The Other Side of the Night (4 page)

At the beginning of the 20th century the Cunard Line, once the dominant passenger line on the North Atlantic, was confronting the gravest crisis of its sixty-year history. It was not facing the oblivion which had overtaken many other passenger lines over the decades, but rather a fate far worse: obscurity. The company was unable to sustain the energy and momentum that had driven its many successes in the 1880s, and the decade between 1895 and 1905 could not be considered one of the line’s most stellar periods.

Only six new ships had been launched in the whole of the 1890s, and by the turn of the century the majority of Cunard’s fleet was made up of vessels that were small, slow, and rather pedestrian. The average age of the company’s ships was thirteen years, and the oldest member of the fleet, the
Servia
, had been launched in 1881. While for sixty years Cunard had been symbolic of safe, well-founded vessels that crossed the Atlantic reliably, if not always spectacularly, the new standards for speed and comfort being set by its British and German competitors meant that safety and reliability were no longer enough. While Cunard refused to indulge in the penchant for increased luxury and ever-higher speeds which engrossed most of its competitors, the choices of the traveling public made it clear that they
wanted
to be sped across the Atlantic, and coddled as they did so.

The threat—“problem” is too weak a word—that the newly-sur-gent Teutonic companies particularly posed to Cunard was very real. In quick succession the twin German shipping lines, Hamburg-Amerika and Norrdeutscher-Lloyd, introduced a series of very fast, very luxurious liners that quickly began skimming the cream of the North Atlantic passenger trade, and were making enormous inroads on the volume of immigrant traffic being carried to the New World as well. The first of these ships was the mean-looking, imposing, unmistakably German
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
. In the words of John Malcolm Brinnin, she ushered in “a period of steamship history when the landscapes of Valhalla enscrolled on the walls and ceilings of grand saloons would all but collapse under their own weight, as well as a period when Teutonic efficiency united with matchless engine power would give Germany all the honors on the northern seas. And when the wits of the first decade of the [Twentieth] Century began to say something was ‘hideously’ or ‘divinely’ ‘North German Lloyd’ they meant, according to one American contemporary, ‘two of everything but the kitchen range, then gilded.’” Her pretentiousness slowed her not a whit, for the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
immediately took the Blue Ribband (the honor for speed champion), romping across the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage in early 1897 at nearly 22 knots.

Not content in merely besting the British steamship lines, whose transatlantic ascendancy had heretofore been unchallenged, the Germans embarrassed them by next introducing the
Deutschland
, which belonged to the Hamburg-Amerika Line, crossing the “Big Pond” at a speed of nearly 23 knots. Long, low, with a sleek four-funneled superstructure, the
Deutschland
looked the very part of the Atlantic greyhound. Yet her preeminence was to last less than a year as, adding insult to injury, the new
Kronprinz Wilhelm
set a new record at 23½ knots. The year after that the
Kaiser Wilhelm II
proved a shade faster still. This Teutonic monopoly on the Blue Ribband was more than Great Britain could stand—a head to head showdown was approaching between these upstart Germans and the established maritime prowess of the British.

Almost overnight, it seemed, Cunard’s entire fleet seemed dated and obsolescent, a collection of dowdy, frumpy old ladies whose staid conservatism, which had once seemed to be part of their appeal, was now seen as quaint and homely—and hopelessly passé. Even the vaunted claim, “The Cunard has never lost a life,” which had been invoked with suitable gravity for more than half a century any time a newcomer to the North Atlantic appeared to challenge the line, now lost its potency. Safety was no longer enough, as passengers wanted speed and luxury just as much, if not even more. That the Germans were each carrying roughly twice as many passengers as Cunard was bad enough, but because of the sensation these new ships were creating for Norddeutscher-Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika, along with the accompanying publicity, they were attracting still more passengers. Even if a traveler wasn’t able to make his or her crossing on one of the German speedsters, the cachet of sailing on one their stablemates was still attractive. And because Cunard, like the German lines, relied heavily on the immigrant trade to make its profits, any decline in the number of fare-paying passengers carried serious financial consequences.

Cunard’s response to the German challengers would soon appear, first in the form of the
Caronia
and
Carmania
— the “Pretty Sisters,”—and ultimately in the awesome shapes of the
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
, ships that would be triumphs of speed and luxury on such a scale that the German shipping lines would never recover their brief pre-eminence on the North Atlantic. But those magnificent ships were still to come when construction began on a handful of modern, if somewhat modest, Cunard liners. The first step taken toward refurbishing the fleet was an order placed for three liners, two to be built by C.S. Swan & Hunter and one by the John Brown shipyard. The first two would be the
Ivernia
and
Saxonia
, followed two years later by a ship that would be neither the largest nor the fastest ship in the line’s service, but would ultimately become one of the most famous in the whole history of Cunard: the
Carpathia
.

Built in the Swan Hunter yard, the
Ivernia
was launched in late 1899, and entered service in April 1900. At close to 14,000 gross tons, she was the largest ship yet built for Cunard, but she would hold that honor for little more than a month, as the next ship to enter service, the
Saxonia
, was even larger. Built by the John Brown shipyard on Clydeside, in Scotland, the
Saxonia
was launched on December 16, 1899, with a gross tonnage of over 14,200 tons. By mid-May 1900 her fitting out was complete, and she set out on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Boston on May 22. She was equipped with a pair of quadruple expansion engines, which turned two propellers. Not yet ready to challenge the Germans head-to-head, Cunard’s priority with the three sisters was size, not speed, and the
Saxonia
’s machinery gave her a service speed of 15 knots.

The appearance of the
Ivernia
and
Saxonia
was distinctive, if not particularly handsome. They had long, black hulls with a graceful sheer, straight up-and-down cutter bows, and attractive counter sterns reminiscent of the popular
Campania
and
Lucania
; but there the resemblance ended. Rather than the multi-tiered superstructure sported by their predecessors, surmounted by clusters of vent cowls and topped by a pair of powerful-looking funnels, the superstructures in these new ships were long and low, creating the visual impression that they had been somehow flattened out and spread the length of the hull. Atop it all would be perched a single tall, almost spindly funnel; spaced equidistant along the length of the ships were four masts. As awkward as this arrangement may sound, as a whole the proportions worked together to create a look that was modern and purposeful, if not exactly handsome.

This class of ships had been designed from the outset to make money for Cunard by carrying both passengers and cargo. The four masts were no affectation added for appearance—they acted as kingposts for the booms that were used when loading or unloading cargo. The cargo spaces were quite large, and as a consequence the passenger accommodations were not as extensive as might have been expected of the largest ships in the Cunard fleet. Accommodations were for two hundred Second Class passengers and fifteen hundred Third Class—there were no First Class cabins at all. Their dual roles as cargo
and
passenger ships were confirmation, if any were needed, of Cunard’s straitened circumstances: the line could no longer depend for its revenues on ships built exclusively for passengers, but as in its early days the company was once again looking to freighting as a way to help it stay solvent. In the first few years of the 20th century Cunard needed to earn every pound it possibly could.

The third ship of this trio, the
Carpathia,
joined the
Ivernia
and
Saxonia
in 1903. Her keel had been laid down on September 10, 1901 at the Wallsend shipyard Swan & Hunter, and she was launched on August 6, 1902. An interesting sidelight to her construction was that while the
Carpathia
was taking shape in one of the yard’s gantries, at the other end of the shipyard archaeologists had begun excavating the recently-discovered eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient Roman boundary between Britannia and Caledonia (Britain and Scotland)—a fascinating juxtaposition of the ancient world and the modern. As the
Carpathia
was just barely larger than 14,000 tons, the
Saxonia
remained the largest ship in Cunard service until the
Caronia
made her appearance in 1905.

In her role as a cargo carrier, the
Carpathia
was a bit more specialized than her two sisters. Designed to carry refrigerated food, in particular meat, she had been built with three large refrigerated holds, as well as one for her own provisions. Her powerplant was identical to that of the
Ivernia
and
Saxonia
, a pair of ten-cylinder quadruple expansion engines turning two propellers, which gave her a top speed during her sea trials of just over 15 knots.

Like her two sisters, the
Carpathia
was originally designed to carry just Second and Third Class passengers. Despite the absence of First Class berthing, the standard of the accommodations was remarkably high: rather than imitate the gilt-and-marble extravagance of the German ships, Cunard placed a premium on quiet comfort. Even in Third Class there were features normally found only in higher classes on other companies’ ships–-they included a smoking room (the usual practice was for Third Class smokers to make do with taking their nicotine on the open deck, quite an impossible feat in anything but clear weather), a bar, a ladies’ sitting room and a dining saloon spacious enough to serve 300 people at one sitting—quite large as a standard for any class of passengers at the time. Second Class had similar amenities, somewhat more opulent in decor, of course, and it also had a library.

While the term “steerage” was still used more-or-less interchangeably with “Third Class,” the circumstances that greeted Third Class passengers in the first decade of the 20th century were a far cry from the “dank ’tween decks” of sixty years before. The culmination of the trend begun by William Inman a half-century earlier, the accommodations aboard the
Carpathia
were typical of a new consciousness of the value of Third Class passengers to the Cunard Line.

William Inman, a Liverpool shipowner who formed the line which bore his family name, had revolutionized the immigrant trade in the mid-19th century. While the rest of the steamship industry focused their efforts on luring First Class travelers aboard their ships, Inman recognized the potential market that emigrants represented, especially the Irish, and decided that the time had come to take advantage of the opportunity. Rather than compelling them to cross the Irish Sea to embark at Liverpool or Bristol, he began embarking them at Queenstown (now Cobh), which sat on a small harbor on the south Irish coast.

Charmingly, Inman’s wife took on a very active role the business, creating the ships’ interiors as well as drawing up their sailing schedules. She also made it her business to look after the welfare of Inman passengers: on one occasion she disguised herself as an emigrant on the passage from Liverpool to Queenstown in order to experience firsthand what life was like for the steerage passengers. For as little as £5 ($25), an Inman ship would carry an emigrant from Liverpool to Philadelphia. The fare included three meals a day: arrowroot with sugar and milk, oatmeal porridge and molasses at breakfast; a mix of salt beef and fresh beef at dinner; tea and gruel for supper. Bland and monotonous it may have been, but a genuine improvement over the offerings of other lines, where emigrants had often been expected to provide their own food and prepare it during the voyage. Little wonder, then, that impoverished Irish families soon flocked to the Inman offices in Dublin and Queenstown. Other steamship lines, including Cunard, were quick to copy Inman’s success, and within a generation Queenstown had been transformed into one of the busiest emigration ports in Europe.

A great many myths have built up around the flood of immigrants that flowed to the shores of the New World at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, aided by a spate of romanticized reporting, photographs, and artwork from the period. All too often the steerage passengers were portrayed as “tired, poor…huddled masses”—babushka- and shawl-clad mothers gripping the hands of small, wide-eyed children, or wide-eyed young men in ill-fitting clothing clutching their few belongings in loosely tied bundles, all hoping to find their fortunes in such exotic locales as New York, Pittsburgh, or Chicago.