This volume covers the development and decline of the steam engine from the late-18th century to the present day. It is not a history of the steamship, but the story of the machinery which powered those ships. It aims to tell the story of marine engineering development through the steamship and the job it did both in commercial and naval terms.

This book examines how the expansion of a steam-powered Royal Navy from the second half of the nineteenth century had wider ramifications across the British Empire. In particular, it considers how steam propulsion made vessels utterly dependent on a particular resource – coal – and its distribution around the world. In doing so, it shows that the ‘coal question’ was central to imperial defence and the protection of trade, requiring the creation of infrastructures that spanned the globe. This infrastructure required careful management, and the processes involved show the development of bureaucracy and the reliance on the ‘contractor state’ to ensure this was both robust and able to allow swift mobilisation in war. The requirement to stop regularly at foreign stations also brought men of the Royal navy into contact with local coal heavers, as well as indigenous populations and landscapes. These encounters and their dissemination are crucial to our understanding of imperial relationships and imaginations at the height of the imperial age.

An innovative account of the trials and tribulations of first-generation Victorian mail steamship lines, their passengers and the public.

Winner, 2016 the John Lyman Book Award, sponsored by the North American Society for Oceanic History. During Daniel O. Killman’s more than fifty years at sea, he was shipwrecked off Coos Bay, discovered gold in Alaska, was dismasted in a hurricane near Fiji, lost a rudder en route to Adelaide, had run-ins with bureaucrats, officials, and seamen, and found himself in court facing charges of murder, all the while remaining in impeccable standing with the owners of his vessels. His thrilling life at sea during the last decades of sailing ships and the emergence of steam vessels in the Pacific is chronicled in Forty Years Master: A Life in Sail and Steam. Edited and annotated nearly forty years after Killman’s death by prominent Pacific Coast maritime historians John Lyman and Harold D. Huycke Jr., Killman’s memoir has been compiled by Rebecca Huycke Ellison from her father’s papers. Now with an introduction by maritime scholar Brian J. Rouleau and an afterword by David Hull, Killman’s rollicking narrative of storms, surly mates, bustling ports, and the business of navigating the high seas will entertain and inform scholars, students, and general readers interested in nautical and maritime history, late nineteenth–early twentieth century trade and commerce, and West Coast/trans-Pacific maritime history.

For millennia, humans well-knew that there was a force far more powerful than they upon the Earth, and that was Nature itself. They could only dream of overcoming its power, or try to believe in the myths and fables of others who supposedly had done so. Then, at the dawn of the 19th century, along came a brilliant, creative, controversial American by the name of Robert Fulton. In the late summer of 1807, he ran his experimental "steamboat" from New York City to Albany, not once, but repeatedly. With these continuing commercial trips, Fulton showed that it was possible to alter artificially both a person's location and the amount of time it took to change it. In so doing, he also broke through an enormous psychological barrier that had existed in people's minds; it was, in fact, possible to overcome Nature to practical effect. But running these steamboats on rivers, lakes and bays was one thing. Taking such a vessel on a voyage across the ocean was a different proposition altogether. Experienced mariners didn't think it could be done. These early steamboats were just too flimsy and unwieldy to withstand the dangers of the deep. Yet there was at least one man who believed otherwise. His name was Captain Moses Rogers. He set out to design a steam vessel that was capable of overcoming the vicissitudes of the sea. This craft would be not a steamboat, but a steamship, the first of its kind. Finding a crew for such a new-fangled contraption proved to be exceedingly difficult. Mariners--conditioned as they were to "knowing the ropes" of a sailing ship--looked upon this new vessel, and its unnatural means of propulsion, with the greatest suspicion. To them, it was not a "Steam Ship"--instead, it was a "Steam Coffin."