The wooden ship was bought by a syndicate while it was still under construction at the Gordon & Company shipyard in Deptford in order to win a prize of 80,000 rupees for the first steamship connection from Great Britain to India. On August 16, 1825, the Enterprise was set off from Falmouth with 17 passengers on board and arrived in Calcutta after 113 days of voyage. The trip had actually been estimated at two months, but due to the large coal reserve, the ship was deep in the water. Progress was slower and more coal was used. When the coal supply ran out, they sailed to Cape Town , the only port on the route that had a coal depot at that time. New coal was stashed here and the journey continued. The last part of the trip had to be sailed again. So you traveled a total of 63 days under steam, 40 days under sail and anchored for 10 days. Since the Enterprise fulfilled its actual task, but took longer than the required 70 days for the journey, the operators were awarded half of the prize money.
After that, the administration of Bengal initially bought the ship for 40,000 pounds. Here she served as a troop transport during the First Anglo-Burmese War . After the war it was used as a tug on the Hugli in 1826 . In 1829 it served the East India Company , although it did not prove to be a useful ship in the mail traffic between Suez and India and was again used on the Hugli. It was scrapped in 1834, with the steam engine in the Calcutta-built ship Enterprise still doing its job.
technology
The mechanical drive system consisted of a two-cylinder side balancing steam engine made by Maudslay, Sons and Field . The pistons were 1.09 m in diameter and the stroke was 1.22 m. The steam, with only about 0.2 bar pressure, was supplied by a simple copper flue gas boiler. The power was transmitted to a pair of side wheels with a diameter of 6.10 m.
literature
van Oosten, FC: Steamers conquer the seas: The beginnings of steam shipping . Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg 1975, ISBN 3-7979-1855-0 , p.48-51 .
Dunn, Laurence (Ed.): Ships: A picture history . 2nd Edition. Pan Books Ltd., London 1971, ISBN 0-330-02876-6 , pp.26 .
Individual evidence
↑ Halford Lancaster Hoskins: British routes to India , Philadelphia 1928, pp. 94–96 ( online )
^ Edgar C. Smith , A Short History of Naval and Marine Engineering , 1937, pp. 22-26 ( online )
↑ Arnold van Bever Houdt: These Are The Voyages , 2013, pp 52-53 ( online )
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