, under {144} her Spanish name
of _Isabella Segunda_, she made another record. When the British
Legion, under Sir de Lacy Evans, was attacking the Carlists in the bay
of St Sebastian, she stood in towards the Carlist flank and thereupon
fired the first shot that any steam man-of-war had ever fired in action.

Strangely enough, she cannot be said to have come to any definite end
as an individual ship. She continued in the Spanish service till 1840,
when she was sent to Bordeaux for repairs. The Spaniards, who are
notorious slovens at keeping things shipshape, had allowed her to run
down to bare rot after her Britisher-Canadian crew had left her. So
the French bought her for a hulk and left her where she was. But the
Spaniards took her engines out and put them into a new _Isabella
Segunda_, which was wrecked in a storm on the Algerian coast in 1860.

Her career of record-making is well worth a general summary: the _Royal
William_ was the first steamer built to foster inter-colonial trade in
Canada; the first Canadian steamer specially designed for work at sea;
the first sea-going steamer to enter a port in the United States under
the British flag; the first steam transport in Portugal; the first
steam man-of-war in {145} Spain; the first naval steamer that ever
fired a shot in action; and the first vessel in the world that ever
crossed an ocean under steam alone.

The next step in the history of Canadian steamers is not concerned with
a ship but with a man. Sir Hugh Allan, who, though the greatest, was
not the first of the pioneers. The Cunard brothers preceded the Allan
brothers in establishing a transatlantic line. Samuel Cunard had been
one of the shareholders in the _Royal William_. He had wonderful
powers of organization. He knew the shipping trade as very few have
ever known it; and his name has long since become historical in this
connection. The first 'Cunarder' to arrive in Canada was the
_Britannia_, 1154 tons, built on the Clyde, and engined there by
Napier. From that time on till Confederation, that is, from 1840 to
1867, Cunarders ran from Liverpool to Halifax. But Halifax was always
treated as a port of call. The American ports were the real
destination. And after 1867 the Cunarders became practically an
Anglo-American, not an Anglo-Canadian, line. During their connection
with Canada, partially renewed in the present century, the Cunards
never did {146} anything really original. They were