DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT
_The Success of “The Sun” Leads to the Founding of the
“Herald.”--Enterprises and Quarrels of a Furious Young
Journalism.--The Picturesque Webb.--Maria Monk._
The usefulness of Richard Adams Locke as a _Sun_ reporter did not end
with the moon hoax. Far from expressing regret that its employee had
gulled half the earth, the _Sun_ continued to meet exposure with a
calm and almost flippant front, insisting that it would never admit
the non-existence of the man-bats until official contradiction arrived
from Edinburgh or the Cape of Good Hope. The paper realized the value,
in public interest, of Locke’s name, and was proud to announce, in
November of 1835, that it had commissioned Locke to write another
series of articles, telling the story of the “Life and Adventures of
Manuel Fernandez, otherwise Richard C. Jackson, convicted of the murder
of John Roberts, and to be executed at the Bellevue Prison, New York,
on Thursday next, the 19th instant.”
This was a big beat, for the young men of the _Courier and Enquirer_,
and perhaps of the _Herald_, had been trying to get a yarn from
the criminal, a Spaniard who had served in foreign wars, had been
captured by savages in Africa, and had had many other adventures.
Fernandez was convicted of killing another sailor for his attention
to Fernandez’s mistress, a Mrs. Schultz; and for about three weeks
Locke spent several hours a day in the condemned man’s cell. The “Life
and Adventures,” which was printed on the first page of the _Sun_, ran
serially from November 14 to November 25, and was read with avidity.
It was ironical that the hero of the story, who had expressed to Locke
an eagerness to have his career set before the public in its true
light, was prevented from reading the later instalments; for the law,
taking no cognizance of the literary side of the matter, went about its
business, and Fernandez was hanged in the Bellevue yard on the 19th, a
morning when the _Sun’s_ narrative had wrecked the sailor off the coast
of Wales. Mr. Locke reported the execution and drew upon the autopsy to
verify the “Adventures.”
It is an interesting fact that the corpse of Fernandez
exhibited marks of all those serious injuries which are
recorded in the course of our narrative of his life, more
particularly that dreadful fracture of his vertebræ which he
suffered in Leghorn.
The mere word of a “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland” was no
longer to be relied upon!
The _Sun’s_ story of the great fire of December, 1835, sounds like
Locke, but it may have been written by one of the other bright young
men who worked for Benjamin H. Day. Among them were William M. Prall,
who succeeded Wisner as the court reporter, and Lucius Robinson.
“Robinson seemed to be a young man of excellent ideas, but not very
highly educated,” Mr. Day remarked about fifty years later.
Perhaps the Day standards were very high. Robinson was twenty six when
he worked on the _Sun_. He had been educated at an academy in Delhi,
New York, and after that had studied law and been admitted to the bar.
He was too poor to practise at once, and went into newspaper work to
make a living. After leaving the _Sun_ he was elected district attorney
of Greene County, and in 1843 was appointed master of chancery in
New York. He left the Democratic party when the Republican party was
organized, but returned to his old political allegiance after the Civil
War. In 1876 he was elected Governor of New York--an achievement which
still left him a little less famous than his fellow reporter, Locke.
“Give us one of your real Moscow fires,” sighed the _Sun_ in the first
week of its existence.
The prayer was answered a little more than two years later, when about
twenty blocks south of Wall Street, between Broad Street and the
East River, were consumed. The fire started late in the evening of
Wednesday, December 16, and all that the _Sun_ printed about it the
next morning was one triple-leaded paragraph:
POSTSCRIPT--HALF PAST 1 O’CLOCK--A TREMENDOUS CONFLAGRATION
is now raging in the lower part of the city. The Merchants’
Exchange is in flames. Nearly all the blocks in the triangle
bounded by William and Wall Streets and the East River are
consumed! Several hundred buildings are already down, and the
firemen have given out. God only knows when the fire will be
arrested.
On Friday morning the _Sun_ had two and a half columns about the fire,
and gave an approximately correct estimate that seven hundred buildings
had been burned, at a loss of twenty million dollars. The calamity
provided an opportunity for the fine writing then indulged in, and the
fire reporter did not overlook it; nor did he forget Moscow. Here are
typical extracts:
Where but thirty hours since was the rich and prosperous
theater of a great and productive commerce, where enterprise
and wealth energized with bold and commanding efforts, now
sits despondency in sackcloth and a wide and dreary waste of
desolation reigns.
It seemed as if God were running in his anger and sweeping away
with the besom of his wrath the proudest monuments of man.
Destruction traveled and triumphed on every breeze, and billows
of fire rolled over and buried in their burning bosoms the
hopes and fortunes of thousands. Like the devouring elements
when it fed on Moscow’s palaces and towers, it was literally
a “sea of fire,” and the terrors of that night of wo and ruin
rolling years will not be able to efface.
The merchants of the First Ward, like Marius in the ruins of
Carthage, sit with melancholy moans, gazing at the graves of
their fortunes, and the mournful mementoes of the dreadful
devastation that reigns.
On the afternoon of the following day the _Sun_ got out an extra
edition of thirty thousand copies, its normal morning issue of
twenty-three thousand being too small to satisfy the popular demand.
The presses ran without stopping for nearly twenty-four hours.
On Monday, the 21st, the _Sun_ had the enterprise to print a map of
the burned district. Copies of the special fire editions went all over
the world. At least one of them ran up against poetic justice. When it
reached Canton, China, six months after the fire, the English newspaper
there classed the story of the conflagration with Locke’s “Astronomical
Discoveries,” and begged its readers not to be alarmed by the new hoax.
The _Sun_ had grown more and more prosperous. In the latter part of
1835 its four pages, each eleven and one-half by eighteen inches,
were so taken up with advertising that it was not unusual to find
reading-matter in only five of the twenty columns. Some days the
publisher would apologize for leaving out advertisements, on other
days, for having so little room for news. He promised relief, and it
came on January 4, 1836, when the paper was enlarged. It remained a
four-page _Sun_, but the pages were increased in size to fourteen by
twenty inches. In announcing the enlargement, the third in a year, the
_Sun_ remarked:
We are now enabled to print considerably more than twenty-two
thousand copies, on both sides, in less than eight hours. No
establishment in this country has such facilities, and no daily
newspaper in the world enjoys so extensive a circulation.
In the first enlarged edition Mr. Day made the boast that the _Sun_
now had a circulation more than double that of all the sixpenny
respectables combined. He had a word, too, about the penny papers that
had sprung up in the _Sun’s_ wake:
One after another they dropped and fell in quick succession
as they had sprung up; and all, with but one exception worth
regarding, have gone to the “receptacle of things lost upon
earth.” Many of these departed ephemerals have struggled hard
to keep within their nostrils the breath of life; and it is
a singular fact that with scarcely an exception they have
employed, as a means of bringing a knowledge of their being
before the public, the most unlimited and reckless abuse
of ourselves, the impeachment of our character, public and
private; the implications, moral and political; in short,
calumny in all its forms.
As to the last survivor of them worth note, which remains, we
have only to say, the little world we opened has proved large
enough for us both.
The exception to the general rule of early mortality was of course the
_Herald_. In spite of this broad attitude toward his only successful
competitor, Day could not keep from swapping verbal shots with
Bennett. The _Sun_ said:
Bennett, whose only chance of dying an upright man will be that
of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope, falsely charges the
proprietor of this paper with being an infidel, the natural
effect of which calumny will be that every reader will believe
him to be a good Christian.
Day had a dislike for Colonel Webb, of the _Courier and Enquirer_,
almost as great as his enmity toward Bennett; so when Webb assaulted
Bennett on January 19, 1836, it was rather a hard story to write. This
is the _Sun’s_ account of the fray:
Low as he had fallen, both in the public estimation and his
own, we were astonished to learn last evening that Colonel
Webb had stooped so far beneath anything of which we had ever
conceived it possible for him to be guilty, as publicly,
and before the eyes of hundreds who knew him, to descend to
a public personal chastisement of that villainous libel on
humanity of all kinds, the notorious vagabond Bennett. But so
it is.
As the story is told to us by an eye-witness, the colonel met
the brawling coward in Wall Street, took him by the throat,
and with a cowhide striped the human parody from head to foot.
For the space of nearly twenty minutes, as we are told, did
the right arm of the colonel ply his weapon with unremitted
activity, at which time the bystanders, who evidently enjoyed
the scene mightily, interceded in behalf of the suffering,
supplicating wretch, and Webb suffered him to run.
Had it been a dog, or any other decent animal, or had the
colonel himself with a pair of good long tongs removed a
polecat from his office, we know not that we would have been so
much surprised; but that he could, by any possibility, have so
far descended from himself as to come in public contact with
the veriest reptile that ever defiled the paths of decency, we
could not have believed.
Webb’s quarrel with Bennett grew out of the _Herald’s_ financial
articles. Bennett was the first newspaperman to see the news value of
Wall Street. When he was a writer on the _Courier and Enquirer_, and
one of Webb’s most useful men, he made a study of stocks, not as a
speculator, but as an investigator. He had a taste for money matters.
In 1824, five years after his arrival in America from the land of his
birth, Scotland, he tried to establish a commercial school in New York
and to lecture on political economy. He could not make a go of it, and
so returned to newspaper work as reporter, paragrapher, and poet.
In 1828 he became Washington correspondent of the _Enquirer_, and
it was at his suggestion that Webb, in 1829, bought that paper and
consolidated it with his own _Courier_. Bennett was a Tammany Society
man, therefore a Jacksonian. He left Webb because of Webb’s support of
Nicholas Biddle, and started a Jackson organ, the _Pennsylvanian_, in
Philadelphia. This was a failure.
Meanwhile Bennett had seen the _Sun_ rise, and he felt that there
must be room for another penny paper in New York. With his knowledge
of stocks he believed that he could make Wall Street news a telling
feature. In his second issue of the _Herald_, May 11, 1835, he printed
the first money-market report, and three days later he ran a table
of sales on the Stock Exchange. At this time, and for three years
afterward, Bennett visited Wall Street daily and wrote his own reports.
His flings at the United States Bank, of which Webb’s friend Biddle
was president, and his stories of alleged stock speculations by the
colonel himself, were the cause of Webb’s animosity toward his former
associate. Bennett took Webb’s assault calmly, and even wrote it up
in the _Herald_, suggesting at the end that Webb’s torn overcoat had
suffered more damage than anything else.
Day’s quarrel with Bennett, which never reached the physical stage, was
the natural outcome of an intense rivalry among the most successful
penny papers of that period--the _Sun_, the _Herald_, and the
_Transcript_. Against the sixpenny respectables these three were one
for all and all for one, but against one another they were as venomous
as a young newspaper of that day felt that it had to be to show that it
was alive.
Day’s antagonism toward Webb was sporadic. Most of the time the young
owner of the _Sun_ treated the fiery editor of the _Courier and
Enquirer_ as flippantly as he could, knowing that Webb liked to be
taken seriously. Day’s constant _bête noire_ was the commercial and
foreign editor of Webb’s paper, Mr. Hoskin, an Englishman.
On January 21, 1836, the _Sun_ charged that Webb and Hoskin had
rigged a “diabolical plot” against it. The sixpenny papers had formed
a combination for the purpose of sharing the expense of running
horse-expresses from Philadelphia to New York, bringing the Washington
news more quickly than the penny papers could get it by mail. The _Sun_
and the _Transcript_ then formed a combination of their own, and in
this way saved themselves from being beaten on Jackson’s message, sent
to Congress in December, 1835.
In January, 1836, Jackson sent a special message to Congress. It
was delivered on Monday, the 18th, and on Wednesday, the 20th, the
_Sun_ published a column summary of it. Webb made the charge that his
messenger from Washington had been lured into Day’s offices, and that
the _Sun_ got its story by opening the package containing the message
intended for the _Courier and Enquirer._ The _Sun_ replied that it
received the message legitimately, and that the whole thing was a
scheme to discredit Mr. Day and his bookkeeper, Moses Y. Beach:
The insinuation of Webb that we violated the sanctity of a seal
we hurl back in proud defiance to his own brow.
Webb went to the police and to the grand jury, and for a few days it
looked as if the hostile editors might reach for something of larger
calibre than pens. Thus the _Sun_ of January 22:
We were informed yesterday at the police office, and
subsequently by a gentleman from Wall Street, that Webb, of
the _Courier and Enquirer_, had openly threatened to make a
personal assault upon us. It was lucky for him that we did not
hear this threat; but we can now only say that if such, or
anything similar to it, be his intention, he will find each of
the three editors of the _Sun_ always provided with a brace
of “mahogany stock” pistols, to accommodate him in any way he
likes, or may not like.
The specification of “mahogany stock” referred to Colonel Webb’s own
supposed predilection for pistols of that description. Mr. Day and his
aids may have carried these handsome weapons, but it is not on record
that they made use of them, or that they had occasion to do so. Persons
gunning for editors seemed to neglect Mr. Day in favour of Mr. Bennett.
No sooner was this fierce clash with Webb over than the _Sun_ found
itself bombarded from many sides in the war over Maria Monk. This
woman’s “Awful Disclosures” had just been published in book form
by Howe & Bates, of 68 Chatham Street, New York. They purported to
be “a narrative of her sufferings during a residence of five years
as a novice and two years as a black nun in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery
at Montreal.” On January 18, 1836, the _Sun_ began to publish these
shocking stories, in somewhat condensed and expurgated form. It did
not vouch for their truth, but declared that it printed them from an
“imperative sense of duty.” “We have no better means than are possessed
by any reader,” it cautiously added, “to decide upon their truth or
falsehood.”
The “Disclosures” ran in the _Sun_ for ten days, during which time
about one-half of the book was printed. Maria Monk herself was in
New York, and so cleverly had she devised the imposture that she was
received in good society as a martyr. Such was the public interest that
it was estimated by Cardinal Manning, in 1851, that between two hundred
and two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the volume were sold in
America and England. The Know-Nothing Party used it for political
capital, and anti-Catholic riots in several cities were the result of
its publication.
Its partial appearance in the _Sun_, while it may have helped the
circulation of the book, undoubtedly hastened the exposure of the
fraud. The editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_, William Leete Stone,
liked nothing better than to show up impostors. He had already written
a life of Matthias the Prophet, and he decided to get at the truth of
Maria Monk’s revolting story.
Stone was at this time forty-four years old. He had been editor of
the Herkimer _American_, with Thurlow Weed as his journeyman; of the
_Northern Whig_, of Hudson, New York; of the Albany _Daily Advertiser_,
and of the Hartford _Mirror_. In 1821 he came to New York and succeeded
Zachariah Lewis as editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_. As a Mason
he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the
anti-Masonic movement.
Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and Thurlow Weed
accompanied Lafayette in his tour of the United States. In 1841
President William Henry Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague,
but when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler. He was also
the first superintendent of the New York public schools--an office
which he held at the time of his death, in 1844.
Stone went to Montreal, visited the Hôtel Dieu, and minutely compared
the details set down by the Monk woman in regard to the inmates of the
nunnery and the plan of the building. The result of his investigation
was to establish the fact that the “Awful Disclosures” were fiction,
and he exposed the impostor not only in his newspaper, but in his book,
“Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hôtel Dieu.” The adherents of the
woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general belief in her fake
was not entirely dissipated for years; not even after her own evil
history was told, and after the Protestant residents of Montreal had
held a mass-meeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city prison
in New York fourteen years after she had created the most unpleasant
scandal of the time.
News matters of a genuine kind diverted the types from Maria Monk.
There was the celebrated murder of Helen Jewett, a case in which Mr.
Bennett played detective with some success, and the Alamo massacre.
Crockett, Bowie, and the rest of that band of heroes met their death on
March 6, 1836, but the details did not reach New York for more than a
month; it was April 12 when the _Sun_ gave a column to them.
Texas and the Seminole War kept the news columns full until May 10,
when Colonel Webb again pounced upon James Gordon Bennett. Said the
_Sun_:
Upon calculating the number of public floggings which that
miserable scribbler, Bennett, has received, we have pretty
accurately ascertained that there is not a square inch of his
body which has not been lacerated somewhere about fifteen
times. In fact, he has become a common flogging property; and
Webb has announced his intention to cowskin him every Monday
morning until the Fourth of July, when he will offer him a
holiday. We understand that Webb has offered to remit the
flogging upon the condition that he will allow him to shoot
him; but Bennett says:
“No; skin for skin, behold, all that a man hath will he give
for his life!”
The _Sun_ beat the town on a great piece of news that spring.
“Triumphant News from Texas! Santa Anna Captured!” the head-lines ran.
This appeared on May 18, four weeks after Sam Houston had taken the
Mexican president; but it was the first intimation New York had had of
the victory at San Jacinto.
During the investigation of the murder of Helen Jewett and the trial
of Richard P. Robinson, the suspect, the _Sun_ attacked Bennett for
the manner in which the _Herald_ handled the case. Bennett saw a good
yellow story in the murder, for the house in which the murdered girl
had lived could not be said to be questionable; there was no doubt
about its character. Bennett’s interviewing of the victim’s associates
did not please the _Sun_, which pictured the unfortunate women “mobbed
by several hundred vagabonds of all sizes and ages--amongst whom the
long, lank figure of the notorious Bennett was most conspicuous.”
When it was not Bennett, it was Colonel Webb or one of his men. The
_Sun_ went savagely after the proprietor of the _Courier and Enquirer_
because he led the hissing at the Park Theatre against Mr. and Mrs.
Joseph Wood, the English opera-singers. The offence of the Woods lay
in giving a performance on an evening when a benefit was announced for
Mrs. Conduit, another popular vocalist. The town was divided upon the
row, but as the Woods and Mrs. Conduit were all English-born, it was
not a racial feud like the Macready-Forrest affair. The _Sun_ rebuked
Colonel Webb particularly because, after booing at the Woods, he had
refused Mr. Wood’s offer to have it out over pistols and coffee.
Wood was not a lily-finger. He had been plain Joe Wood, the pugilist,
before he married the former Lady Lennox and embraced tenor song in
a serious way. Society rather took the part of the Woods, for after
the Park Theatre row a dinner in their compliment was arranged by
Henry Ogden, Robert C. Wetmore, Duncan C. Pell, John P. Hone, Carroll
Livingston, and other leading New Yorkers.
The fearlessness of the _Sun_ did not stop with saucing its
contemporaries. When Robinson was acquitted of the Jewett murder, after
a trial which the _Sun_ reported to the extent of nearly a page a day,
the _Sun_ editorially declared:
Our opinion, calmly and dispassionately formed from the
evidence, is that Richard P. Robinson is guilty of the wilful
and peculiarly atrocious murder of Helen Jewett.... Any
good-looking young man, possessing or being able to raise
among his friends the sum of fifteen hundred dollars to retain
Messrs. Maxwell, Price, and Hoffman for his counsel, might
murder any person he chose with perfect impunity.
Robinson’s acquittal was credited largely to Ogden Hoffman, whose
summing up the _Sun_ described as “the most magnificent production of
mind, eloquence, and rhetorical talent that ever resounded in a hall of
justice.” This was the Ogden Hoffman of whom Decatur said, when Hoffman
left the navy in 1816, that he regretted that the young man should have
exchanged “an honourable profession for that of a lawyer.” Hoffman
and his partner Maxwell, who shared in this tremendous fee of fifteen
hundred dollars, had been district attorneys of New York before the
time of the Jewett murder, and the _Sun_ inquired what would have been
Robinson’s fate if Hoffman, and not Phenix, had been the prosecutor.
On August 20, 1836, the _Sun_ announced that its circulation averaged
twenty-seven thousand copies daily, or fifty-six hundred more than the
combined sale of the eleven six-cent papers. Of the penny papers the
Sun credited the _Herald_ with thirty-two hundred and the _Transcript_
with ten thousand, although both these rivals claimed at least twice
as much. Columns were filled with the controversy which followed upon
the publication of these figures. The _Sun_ departed from a scholarly
argument with the _Transcript_ over the pronunciation of “elegiac,” and
denounced it as a “nestle-tripe,” whatever that was.
There was a little room left for the news. Aaron Burr’s death got a
stick; Marcy’s nomination for Governor of New York, an inch; Audubon’s
arrival in America, four lines. News that looks big now may not have
seemed so imposing then, as this _Sun_ paragraph of September 22, 1836,
would show:
Two more States are already spoken of for addition to the
Union, under the names of Iowa and Wisconsin.
Richard Adams Locke left the _Sun_ in the fall of 1836, and on October
6, in company with Joseph Price, started the _New Era_, a penny paper
for which the _Sun_ wished success. In less than a month, however,
Locke and his former employer were quarrelling about the price of meals
at the Astor House. That famous hotel was opened in May, 1836, with
all New York marvelling at the wonders of its walnut furniture, so
much nicer than the conventional mahogany! Before it was built, it was
referred to as the Park Hotel. When it opened it was called Astor’s
Hotel, but in a few months it came to be known by the name which stuck
to it until it was abandoned in 1913.
But to return to our meal. Said Mr. Locke’s _New Era_:
A paragraph is going the rounds of the papers abusing the Astor
House. Nothing can be more groundless. Where the arrangements
are complete, the charges, of course, must be corresponding. We
suppose the report has been set afloat by some person who was
kicked out for not paying his bill.
To this horrid insinuation Day replied:
The report they speak of was set afloat by ourselves, after
paying $1.25 for a breakfast for a lady and her infant a year
and a half old, served just one hour and seven minutes after
it was ordered, with coffee black as ink and without milk, and
that, too, in a room so uncleanly as to be rather offensive.
Locke wanted to make the _New Era_ another _Sun_, but he failed. His
second hoax, “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” which purported to
tell hitherto unrelated adventures of the Scottish explorer, fell down.
The public knew that the _New Era_ was edited by the author of the moon
story. When the _New Era_ died, Locke went to the Brooklyn _Eagle_,
just founded, and he succeeded Henry C. Murphy, the proprietor and
first editor, when that famous lawyer and writer was running for mayor
of Brooklyn. Locke afterward was a custom-house employee. He died on
Staten Island in 1871.
Squabbling with his former friend Locke over hotel service was no
such sport for Day as tilting at the owner of the _Herald_. The _Sun_
attacked Bennett in the fall of 1836 for his attitude toward the
Hamblin benefit. Thomas Sowerby Hamblin was made bankrupt by the Bowery
Theatre fire on September 22, for the great fires of the previous
December had ruined practically all the fire-insurance companies of
New York, and there was not a policy on the theatre which this English
actor-manager, with James H. Hackett, had made the leading playhouse
of America. Hamblin did not like Bennett’s articles and the _Sun_ thus
noted the result of them:
Alas, poor Bennett! He seems destined to be flogged into
immortal fame, and become the common buffet-block of all
mankind. Mr. Hamblin paid him a complimentary visit last
evening [November 17] in his editorial closet and lathered
him all into lumps and blotches, although the living lie was
surrounded by his minions and had a brace of loaded pistols
lying on his desk when the outraged visitor first laid hands on
him.
When the _Sun’s_ advertising business had increased until its income
from that source was more than two hundred dollars a day, it bought
two new presses of the Napier type from Robert Hoe, at a cost of seven
thousand dollars. These enabled Mr. Day to run off thirty-two hundred
papers an hour on each press. On the 2nd of January, 1837, the size
of the _Sun_ was slightly increased, about an inch being added to the
length and width of each of its four pages.
In February, 1837, the price of flour rose from the normal of about
$5.50 a barrel to double that amount. The _Sun_ declared that the
increase was not natural, but rather the result of a combination--a
suspicion which seems to have been shared by a large number of
citizens. The bread riots of February 13 and later were the result of
an agitation for lower prices.
The _Journal of Commerce_ denounced the _Sun_ as an inciter of the
riots, and suggested that the grand jury should direct its attention
toward Mr. Day. The _Sun_ not only refused to recede from its stand,
but suggested that the foreman of the grand jury, the famous Philip
Hone, had himself incited a riot--the riot against the Abolitionists,
July 11, 1834--which had a less worthy purpose than the _Sun’s_ stand
on the matter of flour prices. The _Sun_ was virtuously indignant,
even more than it had been a short time before, when the Transcript
charged the _Sun’s_ circulation man, Mr. Young, with biting two of the
_Transcript’s_ carriers!
The beginning of regular transatlantic steamship service did not find
in the _Sun_ a completely joyous welcome--thanks, perhaps, to the
temperament of Lieutenant Hosken, R.N. He was an officer of the Great
Western, a side-wheeler of no less than thirteen hundred and forty
tons, with paddles twenty-eight feet in diameter. This new ship, built
at Bristol, and a marvel of its time, reached New York, April 23, 1838,
after a passage of only sixteen days! The Sirius, another new vessel,
got in a few hours ahead of the Great Western, after a voyage of
eighteen days. The _Sun_ said of this double event:
Of the conduct of the officers in command of the Great Western,
we regret that we are compelled by reports to place it in no
very favorable contrast with the gentlemanly demeanor of the
officers of the Sirius. Every attention has been paid her,
citizens have turned out to welcome her arrival, she was
saluted by the battery on Ellis’s Island, _et cetera, et
cetera_, and thousands of other demonstrations of courtesy
were made, which proved only throwing pearls before swine.
A news boat was ordered to keep off or be run down, and
the hails of that boat and others were answered through a
speaking-trumpet in a manner which would have done toward the
savage of Nootka Sound, but is not exactly the style in which
to meet the courtesies of members of a community upon which
the line of packets depends in a large part for success. One
would have thought that all the impudence of Europe was put
on board a vessel built of large tonnage expressly for its
embarkation. By the time our corporation officers have run the
suspender-buttons off their breeches in chase of Lieutenant
Hosken, R. N., they will discover that they have been fools for
their pains.
Reverse this account entirely, and it will apply to the
Sirius--testimony which we are happy to make.
So the _Sun_ was not obsequiously grateful for the arrival of a ship
whose speed enabled it to announce on April 24 that Queen Victoria had
issued, on the 6th, the proclamation of the details of her coronation
at Westminster on June 26, and that O’Connell was taking steps to
remove the civil disabilities from the Jews.
All this time the _Sun_ was not neglecting the minor local happenings
about which its patrons liked to read. The police-courts, the theatres,
and the little scandals had their column or two.