Already he had witnessed one proof of the power of steam. In 1838, in company with Haliburton, he was on his way to England on the _Tyrian_, one of the old ten-gun brigs which carried the mails, slow and uncomfortable at the best, unseaworthy death-traps in a storm. As she lay rolling in a flat calm with flapping sails, a few hundred miles from England, a smear appeared on the western horizon. The smear grew to a smudge, the smudge to a shape, and soon there steamed up alongside the _Sirius_, a steamer which had successfully crossed the Atlantic, and was now on her return to England. The captain of the _Tyrian_ determined to send his mails on board. Howe accompanied them, took a glass of champagne with the officers, and returned to the {94} brig. Then the _Sirius_ steamed off, leaving the _Tyrian_ to whistle for a breeze. On their arrival in England, Howe and Haliburton succeeded in combining the chief British North American interests in a letter to the Colonial Office. That much-abused department showed sympathy and promptitude. Negotiations were entered into, contracts were let, and in 1840 the mails were carried from England to Halifax by the steamers of a company headed by Samuel Cunard, a prominent Halifax merchant, founder of the line which still bears his name. At once the distance from England to Nova Scotia was reduced from fifty days to twelve. Certainty replaced uncertainty; danger gave way to comparative security. It was the forging of a real link of Empire. A decade later Howe saw that the railway could play the same part. At this time the question was being discussed in all the provinces. Nova Scotia wished to link her harbours with the trade of the Canadian and American West and of the Gulf of St Lawrence, so as to be at least the winter port of the northern half of North America. New Brunswick wished to give to the fertile valley of the St John and the shores of the Bay of Fundy {95} an exit to the sea, and to unite them with the American railways by a line from St John to Portland. The need of Canada was still more pressing; between 1840 and 1850 she had completed her St Lawrence system of canals, only to find them side-tracked by American railways. A line from Montreal to Windsor, opposite Detroit, became a necessity.