Sir Samuel Cunard (1787-1878) was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He sailed from Canada to England in 1838 where he formed the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, later known as the Cunard Line, Ltd. To his Scottish shipbuilders, Cunard said "I want a plain and comfortable boat, with not the least unnecessary expense for show." A mere 16 months after securing the contract, Cunard delivered Britannia. Her maiden voyage on July 4, 1840, with Cunard himself at the helm, from Liverpool to Boston, ushered in a new era for the British. When she arrived in Boston, Britannia's passengers presented Captain Woodruff with a large silver cup that today is displayed in the Columbia Dining Room aboard QE2. Its 14-day, 8-hr voyage marked the beginning of regular transatlantic service by steamship. Charles Dickens immortalized the Britannia when he made a stormy crossing in January 1842. His caustic observations of the trip were recorded in his slim volume American Notes, appalled at the false sales pitch of opulent sleeping quarters, finding instead "a thoroughly hopeless, preposterous box" and a main saloon like a "gigantic hearse". His voyage ended with the ship running aground off Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his decision to return on one of the slower but proven sailing packets. Cunard constantly improved his steamship service. The company motto of "Speed, Comfort and Safety" as well as Cunard's standing orders to all his captains to avoid the "Three R's" (racing, rivalry, risk-taking) demonstrated his concern for the well-being of his passengers and crew, a rarity in those days. During it's first 35 years of operation, Cunard Line ships sailed without a single fatality. The first
Cunard's Persia 1st all-iron steamship
4 Cunard ships were built on the Clyde, the Britannia by Robert Duncan, the Acadia by John Wood, the Caledonia by Charles Wood and the Columbia by Robert Steele. They were identical sister ships, " wooden paddlers 207 feet long on the keel with a beam of 34.2 feet inside the paddlers, giving a tonnage by the measurement then in rule of about 1,150. The engines took up over seventy feet of the length of the ships, and were all built by Messrs. R. Napier and Company on the Clyde. They were side-lever machines with a nominal horse power of rather more than four hundred, capable of driving the ship at a speed of eight and one-half knots on thirty-eight tons of coal per day. " ( Bowen, p. 38) Cunard's first iron ship, the Persia, was built by Napier in 1856, and his first screw-propelled ship, the China, in 1862. His success would stimulate the development of rival steamship lines.
Sources:
Bowen, Frank C. A Century of Atlantic Travel: 1830-1930. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1930.
Fox, Stephen. Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships. New York : HarperCollins, 2003.
Grant, Kay. Samuel Cunard, Pioneer of the Atlantic Steamship (1967)
Hyde, Francis E. Cunard and the North Atlantic, 1840-1973: a history of shipping and financial management (1975)
Johnson, Howard. The Cunard Story (1987)
Maxtone-Graham, John. Cunard: 150 Glorious Years (1989)
Woolley, Peter W. and Terry Moore. The Cunard Line: a pictorial history 1840-1990 (1990)
