6 - Commerce and the Steamboat

(Part 1)

Early American Steamboats

The Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam engine resulted in massive changes to society, and the maritime industry was not immune to such changes. Early in the 19th Century, steam-powered ships carrying the name Enterprise began to appear, many of them devoted to trade and other commercial activities. In the United States, paddlewheel steamboats were almost symbolic of the great Mississippi River and other western waterways. But they were also common along eastern waterways and even in the Great Lakes.

One of the earliest steam-powered Enterprises was a sternwheel steamboat built in Brownsville, Pennsylvania by Daniel French and later owned by Mississippi steamboat pioneer Henry Miller Shreve. The 80-foot Enterprise was the fourth steamboat west of the Allegheny Mountains. From December 1814 to January 1815, she was used to carry supplies to Andrew Jackson's army during the Battle of New Orleans. Subsequently, heirs of steamboat pioneers Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton had the Enterprise seized in their legal fight to maintain their steamboat monopoly. However, when the courts rules against the monopolists, Shreve sailed her up the Mississippi, Ohio, and Monongahela Rivers from New Orleans to Louisville and eventually to Pittsburgh and Brownsville. This remarkable voyage of some 2,200 miles forshadowed the advent of the famous Mississippi river boats. The Enterprise was retired in 1819.

In 1816, the brothers Samuel and Charles Howard received the exclusive right to navigate Georgia state waterways by steam-powered vessel and formed the Steamboat Company of Georgia. They built a 90-foot vessel, which they named Enterprise, for service between Savannah and Augusta, Georgia. She was the first tow boat launched in America, and although she was built to pull cotton barges, she was capable of much more. On May 11, 1816, the Enterprise impressed her owners and other interested onlookers by pulling a large ship named the Georgia down river from Savannah to Five Fathoms at a speed of five knots. Two months later, she was used to tow another large vessel, the Arethusa, from the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina to the outer buoy several miles away. When doing the work for which she was designed, the Enterprise easily handled two of the 70 to 90-foot cotton barges. To the delight of the Howard brothers, she also paid for herself by generating passenger revenues.

Prior to 1824, competition among companies in the Great Lakes region was regulated by the legislature of New York state, which granted a monopoly to the Fulton-Livingston Company and its subsidiaries. However, this monopoly was contested by other steamboat operators and in March 1824 was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Almost immediately, competing steamboats began to appear on the Lakes. The first of these competitors was a sidewheel steamer named Enterprise, which was built by the Levi Johnson & Turnhooven Brothers Company on the Cleveland shores of Lake Erie. By 1825, there were five steamboats operating on Lake Erie and eleven on Lake Ontario. When the Erie Canal was opened later that year, steamboats could for the first time sail from the Atlantic, past the port of New York, and to as far west as Chicago.

Steam and the East India Company

At about the same time, steamships were also beginning to make their presence felt halfway around the world in India. In 1823, a consortium of Indian businessmen, headed by the Rajah of Oude, offered a prize of 80,000 rupees to the owners of the first steamer to reach Calcutta from a European port in less than 70 days. A group of businessmen in London took up the challenge and paid 43,000 pounds sterling for the sidewheel steamship Enterprise, which was being built by Gordon and Company in Deptford, England. The Enterprise was built of oak and was 141 feet long. She was launched on February 23, 1825 and left Falmouth, England on August 16, 1825, under Captain James Henry Johnston. She stopped at Cape Town, South Africa on October 13 and, after surviving storms in the Indian Ocean, arrived at Calcutta on December 7. She had made the 15,570-mile voyage in 113 days, 64 of which were under steam power. Although the Enterprise did not meet the 70-day requirement to win the prize, the Indian consortium donated 40,000 rupees to the owners of the ship for their respectable showing. The Enterprise had proven that it was practical for a steamship to make the long trip from Europe to India via the Cape of Good Hope.

In 1825 the paddle steamer Enterprise became the first steam-powered vessel to sail from Europe to India.

The British owners then sold the Enterprise to the government of Bengal, which used it as a troop carrier during the First Anglo-Burmese War. During this conflict, Britain assembled a large fleet of vessels to fight off an invasion by Burma into British-held provinces of India. After the Burmese invaders were repelled in 1826, the Enterprise was pressed into service as a tug on the Hooghly River, with occasional trips to Singapore. In 1829, she was sold to the government of Bombay for use on the trade route between Bombay and Suez. However, because of the Enterprise's age, this did not prove successful, and the steamer was again sold to the government of Bengal, where she resumed tug service on the Hooghly River. The hardworking steamer was finally retired and broken up in 1834. However, her two 60 horsepower steam engines lived on in a new Enterprise, which was built that same year in Calcutta.

This new steamship Enterprise was built of teak and served with the East India Company, which in 1600 had been given a charter by the British crown to maintain a trade monopoly in the Far East. In addition to her commercial service, the Enterprise served from 1839 to 1840 with other vessels of the East India Company and the Royal Navy in the First China War, better known as the Opium War. As a result of this conflict over the right of British merchants to ship opium from Bengal to China, the Emperor of China was forced to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain. The Enterprise also served in the Second Burma War in 1852.

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Last Updated: March 8, 2007