x made an ocean voyage to the Delaware River. The first
English venture was that of the steamer Caledonia, which made a passage
to Holland in 1817. The London Times of May 11, 1819, printed in its
issue of that date the following item:

"GREAT EXPERIMENT.--A new vessel of three hundred tons has been
built at New York for the express purpose of carrying passengers
across the Atlantic. She is to come to Liverpool direct."

This ship-rigged steamer was the "Savannah," and the bold projector of
this experiment of sending a steamboat across the Atlantic was Daniel
Dodd. The Savannah was built in New York, by Francis Ficket, for Mr.
Dodd. Stephen Vail, of Morristown, New Jersey, built her engines, and on
the 22d of August, 1818, she was launched, gliding gracefully into the
element which was to bear her to foreign lands, there to be crowned with
the laurels of success. On May 25th this purely American-built vessel
left Savannah, and glided out from this waste of marshes, under the
command of Captain Moses Rogers, with Stephen Rogers as navigator. The
port of New London, Conn., had furnished these able seamen.

The steamer reached Liverpool June 20th, the passage having occupied
twenty-six days, upon eighteen of which she had used her paddles. A son
of Mr. Dodd once told me of the sensation produced by the arrival of a
smoking vessel on the coast of Ireland, and how Lieutenant John Bowie,
of the king's cutter Kite, sent a boat-load of sailors to board the
Savannah to assist her crew to extinguish the fires of what his
Majesty's officers supposed to be a burning ship.

The Savannah, after visiting Liverpool, continued her voyage on July
23d, and reached St. Petersburg in safety. Leaving the latter port on
October 10th, this adventurous craft completed the round voyage upon her
arrival at Savannah, November 30th.

I pulled up the Savannah until within five miles of the city, and then
left the river on its south side, where old rice-plantations are first
met, and entered St. Augustine Creek, which is the steamboat
thoroughfare of the inland route to Florida. Just outside the city of
Savannah, near its beautiful cemetery, where tall trees with their
graceful drapery of Spanish moss screen from wind and sun the quiet
resting-places of the dead, my canoe was landed, and stored in a
building of the German Greenwich Shooting Park, where Mr. John Hellwig,
in a most hospitable manner, cared for it and its owner.

While