, Dick!" cried Mr. Tolman, shaking hands with his young guest after greeting the steamboat magnate.
"It is eleven pounds, sir," laughed Dick. "We have bully eats at school and all you want of them."
The final phrase had a reminiscent ring as if it harked back to a time when three ample meals were a mirage of the imagination.
"Well, I am glad to hear you have done justice to them and encouraged the cook," was Mr. Tolman's jocular reply. "Now while you stay here you must cheer on our cook in the same fashion. If you don't we shall think you like New Haven better."
"I guess there is no danger of that," put in Mr.
Ackerman. "Dick seems hollow down to his ankles. There is no filling him up; is there, boy?"
"I couldn't eat that third ice-cream you offered me yesterday," was the humorous retort.
"I hope you've saved some room for to-morrow's dinner," Mrs. Tolman interrupted, "for there will be mince pie and plum pudding and I don't know what not. And then there is the turkey—we ordered an extra large one on purpose."
Dick and Steve exchanged a sheepish grin.
"Well, it is jolly to see you good people," Mr. Tolman declared, as he ushered the visitors into the living room, where a bright fire burned on the hearth. "Our boys have done well, haven't they, Ackerman? I don't know which is to win the scholarship race—the steamboats or the railroads."
"We could compare marks," Stephen suggested.
"That would hardly be fair," Mr. Ackerman objected quickly, "for the steamboats did not start even with the railroads in this contest. Dick has had to put in a lot of hours with a tutor to make up for the work he missed at the beginning of the year. He has been compelled to bone down like a beaver to go ahead with his class; but he has succeeded, haven't you, sonny?"
"I hope I have," was the modest retort.
"Furthermore," went on Mr. Ackerman, "there are other things beside scholarship to be considered in this bargain. We want fine, manly boys as well as wise ones. Conduct counts for a great deal, you know."
Stephen felt himself coloring.
"There have been no black marks on Dick's record thus far. How about yours, Steve?" asked the New York man.
"I—er—no. I haven't had any black marks, either," responded Stephen, with a gulp of shame.
"That is splendid, isn't it!" commented Mr. Ackerman. "I wasn't looking for them. You have too fine a father to be anything but a square boy."
Once more Stephen knew himself to be blushing. If they would only talk about something else!
"Are you going to finish your steamboat story for us while you are here?" inquired he with sudden inspiration.
"Why, I had not thought of doing any steamboating down here," laughed the capitalist. "Rather I came to help the Pilgrims celebrate their first harvest."
"But even they had to come to America by boat," suggested Doris mischievously.
"I admit that," owned the New Yorker. "And what is more, they probably would have come in a steamboat if one had been running at the time."
"What was the first American steamship to cross the Atlantic, Ackerman?" questioned Mr. Tolman when they were all seated before the library fire.
"I suppose the Savannah had that distinction," was the reply. "She was built in New York in 1818 to be used as a sailing packet; but she had side wheels and an auxiliary engine, and although she did not make the entire trans-Atlantic distance
by steam she did cover a part of it under steam power. Her paddle wheels, it is interesting to note, were so constructed that they could be unshipped and taken aboard when they were not in use, or when the weather was rough. I believe it took her twenty-seven days to make the trip from Savannah to Liverpool and eighty hours of that time she was using her engine. Although she made several trips in safety it was quite a while before the American public was sufficiently convinced of the value of steam to build other steamships. A few small ones appeared in our harbors, it is true, but they came from Norway or England; they made much better records, too, than anything previously known, the Sirius crossing in 1838 in nineteen days, and the Great Western in fifteen. In the meantime shipbuilders on both sides of the Atlantic were studying the steamboat problem and busy brains in Nova Scotia and on the Clyde were working out an answer to the puzzle. One of the most alert of these brains belonged to Samuel Cunard, the founder of the steamship line that has since become world famous. In May, 1840, through his instrumentality, the Unicorn set out from England for Boston arriving in the harbor June third after a voyage of sixteen days. When we reflect that she was a wooden side-wheeler, not much larger than one of our tugboats, we marvel that she ever put in her appearance. Tidings of her proposed trip had already preceded her, and when after much anxious watching she was sighted there was the greatest
enthusiasm along the water front, the over-zealous populace who wished to give her a royal welcome setting off a six-pounder in her honor that shattered to atoms most of her stained glass as she tied up at the dock."
His audience laughed.
"You see," continued the capitalist, "the ship came in answer to a circular sent out by our government to various shipbuilders asking bids from swift and reliable boats to carry our mails to England. Cunard immediately saw the commercial advantages of such an opportunity, and not having money enough to back the venture himself the Halifax man went to Scotland where he met Robert Napier, a person who like himself had had wide experience in shipping affairs. Both men were enthusiastic over the project; before long the money necessary for the undertaking was raised, and the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, with a line of four ships, was awarded the United States Government contract. These ships were very significantly named: the Britannia in honor of England, the Arcadia as a compliment to Mr. Cunard's Nova Scotia home, the Caledonia in memory of Napier's Scotch ancestry, and the Columbia out of regard to America. And in passing it is rather interesting to recall that in homage to these pioneer ships it has become a tradition of the Cunard Line to use names that terminate in the letter a for all the ships that have followed them. For, you must remember, it was
this modest group of steam packets that were the ancestors of such magnificent boats as the Mauretania and Lusitania."
"There was some difference!" interrupted Stephen.
"Well, rather! Had you, however, told Samuel Cunard then that such mammoth floating hotels were possible he would probably not have believed you. He had task enough on his hands to carry the mails; transport the few venturesome souls that dared to cross the sea; and compete with the many rival steamship lines that sprang up on both sides of the ocean as soon as some one had demonstrated that trans-Atlantic travel was practical. For after Cunard had blazed the path there were plenty of less daring persons ready to steal from him the fruits of his vision and courage. From 1847 to 1857 the Ocean Steamship Company carried mails between New York and Bremen, and there was a very popular line that ran from New York to Havre, up to the period of the Civil War. Among the individual ships none, perhaps, was more celebrated than the Great Eastern, a vessel of tremendous length, and one that more nearly approached our present-day liners as to size. Then there was the Collins Line that openly competed with the Cunard Line; and to further increase trans-Atlantic travel, in 1855 Cornelius Vanderbilt, ever at the fore in novel projects, began operating lines of steamships not only to England and France but to Bremen."
Mr. Ackerman paused a moment.
"By 1871 there was an American line between Philadelphia and Liverpool. In the meantime, ever since 1861, there had been a slow but steady advance in ocean shipbuilding. Although iron ships had gradually replaced wooden ones the side-wheeler was still in vogue, no better method of locomotion having been discovered. When the change from this primitive device to the screw propeller came it was a veritable leap in naval architecture. Now revolutions in any direction seldom receive a welcome and just as the conservatives had at first hooted down the idea of iron ships, asserting they would never float, so they now decried the use of the screw propeller. Indeed there was no denying that this innovation presented to shipbuilders a multitude of new and balking problems. While the clipper ships had greatly improved the designs of vessels the stern was still their weakest point and now, in addition to this already existing difficulty, came the new conundrums presented by the pitch, or full turn of the thread, in the screw propeller; also the churning of the current produced by the rapidly whirling wheel, which was found to retard the speed of the ship very materially. Valiantly engineers wrestled with one after another of these enigmas until they conquered them and put shipbuilding on the upward path where it has been ever since. In time steel s............