The Atlantic Stakes

When I was a child, the most magical day of the year for me was the one—usually a week or two after New Year’s—when my grandparents would leave on their annual trip to someplace warm. My brother and I got a day off from school, and a hired car took everyone to the piers that then lined the West Side of Manhattan for several miles. There we would board a passenger ship bound for the Mediterranean, South Africa, Hong Kong, or some other place as distant from New York as it was exotic to my young mind.

There would be a small party in my grandparents’ cabin; my grandfather would take us around to inspect the ship, and I would wave to the people on the pier far below, pretending that I was going too. Then, inevitably, the loudspeakers would begin announcing departure, and visitors were asked to disembark. I obediently went along and stood on the pier watching fascinated while tugs pushed the great ship out of her dock and she set off down the Hudson River, headed for the ends of the earth.

I was perhaps too obedient a child, for I have often wondered what would have happened had I simply turned left when everyone else turned right, vanished in the crowd, and hidden out until the ship was past Sandy Hook and had dropped the pilot. To be sure, there would have been hell to pay when I finally got back to New York. But I seriously doubt that whatever the inevitable punishment, it could possibly have been too high a price to pay for such an adventure. But I never got to sail on a passenger ship out of New York Harbor, and by the time I was grown up, almost all were gone, unable to compete with the Boeing 707s that began flying in 1958. One of the most storied and romantic businesses in history simply vanished in less than a decade.

Curiously, the passenger-ship business had a precise beginning. Until 1818 passenger carrying had been nothing more than a supplement to cargo hauling, and ships left when they had full holds. But then a New York merchant named Isaac Wright decided to change things. Engaged in transatlantic trade that required frequent crossings, Wright hated having to wait, so he put up twenty-five thousand dollars—as did each of his four partners—to found the Black Ball Line. According to an early advertisement, it would operate a fleet of vessels “between New York and Liverpool, to sail from each place on a certain day in every month throughout the year.” The first ship, the James Monroe , left New York on January 5, 1818, right on schedule.

Equally curious, although the United States was present at both the creation and, as we shall see, the end of the passenger-ship business, it was perhaps the only major business of the industrial era that the United States not only did not dominate but, for most of the era, had virtually no role in at all. There was a brief exception to this, in the 1850s, and it involved a now nearly forgotten man, Edward Knight Collins. He would fail utterly in the business and pay a staggering personal price as well, but he would also profoundly affect it.

Though the first regularly scheduled passenger service was in sailing ships, steam quickly replaced sail. But, under steam, the passenger-ship business was seldom really profitable. For most of its existence it depended on the kindness of governments to stay viable. The names of British passenger liners, for instance, were usually preceded by the initials RMS, standing for Royal Mail Steamship (translation: big government subsidies hidden in mail contracts).

In 1840 Samuel Cunard, a Canadian, convinced the British government to award a mail contract to his passenger line, and Parliament agreed to pay him sixty thousand pounds a year—no small sum in the 1840s—provided the ships would be available for troop carrying when necessary. Cunard soon dominated the North Atlantic passenger business, but he conceived it to be one of delivering passengers to the other side of the ocean merely safely and reliably, not comfortably and quickly.

One of his earliest and by far most prominent passengers was not amused. When Charles Dickens first visited the United States in 1842, he traveled here on the Cunarder Britannia and said of his bunk that “nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made, except coffins.”

It was in Cunard’s Spartan accommodations and pedestrian food that Collins thought he saw opportunity. He had been born of Cape Cod seafaring stock, and when his father retired as a ship captain, the two of them established regular service between New York, New Orleans, and Veracruz. After his father died, Collins began operating sailing ships on the North Atlantic run.

When members of Congress began calling for American ships to haul American mail to Europe, and the Navy wanted ships that could be converted to troop transports when needed, Collins struck a deal with the federal government. He would build five steamships and run them twenty times a year between New York and Liverpool in exchange for an annual subsidy of $385,000.

The first Collins steamship to be ready, the Atlantic , was not a beautiful vessel—the early steamships seldom were—but she had features no Cunarder could match. Her cabins were steam-heated. She carried forty tons of ice in an ice room and had real bathrooms and even a barbershop. Equally important, her engines were far more powerful than anything in a Cunard steamer. She crossed the Atlantic on the return from her maiden voyage in the record time of ten days and sixteen hours.

The battle was quickly joined between Cunard and Collins, and it appeared at first that Collins might be ahead. The public (egged on by the newspapers) loved the idea of a contest for speed between the two countries, and Collins, flamboyant by nature, accommodated them. Although his ships had a designed speed of 11.75 knots, in 1852 the Arctic crossed from New York to Liverpool in only nine days, seventeen hours, and twelve minutes, for an average speed of 13.06 knots. Cunard not only couldn’t match that speed, but, concerned with safety, wouldn’t try.

In the first eleven months of 1852, according to the New York Herald , Collins carried 4,306 passengers across the Atlantic and Cunard only 2,916. There was just one big problem: Collins was losing money on every voyage. The still-primitive engines, being pushed to their limits, broke down frequently and were expensive to repair. All the amenities took up valuable space. In 1851 Collins lost an average of $16,928 per voyage.

Collins went back to Congress and obtained an increase in his subsidy of $13,750 per voyage. He then had a great stroke of luck when in 1854 the British government, having declared war on Russia, commandeered Cunard’s ships to carry troops to the Crimea. Collins essentially had the North Atlantic to himself.

But tragedy soon struck. On September 27, 1854, the Arctic , running at high speed through dense fog (the idea, believe it or not, was that the higher the speed, the sooner the ship would be clear of the fog), collided with a small French vessel, the Vesta . The Vesta limped off to safety at St. John’s, Newfoundland; the Arctic foundered while still twenty miles from land. Only 86 of the 408 passengers and crew on board were rescued. Among the lost were Edward Collins’s wife and his two children.

The public, once obsessed with speed and comfort, now saw the virtues of safety, and Cunard noted that between 1840 and 1854 it carried a hundred thousand passengers on seven thousand voyages across the Atlantic, during which “not a single passenger had been lost nor a pound of baggage damaged.”

Less than two years after the Arctic disaster, another Collins liner, the Pacific , simply vanished in the mid-Atlantic. By this time Cunard was back in business, and Collins began to lose passengers in droves. When politics turned against him and his subsidy was cut by more than half, it was all over. He suspended operations in February 1858.

Both Collins and the United States turned their backs on the North Atlantic, which would be largely a British pond for the next few decades, and Collins died in 1878 in relative poverty. But his idea that passenger ships should be swift, luxurious, and innovative survived. Cunard’s first new ship after the Crimean War was the Persia , the largest and most powerful vessel yet built, designed expressly to recapture the speed record for Britain, which she did.

And every few years thereafter the Blue Riband, as the speed record was called, would change hands as some new steamer pounded her way across the Atlantic in a few hours’ less time. But no American vessel won the Blue Riband after Collins’s Arctic seized it in 1852 until, exactly a hundred years later, the SS United States took it from Cunard’s Queen Mary in 1952.

The United States still held it when, on November 15, 1969, it was announced that she would be suspended from service in the face of ever-mounting losses, and regular passenger-ship service across the North Atlantic ended. I hope it is some comfort to the shade of Edward Knight Collins to know that an American vessel will now hold the Blue Riband forever.