page_title: SS City of Peking
section_title: Early problems
hierarchical_section_title: SS City of Peking / Service history / Early problems
caption_attribution_description: English: SS City of Peking at Pier 42 (Canal Street), North River, New York in 1874.
context_page_description: SS City of Peking was an iron-hulled steamship built in 1874 by Delaware River Iron Ship Building and Engine Works, Chester, Pennsylvania for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. City of Peking and her sister ship City of Tokio were at the time of construction the largest vessels ever built in the United States, and the second largest in the world behind the British leviathan Great Eastern.
  Like Great Eastern, construction of the two Pacific Mail ships was to be plagued with financial difficulties, which threatened to bankrupt the shipbuilder. Unlike Great Eastern, however, which was a commercial failure, City of Peking would go on to have a long and successful commercial career.
  In addition to her cargoes, City of Peking brought many Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States, and later served as a troopship in the Spanish–American War.
context_section_description: City of Peking, the largest ship ever built in the United States at the time, was finally launched in March 1874 to great fanfare. Roach himself was honored with a testimonial dinner at which he was toasted—quite inaccurately, and to the chagrin of older, more established shipyards—as "the father of iron shipbuilding in America".
  However, City of Peking's first voyages proved troublesome. For her maiden voyage around Cape Horn to her operating port of San Francisco, she was heavily loaded with railroad iron fore and aft, while her coal was stored amidships. As the coal was consumed on the voyage, the increasingly uneven weight caused the vessel's hull to "hog" or strain excessively, loosening approximately 5,000 rivets, while some propeller blades were also lost. When she arrived in San Francisco, Roach found himself faced with a stiff $300,000 repair bill.
  On her next voyage, which was also her first transpacific crossing, the problems recurred, and when she arrived in Hong Kong, Roach suffered the embarrassment of having his celebrated new vessel declared unseaworthy by the British authorities. Roach was forced to dispatch a team of workmen to effect on-the-spot repairs, and he now found himself denigrated in the American press as a builder of inferior ships. Even with the problems however, City of Peking had still managed to set a new speed record of 22 days on her first San Francisco to Hong Kong crossing.
  Concerns about the ship's quality ultimately proved groundless. The damage sustained on these two initial voyages was determined to be caused by improper loading of the ship combined with weakness of the wooden decks, which were subsequently  replaced with iron. After these repairs and modifications, City of Peking went on to establish an enviable record of reliability, suffering only one complete mechanical breakdown over the course of almost three decades of transpacific service. By 1879, American editorialists were again singing the praises of the great ship, while a period in drydock proved her still capable of attracting thousands of curious sightseers. City of Peking would eventually make a total of 116 round trips between San Francisco and Yokohama/Hong Kong in the period from 1875 to 1903.
caption: City of Peking at Pier 42, North River, New York in 1874
exif: {}