Tod & Macgregor Shiplist

Notes:

          The Blenheim was built for Langtry & Herdman in 1848. She was one of the outstanding cross-channel steamers of her time, with an iron hull some 210 ft in length, a clipper bow, and two funnels aft of her paddle-boxes. Her accommodation was good. Her saloon was rich in Victoriana, such as carved rosewood panels, crimson damask covers on the cushions and walls adorned with paintings of Blenheim, Ramilles, Vienna and Ulm. Her steerage accommodation earned this comment from the Belfast Newsletter: ‘we are glad to see that deck passengers have been looked at – a number of arrangements including a capacious steerage being made to promote their comfort’.

          The Blenheim was transferred to the Belfast SS Co. when the owners went out of business in 1859 after which she continued on the Belfast-Liverpool route until 1862. Later that same year, she was chartered to the Great Eastern Railway for the opening of the Harwich-Rotterdam cargo service, the forerunner of the present Harwich-Hook of Holland route to the Continent.

          The fourteen years spent by the Blenheim in the Belfast-Liverpool trade were years of change during which she ran either alongside or in competition with at least fourteen other steamers. For her first two years she shared traffic with the Athlone of the City of Dublin SP Co. This peaceful existence was broken by the arrival of the Waterford SS Co’s Camilla in March 1850. For the next seven years conditions were very unsettled with outbreaks of intense competition between five companies which at one time or another competed for the Belfast-Liverpool traffic in this period. In 1857 the two survivors, Messrs Langtry & Herdman and the Belfast SS Co., came to terms, and two years later the former retired leaving the Belfast SS Co with a complete monopoly. Thus the Blenheim began her career at the close of the Langtry/City of Dublin monopoly and ended it with the beginning of the Belfast SS Co.’s supremacy in the Belfast-Liverpool trade. She was the only steamer to have survived the ‘Seven Years War’!

[Irish Passenger Steamship Services, D.B. McNeill]

          Her interesting life did not stop then! Richard Eustace bought this beautiful ship in 1864. He used her as a blockade runner between October 1864 and January 1865, making four successful runs; Nov 5th 1864, to Wilmington North Carolina out of Nassau, returning on the 18th; Dec 4th 1864 to Wilmington North Carolina out of Nassau returning on the 15th. On the fifth run she was captured by the Tristram Shandy in New Inlet after the fall of Fort Fisher in the 25th of January 1865.

          A story of her last successful trip is laid out below:

The following description of James Robert Gordon (Planter; U.S. Senator)'s late Civil War experience is from William A. Tidwell, Come Retribution, p. 406: "Jefferson Davis persuaded him to go to England in 1864 to help arrange the purchase of a privateer. Gordon's return was delayed when he contracted yellow fever at Bermuda. He finally reached Wilmington aboard the blockade runner Blenheim which steamed blithely into port on the night of 24 January 1865 without the captain being aware that Fort Fisher had been captured by a federal amphibious force on 15 January. The next morning the vessel was taken as a prize, and the crew was removed to Old Point Comfort, Virginia.

http://homepage.mac.com/bfthompson/Miller_family/ps02_241.html

          The story of the capture is laid out below:

"Shortly after dawn, a boarding party from USS Tristram Shandy, Acting Lieutenant Francis M. Green, seized blockade running steamer Blenheim just inside the bar at New Inlet, North Carolina. Blenheim had run into the approach to Wilmington unaware that Federal forces now controlled the area and anchored off the Mound battery. "At the time of boarding," Green reported, "they were endeavouring to get the vessel underway." Blenheim was the third prize to be lured into Union hands by the Confederate range lights at the Mound which Rear Admiral Porter had kept burning."

http://www.multied.com/Navy/cwnavalhistory/January1865.html http://www.historycentral.com/NAVY/cwnavalhistory/January1865.html

          She was sold to private interests and renamed Richmond. She was burned on 12th of November 1866, at Baltimore, Maryland.

[Lifeline of the Confederacy, Stephen R. Wise]