“On Saturday morning at eight o’clock arrived here from Montreal, being her first trip, the steamboat ACCOMMODATION, with ten passengers. This is the first vessel of the kind that ever appeared in this harbour. She is continually crowded with visitants. She left Montreal on Wednesday, at two o’clock, so that her passage was sixty-six hours, thirty of which she was at anchor. She arrived at Three Rivers in twenty-four hours. She has at present berths for twenty passengers, which next year will be considerably augmented. No wind or tide can stop her. She has 75 feet keel, and 85 on deck. The price for a passage up is nine dollars, and eight down—the vessel supplying provisions. The great advantage attending a vessel so constructed is, that a passage may be calculated on to a degree of certainty, in point of time, which cannot be the case with any vessel propelled by sails only. The steamboat receives her impulse from an open double-spoked, perpendicular wheel, on each side, without any circular band or rim. To the end of each double spoke is fixed a square board, which enters the water, and by the rotary motion of the wheel, acts like a paddle. The wheels are put and kept in motion by steam, operating within the vessel. A mast is to be fixed in her for the purpose of using a sail when the wind is favourable, which will occasionally accelerate her headway.” In 1813 two new steamers were placed on the St. Lawrence, called respectively the SWIFTSURE and the CAR OF COMMERCE, and, after a further interval of four years, a fourth steamer, the QUEBEC, began to ply between Quebec and Montreal. The first of these steamers, the SWIFTSURE, was 140 feet over all, with a beam of 24 feet. On her maiden voyage she made the passage from Montreal to Quebec in twenty-two and a half hours, in the face of a strong easterly wind all the way. Notwithstanding that she “beat the most famous of the sailing packets on the line (fourteen hours in a race of thirty-six hours), her owners do not seem to have been very confident of her movements under all circumstances, or of the number of passengers who would patronise her, for she was advertised to sail ‘as the wind and passengers may suit.’”[9] [Illustration: Terry Steamer St Lawrence] FOOTNOTES: [9] Lindsay’s “Merchant Shipping,” folio 59. CHAPTER III. Steamboats on the River Clyde, the COMET, INDUSTRY, ARGYLE.—On the Thames, the MARGERY and the THAMES.—The first Irish Steamer, the CITY OF CORK. Without, in the slightest degree, detracting from the credit due to the inventors referred to in the earlier pages of this history, it is indisputable that the River Clyde is the birthplace of European Steam Navigation.