It boasted a spacious dining-room, ninety feet long, a deck cabin for ladies, a reading room, a promenade deck, shaded and provided with seats.

One of the regular steamers of the line towed it to Albany, and its passengers were assured freedom from the noise and vibration of machinery, as well as safety from possible boiler explosions--the latter rather a common peril of steamboating in those days.
[Illustration: "THE DREADNAUGHT"-- NEW YORK AND LIVERPOOL PACKET] It was natural that the restless mind of the American, untrammeled by traditions and impatient of convention, should turn eagerly and early to the question of crossing the ocean by steam.

When the rivers had been made busy highways for puffing steamboats; when the Great Lakes, as turbulent as the ocean, and as vast as the Mediterranean, were conquered by the new marine device; when steamships plied between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston, braving what is by far more perilous than mid-ocean, the danger of tempests on a lee shore, and the shifting sands of Hatteras, there seemed to the enterprising man no reason why the passage from New York to Liverpool might not be made by the same agency.
The scientific authorities were all against it.

Curiously enough, the weight of scientific authority is always against anything new.

Marine architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces.