Titanic: The Myths and Legacy of a Disaster E-Book

Roger Cartwright

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

On 15 April 2012, 100 years will have passed since the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic hit an iceberg and foundered in the North Atlantic with the loss of 1,503 lives. Had the disaster not occurred, what is now the best-known ship in the world would have lost the title of the largest liner within just two years. She was certainly not the fastest passenger ship of the time and can be considered a technological throwback, yet Titanic captures the imagination like no other. This book seeks to explore the myths and the truth about Titanic and explores the legacy that has made the ship so well known. Why was she built? Who really owned her? Why was nobody ever proved negligent? How has today's transportation been made safer by Titanic? Have we really learned the right lessons? Perhaps not! Since 1912 there have been worse disasters yet none has replaced Titanic in the popular consciousness. Her legacy exists in procedures, building regulation, navigational practice, statues, poems, novels, movies and even a musical. This book explores why.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

About the Authors

Chapter 1The Context ofTitanic

Rivalry on the North Atlantic leads to bigger and faster ships

• The roles of Morgan, Ismay and Ballin

Chapter 2The Olympic Class

Luxury and size over speed • Built too quickly, to a faulty design and with substandard materials

Chapter 3Anatomy of a Disaster

What happened and why

Chapter 4CarpathiaSpeeds to the Rescue

Carpathia, Californian, a mystery ship? • Survivors and victims

Chapter 5Aftermath

The US and UK inquiries • The ordeal of Captain Lord

Chapter 6The Demise of White Star and Harland & Wolff, a Conspiracy and the Finding ofTitanic

White Star declines and merges with Cunard • The run down of Harland & Wolff • Memorials • Robert Ballard finds Titanic

• Legal issues over ownership and the recovery of artefacts

Chapter 7The Safety Lag

Must transportation safety always lag behind progress?

Chapter 8Conclusions

Timeline

Bibliography

Copyright

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their appreciation to all those passengers and crew of the cruise ships they have worked on over the past ten years for their suggestions and the encouragement that has led to the production of this book.

Thanks are also due to those who assisted the authors in Belfast and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and to their editor, Amy Rigg and her team at The History Press.

We are also grateful to Peter Lamont, production designer on the 1997 Titanic movie, for his insights and excellent company whilst cruising the Baltic on the MV Saga Ruby.

Special thanks are due to David Hoddinott of St John’s, Newfoundland, for permission to reproduce his painting Date with Destiny and to Gordon Bauwens for the use of Titanic – A Day to Remember.

Abbreviations

GRT

Gross Registered Tonnage

IMM

International Mercantile Marine

RMS

Royal Mail Steamer

SS

Steamship

Introduction

Note: the GRT (Gross Registered Tonnage) is not, as many in the media make the mistake of saying, a measurement of weight. It is actually a measurement of enclosed space, i.e. volume – the volume of a merchant ship reflects its capacity and is thus of more importance to the owner. In the case of merchant ships the word tonne comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘tun’ meaning barrel. For medieval ship owners the number of barrels the vessel could carry was of prime importance. There are still inns and pubs in the UK named ‘The Three Tuns’ whose sign is three barrels.

In this book the GRT is rounded up or down to the nearest 500 tonnes. However, since GRT changes as ships are altered, it is indicative rather than substantive. As an example, the Normandie of the 1930s had a GRT of 79,280 when she entered service. When the Queen Mary came out she exceeded this figure and the French Line refitted Normandie with an enclosed café grill at the stern. It didn’t weigh much but as it was enclosed it increased the GRT to 82,799 compared to Queen Mary’s 80,774, making Normandie once again the world’s biggest ship at the time and restoring French national pride.

A knot in navigation is the measure of speed at sea, and is equal to 1 nautical mile per hour (approximately 1.15 statute miles per hour).

What I don’t understand is how a big ship like that can sink – it only hit a little iceberg.

Jean Marsh as Rose in Upstairs, Downstairs, London Weekend Television series of the 1970s.

Titanic is possibly the best known ship in the world. Since her foundering in April 1912, a wealth of myths, conspiracy theories and half-truths about the ship have been repeated. She was too big, she was unsinkable, she was trying to gain the Blue Riband, steerage passengers were denied lifeboat spaces and even that she never actually sank. Since 1912 there have been passenger vessels of four times the tonnage of Titanic and disasters (albeit most in wartime) that have led to many, many more casualties at sea and yet the legacy of Titanic is still with us.

Ask a random group of people what has been the worst shipping disaster outside wartime and the chances are they will say ‘Titanic’. One thousand five hundred and thirteen lives were lost when Titanic foundered. In December 1987, some 4,341 people died when Doña Paz, an inter-island passenger ferry owned by Sulpicio Lines, collided with the oil tanker Victor off Mindoro in the Philippines.

A second question to ask is ‘name the two British-registered transatlantic liners that sank off North America with the loss of over 1,000 lives each in the three years before the First World War’. Most people will name Titanic but how many will know of the loss of Canadian Pacific’s the Empress of Ireland and 1,024 lives in the St Lawrence in 1914?

Shipbuilding is such a perfect art nowadays that absolute DISASTER, INVOLVING THE PASSENGERS IS INCONCEIVABLE. Whatsoever happens, there will be time before the vessel sinks to save the life of every person on board. I will go a bit further. I will say that I cannot imagine any condition that would cause the vessel to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.

Captain Smith, later to be the captain of Titanic, in an interview to the Boston Post 16 April 1907, five years almost to the day before the sinking.

On the bridge of the ship on that fateful voyage was a notice:

The safety of all those on board weighs with us beyond all other considerations, and we would once more impress upon you and the entire navigation staff most earnestly that no risk is to be run which can be avoided by the exercise of caution….and by choosing, whenever doubt exists, the course that tends to safety.

IMM Instructions to captains, 1912.

Titanic has spawned a succession of articles, novels and motion pictures that stretch from the accurate to the faintly ridiculous. The true story and its legacy is strong enough to stand the test of time without myths.

What is it about this ship and the disaster that befell her that still impacts on our sensibilities 100 years after the event? Even today an organisational reorganisation that occurs against the background of crisis is referred to as ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’. Why is it that we seemed doomed to repeat the technological arrogance of Titanic, as will be demonstrated in the book? The author has also worked in the airline industry, the successor to the liner trade, and will show through case studies on the Comet and the DC10 that technological advances in speed and size can easily run ahead of safety just as they did with Titanic.

Roger Cartwright, together with his wife June, has presented many talks on the story of Titanic both to land-based groups and to cruise ship passengers. Despite dealing with the most famous shipwreck in history, one can guarantee to fill a cruise ship lounge or theatre for a talk on Titanic; it is a topic that seems to fascinate people of all ages and cultures.

There are many Titanic buffs in the world – people who are extremely knowledgeable about the ship and who can recite the statistics about her. This book is not designed for them. During their travels the authors have often been told that ‘everybody knows that Titanic was too big, or trying for the Blue Riband etc.’ There are many myths about the ship and this book is for the general reader who wants to separate fact from fiction and who wishes to understand why the legacy of Titanic is still with us.

When the Titanic set sail on her maiden voyage, even had she survived her reign as the largest ship in the world it would have been brief as the Germans were already building a larger competitor. She was not unique (as some commentators later claimed) as she was one of a planned trio of ships, Olympic, Titanic and Gigantic (renamed Britannic after the disaster). She was certainly slower than Cunard’s Mauretania and could never have held the record for the fastest westbound crossing of the Atlantic – the so-called Blue Riband. She was, however, with her sister Olympic of 1911, possibly the most luxurious passenger ship up to that time.

Titanic was not even really British. She was built in a UK yard (Harland & Wolff in Belfast), registered in Liverpool and flew the Blue Ensign that indicated that her captain, Captain Smith, was a senior Royal Naval Reserve Officer. Her registered owner was the UK White Star Line but White Star was part of J. Pierpont Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine. Britons may have built and crewed Titanic but she was paid for with US dollars and owned, ultimately, by a US billionaire.

Titanic carried with her not just the kinetic energy of some 30,000+ tons of steel and fittings (her gross tonnage of 46,000 GRT was, as noted, a measure of volume not weight) moving at 21 knots but also, for reasons that will be explored in the book, emotional energy that seems as strong today as it was in 1912.

This book examines the genesis of the superliners, spawned as it was through the Anglo–German commercial rivalry on the North Atlantic and the influence of US finance. The building of the ship and the fateful voyage will be examined through a series of statements/questions that are often quoted (and form the basis for the co-authors’ talks) when referring to Titanic; although not all are in fact myths, some are sadly true. Viz:

Myth? Steerage class was very poor

Myth? White Star was a British company

Myth? Prior to the Titanic disaster White Star Line had a good safety record

Myth? Captain Smith believed that ships were so well built in 1912 that they would not sink

Myth?Titanic was ultra large

Myth? Watertight compartments and the notion of unsinkability

Myth?Titanic was built using the most modern techniques

Myth?Titanic had enough lifeboats according to the Board of Trade

Myth? Captain Smith had an unblemished safety record

Myth? J.P. Morgan was supposed to sail on the ship but cancelled his booking

Myth?Titanic nearly had a collision as she left Southampton

Myth? The richest man in the world was on board Titanic

Myth? There really was an ‘unsinkable Molly Brown’

Myth? Captain Smith and his officers ignored ice warnings

Myth? There was a true love story on board the Titanic

Myth? Class distinction played a part in the tragedy

Myth? There had been a written premonition about the disaster

Myth? Bruce Ismay dressed as a woman to obtain a lifeboat place

Myth? The band played ‘Nearer my God to Thee’

Myth? An officer shot himself

Myth? The crew wages stopped the moment the ship sank

Myth? There was another ship near to Titanic that made no rescue effort

Myth? Over 1,500 men women and children drowned on the Titanic

Myth? It was the first SOS ever sent

Myth?Titanic wasn’t insured

Myth? DNA evidence cannot be wrong

Myth? Britannia still ruled the waves in 1912

Myth? Captain Smith cancelled the lifeboat drill

Myth? The seamen on Olympic went on strike and were accused of mutiny

Myth? The surviving Titanic crew were treated like pariahs

Myth? The British Inquiry was a whitewash designed to protect the Board of Trade

Myth? A passenger tried to bribe the crew of a lifeboat not to go back and pick up people in the water

Myth? The Titanic was in one piece as she went down

Myth? The Titanic disaster was the beginning of the end for White Star

Myth? Captain Smith’s table and sideboard from Titanic are still in existence

Myth?Titanic never sank

Myth? The search for Titanic was really a secret mission to locate two missing nuclear submarines

Myth? Ice is no longer a problem for shipping

Myth? It remains the worst peacetime shipping disaster ever

Myth? Jack Dawson (from the 1997 movie) did exist

The book also considers both the US and British inquiries into the loss of the ship and the impact that this had on US–UK relations and whether it was the first public manifestation of US supremacy over Britain, as the first inquiry into the loss of a UK-registered ship, sunk in international waters, was in New York and not London! The demise of White Star and its merger with Cunard during the Depression years and the subsequent takeover of Cunard by the Carnival Corporation will form the basis for a further part of the story.

The impact of Titanic on safety at sea forms a section on its own, culminating in an examination of the similarities and lessons learned in the Andrea Doria sinking in the 1950s. The loss of Comet and DC10 airlines in similar circumstances to Titanic, i.e. where safety technology had either been outpaced or ignored, are examined.

The book also looks at the physical legacy of Titanic; the wreck itself and its discovery and artefacts (indeed should they have been recovered?) the graveyards, the shipyard and the fates of survivors. Finally, Titanic in literature, films and factual books is examined.

The route across the Atlantic from Europe to North America (and vice versa) has always been one of the most important trade routes of the modern world. Linking as it does the old world of Europe with the new opportunities that, from the seventeenth century onwards, were to be found in North America, the means of making the journey became not only commercial but a way of displaying national pride. The largest, fastest and most opulent vessels of their day were placed on the route and if they were British, French, German, Italian or Dutch their entry into New York was a symbol of the national pride of their owners. Similarly, but on a much smaller scale, the arrival of the SS United States – the fastest passenger liner ever built – presents a tangible picture of American technology when she steamed into Southampton or Bremerhaven.

Not only were the European, Canadian and US merchant fleet’s largest liners placed on the route but it also saw (with only two exceptions) the only four-funnelled liners ever built. One might wonder why the number of funnels is important? At the beginning of the twentieth century most British cruisers had four funnels whilst their German equivalents had three. Russia, however, had a five-funnelled Askold. In 1902 she was sent to the Persian Gulf and the local leaders were very impressed: the more funnels, the more powerful. The Royal Navy could not allow itself to be outdone so the captain of the four-funnelled HMS Amphorite rigged up two dummy canvas funnels and fed smoke to them. As Wilfrid Pym Trotter has said of the incident, ‘thus was British prestige restored’ and perhaps more importantly British influence in what was to become a major oil producing region.

Much has been written about the naval armaments race between Britain and Germany before 1914. Less well known is the parallel race between the two countries to produce the largest and fastest transatlantic liner. Douglas R. Burgess has written about this in his excellent study, ‘Seize the Trident’. He believes that the Titanic disaster was a direct consequence of the race to be either the fastest or the biggest, or both. He comments that it was easier to build bigger and bigger ships but less easy to introduce new navigational methods or to change the culture of captains trained in the age of sail.

The race to produce the biggest and the best reached its zenith between the wars when Britain, France, Italy and Germany vied with each other to impress New York with the Bremen and Europa, the Rex, the beautiful Normandie and the stately Queen Mary – the Dictatorships against the Democracies! Even after the war, when the speed crown was firmly in American hands with the SS United States and the jet airliner had spelt the end of the conventional passenger liner, France and Britain still clung on to the grandeur of the North Atlantic liner, introducing the France and the QE2 in 1962 and 1968 respectively. Both ended their careers as cruise ships. In the 1930–40s a ship of 80,000+ GRT – of which there were only three, Normandie, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth – seemed the ultimate. In 2004 the 149,000 GRT Queen Mary 2 made her debut as the biggest passenger ship ever built (she is a combination of Atlantic liner and cruise ship) and she was supplanted in 2006 by the 154,000 GRT cruise ship Freedom of the Seas (Royal Caribbean International) whose Oasis of the Seas of 2010 and her sister Allure of the Seas at 220,000 GRT are the world’s largest passenger ships ever built.

Titanic is part of the North Atlantic story and her legacy is still with us today. Whilst the Olympic Class were the biggest liners of their day, they were far from the most advanced. Titanic’s technology at her introduction in 1912 was a generation earlier than that of her main rivals, Cunard’s Mauretania and Lusitania. So why was a technologically regressive ship built and then billed as a superliner? It is that story and the legacy it has left that forms the basis of this book.

About the Authors

Scottish-based maritime historian Dr Roger Cartwright has entertained and informed British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and European cruise ship passengers on some thirty of the world’s best-known cruise liners with his maritime history-themed talks. Roger has worked in both education and management training in the UK, USA, Germany and India. He is an internationally published author on the history of the cruise industry and a variety of management topics. He also worked as a consultant to a major airline in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. His work with the Royal Navy has provided him with an in-depth knowledge of maritime history, whilst the many case studies and books he has written about the cruise industry have made him an acknowledged authority of cruise companies, cruise liners and the history of cruising. Roger has also been involved in government studies into mergers within the cruise industry. Roger is proud to be a life trustee of the Canadian Naval Memorial, the corvette HMCS Sackville berthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

His wife June is an illustrator and works with Roger in sourcing materials and putting together his maritime-themed presentations. She is also an accomplished poet.

Chapter 1

The Context of Titanic

Giant ocean liners did not just happen but were part of a natural evolution that involved both technological innovation and social change. The social change was the massive emigration between Europe and North America, particularly to the United States, that occurred from the end of the US Civil War in 1865 until the US Government acted to restrict emigration after the First World War.

The technological innovations in ship design enabled the mass movement of people and that movement in turn encouraged more technological innovation.

Easy movement across the Atlantic did not begin until the liner developed into a safe and efficient form of transportation. The sailing ship was too dependent on the vagaries of the weather to offer a reliable, scheduled service. It was also a very unsafe means of conveyance. Dr Johnson once referred to an ocean voyage as like ‘being in prison but with the added possibility of being drowned’. Although the sailing packet ships could advertise the day they would sail, their arrival could not be predicted, making proper schedules difficult. Nevertheless, the seeds of the transatlantic mass passenger trade were sown when Jeremiah Thomson, an English emigrant living in New York, and four associates founded the Black Ball (named after the emblem on the fore topsail) Line in 1817. These ships sailed to a schedule, although arrival times were at the whim of the wind. Their Pacific actually sailed from New York to Liverpool in a mere seventeen days that year, taking advantage of the winds and the current which flows from North America to Europe. Until the introduction of steam, eastbound passages were nearly always faster than westbound ones.

As early as 1819 the Savannah became the first steam vessel to make an Atlantic crossing, followed by several other vessels, although they all made most of the crossing under sail, using their primitive steam engines coupled to paddle wheels only briefly during the voyage.

The Royal William was one of these early passenger steamships to cross the Atlantic using steam and because of the involvement of Samuel Cunard she has left her mark on history. Again, much of her voyage was, however, actually under sail. Financed by and Canadian built from Scottish plans, she set off in August 1833 with just seven passengers. Samuel Cunard from Halifax, Nova Scotia, was heavily involved in the financing of the voyage. The voyage itself took nineteen days: not too bad for an eastbound run. It was not a proper commercial service but more of a trial to see whether steam power could be used profitably on such a large ocean. Indeed the Royal William had been built for the St Lawrence service and as the river was icebound in winter the ship’s owners were keen to see if she could be employed in European waters. Steam ships were not new by this time but they had been mainly used for inland waterway and coastal applications. For one thing coal capacity was limited and early marine steam engines were very inefficient in their use of fuel.

The Cunard family had emigrated to Britain’s American colonies in 1683. They were German Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania. As loyalists during the War of Independence they were forced to move at the war’s conclusion and set up home in Nova Scotia. Samuel Cunard was born in 1788; his mother was an alcoholic whilst his father, Abraham, owned a timber yard. Cunard obtained work in the engineering department of the Naval Dockyard in Halifax, the major port of entry in North America for Britain after the revolutionary war.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (voted the second greatest Briton, after Winston Churchill, in a post-Millennium poll in the UK) planned a commercial service to extend the Great Western Railway that he had engineered from London to Bristol onwards by sea to New York. Bristol was, in the early part of the nineteenth century, Britain’s premier port for Atlantic voyages. His Great Western was beaten from making the first proper commercial voyage by the Irish Sea packet ship Sirius, hastily put into service by the rival British and American Steam Ship Company. With a GRT of just 703 and equipped for 100 passengers, Sirius was built by the Menses Yard at Leith on the Firth of Forth. Whilst intimately associated with the Great Western, Brunel was not a shipbuilder and as such much of the detailed work was carried out by his colleagues William Patterson and Christopher Claxton.

The British and American Steam Ship Company had ordered a huge (for the time) vessel of 1,800 GRT (they had originally planned for four smaller ships) to be named British Queen. As the British Queen was by no means ready they chartered the Sirius, setting off with ninety passengers before Great Western had completed her trials. During these trials Great Western suffered a fire in her engine room and Brunel was injured, breaking his leg, during the operation to quench the flames. Great Western finally commenced her maiden voyage from Bristol to New York on schedule on 8 April 1838, four days behind Sirius. To the chagrin of the company accountants she was carrying only seven of the fifty-seven booked passengers – the remainder having cancelled their bookings after the fire.

Sirius won the race to be first to New York, arriving there on 23 April, having completed the voyage in eighteen days, fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes. Even the best of the sailing ships on the route were taking on average twenty-four days to Europe and, being against the currents, thirty-plus days back.

No sooner were the celebrations in full flow than smoke was seen on the horizon. Was it a ship on fire? No, it was the Great Western. She had made up nearly all the time and crossed the Atlantic in fifteen days and twelve hours. Sirius’s record was short lived. Later the Blue Riband was to be awarded to the passenger vessel that beat the previous westbound (against the prevailing current and winds) time and thus Great Western is technically the first holder. The first ship recorded as flying a blue riband, or pennant, from her masthead to show that she had broken the record was the Rex in August 1933. Normandie flew a blue riband from her masthead as she entered New York harbour on her record-breaking maiden voyage in May 1935. That same year British Member of Parliament Harold K. Hales drew up a set of rules for the trophy that he had commissioned. The last liner to hold the Hales Trophy was the SS United States but it is now held by a fast ferry, several of which have been fitted out for record-breaking attempts across the Atlantic. Despite protests, the US Courts ruled that they were eligible despite the fact they were most certainly not liners. The award was not for the quickest crossing but for the average speed, as Bremerhaven to New York is further than Liverpool to New York etc. Hence the Collins liner Pacific took the title from Cunard’s Asia in 1850 by running from Liverpool to New York in ten days, four hours and forty-five minutes at an average speed of 12.46 knots, whereas the Asia had covered Liverpool to Halifax (a shorter distance) in only eight days, fourteen hours and fifty minutes, but at an average speed of 12.25 knots. Nevertheless the record-breaker often achieved not just the highest average speed but often the fastest crossing as well.

With a successful crossing under his belt, Brunel’s shipping star seemed in its ascendancy. The prize he sought was the lucrative British Admiralty North American mail contract. The Admiralty contract, as issued in 1839, called for a monthly UK to Halifax service operated by ships of at least 300 horsepower. With one ship Brunel could not manage a monthly service, but he offered to provide three ships within two years. The British Government wanted a much earlier start to the contract.

Although the time allowed for bids was short, Cunard took passage to the UK and made a surprise bid to the Admiralty. In association with Robert Napier of Glasgow, a renowned marine engine builder, and ship owners George Burns and the McIvers (David and Charles) from Liverpool, Cunard offered to provide four ships and to operate a weekly service. Brunel had been outflanked and the Admiralty awarded the contract to Cunard. It was the beginning of a company that still exists today, albeit as a Carnival brand.

Cunard’s first ships were the Britannia, Arcadia, Caledonia and Columbia, named after Great Britain, Nova Scotia, Scotland (where the ships were built) and the US.

The four paddle steamers were 207ft long and 34ft wide, with a GRT of 1,150 on a wooden hull. They carried 115 passengers in cramped conditions at a speed of between 9 and 10 knots. They had red and black painted funnels; Cunard had commissioned chemists to produce a heat-resistant paint – henceforth the plain black funnel would be replaced by a visual identification of the owning company.

Cunard did not believe in spending money unnecessarily and the ships were far from luxurious. Charles Dickens sailed on Britannia in 1842 and compared his cabin to a coffin! Columbia was wrecked in 1843 but with no loss of life. Cunard also introduced red (port) and green (starboard) running lights on the line’s vessels. The Cunard Line philosophy was one of conservatism and safety. It is a proud boast of Cunard’s transatlantic operation that until the torpedoing of the Lusitania in 1915 no passenger lives were lost in accidents. Apparently this is not quite true as a small number of lives may have been lost due to being swept overboard, but that was not seen as being the company’s fault.

Brunel soldiered on and tried to compete. Whilst Cunard grew using wooden ships and remaining true to paddle wheel propulsion, Brunel was convinced that iron ships with screw propellers were the answer and he became involved with the experiments carried out by the Admiralty in 1845, in which the paddle sloop HMS Alecto and the screw vessel HMS Rattler were pitted against each other in a ‘tug of war’. The screw vessel won, although recent research using models suggests that the result was not perhaps as clear cut as it seemed at the time.

To prove his belief that screw and iron ships were the way forward, Brunel planned and launched the huge (for the time) 3,270 GRT Great Britain. Iron hulled with a propeller, she was so big that part of the lock gates at Bristol had to be removed to get her out. She was originally designed as a large paddle steamer but Brunel decided to fit her with a propeller. Iron vessels were not new but had previously been used for barges on inland waterways; an iron vessel will float but the iron of the time was less easy to shape than wood and could be very brittle and was also less adaptable to the flexing needed to cope with the stresses and strains encountered on the open ocean. It was also harder to make hull repairs whilst at sea. Generations of seamen had grown up with wooden ships and sails – new skills would be needed now. Iron had, however, the advantage of comparative lightness, meaning the engines had less weight to propel through the ocean.

In the summer of 1845 she commenced her maiden voyage to New York but by then the Atlantic was virtually a Cunard lake. Nevertheless she was a very impressive ship but not very successful, being slower than the Cunard vessels.

In September 1846 she left Liverpool (to which port she now operated, spelling the end of Bristol as a passenger terminus) with her largest complement: 180 passengers – the largest number ever carried in a single ship to that date. The iron hull played havoc with her compass and instead of skirting the Isle of Man she ran aground in Dundrum Bay, County Down, Ireland. No lives were lost but the ship was stranded. Re-floating took all winter and a wooden ship would have broken up in the freezing gales.

Unsuccessful against the North Atlantic competition, Great Britain was switched to the Liverpool–Australia run in 1856, making thirty-two voyages in twenty-three years. Laid up in 1875, she was sold in 1882 and converted to a sail-only ship. Carrying coal, her cargo caught fire and she put into the Falklands in May 1886 where she was hulked. In the 1930s there was talk of a restoration but no money was available and she was towed to a deserted cove and beached. She remained intact, however, and in 1970 was towed back to her birthplace of Bristol where she was lovingly restored and opened to the public – a fitting monument to her builder and his vision. In appalling weather and with little maintenance she was a survivor from the earliest days of steam ships.

The pioneering Great Western was laid up in 1846 after forty-five round trips. Sold as a transport during Crimean War, she was broken up in 1856.

Brunel was not finished with ocean liners, however. In addition to working on the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition, he was to build one other ship, and what a ship it was; the mighty Leviathan – or as she was later named, Great Eastern.

Built for the UK–Australia service, new owners during the building process decided to use her instead on the North Atlantic. She was nearly 20,000 GRT (five times bigger than anything else afloat). Brunel had calculated this would allow her to carry enough coal to reach Australia! She had sails, paddles and a propeller. She was designed to carry 596 cabin and 2,400 steerage passengers from UK to Australia. Nothing as big was seen until White Star introduced their big four: Celtic, Cedric, Baltic and Adriatic from 1901 onwards.

Built at the J. Scott Russell yard on the Thames, she was laid down as Leviathan in 1854 but renamed Great Eastern for the Great Steamship Company whilst building. The yard went bankrupt and the project seemed doomed more than once. Brunel and Scott Russell fell out over the way the building was carried out. Everything about her was huge and she had to be launched sideways along rails, but stuck fast at the first attempt on 3 November 1857. This was highly embarrassing as the company had sold tickets for the event.

The ship took a great toll on Brunel’s health but finally took to the water on 31 January 1858. Brunel went on board just before her maiden voyage and, despite suffering from nephritus, posed for his photograph. The date was 2 September 1859; he died shortly after, worn out by the stress of the project and his illness. She operated on the North Atlantic from 1860 until 1863 and then found employment as a cable ship for which she was well suited. She laid one of the Atlantic cables (but not the first, which that was laid by HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara in 1858).

After her cable duties she languished as a floating exhibition ship and advertising hoardings on the Mersey for Lewis’s Bon Marché department store, until she was broken up in 1888–89. As she was being dismantled the remains of two bodies, workmen from the builder’s yard, were found in her double hull.

Cunard went on to dominate the North Atlantic but competition was never far away. Initially it came from the United States and the Collins Line, whose driving force was a New Yorker named Edward Knight Collins. Collins entered the North Atlantic trade in 1850 with the most luxurious ships yet seen. His four initial greyhounds, Arctic, Atlantic, Baltic and Pacific, were of 2,800 GRT, carrying 200 passengers in first class with the later addition of eighty second class and 145 crew. With a speed of 12 knots the Collins Line soon provided a more luxurious alternative to the Cunard vessels, which now looked dated and spartan. However, the loss of Arctic in 1854 with 332 dead including Collins’s wife and two of his children and then the disappearance of the Pacific outbound from Liverpool in 1856 (her wreck was found in 1991 just 60 miles from Liverpool) doomed the company and it ceased operations in 1860.

Who would challenge Cunard next? Cunard was behind the times. Cambria and Hibernia were slightly larger versions of the Britannia class whilst the four ships of the America class, America, Canada, Europa and Asia, were slightly bigger and faster again. In 1850 they brought the crossing time down to eight days and fourteen hours between Liverpool and Halifax with a speed of 12.25 knots, only to lose the record to Collins’s Pacific the same year.

Cunard’s response to the Collins challenge was the launching, in 1855 and 1861, of its last two paddle steamers, the Persia and the Scotia respectively. Cunard still stuck to paddle-wheel propulsion using side-lever steam engines but these ships followed Brunel’s lead and were constructed of iron. Of 3,871 GRT, compared to Britannia’s 1,135, Scotia could carry 273 first-class and fifty second-class passengers at 13.5 knots. She took the record but there would be no further improvement on the wooden paddle steamer powered by side-lever steam engines. All the ships covered up to this point also carried a full set of sails, vital as the engines were still not as reliable as they would need to be if they were to be relied on completely. Persia also introduced internal bulkheads, the beginnings of the watertight compartment concept. It soon proved itself. In January 1856, five days out of Liverpool on her maiden voyage, Persia hit an iceberg head on at 11 knots. Her bow was crumpled and the bulkheads held – she survived although her rivets ‘popped’ for over 16ft from her bow. Guion Line’s Arizona had a similar experience in November 1879 and her bulkheads helped her to survive – Titanic, as we shall see, was not so lucky.

The propeller, as a means of ship propulsion, had been pioneered by an English farmer, Francis P. Smith, of all people. He was an amateur engineer but in 1836 he had patented a screw device for propelling a vessel. His experimental vessel Archimedes interested both the Admiralty and Brunel, and led to the Great Britain being screw rather than propeller driven.

Cunard, however, was not interested. It was enough that Persia and Scotia were built of iron; propulsion would remain traditional but competition was still around and from another British source, a source that would lead directly to Titanic – the White Star Line. Nevertheless Cunard was forced to adopt screw propulsion and Scotia was the last Cunard paddle-driven vessel on the North Atlantic.

Steerage and emigrants

Steerage was used to refer to the lowest decks of a passenger vessel. This area of the ship came to be used to accommodate passengers travelling on the cheapest class of ticket, and offered only the most basic amenities; initially this typically meant limited toilet use, no privacy and poor food. The name ‘steerage’ came from the fact that the control lines of the rudder ran on this level of the ship and does not imply accommodation at the stern. Cunard, Brunel and the Collins Line did not carry steerage passengers initially. Such passengers, more often than not those emigrating from Europe to the United States or Canada, were carried on over-crowded sailing ships. These voyages were long, uncomfortable and dangerous.

The potato famine that hit Ireland in 1846 brought about a massive increase in those wishing to leave the old world for the new. Five shipwrecks alone killed over 1,200 emigrants crossing the Atlantic and by 1852 nearly fifty emigrant vessels had been lost. To appreciate the huge number of emigrations to the US, the Ellis Island Centre (where most of the immigrants from the late 1890s onwards were processed) has stated that more than 22 million passengers and members of ships’ crews entered the United States through Ellis Island and the Port of New York between 1892 and 1924.

Ellis Island opened in 1892 as a federal immigration station and remained as such until 1954; it is now a museum and educational resource and well worth a visit if you are in New York. Millions of newly arrived immigrants passed through the station during that time – in fact, it has been estimated that close to 40 per cent of all current US citizens can trace at least one of their ancestors to Ellis Island.

America was built by immigrants. From Plymouth Rock in the seventeenth century to Ellis Island in the twentieth, people born elsewhere came to America. Some were fleeing religious persecution and political turmoil. Most, however, came for economic reasons and were part of extensive migratory systems that responded to changing demands in labour markets. Their experience in the United States was as diverse as their backgrounds and aspirations. Some became farmers and others toiled in factories. Some settled permanently and others returned to their homeland. Collectively, however, they contributed to the building of a nation by providing a constant source of inexpensive labour, by settling rural regions and industrial cities, and by bringing their unique forms of political and cultural expression.

Colonial immigration figures were nothing compared to those of the nineteenth century. From 1815 to the start of the Civil War, 5 million people moved to the United States, about half from England and 40 per cent from Ireland. Between the end of the war and 1890 another 10 million came, mostly from north-west Europe – England, Wales, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. Finally about 15 million immigrants arrived in the relatively brief period between 1890 and 1914, until the outbreak of war in Europe temporarily arrested the flow. This later group came mostly from eastern and southern Europe and consisted of new immigrant groups – Poles, Russian Jews, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Croatians, Slovenes, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians and Greeks.

These people came largely for the same reasons that colonials had. The American economy had needed both unskilled and skilled workers through much of the nineteenth century. But after the 1880s the demand was almost exclusively for unskilled workers to fill the growing number of factory jobs. Coinciding with this were conditions in some areas of Europe, which were undergoing substantial economic changes in the 1880s as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Southern and eastern Europeans dislocated from their land and, possessing few skills, were attracted to the burgeoning industries in the United States. These ‘poor, huddled masses’ were to provide the incentive for a huge expansion in the transatlantic passenger trade.

Myth?

Steerage class was very poor

At first emigrants were carried in poor accommodation, initially in sailing vessels and latterly in the most primitive conditions in early steamships. However, pressure on governments brought about improvements and regulations relating to the treatment of steerage passengers. As early as 1848 the British Parliament passed legislation on the ventilation, safety and cleanliness of emigrant accommodation. No longer would they be forced into poor accommodation with women sometimes in fear of their virtue from both the crew and male passengers. Further legislation followed in 1873, following US Congress investigations.

There was an economic imperative that led to improved steerage (later called third class) conditions: those who travelled to the New World in steerage might make their fortunes and visit their old homes, travelling in either first or second class; those who had a reasonable journey might also tell their friends and relatives back home and encourage them to travel on the same line.

The German company Hamburg-Amerika, under Albert Ballin, built a whole town at Hamburg docks to accommodate and process emigrants for its ships, so important was the traffic to Ballin. Ballin and his rivalry with Cunard and White Star plays an important but peripheral role in the Titanic story as will be shown later.

One company that was interested in the steerage/emigrant trade was the British Inman Line. Founded in 1850 as the Liverpool and Philadelphia Shipping Company, their first vessel was a speculative venture by the Todd and McGregor yard on the River Clyde – the iron-hulled, screw-propelled City of Glasgow. It would be a long time before Cunard would accept such a departure from tradition. Sold to the Richardson Brothers of Liverpool, whose junior partner was William Inman, she had already shown that she was seaworthy and had carried first and second class across the Atlantic at half the fare charged by Collins and Cunard.

She was so successful that the Richardsons ordered a series of ships designed for both first class and the emigrant traffic. The line suffered a major tragedy in 1854 when the City of Glasgow disappeared without trace in the Atlantic with the loss of 480 souls – the worst Atlantic tragedy to date. Within six months the City of Philadelphia was lost by grounding, fortunately without loss. If it had not been for British Government charters during the Crimean War the company may have failed. Inman eventually became an Anglo–American company in 1887, after the death of William Inman. A consortium fronted by the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the company to add to the railroad’s American Steamship Company and the Belgian-flagged Red Star Line.