Part 22

His next great stride was the new 'pole-puffer-engine' of 1816, in connection with which squabbles arose between the engineer and his relations, Henry Harvey and Andrew Vivian, both of whom were said to have been moved to jealousy by Trevithick's having arranged to get the castings for the first of these engines (viz., that for Wheal Herland, near Gwinear) made at Bridgenorth, instead of at Hayle. The first trial of the new engine, when at length set up, seems to have been somewhat of a failure, owing to the inaccurate way in which it was made. Here is an eye-witness's amusing account of its starting:

'I was a boy working in the mine, and several of us peeped in at the door to see what was doing. Captain Dick Trevithick was in a great way; the engine would not start. After a bit, Captain Dick threw himself down upon the floor of the engine-house, and there he lay upon his back; then up he jumped, and snatched a sledge-hammer out of the hands of a man who was driving in a wedge, and lashed it in, in a minute. There never was a man could use a sledge like Captain Dick; he was as strong as a bull. Then he picked up a spanner, and unscrewed something, and--off she went! Captain Vivian was near me, looking in at the doorway. Captain Dick saw him, and, shaking his fist, said, "If you come in here, I'll throw you down the shaft." I suppose Captain Vivian had something to do with making the boilers, and Captain Dick was angry because they leaked clouds of steam. You could hardly see, or hear anybody speak in the engine-house, it was so full of steam and noise; we could hear the steam-puffer roaring at St. Erth, more than three miles off.'

Another altercation on the subject of this engine took place at a meeting of the Wheal Herland adventurers, when Trevithick said: 'I could not help threatening to horsewhip Joseph Price for the falsehoods that he, with the others, had reported. I hear that he is to go to London to meet the London Committee on Monday. I hope the Committee will consider J. Price's report as from a disappointed man. It is reported that he has bought very largely in Woolf's patent, which now is not worth a farthing, besides losing the making my castings, which galls him very sorely.'

The final result was that the Wheal Herland engine proved a great success.

'Every engine that _was_ erecting is stopped, and the whole county thinks of no other engine,' wrote its engineer; and that Trevithick had 'the courage of his convictions' may be judged from his saying: 'I have offered to deposit £1,000 to £500 as a bet against Woolf's best engine, and give him 20,000,000 (lbs. "duty"), but that party refuses to accept the challenge.' Indeed, Mr. Francis Trevithick claims that '_This engine performed the same work as the Watt engine, with less than half of the daily coal_.'

It would, in fact, be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Richard Trevithick's contributions to this branch of applied mechanics; and had he been as prudent in his management of his business affairs, and as sharp in looking after his pecuniary interests as he was brimful of talent in his scientific inventions, it would never have been necessary for the late Mr. Michael Williams, M.P.,[154] to write of him that 'he was at the same time the greatest and the worst-used man in the county.'

Such was Trevithick's position when he had reached the age of forty-five. Sanguine, impetuous, and brilliant--no sooner finishing one invention than commencing another (nay, sometimes before he had thoroughly completed the first)--a benefactor of incalculable extent to the prosperity of his native county, but so unsuspecting and so indifferent to his own, that he turned at length to the New World for the appreciation and reward that he had failed to secure in the Old.

The circumstances which led to this determination are somewhat curious. A desire having been felt amongst several wealthy Spaniards in Peru to rework certain of the old gold and silver mines which required draining, Don Francisco de Uville, of Lima, a Swiss gentleman, was sent to England to search for the best steam pumping-engines for their purpose. The names of Messrs. Boulton and Watt were so famous, that, almost as a matter of course, he first consulted them; but they discouraged the project, mainly on the grounds that the rare atmosphere of the Cordilleras would interfere with the efficiency of the steam-engine. Thus rebuffed, and much dejected, he chanced to see in the window of a shop, near the spot where the 'Catch-me-who-can' had been exhibited, a small model of one of Richard Trevithick's engines, which he at once secured for £20, and hastened back with it to Peru. Arriving there, he at once put its powers to the test, and was delighted to find that Boulton and Watt's doleful prophecies were not fulfilled. Accordingly he forthwith returned to England with the model, which bore Trevithick's name engraved on it, in search of the engineer who had constructed the wonderful machine, and had the good luck to find on board the same ship as that in which he made the voyage a cousin of Trevithick's--a Mr. Teague--who at once put the Don on the right track. Satisfactory interviews ensued, large orders for engines were put in hand--pumping-engines, winding-engines, sugar-rolling engines, and crushing-engines, to the tune of some £16,000. The anticipated profits were £50,000 a year, and Trevithick was to be paid, not in money, unluckily for him, but in shares, which were to secure to him an income of £10,000 per annum.

At length the engines duly arrived at Lima, and were landed under a salute from the guns of the batteries. But things did not work well. The men sent out were unaccustomed to the use of wood-fires, and they failed to carry out all Trevithick's instructions, whereupon he himself resolved upon going to the rescue; and accordingly he sailed from Penzance in a South Sea whaler, the _Asp_, on 20th October, 1816, intending to land at Buenos Ayres and work his way across the South American continent--an undertaking which, in those days, it need scarcely be added, was of a most formidable character, and no doubt, therefore, was all the more attractive to the remarkable man whose career we have been considering.

On his arrival in Peru, he was received with almost royal honours, and, at once getting to work, soon set matters to rights; for by the early part of 1817 there were four engines at work, including that used for coining at the Mint. An immediate collapse of the whole undertaking would probably have been the result but for the timely arrival of 'Don Ricardo,' as he was styled by the natives. Amongst the difficulties to be overcome in this enterprise may be mentioned those of transit, and these may be estimated from the facts that the Cerro de Pasco Mines were 170 miles from Lima, that the roads were for the most part mule-tracks only, and that the site was 13,400 feet above the sea! No wonder that, on his eventually triumphing over all these difficulties, thoughts were seriously entertained of erecting a statue to him in solid silver, and that, according to Mr. Walker's memoir, he was made a Marquis and Grandee of Spain. But the whole scheme was unhappily doomed to failure. Deaths and dissensions took place amongst the shareholders; Uville died in August, 1818, and the whole brunt of the management fell upon Trevithick. He now, too, foolishly engaged in other undertakings whilst his hands were already sufficiently full, and lost large sums of money in a speculative process for extracting silver by smelting instead of by amalgamation. Then a war of independence broke out, and poor Trevithick had the mortification of learning that the Royalists had actually destroyed his machinery, and flung it--where he had so often before threatened to fling _his_ enemies--'down into the shafts.'[155]

This was the death-blow of the affair, and he immediately set to work on a fresh venture, namely, the raising of the cannon from a Russian ship which had been sunk near Callao. By this he readily made no less than £2,500, but--will it be believed?--he forthwith lost it all by an imprudent speculation in a pearl-fishery at Panama! Some of the money would have been particularly acceptable to poor Mrs. Trevithick, whom her thriftless husband had left at Penzance unprovided for; in fact, he omitted (doubtless from sheer thoughtlessness) to pay, as he had promised to do, the house-rent a year in advance for her. Another curious instance of Trevithick's utter incapacity for understanding business matters appears in the following anecdote. Being very hardly pressed for payment of some account due from him, he snatched the bill from his creditor, and writing, 'Received--Richard Trevithick,' at the foot of it, handed it back to the poor man with an angry exclamation, in his strong Cornish dialect, of 'There! will that satisfy you?'

A strange episode in his career now occurs. Bolivar actually pressed him as a soldier; but Trevithick soon 'tir'd of war's alarms,' and the President readily allowed him to return to more congenial pursuits, sending him on some special mission to Bogota--yet not before Trevithick had signalized his connexion with the army by inventing a most ingenious carbine with an explosive bullet. Whilst in South America he also became, for the nonce, a surgeon, and actually amputated both legs of a poor fellow crushed by the fall of some of Trevithick's heavy machinery. The man was very proud of what he had undergone, and used to boast of his capital stumps.

Having previously paid a short visit to Chili, Trevithick (who had now lost all his property) finally left Peru in 1822, on the above-named special mission; but, distrustful of Bolivar's promises and hearing of something more to his advantage, as he considered, he made his way to certain rich mines that he had heard of in Costa Rica instead. Thither--to that region of snakes, miasma, and earth-quakes--we must now follow him.

There were known to be rich mines of the precious metals near Quebradahonda, in the interior of the little tract of mountainous country which forms part of the narrow belt of land connecting North and South America; but the difficulties of access in 1826-27 rendered them almost valueless, and Trevithick and his party conceived the idea of approaching them from the Atlantic side, by a route which should be practicable for steam conveyances--namely, by way of San Juan (now Greytown) and the rivers San Juan de Nicaragua and Serapique. Rafts and boats were constructed for the descent of those streams, and fearful hardships and dangers befell the explorers--who were bent upon accomplishing a somewhat similar task in Central America to that which Lander had performed a few years before in Western Africa. Three weeks were spent in accomplishing their object--during which the little party subsisted on monkeys and wild fruits; and more than once Trevithick, an indifferent swimmer, but who managed to buoy himself up by bundles of sticks which he placed under his arms, was nearly drowned. He had however, at length the gratification of reaching San Juan--the first European who had made the voyage from Lake Nicaragua to the sea.

By some means or other he contrived to reach Cartagena (de las Indias) on his homeward journey, disconsolate enough no doubt; but what befell him on his way is best told in the following letter:

'Stanwick, Cumberland, 27th November, 1864.

'SIR,

'I read in the public prints that in a speech made by you in Belle Vue Gardens you referred to the meeting of Robert Stephenson with Trevithick at Carthagena, which, if your speech be correctly reported, you attribute to accident. The meeting was not an accident, although an accident led to it, and that accident nearly cost Mr. Trevithick his life; and he was taken to Carthagena by the gentleman that saved him, that he might be restored. When Mr. Stephenson saw him he was so recovering; and if he looked, as you say, in a sombre and silent mood, it was not surprising, after being, as he said, "half drowned and half hanged, and the rest devoured by alligators," which was too near the fact to be pleasant. Mr. Trevithick had been upset at the mouth of the river Magdalena by a black man he had in some way offended, and who capsized the boat in revenge. An officer in the Venezuelan and the Peruvian services (Mr. Bruce Napier) was fortunately nigh the banks of the river shooting wild pigs. He heard Mr. Trevithick's cries for help, and seeing a large alligator approaching him, shot the reptile in the eye, and then, as he had no boat, lassoed Mr. Trevithick, and by his lasso drew him ashore much exhausted and all but dead. After doing all he could to restore him, he took him on to Carthagena, and thus it was he fell in with Mr. Stephenson, who, like most Englishmen, was reserved, and took no notice of Mr. Trevithick, until an officer said to him, meeting Mr. Stephenson at the door, "I suppose the old proverb of two of a trade cannot agree is true, by the way you keep aloof from your brother chip. It was not thus your father would have treated that worthy man, and it is not creditable to your father's son that he and you should be here day after day like two strange cats in a garret; it would not sound well at home." "Who is it?" said Mr. Stephenson. "_The inventor of the locomotive_, your father's friend and fellow-worker; his name is Trevithick--you may have heard it," said the officer; and then Mr. Stephenson went up to Trevithick. That Mr. Trevithick felt the previous neglect was clear. He had sat with Robert Stephenson on his knee many a night while talking to his father, and it was through him Robert was made an engineer. My informant states that there was not that cordiality between them he would have wished to see at Carthagena.

'The officer that rescued Mr. Trevithick is now living. I am sure he will confirm what I say if needful. A letter will find him if addressed to No. 4, Earl Street, Carlisle, Cumberland.

'There are more details, but I cannot state them in a letter, and you might not wish to hear them if I could.

'I am, sir, 'Your very obedient servant, 'JAMES FAIRBAIRN,

who writes as well as rheumatic gout will let him.

'P.S.--I forgot to say the name of the officer is Hall.

'To E. W. Watkin, Esq., M.P.'

On recognising Stephenson, Trevithick is said to have exclaimed, 'Is that Bobby!--I've nursed him many a time.' The younger engineer had £100 in his pocket, and generously gave his senior half of it to facilitate his return to England, which Trevithick shortly afterwards accomplished, by way of Jamaica, in the autumn of 1827, landing at Falmouth on the 9th October, after a weary, anxious absence of eleven years. His health does not seem to have been much injured; but his belongings were simply the clothes he stood upright in, a gold watch, a pair of dividers, a magnetic needle, and a pair of spurs. A friend had to pay his passage-money before he could leave the ship which brought him home.

But he had the happiness of finding his wife and their family of four sons and two daughters all well. The Church bells rang out a merry peal of welcome; and he was entertained at the houses of all the principal people in the county. A great deal was said of the handsome remuneration which was due to him for having been the means, through his many inventions, of saving Cornwall half a million of money,--but little or nothing seems to have come of all the talk; and when he claimed £1,000 from each of the leading mines which had adopted his machinery, they seem--so far as I can ascertain, with one exception only--to have repudiated them. The exception to which I refer was a compromise of his claims by the Messrs. Williams, of Scorrier, in respect of certain mines in which they were interested, for the sum of £150. Nor was his petition to Parliament, dated 27th February, 1828, setting forth his many truly _national_ claims for consideration, and containing an interesting summary of his inventions (but unfortunately too long to reproduce here), more successful.

Trevithick was now verging upon sixty years of age, and found that he had to begin life anew. His first endeavour was to form a company to work his mines in Costa Rica, but neither he nor his friend Gerard could succeed in doing this either in England, in France, or in Holland; and, if the report be true that he refused a cheque for £8,000 for his share in the mine-grants, he must have lived to repent it bitterly. However, his busy brain was soon at work again with inventions. First an iron ship and a gun with friction-slides; then a recoil gun-carriage, in which he utilized the recoil somewhat after the manner since so effectually accomplished by Moncrieff; then we find him suggesting a mode of making ice by steam. Next he invents a chain-and-ball pump for draining the Dutch marshes; and, soon after, we hear of his being employed by the Government of that country to examine into sundry important engineering works which they had in hand, whilst poor Trevithick had to borrow £2 from a friend to enable him to get over to Holland for the purpose. It may be mentioned, to show what a good-natured fellow he was, that he at once gave 5s. out of this to a poor neighbour who had had the misfortune to lose his pig.

During a great part of this period of his life Trevithick was at Hayle Foundry, engaged in the construction of the great draining engines for Holland; but he, nevertheless, found time for further inventions, notably for applying tubular boilers, a superheating system, and surface-condensers to marine engines, to say nothing of his proposals to make the same water act over and over again by alternate expansion and contraction, so as to avoid the objectionable necessity for using salt water in the boilers. By his method marine engines occupied only half their former space; were half the weight; and consumed half the fuel that they formerly did: and it would scarcely be too much to say that his genius rendered the first voyage across the Atlantic practicable. In connexion with this subject, he took out his eighth and last patent in 1832.

Perhaps his latest project was as original--not to say Utopian--as any that even his fertile brain ever conceived. It was to erect a perforated, gilt, cast-iron column, 1,000 feet high, to commemorate the passing of the Reform Bill. One novel feature in it was the air-elevator, which worked in a tube in the centre of the column, and shot the traveller from the base to the summit, on arriving at which he was to secure a glorious bird's-eye view of London.

But the end was approaching. He had been in indifferent health in the spring of 1830; and, although his son does not state the causes of his father's death, there is too much ground to fear that poverty and misery at least accelerated it. He was at work in April, 1833, in Messrs. Hall's factory, at Dartford, Kent, probably on one of his marine engines, when, on the 22nd of that month, somewhat suddenly--for his relations knew nothing of his illness--the great engineer died. He was penniless, and was indebted to charity for his grave, and to the mechanics of Messrs. Hall's factory for becoming the bearers and the only mourners at his simple funeral.

Unless a tombstone has lately been erected, Richard Trevithick furnishes another example of one of Cornwall's most illustrious sons being without a monument to mark where he lies. Is this creditable to the county, or the country, in which he was born, or to the age which he so much enriched by the versatile power of his genius?

Since the above was written,--and also since the date of a letter which I sent to the Cornish papers in June, 1881, calling attention to the facts above referred to,--endeavours have been made to procure some fitting record in Cornwall in honour of Trevithick's memory; and an influential meeting on the subject was held in London on 20th April, 1883.

FOOTNOTES:

[141] A work to which I beg to acknowledge my indebtedness for the main facts of this notice.

[142] On her wedding finger-ring (the internal diameter of which was 7/8ths of an inch!) her husband had rudely engraved the pretty old English posy:

'God above Increase our love.'

[143] A very remarkable man. Being anxious to ascertain how castings were made, in order to substitute cast-iron pumps for the bored wooden tubes formerly in use in the Cornish mines, he went 'up the country' for the purpose; but was refused admittance into any of the foundries, until he hit upon the expedient of dressing himself in rags and feigning to be half-witted, whereupon he gained employment as a sort of messenger to the workmen, and thus got an opportunity of acquiring the much-desired information.

[144] Still largely in use, in almost precisely the form in which he designed it in 1797.

[145] Cf. Gregory's 'Mechanics;' Ree's 'Cyclopædia;' and Stuart's 'History of the Steam Engine;' Luke Hebert on 'Railways;' Lean's 'Historical Account of the Steam Engine in Cornwall;' Davies Gilbert's 'Observations on the Steam Engine,' in _Philosophical Transactions_, 25 Jan., 1827; 'Memoirs of Distinguished Men of Science in 1807-8,' by Wm. Walker, junr.; R. Edmonds, junr.'s 'Contributions to the Biography of R. Trevithick;' the _Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal_ for Oct., 1859; and _All the Year Round_, 4th Aug., 1860:--for much valuable technical, and other, information on the subject of Trevithick's inventions.

[146] Cf. _Engineering_, 27th March, 1868--'Trevithick was the real inventor of the locomotive;' also Zerah Colburn's 'History of the Locomotive,' p. 13 (ed. 1871); and O. D. Hedley's 'Who invented the Locomotive?' (ed. 1858). The second model had a horizontal instead of a vertical cylinder. His locomotive of 1804, built at Newcastle-on-Tyne, was specially fitted with flanged wheels for running on a railway.

[147] Sir Humphry Davy spoke of these machines more euphemistically as Trevithick's 'dragons.'

[148] Trevithick was born April 13th, 1771, and died April 22nd, 1833. George Stephenson was born June 9th, 1781, and died Aug. 12th, 1848.

[149] Viz., not until 1814--twelve years after Trevithick's locomotive.

[150] Brunel, who afterwards constructed the Thames Tunnel, at Wapping, is said to have formed the highest opinion of Trevithick's inventive skill in this operation. (It had been previously attempted by Dodd.) Trevithick very nearly lost his life when the water flooded the driftway, owing to his insisting upon seeing all his men safely out before him.

[151] Trevithick's claim to the invention of the screw-propeller was disputed.

[152] Earlier attempts were made in 1788 and 1803. The first remunerative steamboat for passengers seems to have been the _Comet_, which ran, in 1812, between Glasgow and Helensburgh, on the Clyde.

[153] 'The next step was to call in the aid of Steam to Agriculture. Steam is almost an Englishman.'--_Emerson._

[154] Trevithick, before leaving England for South America in 1816 being pressed for money, sold a half share of his patent in the high-pressure steam expansive pole-engine to Messrs. Williams, of Scorrier, for £200. He remained abroad for ten years.

[155] Some of the remains of the machinery were seen lying about on the mountain-sides in 1850.

_VIVIAN_,

THE SOLDIER.

_VIVIAN_,

THE SOLDIER.

'See! through the battle's lurid haze, How Vivian, as the trumpet blew, Led the last charge at Waterloo.'

H. S. STOKES: _Rhymes from Cornwall_.