Until Sam Cunard came along with his first paddle steamer, a
crossing of the Atlantic from Europe to North America took six
weeks. Steam cut that to six days and also offered a style of
sailing comfort never known before. Steamship passengers thought
they had found Heaven, that travel could not possibly get better
than this. And for the best part of a century it couldn't - but
along with the triumphs came a number of disasters. Stephen Fox has
evoked the spirit of the early steamship era, starting with the
traditional 'packets' of the 1820s and moving forward to the
Lusitania, the Mauretania and the Titanic. The tales of engineers,
crew members and passengers are told in colourful detail with
extracts from diaries and other writings (including those of
Dickens and Emerson). The age of Victorian entrepreneurial zeal
truly linked the old world and the new, allowing millions of
emigrees to travel cheaply and so set up fresh lives for their
families in America. It was this influx of people that turned
America into a turn-of-the-century power that would have been
unthinkable only 70 years earlier. In detailing the remarkable
story, Fox shows how egos often clashed to the extent of bitter
rivalries between engineers and designers. Such competition proved
to be good for the industry, and certainly for those who sailed on
the ships. The floating palaces became 'a kind of third human
environment, neither land nor sea but partaking of each, and
bridging them in unprecedented ways'. This new form of culture
permeated the attitudes of passengers and crew and became jealously
preserved throughout the century- a snobbery of the ocean. Fox's
book is rich in technical and social detail, charting a defining
century in human migration. (Kirkus UK)
An epic social history of steamship travel from the 19th-century to
the ‘Lusitania’, the ‘Mauretania’ and the ‘Titanic’.
The great transatlantic steamships became emblems of an age, of a
Victorian audacity of spirit-cathedrals to man's harnessing of new
technology. Through the innovations and designs of key engineers
and shipping magnates – Samuel Cunard, Isambard Kingdom Brunel
and Edward Knights Collins – ‘the largest movable objects in
human history' were created. To the wealthy, steamships represented
glamorous travel, but to most they offered cheap passage out of
Europe to the New World. At their peak, steamships delivered one
million new Americans each year, transforming the world’s oceans
from barriers into highways. In this fascinating history, Stephen
Fox chronicles the tragedies that marked the evolution of the ocean
liner, including the 1852 sinking of the ‘Arctic’, with the
loss of three hundred and twenty-two lives, and the early
20th-century losses of the ‘Lusitania’ and the ‘Titanic’.
Using contemporary records, diaries and writing, he penetrates the
experience of transatlantic passage and examines the societies
created on the vast floating cities, ‘a kind of third human
environment, neither land nor sea but partaking of each, and
bridging them in unprecedented ways’.
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