Floating Palaces

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 22, 1996 | by Stephen Goode

They were the largest moving objects ever built by man, viewers learn right at the start of the two-part, four[beta]hour documentary Floating Palaces, scheduled to air April 21-22 on the A&E Network. The Queen Mary, the SS United States and the ill-fated Titanic and Lusitania are names familiar to almost everyone. The great luxury ships -- many of them three football fields in length or longer -- plied the Atlantic Ocean from the turn of the century on, reaching their heyday during the twenties and thirties. Today, only the Queen Elizabeth 2 makes regular voyages.

Floating Palaces tells the story of these cities at sea, from the struggle in the 19th century to make steam-driven travel a possibility to their rapid decline during the Great Depression. The age of commercial aviation (see Travel, page 40) sealed their fate after World War II.

It's a great story, and Floating Palaces tells it well. The two segments of the documentary follow the QE2 as it leaves England for its 998th trip across the Atlantic and then returns. Woven seamlessly into the day-to-day life aboard ship is the history the film wants to tell.

Hardly anyone paid attention in 1819 when the Savannah, the first steam-driven vessel to cross the Atlantic, set off from America to England -- only to return by sail. Two decades later, however, large steam-driven ships became the obsession of men such as the majestically named Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an English civil engineer, and Samuel Cunard, a fisherman and businessman from Nova Scotia.

The British and Germans built the first big steamships during the 15-year period prior to World War I. The stars in the British fleet were the Lusitania, the Mauretania and (most elegant of all) the Aquitania. Germany had the Imperator and the Vaterland. (A third giant, the Bismarck, wasn't finished until after the outbreak of the war.)

As Floating Palaces shows with film footage and photographs, these were splendid creations, inside and outside top to bottom. Shipbuilders imported hardwoods from Africa and costly marble for their luxury liners. First-class accommodations were as elegant as those in any five-star hotel. (The menu on the Aquitania apologized to diners that "the motion of the ship precludes the finer wines.") In a lighter moment, one of the designers recalls that he always worked with rich, seasick American ladies in mind -- creating interiors that would take their minds off the fact that they were on a boat.

It was the Germans who discovered that things could go too far. One of their big new liners, top-heavy, listed to port. Engineers trimmed 15 feet off each of its four smokestacks and removed much of the marble from the interior but to no avail: It continued to list.

Germany lost its great boats in World War I, mostly to the Allies who took them as partial payment for war debts. The Vaterland, in American waters when the United States entered the fray, was seized, renamed Leviathan and used to transport American troops to Europe.

Interestingly, it wasn't the very rich who provided the profits for the ship owners during those golden years. It was the millions of immigrants who travelled in steerage to the United States, their tickets accounting for two-thirds of the profits a company would make on a voyage.

With strict immigration laws in force during the Roaring Twenties, however, ship owners stopped relying on steerage income and tried to woo aboard a more middle-class clientele. "Getting there is half the fun," declared the ads that attracted thousands who wanted to travel in style -- not quite the old elegance, but still impressive.

Then came the Great Depression. The once-grand Mauretania booked passengers for one-day cruises at $1. The great ships began a decline into faded grandeur from which they never recovered.