This was not, however, by any means the first company to run steamers between Dublin and London, the City of Dublin Company having preceded it by several years, as also did the Cork Steamship Company, and the St. George Company. The first steamers of the British and Irish Company were the _City of Limerick_, _Devonshire_, and _Shannon_, but it would appear from the bill just quoted that the _Devonshire_ and _Shannon_ gave place to, or were supplemented by, the _Nottingham_ and _Mermaid_. This bill, according to the company’s handbook, was issued in 1836. The _Duke of Cornwall_, added to the fleet in 1842, was, like the others, a little wooden paddle-steamer, and schooner-rigged; she was the last of the vessels of this type purchased by the company. Three years later, by which time the superiority of the screw for sea-going steamers had already compelled recognition, the company showed its enterprise by placing two auxiliary screw steamers, the _Rose_ and _Shamrock_, on its London and Dublin service, each of them proving an unqualified success. That decade will ever be memorable for the introduction of iron vessels with screw propellers. In 1850 the company purchased the _Foyle_, one of the finest iron steamers in existence at the time, and in the summer of the next year established its regular service between Liverpool and London, with calls both ways at the intermediate south of England ports. It ran for a year a service between London and Limerick with the screw steamer _Rose_, which was disposed of the next year. Two fine steamers, the _Nile_ and the _Lady Eglinton_, were secured in 1852, and the chartering of the latter vessel as a troop and storeship by the Government during the Crimean War, and the wreck of the _Nile_ off Cornwall, caused the cessation of the company’s London and Liverpool service. An interesting connection between the company and the transatlantic service is found in the history of the invariably unsuccessful attempts to inaugurate a service between Galway and America.