370 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

sails but [in] the engine-room. Her natural home is the port rather than
the sea. She is tied to her fuel supplies and crosses the oceans sailing to
a time-table. Her officers are composed of scientists and technicians,
specialists confined to special departments—deck or engine-room—and
her crews have specialised duties. The engine-room staffis proportionately
bigger than the deck-staff, which grows less and less numerous.'1

The conquest of the Ocean by this new-fangled mechanically driven
type of vessel in the course of the fifty years A.D. 1840-90 was indeed
as great and rapid a revolution as the previous triumph of the Modern
Western Ocean-faring sailing-ship some four hundred years earlier; but
the distinctive virtue of the steamship, like the qualities of the carrack
and the caravel, was offset by consequent limitations. In the act of
liberating navigation from its age-long servitude to the vagaries of the
winds, the revolutionary new invention of mechanical propulsion re-
tethered Homo Nauigans to the land, of which he had been virtually
independent ever since he had substituted the sail for the oar. The
steamship dispensed with wind-power at the price of tying itself to
coaling-stations; and, however short the intervals at which she might
reluctantly consent to break her voyage in order to refuel, she would
still be constrained to convert commercially valuable cargo-space into
bunker-space which was as unprofitable as the rowing-space which the
invention of the sailing-ship had long since enabled the merchantman
to eliminate. A high consumption of coal for each effective unit of coal-
generated steam power had to be paid for in a reduction of cargo-space
and in a shortening of the maximum possible length of unbroken voyage
that made the archaic steamship's performance uneconomic by com-
parison with the classic sailing-ship's.

In mechanically propelled vessels using coal for fuel the solution of
this problem had to wait for the invention of the compound engine,
which was first installed in the Holt Line S.S. Cleator in A.D. 1863, and
which in A.D. 1865 enabled the Holt Line S.S. Agamemnon to make a
non-stop run of 8,500 miles from Liverpool to Mauritius.2 Even after
this triumph of marine engineering, auxiliary sail, which had been the
steamship designer's earliest expedient for keeping down the rate of
coal consumption, was rigged in the Cunard S.S. Umbria as late as
A.D. 1884;* and sailing-ships which avoided the steamship's handicaps
by continuing to rely on wind-power alone earned the highest profits in
their commercial history during those mid-nineteenth-century decades
in which the technique of steam-propulsion was still feeling its way
towards full efficiency.4 The sailing-ship's nineteenth-century tour de
force of keeping in the running with her new mechanically propelled
rival could hardly have been achieved, however, if, during the same fifty
years A.D. 1840-90, that saw the steamship's crucial problems solved, the
sleeping art of sailing-ship construction had not bestirred itself out of
a three-hundred-years-long stagnation in order to enter on a fresh spurt
of creativity. In tempo and in quality alike, the improvements made in
the Modern Western sailing-ship in that half century could bear com-

i Bassett-Lowke and Holland, op. cit., p. 163. 2 See ibid., p. 182.

3 See ibid., p. 182. 4 See ibid., p. 180.