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Updated: May 3, 2025
By coach and wagon, by highway and by-way, by horse-power and steam-power, we proceeded, until it chanced, one August afternoon, that we left railways and their regions at a way-side station, and let our lingering feet march us along the Valley of the Upper Connecticut.
But I was not leaving anything to chance so far as chances could be foreseen in the adventure that I was about to make, and so I got my sail-power all ready to fall back upon in case my steam-power failed. And when that bit of work was finished I was full of a joyful light-heartedness; for my boat in every way was ready for the water, and I was come at last to the good ending of my long job.
It is as if a man should in these days attempt to colonize, and yet, through inertia or through ignorance, should leave behind him all modern resources of chemistry, of chemical agriculture, or of steam-power. Hazlitt had read nothing.
The steamboat, the national highways, and the canals were all great aids to men in travel and in carrying goods. The next great improvement was the use of steam-power to transport people and goods overland. It was brought about by the railroad and the locomotive. In this country, the first laying of rails to make a level surface for wheels to roll upon was at Quincy, Massachusetts.
Agriculture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow.
It destroyed sixteen vessels, and caused the loss of thirteen lives; and yet so small an amount of steam-power was fully able to bear up against the dreaded fury of a Norther, and to insure the safety of the vessel. Vera Cruz, like almost every other Spanish American seaport town, has its traditional tales of the horrors committed by the buccaneers, or filibusters.
Short railways worked by horses were common in the neighbourhood of collieries, and a few existed elsewhere. In 1821 Edward Pease obtained parliamentary powers to construct a railway between Stockton and Darlington. A visit to Killingworth persuaded him to make use of steam-power. In 1823 an act authorising the use of steam on the proposed railway was carried, and in 1825 the railway was opened.
His son, they said, was squeezing oil out of cocoa-nuts for a living on some God-forsaken islet of the Indian Ocean; but it was from that patent slip in a lonely wooded bay that had sprung the workshops of the Consolidated Docks Company, with its three graving basins carved out of solid rock, its wharves, its jetties, its electric-light plant, its steam-power houses with its gigantic sheer-legs, fit to lift the heaviest weight ever carried afloat, and whose head could be seen like the top of a queer white monument peeping over bushy points of land and sandy promontories, as you approached the New Harbor from the west.
We had expected to see great lathes, worked by steam-power, taking in a rough stick and turning out a finished limb.
We often wonder how the earlier navigators got on, when there were no such things as tinned provisions, and when the facilities for carrying water were of the poorest description, while they were often months and months at sea, without an opportunity of replenishing their stores, and with no steam-power to fall back upon in case they were becalmed.
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