of steam navigation, for she made much of the passage under
sail, being fitted only with what we would call now "auxiliary steam
power." This was in 1819, but so slow were the shipbuilders to progress
beyond what had been done with the "Savannah," that in 1835 a highly
respected British scientist said in tones of authority: "As to the project
which was announced in the newspapers, of making the voyage from New York
to Liverpool direct by steam, it was, he had no hesitation in saying,
perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making a voyage from
New York or Liverpool to the moon." Nevertheless, in three years from that
time transatlantic steam lines were in operation, and the doom of the
grand old packets was sealed.

The American who will read history free from that national prejudice which
is miscalled patriotism, can not fail to be impressed by the fact that,
while as a nation we have led the world in the variety and audacity of our
inventions, it is nearly always some other nation that most promptly and
most thoroughly utilizes the genius of our inventors. Emphatically was
this the case with the application of steam power to ocean steamships.
Americans showed the way, but Englishmen set out upon it and were
traveling it regularly before another American vessel followed in the wake
of the "Savannah." In 1838 two English steamships crossed the Atlantic to
New York, the "Sirius" and the "Great Western." That was the beginning of
that great fleet of British steamers which now plies up and down the Seven
Seas and finds its poet laureate in Mr. Kipling. A very small beginning it
was, too. The "Sirius" was of 700 tons burden and 320 horse-power; the
"Great Western" was 212 feet long, with a tonnage of 1340 and engines of
400 horse-power. The "Sirius" brought seven passengers to New York, at a
time when the sailing clippers were carrying from eight hundred to a
thousand immigrants, and from twenty to forty cabin passengers. To those
who accompanied the ship on her maiden voyage it must have seemed to
justify the doubts expressed by the mathematicians concerning the
practicability of designing a steamship which could carry enough coal to
drive the engines all the way across the Atlantic, for the luckless
"Sirius" exhausted her four hundred and fifty tons of coal before reaching
Sandy Hook, and could not have made the historic passage up New York Bay
under steam, except for the liberal use of spars and barrels of res