Difficulties and differences of various kinds having arisen, none of these vessels were delivered within the time agreed upon, and the company was consequently obliged to start the service with a hired vessel—the _Parana_—which sailed from Galway on the 27th of June, 1860, arriving at St. John’s in seven days thirteen and a half hours, and at New York in eleven days seventeen and three-quarter hours after her departure, or fifteen hours and three-quarters behind the contract time for the delivery of the mail bags at her final destination, and one day thirteen and three-quarter hours beyond the stipulated time for delivering the telegraph messages at St. John’s. The _Connaught_ followed, in her case direct for Boston, on the 11th of July, and was twenty-two and a half hours over time in reaching that place. But serious disasters soon befell these steamers: the _Connaught_ was totally lost on her second voyage in October, of this year when approaching Boston, she having, on this occasion, been one day and twenty and a half hours behind time in reaching St. John’s. One voyage had, consequently, to be omitted altogether. The second ship belonging to the company, the _Hibernia_, encountering a severe gale on her way from the Tyne to Galway was so thoroughly disabled that she never entered the service at all,[245] while their third new ship, the _Columbia_, which sailed for the United States on the 9th of April from Galway, returned in May disabled by ice,[246] after making the slowest passage outwards of any of the fleet, having been ten days seven and a half hours in reaching St. John’s, and seventeen days twenty and three-quarter hours before she arrived at Boston.[247] [Sidenote: Rapid passage of the _Adriatic_, 1861.] The steamship _Prince Albert_ was chartered to take the place of the _Connaught_, and in February 1861 the Company purchased the _Adriatic_, one of the most famous ships of the Collins line. The transfer of this ship to the British flag does not seem to have reduced her speed or detracted from her celebrated sea-going qualities, for she made the run from Galway to St. John’s in six days, the specified time, and, having completed the passage to New York in one day fifteen hours and a quarter less than the contract time, returned from St. John’s to Galway in _five days nineteen hours and three-quarters_, perhaps the quickest passage on record from port to port across the Atlantic.[248]