If this book were the story of the merchant marine of all lands and all peoples, a chapter on the development of the steamship would be, perhaps, the most important, and certainly the most considerable part of it.  But with the adoption of steam for ocean carriage began the decline of American shipping, a decline hastened by the use of iron, and then steel, for hulls.  Though we credit ourselves—­not without some protest from England—­with the invention of the steamboat, the adaptation of the screw to the propulsion of vessels, and the invention of triple-expansion engines, yet it was England that seized upon these inventions and with them won, and long held, the commercial mastery of the seas.  To-day (1902) it seems that economic conditions have so changed that the shipyards of the United States will again compete for the business of the world.  We are building ships as good—­perhaps better—­than can be constructed anywhere else, but thus far we have not been able to build them as cheap.  Accordingly our builders have been restricted to the construction of warships, coasters, and yachts.  National pride has naturally demanded that all vessels for the navy be built in American shipyards, and a federal law has long restricted the trade between ports of the United States to ships built here.  The lake shipping, too—­prodigious in numbers and activity—­is purely American.  But until within a few years the American flag had almost disappeared from vessels engaged in international trade.  Americans in many instances are the owners of ships flying the British flag, for the United States laws deny American registry—­which is to a ship what citizenship is to a man—­to vessels built abroad.  While the result of this attempt to protect American shipyards has been to drive our flag from the ocean, there are indications now that our shipyards are prepared to build as cheaply as others, and that the flag will again figure on the high seas.

Popular history has ascribed to Robert Fulton the honor of building and navigating the first steamboat.  Like claims to priority in many other inventions, this one is strenuously contested.  Two years before Fulton’s “Clermont” appeared on the Hudson, John Stevens, of Hoboken, built a steamboat propelled by a screw, the model of which is still in the Stevens Polytechnic Institute.  Earlier still, John Fitch, of Pennsylvania, had made a steamboat, and urged it upon Franklin, upon Washington, and upon the American Philosophical Society without success; tried it then with the Spanish minister, and was offered a subsidy by the King of Spain for the exclusive right to the invention.  Being a patriotic American, Fitch refused.  “My invention must be first for my own country and then for all the world,” said he.  But later, after failing to reap any profit from his discover and finding himself deprived even of the honor of first invention, he wrote bitterly in 1792: 

“The strange ideas I had at that time of serving my country, without the least suspicion that my only reward would be contempt and opprobrious names!  To refuse the offer of the Spanish nation was the act of a blockhead of which I should not be guilty again.”