Seine River Steamers hospital ships during the First World War, as the ghastily wounded British soldiers could be smoothly moved downriver to larger hospital ships at Le Havre. Atlantic Salmon have naturally returned to the Seine almost a century after over fishing and pollution caused them to disappear. Seine River Steamers The Seine River was the scene of many early experiments with steam navigation. The steamship has a long ancestry, dating back at least to 1783 when the Marquis de Jouffray d'Abbans steamed his little boat, the Pyroscaphe, across the Seine. Robert Fulton even exhibited one to Napoleon's regime. With the success of
Seine River Steamers the city each year their cargo of cereals, coal, and building materials. Factories were constructed and products as diverse as sugar and boots were produced. During the Paris Commune bloodshed was so bad that the Seine ran red with blood. Traffic on the Seine entered into consciousness in a different way too—the Pre-Impressionist and impressionist painters would paint the River scenes from the Pont Neuf, to Argenteuil. And so we are left with colourful and sometimes cubist, copies of age old scenes. In 1867, the year of an exposition, another famed Paris institution came into being—that of the Bateau Mouche.