History/ Patrick Skene Catling: The Atlantic Ocean, like the English language, separates England and Ireland from America or, regarded positively, serves as a connection.
From cockleshell to Concorde, from explorers and merchant venturers to migrants, GIs and tourists, there have been compelling impulses over the years to cross the North Atlantic, making it the world's most travelled long-distance seaway. Most of the time, the heaviest traffic has been westward, in search of Atlantis, El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, and in order to escape from various kinds of oppression and hunger.
Stephen Fox has chosen to concentrate his history of transatlantic travel in the period when it was possible only along the surface of the sea, and when nationalistic and commercial competition achieved unprecedentedly rapid progress, in ships propelled by steam. Even with paddlewheels and then screw propellers, however, the vagaries of winds and currents, fog and the occasional iceberg continued to be significant factors. Fox chronicles both the successes and failures of engineering and seamanship. His style is conscientiously thorough (the book's long subtitle is characteristic), and when he analyses the hierarchies of officers and crews and of passengers from first class to steerage, there are some illuminating glimpses of sociological insight.
He expertly sets the scene with a prologue on Atlantic oceanography and weather, a survey of the natural hazards of the great-circle route from Liverpool to Boston and New York. He tells of winter gales, the tumultuous collision of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream, "rogue waves" reaching heights of 100 feet and more and spring icebergs unpredictably obstructing the shipping lanes off Newfoundland. "A typical splinter or castle berg weighs over 100,000 tons and stands about 150 feet high by 300 feet long, above water."
Fog compounds the dangers. "In iceberg season," he writes, with horrified awareness that seems to inspire a sort of poetry, "with visibility more crucial than ever, the Grand Banks fogs throw a dense smothering blanket over the ice field . . . The sea is lumpy and tumbling. Warning bells and foghorns are muffled, distorted . . . Shapes take on gigantic, unnatural proportions . . . Ghosts and mirages float by. Peering hopelessly through the thick white smoke, a lookout can mistake an iceberg for a ship, or ship for iceberg. The circumstances are gloomy, anxious, strange and very dangerous."
As astronauts now willingly expose themselves to the dangers of flight into space, so sailors ventured to cross the Atlantic, and passengers trusted them, even in the days when small ships, excommunicated from land, had a way of disappearing, never to be seen again. With the ebullient optimism of the Industrial Revolution, when there were people who believed in the perfectibility of man and unlimited progress, investors, especially at first in Britain, were irrationally eager to gamble on new marine technology, and they were soon emulated by others, led by Americans and Germans.
If this book can be said to have a hero, or at least a pre-eminent pioneer businessman, he was Samuel Cunard. Descended from German Quakers who migrated to America in the 17th century, he was born in 1787 in Halifax, where many Pennsylvanian Quakers ended up who had felt unable to support the American Revolution. That bleak Nova Scotian British garrison town nurtured Anglophilia, according to Fox. There was a demand to strengthen the transatlantic link.
In 1831, with the help of governmental subsidies and 169 shareholders, Cunard launched the Royal William, the first steamship to sail from Canada to England. The early steamships had precautionary sails. Steamships anachronistically "sail" to this day. Perhaps sailors should eventually have been renamed steamers. The Royal William, considered large at the time, was only 160 feet long, with a gross capacity of 1370 tons and a two-cylinder engine of 200 horsepower.
The ship was a failure, partly for commercial reasons (his partners evidently insisted on unattractively high rates for passengers and freight), partly because of costly quarantine during an epidemic of cholera. However, Cunard was said already to own more than 30 ships. The unsuccessful Royal William taught him he must in future assume total control of every enterprise.
In 1839, he signed a contract with the British Admiralty to undertake the mail service, with four steamships. He founded the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, thenceforth always known as the Cunard Line. His watchword was prudence.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous Victorian builder of bridges and the Great Western Railway, turned his extravagant creativity to naval architecture. He achieved the most memorable design innovation with the all-iron, propeller-driven Great Britain - a grandiose flop. On her maiden voyage, in 1845, she reached New York in just under 15 days, at an average speed of only 9.25 knots, one and a half knots slower than the current record-holder, Cunard's Cambria.
Fox pays tribute to the fulfilled ambitions and skills of a succession of 19th- and 20th-century marine engineers and to the long-lasting superiority of Scotland's and Ulster's shipbuilders. He elucidates the technicalities of hydrodynamics and other esoterica and makes it possible for one to understand the advantage of having enough lifeboats to carry all passengers, even the crowd deep below decks. He describes in detail the luxurious interior arrangements of "ships-as-buildings" and quotes some comments of celebrity passengers, including Dickens, Mark Twain and J.P. Morgan.
While rivals in the perennial race for the legendary blue riband suffered appalling disasters with great loss of life, the "famous Cunard luck" endured until 1915, when a German submarine sank the Lusitania, with the loss of 1,201 lives. That sinking was the second-worst in the history of transatlantic liners. The worst, of course, was the sinking of the White Star Line's Titanic, but Fox sensibly wastes no words on the familiar story.
"The Mauretania was the greatest steamship ever built," in his opinion. "On the roll of North Atlantic steamers, no other ship so combined technical innovation, speed, beauty, profitability and longevity." Many of the book's illustrations are devoted to her ornate décor.
It is disappointing that this generally interesting book, so comprehensive as far as it goes, stops short before the author could assess relatively modern steamships, such as the French Line's elegant Normandie and France and Cunard's majestic Queens. Is it because he cannot bear the thought of the Queen Mary degraded to immobile Californian tourist trap, and of all those passengers aboard the QEII who don't dress for dinner?
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships By Stephen Fox. HarperCollins, 493pp. £25