This lithographic and letterpress broadsheet, published in 1846, relates to the experimental steam boats designed by American John Fitch. The three incarnations of his boat Perseverance are shown. The first, depicted in the upper right of the lithograph, was tested on the Delaware River, Philadelphia, in 1787. It had banks of oars linked via an overhead framework to a steam engine set very low in the hull. In 1796 another version (shown in the upper left) with side wheel paddles and a stern screw propeller was tried out on Collect Pond, New York, in 1796. The large beam engine and boiler are clearly visible in the centre of the hull. In 1797 a model boat with just side paddles was trialled at Bardstown, Kentucky, where John Fitch died in 1798. This model is depicted at the bottom of the sheet.

The broadsheet was produced by John Hutchings to enhance the claim that Fitch, rather than Robert Fulton, was the inventor of the first steam vessel in America. Fitch’s Perseverances predated Fulton’s Clermont (1806) by some ten years. Various descriptions and testimonies are given, as is a small street map of Collect Pond in New York in 1793.