Origins of Transatlantic Company / 1

The Spanish Transatlantic Company has been the company where my entire professional life has taken place, on whose ships I started as a Nautical student in the mid-fifties of the last century, until I was appointed to command the last passenger ships and held various positions on land, in Madrid, Italy, and Portugal. For all this, talking about Transatlantic means rewinding in time, going back a bit to my youth through a multitude of memories, not devoid of some shadows but with a clear predominance of many bright lights.

I believe that one cannot talk about the Transatlantic Company without mentioning the man who made it possible, who drove it and placed it among the great maritime companies in the world and who, when the time came, did not hesitate to put it at risk, just as his successor did later in an armed confrontation of our old and outdated – I say this with pain – Spanish nation against a young emerging and expansionist republic, the United States – formed by the independent British territories and at the expense of the Spanish/Mexican in North America – which, after a few decades, would become the world's leading power.

Many years ago, an illustrious captain of the Transatlantic Company, Víctor Pérez Vizcaíno, then in command of the mixed motor vessel Covadonga, commented to me during one of his visits to the ship's bridge during my watch: “This ship is the Spanish Queen Mary.” Without forcing the facts and keeping the distances, a certain parallel can be established in the origins and even in the trajectory and respective objectives between the Spanish Transatlantic Company and the British Cunard Steamship Co.

An Irish family of German roots, Quaker by religious confession and with the surname Cunard, had emigrated to Philadelphia in the second half of the 17th century. After the war (1775-1783) and the agreement in Versailles by which Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States, the Cunards moved to Canada. Samuel Cunard was born in Halifax in 1787, the son of a carpenter who managed to make a modest fortune trading in timber. Over time, Cunard succeeded his father and as a wood supplier for shipbuilding, he soon became involved in the shipping industry.

In 1819, Samuel Cunard secured a contract from the British government to transport mail on light sailing ships from Saint John, Newfoundland, to Boston and Bermuda. A little more than a decade later, in 1830, he was a founding partner and director of the Halifax Steamship Company, which, with the first steamship from Nova Scotia, inaugurated a service in Canada linking Halifax with Dartmouth. In 1838, the British government put out to tender the transatlantic mail transport between the United Kingdom and America. Cunard traveled to London and submitted his bid: three paddlewheel steamers, 800 GRT and 300 HP to provide the service, at a total cost to the government of £55,000.

Having been awarded the contract, Samuel Cunard commissioned the construction of four wooden-hulled ships, with mixed sail and steam propulsion, with paddlewheels, 1,150 GRT and a speed of 9 knots. This is the starting point of Cunard Steamship Navigation Co. In 1840, the first steamship of what would eventually become the world's most important shipping company, the Britannia, inaugurated the first regular transatlantic passenger and cargo service, departing from Liverpool to Halifax and Boston. In 1859, Cunard was ennobled by Queen Victoria with the title of baronet, henceforth Sir Samuel Cunard. He passed away in 1865 in London. His shipping company built and owned many of the largest and most successful transatlantic liners of all time and still maintains a prominent presence in the field of tourism cruises.

Antonio López y López was born in Comillas, Cantabria, in 1817, into a humble family and became orphaned of his father when he was barely two years old. Still very young, at 10 years old, he moved to work in Andalusia and at the early age of 14 embarked on the uncertain path of emigration to Cuba in search of fortune, where he worked as a general laborer for a whole decade. His first significant business consisted of a shipment of flour from Santander that he sold in Havana in 1841. Three years later, he registered as a small independent merchant in Santiago de Cuba, where he ran a haberdashery.

From 1845, Antonio López traveled several times to Spain, where he would eventually settle permanently in 1853, but before that, in 1849, he established a company in Cuba dedicated to coastal navigation, Antonio López y hermano, which a year later would be authorized by the Spanish government to operate a cargo and passenger line between Santiago de Cuba and Havana. To this end, López acquired a wooden-hulled steamer, named General Armero, of 716 GRT and 51.8 m in length, built in Philadelphia, which would be the first ship powered by a propeller, registered in Havana, flying the Spanish flag. On its route, it made stops in Guantánamo, Nuevitas, and Gibara.

The steamer "General Armero" flew the password of Antonio López in 1850

In March 1858, the last section of the Madrid-Alicante railway, driven by the Marquis of Salamanca, was completed. Shortly before, in 1857, the firm Antonio López y Cía. was established in Madrid with its headquarters in Alicante, whose primary objective was to open a shipping line between this port and Marseille, to connect with the new railway and thus facilitate the transit of passengers and goods, significantly reducing the time from more than seven days by stagecoach from Madrid to Paris to just over four, bringing it closer to the heart of Europe. At the head of his new company, Antonio López commissioned the shipyard of the Denny Brothers in Dumbarton, Scotland, to build three steamers of 1,350 to 1,900 GRT, named Marsella, Madrid, and Alicante, delivered, in this order, between 1855 and 1858, which successfully initiated passenger and cargo service. Thus was born the company that a few decades later would become the Spanish Transatlantic Company.

In 1859, when the first war in Africa against Morocco broke out, the steamers of López y Cía. were used by the Spanish Navy as troop transports. In 1861, the company created by Antonio López seemed to have reached maturity, so to speak, when the Spanish government awarded him the contract for communications between Spain and Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. To meet the new transatlantic commitments, López acquired seven ships from the fleet of the Trasatlantique Bèlge, recently declared bankrupt, and again turned to the Denny shipyard in Dumbarton to build two new steamers of 3,800 GRT, the Antonio López and the Príncipe Alfonso. With all of them, López's shipping company participated in the transport and landing of troops and civilian personnel in Santo Domingo, a nation that was reincorporated – albeit briefly – to the Crown of Spain in that same year of 1861. The Spanish government would also require López's Atlantic fleet, now made up of nine steamers, to transport in hundreds of trips more than 400,000 soldiers with their equipment during the Long War of Cuba in the decade 1868/78.

At that time, the future marquis began to develop an ambitious project for the development of a shipbuilding industry in Spain, which would crystallize in the construction of the Matagorda dock in Cádiz, initially for the repair and maintenance of his ships. The dock was inaugurated on July 3, 1878, with the entry of the steamer Guipúzcoa. That same year, King Alfonso XII granted the Comillano the marquisate of Comillas. The shipping company created by López then had thirteen excellent mail steamers, and regarding the Matagorda factory, from the initial 200 workers, it already had a workforce of 1,200 by 1881, which gave a considerable economic boost to the depressed situation of the Cádiz province. In July 1892, the Matagorda factory would deliver to the Transatlantic Company the first steamship built in Spain, the mail ship Joaquín del Piélago of 841 GRT, 14 knots of speed, and capacity for 80 passengers, destined for the Cádiz-Tangier line.

On June 1, 1881, the Spanish Transatlantic Company S.A. was officially established in Barcelona, heir and successor to Antonio López y Cía., and in November, the Marquis of Comillas, still tireless, created the General Tobacco Company of the Philippines, which would come to employ five thousand people and have its own fleet of steamers.

Antonio López passed away on January 16, 1883, just before turning 66 years old. When King Alfonso XII learned of the event, he stated: “Spain has lost one of the men who has rendered her the greatest services.” The extraordinary natural intelligence for business and the entrepreneurial, bold, and determined spirit of Comillano Antonio López, like that of Samuel Cunard, allowed him to encompass many facets and business activities, almost always successful, from small trade in Cuba to the shipping sector and shipbuilding, through mining, banking, railroads, tobacco, etc., but undoubtedly the most important and beloved of all his enterprises was precisely the Spanish Transatlantic Company, whose contribution to the History of Spain is neither appreciated nor, I would dare to say, known.

His ships transported hundreds of thousands of Spanish soldiers to Africa, Cuba, and the Philippines, in a logistical effort that came to impress the politicians and analysts of the British government of the time, who, in the mid-19th century, considered Spain to be in such a state of physical and economic prostration that it would incapacitate her for maintaining the last colonies. And it was precisely the patriotic sentiment of Antonio López and his son, Claudio López Bru, second Marquis of Comillas, that led them to risk the entire fleet of the Transatlantic Company, a fundamental pillar on which the effort to maintain the remnants of that immense Spanish empire rested, in which, in the time of the Austrians, it was said that the sun never set. A historical reality as admirable as it is ignored by many and despised by some.