but she managed to crawl across the sails very materially aiding the
engines, and heralded the dawn of a new day in transatlantic travel.
No other steamboat attempted the trip for almost twenty years after,
until in 1838 the _Great Western_ made the run in fifteen days.
This revolutionized water travel and set the whole world talking. It
was the beginning of the passing of the sailing ship and was an event
for rejoicing. In the old wooden hulks with their lazily flapping
wings, waiting for a breeze to stir them, men and women and children
huddled together like so many animals in a pen, had to spend weeks and
months on the voyage between Europe and America. There was little or
no room for sanitation, the space was crowded, deadly germs lurked in
every cranny and crevice, and consequently hundreds died. To many
indeed the sailing ship became a floating hearse.

In those times, and they are not so remote, a voyage was dreaded as
a calamity. Only necessity compelled the undertaking. It was not travel
for pleasure, for pleasure under such circumstances and amid such
surroundings was impossible. The poor emigrants who were compelled
through stress and poverty to leave their homes for a foreign country
feared not toil in a new land, but they feared the long voyage with
its attending horrors and dangers. Dangerous it was, for most of the
sailing vessels were unseaworthy and when a storm swept the waters,
they were as children's toys, at the mercy of wind and wave. When the
passenger stepped on board he always had the dread of a watery grave
before him.

How different to-day. Danger has been eliminated almost to the vanishing
point and the mighty monsters of steel and oak now cut through the
waves in storms and hurricanes with as much ease as a duck swims through
a pond.