Industrialization in New England spread inland, aided by canal lines built during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Canals reached into the back country from such shore cities as New Haven, Providence, Boston, and Portland, increasing rural access to these ports.
When the railroads came in the 1840s and 1850s, they at first followed the old canal lines. Soon they became a network, linking not only interior with shore but the shore communities with each other. Lines reached out along Long Island Sound, turning undeveloped villages, such as Bridgeport, into manufacturing centers where goods could be easily railed up-country. New York overtook Boston in trade both abroad and with the American interior (by way of the Hudson River and Erie Canal). By the 1850s, any community with a convenient rail link with New York City suddenly became a boom town.
This new mobility transformed the character of many towns.
Local speech patterns died out. Small-town people traveled to Boston and New York, expanding their interests beyond local happenings. No longer simply towns- folk, they became Americans.
Paralleling the growth of the railroads on land, steamships carne into existence, churning their great paddle wheels through the coastal waters. Robert Fulton’s Clermont marked the appearance, in 1807, in New York, of the steamship as practical transportation. In March 1815, even as the British blockading fleet was sailing back to England, the 134 foot converted sailing ship Fulton made its first regular run from New York City, up Long Island Sound, to New Haven.
Unlike the almost immediate enthusiasm for the railroads, public acceptance of steamships came slowly. The early rudimentary steamers were small competition for the established coastal packet lines, whose well-appointed ships provided good food, good beds, and good wine between virtually all major communities along the coast. The first challenge by steamers came where wind, tide, and navigational conditions prevented the use of sail.
The most important of these locations lay off Manhattan Island, where the tidal forces of New York Harbor moved up the East River to meet those of Long Island Sound. During most tidal conditions the region is a mile-long stretch of eddies, whirlpools, and contrary currents. The early Dutch called it the “whirling gut,” “Hoellgat,” now romanticized into Hell Gate. Once steamships forced the passage, a regularly scheduled run began carrying passengers between New York and Boston. For some time the steamers stayed within the confines of Long Island Sound, letting off their passengers at Hartford (by way of the Connecticut River), New Haven, New London, or other Connecticut ports. Later they ventured on to open seas, pushing their way past stormy Point Judith to land at the Narragansett Bay ports.
These voyages, even the earlier short trips up the Sound, were overnight affairs, with primitive accommodations. A passenger describing his trip from New York to Providence on the Chancellor Livingston in 1830 complained that the main cabin was heated to stifling by two red-hot stoves and made unbreathable by the “discarded breath of about a hundred passengers. Dinner “passed speedily as heart could desire; but the mingled odour of fish, onions, and grease, was some- what more permanent. Whether it improved the atmosphere, or not, is a point which I could not settle. Later steamers had staterooms and cabins, but at first passengers were simply divided by gender into the vessel’s two large rooms. Everyone slept in the tiers of bunks rising up the wall or on cots covering the floor.
The horrors of one’s fellow passengers sometimes paled before the various disasters that befell early steamboating. Poor engineering design often allowed the hot smokestacks to ignite the adjoining woodwork, or the boiler to explode. If this occurred far from shore, the survivors could usually be counted on one hand. Even safely constructed ships went down as their captains pushed them beyond their limits, attempting record passages down the Sound. Those few trees along the Sound that had not been felled and sold to fire the steamboat boilers often had posters affixed to them offering rewards for the delivery of a disaster victim’s body to grieving relatives.
Still, the steamboat improved and expanded its control along the coast. By 1822, steamers bested the strong currents along the Maine shore to begin scheduled runs (virtually impossible with sailing coasters) from Portland to the landings of nearby towns.
When the railroads began providing overland connections with the steamboat lines, passenger transport mushroomed. Various southern New England towns- Norwich and Stonington, Providence, and Fall River-all competed for the traffic. The great profits made wealthy men out of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk. The boats themselves became floating palaces, each line trying to outdo the other with gilt, marble, velvet, and rooms of a size unequaled by any hotel on land.
The runs carried well into the twentieth century, with the overnight run through Fall River taking most of the business. The Fall River line ran from 1847 for another ninety years, and became quite familiar to New Englanders.
The earliest Sound steamers relied on local wood for fuel, constantly putting into shore for replenishment. By 1830, they had stripped the Connecticut shore of trees, and a decade later, much of the cordwood from coastal Maine had also been depleted. The vessels had to convert to coal.
New England’s mills, railroads, steamers, and family stoves relied on a massive importation of Pennsylvania coal. The few local deposits in Rhode Island were of low grade. One wit, after touring a mine along the Narragansett Bay shore near Newport, pronounced it an excellent refuge for wayward sinners from the fires of the Apocalypse.
The great increase in coastal traffic of all kinds-passenger steamers, ships supplying the raw material for Yankee factories, and the fleets of once-graceful clippers, East Indiamen, packets and schooners, now mastless and filled to foundering with coal-all demanded many navigational improvements. No longer was the traffic such that local skippers and hired pilots could steer vessels past their own shoreline’s hazards. (Many towns, such as Woods Hole, Holmes Hole-now Vineyard Haven of the Cape Cod and Islands region had come into existence as villages where pilots could be hired to steer passing ships.) Steamers had their schedules to keep. Storm, fog, or tide no longer dictated the movement of coastal traffic.
So in the mid-nineteenth century there was a popular outcry for improved navigational aids.
Until the federal government began publishing its own charts around 1840, the best mariners’ maps of the New England coast were those made just before the Revolution under the supervision of Joseph-Frederic Vallet des Barres (1721 – 1824). Des Barres came to America as a British officer and in 1763 began his monumental task of supplying the Royal Navy with an accurate atlas of American waters. By 1782, the last of his charts had been published, completing his Atlantic Neptune-230 large, beautifully colored sheets mapping the area from the Canadian Maritimes, down to the Gulf Coast and into the Caribbean. Although sections of the less-well-known southern waters were not completely accurate, the charts of the Maritime Provinces and New England, drawn from the knowledge of their many mariners, proved highly accurate and stayed in use for half a century. The Atlantic Neptune usually served as the companion piece for a constantly revised volume called The American Coast Pilot, published by Edmund Blunt (1770-1862). The first edition, written by a Captain Laurence Furlong, appeared in Newburyport in 1796. At the time of Blunt’s death it had reached its nineteenth edition. Unlike Des Barres’s charts, the Coast Pilot gave written descriptions of the coast, with instructions on how to enter the harbors-all assembled from accounts by mariners familiar with each locale. Blunt was himself a fiery individual. In one altercation he threw a frying pan at his engraver. The engraver dashed off a sketch of the incident and sent it to a British pottery firm with an order for crockery embellished with the illustration.
Those pieces not purchased and destroyed by Blunt are still highly prized by old Newburyport families. Blunt moved on to New York, where his son George William Blunt (1802-1878) ultimately took over the business, reissuing The Coast Pilot as well as his father’s other famous publication, Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator.
The son, George, also joined the United States Coast Survey. First authorized by Congress in 1807 to identify harbors of refuge, sheltered bays, and other inlets “where vessels may resort in stress of weather not until the 1830s did the survey begin a comprehensive charting of the coast, fishing banks, shoals, and the Gulf Stream. One of its first expeditions was to chart the Nantucket Shoals, that age old terror for New England ships sailing down the coast or making for the West Indies, and for European vessels bound for New York City. By about 1850, the Survey had moved up around Cape Cod and had published charts of the whole New England coast. Their soundings located a surprising number of submerged rocks and other unknown hazards that lay in the previously trusted shipping channels of such large ports as Boston and Gloucester. These charts formed the basis of our modern National Ocean Survey charts, which are continually updated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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