Read (in open-access) in the August issue of the IJMH the article by James P. Delgado: “SS Albatross: An unfortunate steamship”

The short career of the Philadelphia-built coastal steamship Albatross (1850–1853) offers an instructive look at speculation, financing and operating a steamer in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. This was a period of rapid change, financial booms and busts, and business failures. Albatross was built for a short-lived route between Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina, which failed. With a change in ownership and a new home port of New York, it did not last long in its next venture, connecting New York with Halifax, Charlottetown and Quebec. Its final service in a speculative steamship line that proposed to open a competitive route across Mexico’s ‘Isthmus of Tehuantepec’ ended in disaster. That shipwreck may have been a deliberate accident to capitalize on insurance. Albatross’s career exemplifies not only the vagaries of speculative steamship ownership and operation, but also the often shady nature of mid-nineteenth-century speculation and business practices.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08438714251349348