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  • The New England Steamship Company: Long Island Sound Night Boats in the Twentieth Century
  • John K. Brown (bio)
The New England Steamship Company: Long Island Sound Night Boats in the Twentieth Century. By Edwin L. Dunbaugh . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xii+406. $59.95.

Quite frequently, the history of technology plays out in two parallel worlds; the literature for fans and enthusiasts seldom overlaps the studies of professional [End Page 466] scholars. This account of overnight steamboat service between New York and Boston clearly aims to satisfy the aficionados of this bygone era. As such, it is long on narrative (really chronology) and short on context or analysis. There are essentially no notes and no sources outside the fan literature. But the book is well written, it offers encyclopedic coverage of the vessels in this trade, and it suggests some fascinating insights into the lost world that Edwin Dunbaugh forthrightly admits to loving (p. xii). He is well qualified for this work, having published a predecessor volume to this study, Night Boat to New England, 1815–1900 (1992). The present volume was copublished with the Steamship Historical Society, a venerable organization of amateurs dedicated to preserving steamboat history.

If they were to read it, academic historians would likely be surprised by the book's starting point. In the Progressive Era, an average of more than 2,500 people a day chose to travel between New York and Boston by steamboat rather than taking the direct rail service that connected those cities at a notable savings in time, fares, and trouble. Dunbaugh makes no attempt to explain this anachronism beyond suggesting that an elite class preferred the boat. But he does explore some related ironies: it was the New Haven Railroad that controlled both the steamer lines and the all-rail route. The railroad inherited its marine operations from predecessor firms and it had little interest in running the steamboats, but it continued those operations for as long as the profits lasted—until the mid-1930s.

A second notable irony was that the most popular marine route, the Fall River Line, took its Boston-bound passengers on palatial overnight steamers that departed from a Hudson River pier in Manhattan at 6:00 PM, but went only as far as the protected waters of Narragansett Bay. After a 5:30 AM arrival at Fall River, Massachusetts, the voyagers ended up on a train anyway. This routing avoided the hazards and distance of the open-water voyage around Cape Cod. Just how popular this steamer/rail connection was, compared to the direct rail route, is ignored: the book has no data on comparative loadings or even comparative ticket costs. It was an elite, be they vacationers or business travelers, who preferred the steamers. But one senses a much more complex explanation. Evidently this elite highly valued its own conceptions of time and genteel surroundings and its own traditions in the face of modernity as represented by the train.

The book mostly focuses on the ships, routes, and evolving lines that provided steamer services out of New York City to various ports on Long Island Sound—and the eventual success of a direct steamship service to Boston after the Cape Cod Canal opened in 1916. Beyond that, there is some treatment of J. P. Morgan, the power behind the New Haven Railroad and its monopolistic policies. Dunbaugh also considers the anomalous regulatory stance of the Interstate Commerce Commission in allowing a single company to dominate the marine and rail links between these two major cities. He details the numerous start-up steamer lines that rose to challenge the [End Page 467] monopoly, often with some success. Anyone with training in business history will wonder why Morgan attempted a high-seas oligopoly (International Mercantile Marine) at exactly the same moment when the steamer trade on Long Island Sound demonstrated very low barriers to entry.

The New England Steamship Company offers nearly encyclopedic coverage, real depth being impossible given the lack of corporate papers and other relevant primary sources. It is easily criticized for its oversight of the contextual issues important to historians of technology, but the fact is that business...

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