Having in view the success of the three British lines of steamers to which I have just referred, but at the same time paying no heed to the warning presented by the Collins Company in their endeavours to traverse, with unusual speed, the fickle and stormy Atlantic, a company of English and Irish gentlemen, most of whom had little knowledge and, certainly, no experience of the business they were about to undertake, proposed to the British Government, in January 1859, to carry Her Majesty’s mails from Galway to Portland, Boston or New York, _viâ_ St. John’s, Newfoundland, or otherwise, for the sum of 3000_l._ per voyage, “such voyage being the passage out and home.” The great attraction, however, of the offer lay in the further condition that “they would undertake to convey telegraphic messages from the United Kingdom to British North America and the United States in _six_ days, casualties excepted,” the Atlantic cable being then only in contemplation: that is, they offered to make the passage between Galway and St. John’s, Newfoundland, at all seasons of the year, in the unprecedented short time of six days. A contract based on this proposal was entered into on the 21st April, 1859, to which a table was annexed[240] of the time in which this company further agreed to deliver _letters_ at New York and at Galway. With the object of carrying out this contract, the “Royal Atlantic Steam Navigation Company concluded, on the 10th June, 1859, an agreement with Messrs. Palmer of Newcastle, for the construction of two ships at a cost of 95,000_l._ each, and, on the 15th June, they entered into another contract with Messrs. Samuelson of Hull, for the construction of two other ships at a cost of 97,500_l._ each. These vessels were to be built according to lines, plans, and specifications approved by the Admiralty, and were to be delivered within eleven months from the date of the agreements, the commencement of the postal service according to contract having been fixed for June 1860.”[241] The dimensions of these ships were 360 feet long, 40 feet beam, and 32 feet depth of hold. They were each 2800 tons measurement, with engines of about 850 nominal horse-power; in model and equipment they were somewhat similar. Indeed, the _Connaught_ and the _Hibernia_, built by Messrs. Palmer, were “precisely the same;”[242] a clause in their agreement with the company requiring, “that each of the said vessels when completed was, on a fair and proper trial thereof, to accomplish a speed at _the rate of 20 statute miles_ per hour in smooth water, and to consume not more than 8800 pounds of fuel per hour.”[243] But, on the trial of the _Connaught_, the Government inspector reported that the speed of this “vessel was about thirteen knots; the average revolutions of the engines, 16·6; the average pressure of steam in the boilers being 22½ lbs. on the square inch, and the vacuum in the condensers 24½ inches.”[244] [Sidenote: Loss of the _Connaught_, 1860.]