Ocean Steam Navigation Company
The Ocean Steam Navigation Company (German about "Ozeanische Dampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft"), short OSNC or also called Bremen Line , was a shipping company founded in New York in 1847 with US and German capital , which with the paddle steamer Washington was the first regular steamship connection between the United States States and mainland Europe . It was dissolved in 1857 and is considered to be the pioneer of North German Lloyd .
prehistory
From 1840 the English Cunard Line operated the first transatlantic steamship line on the route Liverpool - Halifax - Boston (later Liverpool - New York ). The use of steamships made it possible to shorten the travel time between Europe and the USA by between half and a third compared to the sailing ship , which was of great interest for mail transport in particular. However, the high construction and operating costs of the steamships made regular service profitable at that time only with subsidies .
By organic by the UK to finish controlled mailing, the United States was keen to the monopoly of the Cunard Line break and so while strengthening its position in international maritime trade and establish a faster connection to mainland Europe. In the 1840s, politics and the public in the USA therefore lively discussed the establishment of a separate post line across the Atlantic, and similar considerations took place in Europe. In 1841, for example, the Bremen merchant Carl Keutgen suggested setting up a steamboat line to New York based on the model of the Cunard Line , an idea that the Bremen Senator Arnold Duckwitz took up in 1844 when he met Ambrose Dudley Mann , the consul of the United States in Bremen , in Bremerhaven as a possible port of destination for a US postal line.
When Mann returned to the USA in 1845, the Bremen Senate brought his plans to mind by sending Mann 155 bottles of Ratskellerwein afterwards ( "to give the gentlemen in Washington a taste of old German wine." ). Bremen was also able to build on the excellent political and economic connections that the Hanseatic city had with the United States, as it was one of the first states to recognize the newly founded USA in 1783 - immediately after the American War of Independence . In addition, Bremen has traditionally been heavily involved in North American trade.
In 1845 the US government finally made the decision to set up its own subsidized mail line to Europe and Postmaster General Cave Johnson was commissioned to tender the company. After the announcement of these plans, some of the most important European ports such as Le Havre , Antwerp and Hamburg , in addition to Bremen , sought the favor of possible operators of the line. When the Bremen businessman Carl Theodor Gevekoht was sent to Washington for negotiations on behalf of Mayor Johann Smidt at the end of the year , he succeeded in finding Johnson and State Secretary James Buchanan (who later became the 15th President of the USA) for Bremerhaven as the port of destination for the newly established postal line to win. Soon afterwards they reached an agreement with the American entrepreneur Edward Mills to submit a joint offer to set up a steamship line. On February 28, 1846, Postmaster General Johnson signed a five-year contract with Mills for the carriage of mail from New York to Bremerhaven, which provided for a subsidy of 400,000 US dollars for the use of a total of four ships, “which were not inferior to those of the Cunard Line , in particular what their speed was concerned. " . After lengthy and sometimes difficult deliberations, the contract with Mills was approved by the US House of Representatives and the US Senate in June 1846 and ratified by President James Knox Polk on June 19 .
founding
The registered capital of the new New York public company , named Ocean Steam Navigation Company , was set at $ 100,000 with the option to increase it to $ 1,000,000. The price per share was $ 100. Mills became president of the shipping company, Edwin A. Oelrichs became vice-president . On September 7, 1846, the Washington , a paddle steamer 75 meters in length and 1,800 tons of cargo capacity, was the keel of the line's first ship.
Raising the capital for the construction and operation of the planned four ships turned out to be very difficult, however, as the war with Mexico (1846–1848) in the USA pushed other issues into the background and the stock business was not yet really established in Germany . When there was even the threat of having to surrender the concession to operate the line to the competition from Antwerp, the Bremen Senate sent an embassy with the merchants Hermann Henrich Meier and Gustav Kulenkampff to negotiate in Berlin . There it succeeded in convincing the Prussian government and, subsequently, other German states to acquire shares with a total value of around 300,000 dollars, so that with the shares subscribed in the USA in the course of 1847 a capital stock of almost 650,000 dollars came together. Since foreigners were not allowed to buy US ships at the time, the German money had to be invested in the company through trustees (such as German-American trading houses).
Parallel to the establishment of the actual shipping line and transported or even initiated by it, a number of infrastructure measures and trade agreements were initiated in Bremerhaven and Bremen . In 1846 an agreement was signed with Hanover that established an official postal connection between Bremen and Bremerhaven. Bremerhaven received its own post office. The post office, which opened just a year later at the Old Harbor , had two offices: one in Bremen and one in Hanover. Also in 1846, a lowering of the transit tariffs and the abolition of the Weser tariff were agreed with Hanover . In addition, the completion of the Bremen – Hanover railway line , which began in 1845, went into operation in December 1847 and thus ensured the rapid connection of the city to other German regions and neighboring countries. The Bremen – Bremerhaven electrical telegraph line was also set up in 1847 - the first long electrical telegraph line within Europe.
However, the creation of a second, larger harbor basin, the New Harbor , was to be groundbreaking for Bremerhaven , as the lock to the Old Harbor was too small for the new paddle steamers. The construction work started in 1847 dragged on until 1852, so that the ships of the Ocean Steam Navigation Company in Bremerhaven could initially only anchor in roadsteads .
business
On June 2, 1847, the Washington set out on her first voyage from New York to Bremerhaven. However, the travel time estimated at 14 days could not be adhered to on this first route due to a machine failure which made a repair stop in Southampton , England necessary. The Washington arrived in Bremerhaven on the morning of June 19, where she was greeted with a gun salute in the presence of numerous onlookers by a delegation from Bremerhaven. The guests of honor, which included Edwin A. Oelrichs and Selah R. Hobbie - the Deputy Postmaster General - traveled on to Bremen, where they were received by Mayor Smidt at a feast.
As a result, Bremen became the US’s sole postal agency for all of Germany, as the US refused to negotiate individually with 17 postal offices. The postage for an overseas letter was 15 silver groschen (half the cost of shipping via England) - and was the first uniform letter tariff in the German Confederation . Later on, US mail for and from Austria , Sweden , Norway and Russia was also sent via Bremen, which is reflected in the steep rise in the number of letters carried: while a total of 79,637 letters were transported from New York to Bremen in 1848, this was the case in 1853 354,470.
Despite the initial enthusiasm and the increasing mail volume, the Ocean Steam Navigation Company had to struggle with difficulties during its existence, so only two of the originally planned four ships could be put into operation - besides the Washington, her sister ship Hermann, completed in 1848 . The third ship, the Franklin , which was already under construction, had to be sold, a fourth was not even commissioned. In addition to the high operating costs due to the ships' above-average coal consumption and the technical problems of the Washington , which repeatedly had to go to dry dock for repairs, the February Revolution came in 1848 , which resulted in a decline in passengers and freight, and made it difficult to find further investors.
It was not until 1849 that the line with its two ships was able to guarantee a largely regular operation, but the crossings took an average of 16 to 18 days instead of the announced two weeks. Soon two more new lines between New York and Cherbourg and between New York and Le Havre were competing with the OSNC. Mills resigned as president of the company and the price of the OSNC share sank in the meantime to 10% of their nominal value, so that in the USA the liquidation of the company was already requested. From 1853, however, the situation improved again - the New York and Havre Steam Navigation Company had to file for bankruptcy and the Cunard Line had to restrict its line operations because the British government used its ships for troop transports as a result of the Crimean War . Up until 1856, the OSNC was profitable and paid 10% dividends annually .
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When the US Congress did not renew the expiring contract with the OSNC after ten years, but started a new tender, the company was undercut by Cornelius Vanderbilt . Without the government subsidies, however, the ships could not be operated economically, so that a general meeting on July 23, 1857 decided to dissolve the Ocean Steam Navigation Company . The last voyage of the Washington from Bremerhaven to New York took place on July 12, 1857. Since the sale of the company's two ships generated little income, the German governments involved only got back a third of the money they had invested.
Despite the considerable financial losses, the measures funded in connection with the establishment of the OSNC - such as the construction of the railway lines between Hanover and Bremen, the construction of the New Port in Bremerhaven, the abolition of customs and duties and the standardization of postal traffic - were major Benefits for the Bremen and German economy - this is how Arnold Duckwitz later drew the conclusion:
“ They [OSNC] had paved the way for a later company [Norddeutscher Lloyd]; the Ocean Steam Navigation Company had learned how to and how not to proceed to get better results. The train of goods and people was directed towards Bremen, postal relations were in order, postal contracts calculated for this steamer line were concluded in all directions, so that through this undertaking, even if it went down again, the foundation was laid on which to continue later could be built. "
literature
- Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . Edition Temmen , Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X , p. 639 .
- Rolf Böttcher: Arrival of the paddle steamer "Washington" in Bremerhaven 1847 . Verlag für neue Wissenschaft GmbH, Bremerhaven 1997, ISBN 3-89429-890-1 .
- Dirk J. Peters (Ed.): The North German Lloyd - From Bremen to the World - "Global Player" in the history of shipping . Hauschild Verlag , Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89757-360-4 .
- Arnold Duckwitz: Memories from my public life . Bremen 1877.
Web links
- The OSNC on The Ships List website (in English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Rolf Böttcher: Arrival of the paddle steamer "Washington" in Bremerhaven in 1847 . Verlag für neue Wissenschaft GmbH, Bremerhaven 1997, p. 4 .
- ^ Rolf Böttcher: Arrival of the paddle steamer "Washington" in Bremerhaven in 1847 . Verlag für neue Wissenschaft GmbH, Bremerhaven 1997, p. 12 .
- ^ Rolf Böttcher: Arrival of the paddle steamer "Washington" in Bremerhaven in 1847 . Verlag für neue Wissenschaft GmbH, Bremerhaven 1997, p. 23 .