Most people who have had little experience with the sea, and many who have travelled on it, have little idea of the size of ships. Probably this is due to the fact that we see so much mention made of the world’s greatest ships, with their tonnage and their other measurements, and so little of the thousands of ships that carry the bulk of the world’s passengers and practically all of the world’s freight. Our newspapers refer frequently to ships of thirty or forty or fifty thousand tons, but rarely do they mention the ship of 3,500 or 4,000 tons. Consequently, with such frequent mention of the giant liners before us, our tendency is, naturally enough, to imagine that they are typical of the sea, which is a very great error. In the transatlantic service there were, in 1924, but ten steamships of more than twenty-five thousand tons. On other routes none of them exists. It is as if we thought all buildings small because they do not equal in size St. Peter’s in Rome, or Versailles in France, or the Woolworth Building in New York, for the greatest steamers are as much greater than the average as St. Peter’s is larger than the little parish church, as Versailles is greater than the average home of a country gentleman, as the Woolworth Building is greater than the countless thousands of office buildings that house the great majority of business offices.
Yet these great ships, trifling in number though they are, are properly of interest to stay-at-homes and travellers alike, to landlubbers and sailors. The thing to remember, however, is that from the viewpoint of world commerce they are comparatively unimportant, and that the world could much more readily carry on its great affairs without these gigantic sea-borne palaces than without the smaller passenger ships and the countless thousands of “tramps” that roll and pitch and plod across the Seven Seas and make possible the commerce upon which the modern world depends.
THE MAJESTIC
Formerly the German liner Bismarck. It is now the property of the White Star Line.
It is important, therefore, to bear in mind what measurements constitute greatness in size, and what measurements are average. Such ships as the Majestic, the Berengaria, and the Leviathan are truly gigantic, and probably for many years to come they will not be greatly surpassed in size. So large are these three ships that they can enter only a few of the world’s great harbours, they cannot be tied up at more than a handful of piers, they cannot be docked at more than a few of the world’s great dry docks. There are a few other liners that approach these great ships in size, but not many. The Aquitania, the Mauretania, the Olympic, the Homeric, the Paris, the George Washington, the Belgenland, the torpedoed Lusitania and Justicia, the Titanic which was wrecked on an iceberg—all these ships belong to the same race of giants, but there are no others, although, of course, there are other ships that bridge the gap between the wallowing tramps and these that I have mentioned.
For the present, however, I shall pass by the smaller ships, more important though they are, as a race, and describe, in some detail the marvellous ships that voyage between the English Channel on the East and New York on the West, for it is in this service that all the greatest ships are to be found.
Modern marine engineering is quite up to designing, constructing, and operating ships greater than any that now exist, but should much larger ships be built little would be gained. New dry docks would have to be built, new piers constructed, deeper channels dredged, all at huge expense, and the building of such ships would in itself call for disbursements so vast that the companies operating them would find it difficult or perhaps impossible to make them pay. Consequently, I shall content myself with describing what now exists, feeling certain that any developments within many years will not so much surpass these great ships already afloat as to make my remarks entirely out of date.
As an example, therefore, let us take the Majestic, which, despite some argument on the part of those who put the Leviathan in commission, is slightly larger than any of the others I have named.
To say that she is 956 feet long and 100 feet broad means little. It may, perhaps, mean more to say that it would not be advisable to anchor more than four such ships in a harbour a mile square and forty-five feet deep. But even that, perhaps, may leave one wondering.