From this magnificent hall you can wander on through other apartments of great splendour, drawing-room, library, smoking, music room, bath-rooms, and numbers of state-rooms. There are single berth, double berth, and three and four berth cabins—the old wooden benches for beds, however, being replaced by iron bed-steads throughout the ship. The electric light glows everywhere, being distributed by some fifty miles of wire.
THE “CAMPANIA.”
By permission of The Cunard Steamship Co.
The second-class accommodation differs but in degree from the magnificence of the saloon, while the steerage passengers are berthed on the lower deck, but have the privilege of walking on the upper deck. An additional idea of the size of the ship may be gained when we learn that the crew consists of over 420 persons—viz., 190 engineers, 179 stewards, and 54 sailing hands, while the vessel’s full complement of passengers brings up the total number of persons aboard to 1600 souls—quite a floating town indeed.
About five years after the birth of the Teutonic the newspapers recorded, in May, 1894, that the Lucania, sister ship to the Campania, and one of the newest Cunarders, had performed the journey across the Atlantic in 5 days, 13 hours, and 28 minutes. Her average speed was 22¼ knots, or 25·7 land miles per hour, marking one of the quickest runs then ever recorded; and about the same time came the news that the P. & O. steamer Himalaya had completed a mail transit from Bombay of 12½ days, and as her voyage to Bombay had been just over 13 days—the best outward passage—she had completed a round mail transit to Bombay and back, excluding stoppages, of 25½ days.
A little later, in the same year, the torpedo-boat destroyer, Hornet, built by Messrs. Yarrow & Co., of Poplar, for the British Navy, achieved, it is said, about 27 knots; that is, roughly speaking, near to 29 or 30 miles an hour, which speed proclaimed her to be then one of the fastest steamships in the world. She was fitted with the Yarrow water-tube boilers, which are both light and strong, while the consumption of coal was said to be remarkably small. She has two sets of triple-expansion inverted engines.
Again, a short time later, Messrs. Thorneycroft, of Chiswick, obtained similar results with the Daring, another boat of the same kind built for the British Government, and fitted with the Thorneycroft improved water-tube boilers. These, it is claimed, will raise steam from cold water in fifteen minutes. She passed the measured mile on the Maplin at the high speed of 29¼ miles an hour.
In the same summer a Company put on a fine steamer for service on the Thames and the English Channel, called La Marguerite, which developed, it is said, a speed of 25 miles an hour, which would make her one of the fastest passenger vessels then afloat.