ng Island
Sound to-day in one of the swift and splendid steamboats of the Fall River
or other Sound lines, enjoys very different accommodations from those
which in the second quarter of the last century were regarded as palatial.
The luxury of that day was a simple sort at best. When competition became
strong, the old Fulton company, then running boats to Albany, announced as
a special attraction the "safety barge." This was a craft without either
sails or steam, of about two hundred tons burden, and used exclusively for
passengers. It boasted a spacious dining-room, ninety feet long, a deck
cabin for ladies, a reading room, a promenade deck, shaded and provided
with seats. One of the regular steamers of the line towed it to Albany,
and its passengers were assured freedom from the noise and vibration of
machinery, as well as safety from possible boiler explosions--the latter
rather a common peril of steamboating in those days.

[Illustration: "THE DREADNAUGHT"--NEW YORK AND LIVERPOOL PACKET]

It was natural that the restless mind of the American, untrammeled by
traditions and impatient of convention, should turn eagerly and early to
the question of crossing the ocean by steam. When the rivers had been made
busy highways for puffing steamboats; when the Great Lakes, as turbulent
as the ocean, and as vast as the Mediterranean, were conquered by the new
marine device; when steamships plied between New York, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston, braving what is by far more perilous
than mid-ocean, the danger of tempests on a lee shore, and the shifting
sands of Hatteras, there seemed to the enterprising man no reason why the
passage from New York to Liverpool might not be made by the same agency.
The scientific authorities were all against it. Curiously enough, the
weight of scientific authority is always against anything new. Marine
architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least
that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the
coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to
hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces. It is a matter of history that
an eminent British scientist was engaged in delivering a lecture on this
very subject in Liverpool when the "Savannah," the first steamship to
cross the ocean, steamed into the harbor. It is fair, however, to add that
the "Savannah's" success did not wholly destroy the contention of the
opponents