The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth

Hudson River Steamboats

CHAPTER 22

Palaces Afloat

If passengers hurried to the landing at the sound of the horns they might see the white steamer puffing toward them, hear the distant voice of her bell, see her little boat lowered to the water and passengers and luggage dumped into it. As with slow and dripping paddles the big packet moved majestically by, skillful boatmen in the small craft beside her sheered off, reaching the dock by the imparted impetus. Arriving passengers were hastily deposited and newcomers as hastily embarked. The thin rope connecting the long vessel in the channel with the landing boat was being paid out longer and longer. Suddenly it tightened as deck hands on the steamer began to wind it on a hand winch. Swiftly the embarkers were bumped over the water to the still moving packet. In a moment they were on board and the paddles were roaring again. While the onlookers watched, the big gilt-trimmed steamer became a far white speck on hill-shadowed water.

Once on board, a passenger found himself engulfed in a maelstrom of his fellow countrymen. Everybody talked to everybody else and a man had but to raise his voice to express an opinion and he would be surrounded by a circle of eager listeners. "Speechifying is a very favorite species of exhibition with the men here," wrote the vivacious young English actress, Fanny Kemble, after a day of listening to Hudson steamboat orators. "The gift of gab appears to me to be more widely disseminated amongst Americans than any other people in the world. . . . As to privacy," she wailed, "at any time or under any circumstances, ‘tis a thing that enters not into the imagination of an American."

Indeed, the presence of the unrefined and impecunious masses of the democracy offended the aesthetic sensitivity of distinguished foreign travelers and the new Hudson River aristocracy alike. One young snob, who took a day boat instead of a cheaper night boat because on the latter "you lose the pleasure which even common minds must feel when gazing on the glorious scenery," complained bitterly in his journal that he was forced to witness the "grand Pallisades, the Highlands, and the abrupt sinuosities of this noble river . . . without having a single friendly bosom with which I might reciprocate those impressions of pleasure which the occasion was so aptly fitted to inspire." And the polite mayor of New York City, Philip Hone, confided to his diary: "Our boat had three or four hundred passengers and such a set of ragtag and bobtail I never saw on board a North River steamboat." So popular did Sunday steamboat excursions become that the ministers of New York held a conference to denounce them for emptying the churches.

At mealtimes in the big dining salons the crowds jostled elbows at long tables covered with gleaming white napery while black waiters in white jackets rushed frantically about. Though table manners varied, most Americans agreed that the measure of a gentleman was his politeness to females, and servants and male passengers alike went to great lengths of sacrifice to please them. Food was hearty, abundant, well cooked. A steamboat breakfast one morning in 1829 consisted of English beefsteak, French fricassee, towering piles of American buckwheat cakes, and a delicacy aesthetically announced as "Baptized Toast" but recognized by passengers as toast of the ordinary "milk" variety.

As competition increased the desire for speed grew. Stronger piers were built and the captains and pilot became more expert. Boys who had begun to "follow the river" by learning the old place-rhyme

West Point and Middletown
Konnosook and Doodletown
Kakiak and Mamapaw
Stony Point and Haverstraw

could now nose a long steamer up to the big piles of a dock and hold her there while passengers and luggage were pitched aboard. "Commodore" Vanderbilt, "Uncle" Daniel Drew, "Live Oak George" Law, and the rest of the bold, hard river bullies began their ruthless battle of price cutting and chicanery. The North River Association, the largest boat-owning company on the Hudson, was so badly beaten by Vanderbilt that they bought him off the river. But he refused to stay off. Daniel Drew forced the association to take him in, then secretly started a rival boat against the company, using a fictitious owner’s name. He finally persuaded his fellow directors to offer his dummy owner $8,000 more than they were at first willing to give for ownership of the boat. "I’ll see if he’ll accept" said Uncle Daniel. He went out and took a walk around the block and returned to say that it was a deal. The price of a steamboat ticket from Albany to New York, which had started at $7, dropped to $1 in 1840 when there were a hundred steamboats on the river, and eventually went down to 50 cents. At the height of the rate war some boats were charging no fare at all and passengers were paying only for meals and a stateroom.

Gradually the Olive Branch, the Constellation, the Chief Justice Marshall--the great boats of the thirties --gave way to the new and elaborate "floating palaces" of the forties. Enormous crystal chandeliers hung from the rococo ceilings of salons two decks high and surrounded by galleries. Corinthian columns vied with Gothic arches to express new ideas of elegance and splendor. Carved figureheads stared out over the river from ornately gilded bows. Gold eagles, balancing fullspread on gold balls, topped slim white shafts on the forward decks.

The Hudson River people were very proud of their steamboats, "the most elegant in the world." Despite the great crowds encouraged by low prices, they thought of them as social assets. Orchestras had been introduced in 1821, and the Chancellor Livingston had immediately upheld its aristocratic tradition by holding cotillions on the main deck. All important foreign guests were taken for steamboat rides soon after their arrival in New York. The private steamboat docks of the big Hudson River estates, at which even the largest packets would stop on signal, were evidence of high social rank and great wealth.

More important than their social advantage, the people felt that the big boats were proper conveyances at public events of dignity and pomp. The Marriage of the Waters had proved that. But even before that August ceremony, a military band had played a dead march aboard the Richmond as, with engines stilled, she drifted past Annandale on July 6, 1818. On her deck, "canopied with crepe and crowned with plumes," lay the coffin of General Richard Montgomery, and in the pillared portico of the old house, "Montgomery Place," stood a lone woman, widowed at Quebec forty-three years before. Canada had surrendered the remains of her young husband and the Richmond was carrying them to honored burial in New York. While the minute guns were sounding along the shore, while the muffled drums were beating over the water, the old lady stood there as everybody thought she should. When the Richmond’s paddles were revolving again she fainted, and the people of the valley sighed in a mournful ecstasy and were very sorry for her.

Six years later, on August 16, 1824, the Chancellor Livingston and five other steamers, with bands playing and banners flying, dropped downriver to give the returning hero of the Revolution, the old Marquis de Lafayette, his first sight of steam-propelled vessels. Late in September the James Kent, gleaming in the mist "like an enchanted castle upon the waters," gave him a ride after the Castle Garden ball in his honor. It was two o’clock in the morning and the moon was down when the marquis went aboard, but a throng of ladies in evening dress and wearing sashes which bore "a likeness of the General entwined with a chaplet of roses" rushed after him and refused to come ashore. The James Kent ran aground at Tarrytown but the persistent ladies would not leave her until the military band at West Point lured them to land. Their attentions were almost as embarrassing to the old man as Albany’s attempt next day to drop on his head a stuffed eagle whose beak held a crown of laurel and immortelle for his noble brow.

More than a quarter of a century later the steamboat escort was still the valley’s greatest mark of favor. On a summer day in 1851 the swift and lovely Reindeer proudly bore Jenny Lind from New York to Albany while great crowds along the banks cheered the "Swedish Nightingale," never dreaming that in a few months the great steamer on which she rode so happily would meet its end in a holocaust of bursting boilers, flaming woodwork, and shrieking, dying passengers.

Other visitors, distinguished but less honored, found the Hudson steamboats exciting. Mrs. Basil Hall--who, after being entertained by the flower of New York’s aristocracy for two weeks, complained that she had yet to see one American gentleman--admitted that the steamer on which she and her husband and child journeyed from West Point to Albany was "the most magnificent thing of its kind I have yet seen . . . and the dinner the best and the most neatly served that I have seen in any hotel in this country." The tart Mrs. Trollope, even more outspoken than Mrs. Hall against American ways and manners, had naught but good to say of the steamboats. Captain Marryat preferred the moonlight and solitude of the upper deck to the "whimsical sight" of five hundred people in the immense cabin below, sleeping in five long rows of triple-tier beds, "lying in every state of posture and exhibiting every state and degree of repose." While Harriet Martineau, from a West Point piazza, watched "gallant cadets and their pretty partners" dancing at a ball and listened at the same time to the band, the laughter of Negro servants, the rumble of a coming storm, two great steamboats below her were "constellations on the water" and rockets, veering from them like shooting stars, rivaled the lightning overhead.

In 1840 came the introduction of anthracite coal burned under forced draft, a practical invention by the distinguished president of Union College, Eliphalet Nott. A Hudson River steamer, hitherto accustomed to using between fifteen and thirty cords of fat pine each trip, now began to look less like "a horrible monster marching on the tide and lighting its path by the fire it vomited." Fat pine was still carried to bring up pressure for racing. Captains began tying down safety valves and using other illegitimate devices to attain speed. The boilers of the Aetna exploded and killed many passengers. So did the boilers of the General Jackson.

Steamboat racing on the Hudson began soon after competition was established. The North America and the Champlain and the Nimrod took to spurting whenever one drew alongside the other. Live Oak George Law bet Commodore Vanderbilt a thousand dollars that his Oregon, which had come into the river with a broomstick tied to her smokestack as a symbol of her ability to "sweep the river," could beat the Cornelius Vanderbilt. He won the wager, though his crew, faced by fuel shortage, had thrown into the furnaces all the carved wooden furniture and most of the fancy woodwork. The commodore in his excitement had wrenched the wheel from the hands of his pilot and had forgotten to slacken speed to make the upriver turn at Croton Point. The Oregon beat him back to the Battery by twelve hundred feet.

In 1845 the Swallow, racing with the Express and the Rochester, ran into the little island off Athens called Noah’s Brig and more than a dozen lives were lost. Again and again the editorial pages of the newspapers denounced the flagrant disregard of human life. "The passenger walks and sits and sleeps almost in contact with a volcano that in an instant may blow him to atoms," said the Republican Telegraph of Poughkeepsie as early as 1824. Yet the racing continued for more than a quarter of a century-until there occurred a disaster of such magnitude that public opinion called a halt.