History
It took Britain's Cunard Line less than a year following World War I to re-establish their Atlantic supremacy with a three ship weekly service to New York. The Mauretania, Aquitania and ironically enough, the very ship that was built to compete with them, the Imperator were all plying the Atlantic as if the war had never even happened. Cunard had lost only one superliner, the Lusitania in 1915, but White Star's fleet was another story. The 48,000-ton flagship Britannic was lost in the Aegean in 1916, and the superb Oceanic of 1899 had been wrecked on the islands of Foula in 1914. When the war was over, the Treaty of Versailles appropriated two German superliners to White Star, the 56,000-ton Bismarck, third and largest of Albert Ballin’s great Imperator Class trio, left unfinished at the Blohm & Voss Shipyard, and the 35,000-ton Columbus at F. Schicau in Danzig. While both ships had been launched, they were far from complete, and it would take a further two years for them to be outfitted entirely, leaving White Star out of the loop so to speak until mid 1922.
Laid down in 1912, the Columbus was the first of two of vessels ordered by Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd) for their premiere run, Bremerhaven to New York. At 35,000 tons, they would be large ships for their day. Powered by tried-and-true triple expansion reciprocating engines, the two new liners would be twin screw (the largest in the world until the advent of the Mauretania of 1938), and have a relatively modest service speed of just a shade over 18 knots (33 km/h).
Read more about this topic: RMS Homeric (1922)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)