Ships for the Seven Seas

Thomas R. Heinrich explores American shipbuilding from the workshop level to subcontracting networks spanning the Delaware Valley.Winner of the North American Society for Oceanic History's John Lyman Book AwardOriginally published in 1996. Sustained by a skilled work force and the Pennsylvania iron and steel industry, Philadelphia shipbuilders negotiated the transition from wooden to iron hull construction earlier and far more easily that most other builders. Between the Civil War and World War I, Philadelphia emerged as the vital center of American shipbuilding, constructing a wide variety of vessel types such as passenger liners, freighters, battleships, and cruisers.In Ships for the Seven Seas, Thomas R. Heinrich explores this complex industry from the workshop level to subcontracting networks spanning the Delaware Valley. He describes entrepreneurial strategies and industrial change that facilitated the rise of major shipbuilding firms; how naval architecture, marine engineering, and craft skills evolved as iron and steel overtook wood as the basic construction material; and how changes in domestic and international trade and the rise of the American steel navy helped generate vessel contracts for local builders. Heinrich also examines the formation of the military-industrial complex in the context of naval contracting.Contributing to current debates in business history, Ships for the Seven Seas explains how proprietary ownership and batch production strategies enabled late nineteenth-century builders to supply volatile markets with custom-built steamships. But large-scale naval construction in the 1920s eroded production flexibility, Heinrich argues, and since then, ill-conceived merchant marine policies and naval contracting procedures have brought about a structural crisis in American shipbuilding and the demise of the venerable Philadelphia shipyards

Across the Oceans: Development of the overseas business information transmission

"In the early 19th century, the only way to transmit information was to send letters across the oceans by sailing ships or across land by horse and coach. Growing world trade created a need and technological development introduced options to improve general information transmission. Starting in the 1830s, a network of steamships, railways, canals and telegraphs was gradually built to connect different parts of the world. The book explains how the rate of information circulation increased many times over as mail systems were developed. Nevertheless, regional differences were huge. While improvements on the most significant trade routes between Europe, the Americas and East India were considered crucial, distant places such as California or Australia had to wait for gold fever to become important enough for regular communications. The growth of passenger services, especially for emigrants, was a major factor increasing the number of mail sailings. The study covers the period from the Napoleonic wars to the foundation of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and includes the development of overseas business information transmission from the days of sailing ships to steamers and the telegraph.

Beyond a cup of tea: Trade relationships between colonial Australia and China, 1860-1880

This thesis examines the trade relationships between China and colonial Australia between 1860 and 1880. At the time, the Australian continent was emerging from the boom created by the 1850s gold rushes in the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. China had submitted to the debts incurred from the two Opium Wars and, through that, the creation of the Treaty Ports. New companies and export industries were being developed. Trade between Australia and China increased. The key products included coal from New South Wales, sandalwood from Western Australia and tea from China. Together, they created a flourishing trade environment. Attention in the China-Australia trade discourse has been overly restricted to the tea trade and the search for staples to pay for the tea. This thesis moves beyond this past bilateral consideration. Instead, it argues that a fuller understanding of the China–Australia trade relationship needs to be multifaceted and multi-national. Much bilateral trade was conducted via intermediary ports and traders, rather than directly between ports and traders in Australia and China. Further, complex payment and remittance systems involved firms based in an array of countries, including Great Britain, India and the United States. This thesis, thus, states the importance of analysing trade relationships within a multilateral focus. This thesis uses analysis at the transaction level to explain the prevalent multilateral relationships of this period. Archival records from England, the United States and Hong Kong supplement those in Australia to provide insights into the methods employed to complete transactions. This thesis provides history with an interpretation of the records relating to the China-Australia trade. It engages the correspondence and financial records of of key companies like Jardine Matheson & Co. of England, Augustine Heard & Co. and Russell & Co. of the United States and Robert Towns and Co. from Australia, among others, to interpret the transactions. Analysing trade at a transactional level requires an interdisciplinary approach that draws on insights from a mixture of historical sub-disciplines, including economic history, business history, maritime history, Australian history, China Treaty Port history, Chinese mercantile history and the histories of various commodities. All of these feature in this thesis under the umbrella of trade history to create a broader comprehension of port-to-port relationships. Interpreting at the transaction level moves this interdisciplinary study into an alternate realm, one that opens a better understanding of how each of its elements placed Australia within the global trade environment of the 1860s and 1870s

Across the Oceans: Development of the overseas business information transmission

"In the early 19th century, the only way to transmit information was to send letters across the oceans by sailing ships or across land by horse and coach. Growing world trade created a need and technological development introduced options to improve general information transmission. Starting in the 1830s, a network of steamships, railways, canals and telegraphs was gradually built to connect different parts of the world. The book explains how the rate of information circulation increased many times over as mail systems were developed. Nevertheless, regional differences were huge. While improvements on the most significant trade routes between Europe, the Americas and East India were considered crucial, distant places such as California or Australia had to wait for gold fever to become important enough for regular communications. The growth of passenger services, especially for emigrants, was a major factor increasing the number of mail sailings. The study covers the period from the Napoleonic wars to the foundation of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and includes the development of overseas business information transmission from the days of sailing ships to steamers and the telegraph.

A Foreign Voyage

JOHN GRIDER joined the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State as a Research Fellow in November 2015. He recently completed this captivating project, which investigates the complex interplay between gender, class and race sourced from the narratives of men who found themselves working in the transforming Pacific maritime industry during the mid-nineteenth century

SS Xantho: towards a new perspective. An integrated approach to the maritime archaeology and conservation of an iron steamship wreck

The assessment and excavation of the wreck of the iron-hulled SS Xantho (1848-72) has shown that otherwise unobtainable information about both materials and people can be found in the archaeological study of iron and steamship wrecks. One important development has been the initiation of full pre-disturbance studies of a shipwreck's biological and electrochemical properties, giving insights into the condition of the site and its materials of value to both the archaeologist and conservator. Conducted by diving conservation specialists at the request of the archaeologist, this was the first such comprehensive study to be performed on any underwater site. It is now recognised as an essential element in any modem maritime archaeological project. Site inspection revealed that Xantho was powered by a former Royal Navy gunboat engine, of a type that was evidently the first high pressure, high revolution and mass produced marine engine made. Despite these advances, they were suitable only for use in a naval context. The ship itself was a former paddle-steamer built in the formative years of iron shipbuilding. After 23 years of service it was sold to a scrap metal merchant who joined the hull to the second-hand screw-engine and offered the revamped hybrid for sale. That the ship appeared on the sparsely populated and poorly serviced Western Australian coast, far from coal supplies and marine engine repair facilities, posed an immediate question; what sort of person would use it in this manner? Thus the Xantho program came to focus on Charles Edward Broadhurst and how he came to make the apparently strange decision to purchase such an odd and apparently unsuitable vessel. Archival study and an excavation of the stem section of the wreck were conducted for these purposes. The study of Broadhurst was completed in 1990, the subject of the author's Masters thesis, resurrecting and analysing the entire business career and life of one of Western Australia's forgotten, but most active and controversial colonial entrepreneurs. This thesis centres on the excavation of Broadhurst's ship and describes the recovery of the ship's engine from a highly-oxygenated salt-water environment. The recovery of the engine was followed by conservation treatment and an archaeologically-based 'excavation' of the heavily concreted engine in the laboratory. Begun in 1985 the deconcretion was completed by mid 1995 with the opening up of the last of the internal spaces and the freeing of all working parts in preparation for the engine's reassembly and exhibition. The successes of the two 'excavations' have confirmed both the place of the conservator on the sea-bed and the archaeologist's place in the conservation process. the disassembly of the engine, where nearly two tonnes of concretions were removed, evidence was found of technical significance and of the way Charles Broadhurst, the vessel's owner operated the ship. I also describe commonalities evident in the formation of iron and steamship wreck sites. This enables anomalies noted at the Xantho site to be assessed and quantified against a broader sample, leading to a focus on the behaviour of steamship owners in a frontier environment and the postulation of a number of testable propositions about the material residues of such behaviours

Portland Daily Press: January 19, 1876

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