Illustration of the "terrible conflagration" of a steamboat explosion from 1856.

Dickens made a trip from Pittsburgh down past Louisville to the Mississippi on the Ohio River, which he recorded in evocative detail in his American Notes. Granted, he sounds like a bit of pansie, but his descriptions of the danger of the ships is fascinating. The furnace and all its machinery were open to the passengers, who according to Dickens, often found themselves proximity to its fires.

Worse, according to the newspaper report from 1838 at the right, there was a real misalignment of incentives for boat captains. The safety of the ships was inversely correlated with their speed. The more steam that the captains could “hold onto” the more pressure would exist and the faster the boat could go. But a little too much pressure and — BANG! — you’ve got a boiler bomb.

Dickens, with far greater command of the English language:

“…these western vessels are still more foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats.  I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.

“In the first place, they have no mast, cordage, tackle, rigging, or other such boat-like gear; nor have they anything in their shape at all calculated to remind one of a boat’s head, stem, sides, or keel.  Except that they are in the water, and display a couple of paddle-boxes, they might be intended, for anything that appears to the contrary, to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountain top.  There is no visible deck, even:  nothing but a long, black, ugly roof covered with burnt-out feathery sparks; above which tower two iron chimneys, and a hoarse escape valve, and a glass steerage-house.  Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the staterooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men:  the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water’s edge:  and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge’s deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path.

“Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood:  the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck:  under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months’ standing:  one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that any journey should be safely made.”