The passenger steamers have gone through an amazingly rapid growth since 1888, and have developed along many lines, but it was in that year that the first twinscrew steamers of large dimensions were put in service. The Inman liners City of New York and City of Paris were the first large ships to be so equipped. This double system of propulsion eliminated the necessity for sails on liners, and from that time on the masts of ocean liners have deteriorated to mere supports for derricks and signal spars. By this time, too, all the larger steamers were being fitted with steam steering gears. This important (and now almost universal) appliance was first installed on the Inman liner City of Brussels in 1869.
And now, in the late ’eighties and early ’nineties, came the forerunners of the long list of ships that have grown into the finest fleet of express steamers to be found on any of the Seven Seas. Great Britain and the United States were primarily interested in this trade, but the other nations of northern Europe also had a part to play, and even Austria-Hungary and Italy entered the competition. But the United States gradually grew to depend more and more on the ships of other nations until finally the American Line with its handful of ships was almost the only serious American contender for the profits of the rapidly growing passenger business that had developed.
But into this furious competition a new nation thrust itself. Germany had become a power—a forceful, dominating power—as was proved in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and 1871. And she saw that her “place in the sun” could only be gained by venturing on the sea. Government aid to shipping and an enthusiastic demand on the part of the people for increased tonnage resulted in the building up of a merchant marine that for size and speed, for energy and enterprise became, shortly, second to none but Britain, and in some aspects exceeded even that great sea power.
Britain, it is interesting to note, had built up a fleet of merchant ships that was predominantly composed of freight ships. Germany, on the other hand, built up a fleet dominated in numbers by her liners.
Of the dozen or so principal German lines that dominated her entire merchant marine, the Hamburg-American Line was the most important, and the North German Lloyd was second. At the outbreak of the World War the Hamburg-American Line made up about twenty per cent. of the entire German mercantile fleet, and totalled nearly five hundred ships of about eleven hundred thousand tons. This great organization in the sixty-seven years of its existence had become the most powerful steamship line in the world. Nor was the North German Lloyd far behind. In 1914 its tonnage had reached the huge total of 700,000.
These two lines, and eight or nine others, all of great size, controlled the great part of Germany’s tonnage, and because of subsidies, of preferred rates given them by German railroads, of the practical control of German and Russian emigration, aided, or at least not opposed, by the Government, this huge fleet captured a very large percentage of the European emigrant travel and much of the world’s fast freight. So vast was the Hamburg-American Line that their ships called regularly at literally hundreds of the world’s principal ports and operated seventy-five separate services.
While the Hamburg-American Line was organized in 1847 and the North German Lloyd in 1857, their startling growth did not really begin until after the Franco-Prussian War, and even then for nearly twenty years their development was not surprising.
But in the twenty-four years following 1890 the German lines built fast and furiously. As late as the ’eighties they were buying British-built ships or were having their ships built in British yards, but then came the development of German ship-building and before many years had passed greater and faster liners than any Britain had built came sliding from their German ways into German waters.
THE DEUTSCHLAND