When our tonnage in the foreign trade almost reached the million mark in 1810, the most efficient ships in the world were those under the American flag. And the character of our merchant seamen is shown by the fact that when the British confiscated one of our ships, they were obliged to cut down her spars before they could handle her. And yet some of our nautical writers would have us believe that American ships increased in number in those days because, they say, a discriminating duty laid on imports brought to the country in foreign ships afforded "protection" to ships under the American flag! CHAPTER IX THE BEGINNINGS OF STEAM NAVIGATION It will help us to appreciate the work of the men who first experimented with steam-driven ships if we recall the fact that James Watt, working at Soho, near Birmingham, England, invented the engine which used steam on both sides of the piston in 1782, and that it was for many years after that date an enormously heavy and cumbersome machine. From this fact we see the state of the mechanic arts in England at the end of the eighteenth century, when practical experiments in steam navigation were first begun. That the state of those arts was still lower in the United States would be naturally inferred from the story of Bond's efforts to restrain progress by reëxporting the machinery that had been imported at Philadelphia. As a matter of fact, when one American inventor began to make experiments in steam navigation, he was obliged first of all to train men in the work of building engines; he was unable to find, anywhere in the country, men with the necessary skill. One of the most curious of the early experiments was that made by James Rumsey, who was a bath tender at a pleasure resort in Virginia. He first planned to mount an old-style, single-acting engine in a boat, connect it with a pump, draw in water through a pipe at the bow, and then force it out astern. When this plan was explained to Washington, he wrote a testimonial, saying, "the discovery is of great importance." A boat built on this plan was eventually driven at a speed of four miles an hour. Rumsey also experimented with a screw propeller, but he was poor, and could not carry the experiment to a conclusion. Finally he went to England to get capital (a fact to be remembered), and there he died before he could accomplish anything of real moment.