Our Ocean Railways Author:A. Fraser-Macdonald Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The success of propelling vessels by steam on rivers encourages its employment likewise on the ocean. Propelling vessels by steam on rivers ha... more »d now become an established fact on both sides of the Atlantic. It had also been tested not only on the waves of the Channel seas but also a short distance outside of them. The first vessel to make what was then considered in the latter case a perilous voyage was the Thames Yacht, as she was called, in coming around Land's End to the Thames from Glasgow, where she and her sister ships had been built. To us, nowadays, the legend on the woodcut of this steamer may be amusing; but this was not the case when the incident to which it refers took place. The most remarkable thing in the appearance of this vessel is her cast-iron funnel, used, as in the case of the first Clyde boats, as a mast. As the successful result of this stormy passage of the Thames, the employment of steamers to carry the mails between Holyhead and Dublin, and Dover and Calais, was urged, but without result until 1821. Though the vessels first employed on the service were small—one of them, the Rob Roy, for example, built by Napier, of Glasgow, measuring only 90 tons and fitted with an engine of 30 horse-power —the service was nevertheless satisfactorily performed. A great impulse was given to the use of steam, as a pro- pelling power on the ocean, by the persevering and successful efforts of Stephenson in favour of its employment for locomotion on land by the construction of railways. The prejudices against his proposals, when first mooted, are too well known to require repetition here. His triumph over them, without doubt, largely contributed to deepen the growing impression that steam might be as effectually employed as a motive power on the oce...« less