The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (101 page)

In thirty years, ship losses in Britain had doubled, driving up insurance rates and leading to
hideous loss of life, and Parliament at long last legislated minimum standards for the safe operation of ships. One of the most far-reaching developments was the adoption of load lines showing the depth to which a ship could be loaded safely. In the 1830s
Lloyd’s Register had recommended that ships have a
freeboard of three inches for every foot of depth of hold. (The earliest ship classification society, Lloyd’s was formed in 1760 as the
Register Society at the coffee shop of
Edward Lloyd; it published the first register of ships four years later.) By the mid-nineteenth century, the optional “
Lloyd’s rule” was inadequate to stem the losses due to overloading. Parliamentarian
Samuel Plimsoll maintained that because the value of a ship and its cargo for insurance purposes was whatever the owner said it was, insurance encouraged shipowners to send worn-out and overloaded ships to sea
without regard to the safety of either passengers or crews, much less cargoes. Shipowners framed their opposition to reform in terms of the new mantra of free trade, the triumph of which was the repeal of the seventeenth-century
Navigation Acts in 1850. Greed had replaced disease as the greatest threat to passengers and crews. As a supporter of shipowners who rejected regulation and oversight of their management put it, “
They do not want a fussy, meddlesome, crochetty interference with their business, [nor] an artificial stimulus given to foreign trade by the imposition of needless, frivolous and embarrassing restrictions upon their trade.” Nonetheless, Plimsoll and others persevered and after two decades of lobbying passed the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, the first modern load line legislation. Where the line should be fixed was not determined until 1894, and other countries were slow to follow Britain’s lead;
Germany passed legislation in 1903 and the
United States not until 1924. Six years later the international
Load Line Convention of 1930 established uniform regulations governing how deeply ships could be loaded depending on where they were sailing and the season.

Plimsoll Mark, or Load Line. The distance between the deck line and the mark to which a ship can be loaded safely is called freeboard, which varies according to when and where the vessel is sailing. Tropical (T), summer (S), and winter (W) are the marks that must not be submerged when the vessel is trading in a designated tropical, summer, or winter zone. Additional consideration is given to vessels sailing in freshwater (F) or carrying lumber (L). Winter, North Atlantic (WNA) designates the most dangerous waters—yet among the busiest—routinely used by commercial shipping. The initials on either side of the circle at the center of the mark indicate the classification society under whose rules the ship was designed and built. Here, LR stands for Lloyd’s Register.

Regardless of the dangers attendant on sea travel, people were going to sea in ever greater numbers and not just to emigrate or for business but to travel for travel’s sake. The year after passage of the Merchant Shipping Act,
Katherine Ledoux published
Ocean Notes for Ladies,
a work best remembered for her macabre observation, “
Accidents, too, and loss of life are possible at sea, and I have always felt that a body washed ashore in good clothes, would receive more respect and kinder care than if dressed in those only fit for the rag bag.” Off-putting though such advice might sound today, there was a demand for guides to shipboard etiquette and the practicalities of going to sea. In an age of congested and soulless air travel, it is difficult to conjure the public fascination generated by ocean liners, especially between the 1890s and 1950s, when the size of a nation’s merchant fleet was taken as a barometer of national greatness and the launch of new ships was followed as avidly as that of new consumer electronics today. Ships were a manifestation of a country’s industrial and engineering prowess, and while 51 percent of the world’s merchant tonnage sailed under the Red Duster, as the British merchant ensign is known, other countries competed for bragging rights especially in the elite transatlantic passenger trade.

The British-built, three-masted ship
Tusitala
of 1883 and the German-built Cunard Line passenger ship
Berengaria
, commissioned in 1913, outward bound from New York around 1930. The last generation of deep-water working sail and the heyday of the ocean liner—which provided regularly scheduled trips across all the major oceans, especially the North Atlantic—all but coincided. Square-riggers remained commercially competitive in some trades through the 1930s, while the engine-only steamship dominated long-distance routes from the 1890s until the coming of the passenger jet in the 1960s. From a Cunard Line brochure for the
Berengaria
in the Norman H. Morse Ocean Liner Collection; courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

By the turn of the century, British primacy on the North Atlantic was under threat from both Germany and the United States. Foremost of the German shipping executives of the time was
Albert Ballin, who eventually became general director of the Hamburg-America Line (
Hapag). Although a Jew of modest origins, Ballin had a steadfast belief in Germany’s maritime potential that earned him the friendship of the maritime-minded Kaiser
Wilhelm II. By 1900 he had helped make
Hapag the largest shipping line in the world, with ninety-five oceangoing ships serving a diversified portfolio of routes around the world, and by 1914 twice as many ships served 350 regular ports of call. As remarkable, the world’s second largest company was the
Bremen-based
Norddeutscher Lloyd. Although its operations were global, by the 1880s the
company was supreme on the North Atlantic, where it carried 816,000 passengers between 1881 and 1891, 50 percent more than Hapag, and more than Britain’s White Star and Cunard combined. In 1897 it ushered in a new generation of superliners with the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
. The first of only fourteen ships ever built with four funnels, this was the first non-British ship to set a transatlantic speed record since the
Collins Line’s
Baltic
in 1854, winning the “blue riband” with an average speed of more than twenty-two knots.
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In 1902, American financier
J. P. Morgan mounted a more complex challenge to Britain’s
merchant marine with the founding of the
International Mercantile Marine, a conglomerate that acquired a controlling interest in five major shipping companies and forged revenue-sharing agreements with Hapag and Norddeutscher Lloyd. In response to Morgan’s acquisition of the
White Star Line, the British government offered Cunard a loan of £2.6 million for the construction of two passenger liners, with an annual subsidy for each, on condition that the company remain wholly British for twenty years and that the ships could be requisitioned in wartime. The result was construction of the
Lusitania
and
Mauretania,
the largest and most luxurious liners of their day. The sister ships traded honors for the fastest transatlantic ship until 1909, when the
Mauretania
set a westbound record that stood for twenty years; eastbound, she beat her own record seven times. A
U-boat sank the
Lusitania
in 1915 but the
Mauretania
remained in service until 1935.

By this time, the opulence of the gilded-age ocean liner had given way to a sleeker aesthetic. The first vessel to employ on a grand scale the ocean liner style (later known as art deco) characteristic of the interwar transatlantic fleet was the French Line’s
Ile de France
of 1927. Her spacious public rooms included a three-deck-high restaurant, a four-deck-high grand foyer, and a Gothic chapel adorned with fourteen pillars. And for the benefit of her
Prohibition-weary American passengers she sported what was thought to be the longest bar in any passenger ship. By the end of the decade, the prewar rivalry on the North Atlantic was in full swing. In 1929, Norddeutscher Lloyd’s
Bremen
and
Europa
captured the blue riband, an achievement especially notable because they were the first major civilian ships built with
bulbous bows, originally developed by the American naval architect
David Taylor in 1912. Although such a rounded appendage below the waterline looks ungainly, the bulbous bow deflects water and thereby reduces resistance and improves speed, fuel efficiency, and stability. The bulbous bow remained something of a novelty
until after the
Bremen
’s launch, but it did not become a standard feature in hull design until after
World War II.

Following the success of the
Ile de France
, the French Line determined to build the largest and most beautiful ship in the world, the design of which fell to naval architect
Vladimir Yourkevitch, then an émigré laboring in obscurity in an automobile factory, but who had been responsible for the hull form of the Russian navy’s innovative
Borodino
-class
battlecruisers of 1912. Yourkevitch’s design resulted in the
Normandie.
German engineers overseeing trials of the Russian-designed French ship pronounced it “
unimprovable.” In addition to a bulbous bow,
Normandie
’s hull had an “unmistakably and distressingly pear-shaped” sectional profile amidships. Above the waterline, to heighten the ship’s streamlined appearance, Yourkevitch enclosed all the deck machinery and designed the three ovoid funnels with a slight rake and in diminishing size. Ignoring the economic devastation of the
Great Depression, the
Normandie
was intended for a deluxe trade, and no two of the four hundred first-class rooms were decorated alike. As Ballin had done with the
Vaterland
(later the
United States Line’s
Leviathan
) in 1913, rather than allow the funnels to interrupt the ship’s grand public spaces—the air-conditioned dining room was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—Yourkevitch used split uptakes to create massive open areas, and from center stage of the ship’s theater, the first on a ship, one could see daylight beyond the open promenade of the first-class grill room 150 meters aft. The
Normandie
was being converted to a troopship in 1942 when she caught fire and capsized at her berth in New York. She is survived by her great rival, Cunard’s faster but somewhat dowdier
Queen Mary,
which entered service a year after the
Normandie
and is today a floating hotel in Long Beach,
California.

The North Atlantic “ferry” was far from the only passenger route but for opulence, strength, and speed its ships were the gold standard of the merchant marine. Catering to the world’s financial and political elite, they also had to withstand the demands of the most treacherous seas routinely served by commercial shipping—“Winter, North Atlantic” in the formulation of the
Load Line Convention. Though more benign, the vast distances of the Pacific made that ocean the final frontier of the passenger liner. Completion of the transcontinental railways across the United States (the first in 1869) and Canada (1885) accelerated the growth of transpacific shipping. For Australians laboring under “the tyranny of distance” from Britain and the rest of the world, this opened an alternative route to England, via the Pacific, North America, and the Atlantic, while
Japan and the Orient generally were now accessible to gilded-age American globe-trotters.

Tourists were as easy a mark for satirists as for pickpockets and scam artists
(shipping company brochures routinely warned prospective passengers to be wary of “professional gamblers”), and the English translator
Osman Edwards revised the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle” to mock the acquisitiveness of Americans he encountered in Japan at the turn of the century: