British novelist Charles Dickens wrote an unflattering description of New York in 1842, when she was still operating on Long Island Sound as a passenger steamer.

[1][2][a] With a gross tonnage of 524, she was at the time considerably larger than any steamboat previously built for service between New Haven and New York,[4] and was one of the largest steamers on Long Island Sound.

Not long after New York's introduction however, the Post Office insisted upon a seven-day-a-week service, which was duly implemented in spite of company protests.

[9] Two days earlier, on April 23, the Great Western—the first steamship expressly designed to make regular transatlantic crossings—had arrived in New York, completing her historic maiden voyage.

On the day in question, an estimated 50,000 people turned out to farewell the British ship, with a large fleet of steamboats and other watercraft, including New York, escorting the vessel out of the harbor.

The fire was eventually extinguished, but not before it had destroyed the steamer's upper works, cabin and fittings, as well as much of the customers' luggage, which had been stowed the previous day.

Realizing his error, Vanderbilt returned the New York to service in 1841, and from June of that year, a three-way rate war broke out on the route, with fares sometimes dropping as low as 12½ cents.

[15] In November 1847, New York encountered the Bridgeport steamer Nimrod which had broken down on the Sound, and towed the disabled vessel to Oyster Bay.

I could hardly persuade myself, indeed, but that the bathing establishment off Westminster Bridge, which I left a baby, had suddenly grown to an enormous size; run away from home; and set up in foreign parts as a steamer.

The great difference in appearance between these packets and ours, is, that there is so much of them out of the water; the main-deck being enclosed on all sides, and filled with casks and goods, like any second or third floor in a stack of ware-houses; and the promenade or hurricane-deck being a-top of that again.

The man at the helm is shut up in a little house in the fore part of the boat (the wheel being connected with the rudder by iron chains, working the whole length of the deck); and the passengers, unless the weather be very fine indeed, usually congregate below.

You wonder for a long time how she goes on, for there seems to be nobody in charge of her; and when another of these dull machines comes splashing by, you feel quite indignant with it, as a sullen, cumbrous, ungraceful, unshiplike leviathan: quite forgetting that the vessel you are on board of, is its very counterpart.