The Steamboats
In 1809, two years after the Clermont, the brothers Winans launched a black vessel that looked like a canal boat with a smokestack and ran her between Whitehall and St Johns. She was the second commercial steamboat in the world to enter regular service, and for the next hundred and twenty-one years there was almost always a steamboat on this lake. In 1930 the company that owned nearly all of them printed a book listing every one.
This chart shows that list. Each bar is a vessel, from the year she entered service to the year she left it; the bar's thickness is her tonnage. Click one.
READ THE BOOK → PLAY THE GAME →All of the steamboats
Click a picture for the vessel, or the picture again to see it full size.
Where six steamboats ended, and where thirteen hulls lie
Most were retired, dismantled or sold off to a railroad. Six ended at a place the book names — burned at a dock, sunk on a reef, on the rocks in a gale. These are those places, not surveyed wreck positions: the book gives a place name. Where the statistical table and the narrative name different landmarks, both are quoted; in the Phoenix's case the narrative has her burning off Providence Island and the table has her sinking off Colchester Reef, three and a half miles south, and she is marked at the reef, where the wreck lies.
Of the four in Shelburne Bay, Ross states only that they were retired; they are on the bottom off Shelburne Shipyard, and they have been surveyed. They are drawn as one mark because they are one site — four hulls lying together in about ten feet (3 m) of water.
The hollow rings show something different: nine wrecks that divers go down to, plotted where the hull is rather than where a writer said it went down. Two of them are boats this map already places from the book, and where both exist a dashed line joins them, 5.2 km (3.2 miles) for the Phoenix and 5.2 km for the Champlain II. Neither end of those lines is wrong: Ross named the water a boat sank in and did not give a position. The other six are not in his book at all, because he wrote about steamboats and these are the working craft the steamboats towed: a horse ferry, three canal boats, a coal barge, and a boat carrying quarried stone. This is Vermont’s Underwater Historic Preserve program, nine sites; the lake’s wrecks run to several hundred and are counted on the wreck census.
The nine wrecks in the Underwater Historic Preserves
4–5 September 1819
The burning of the Phoenix
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Shelburne Shipyard
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Four eras
They are Ross's own divisions. The third division is the sharpest: between 1837 and 1875 the boats roughly triple in tonnage and stop being replaced every eight years, because by then a steamboat was a railway's feeder rather than the fastest way to move anything.