Brisbane to Los Angeles - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 101

by his maritime school. His previous internship placement had been aboard a cargo freighter. Even though
the freighter's “drunk Russian cook” served the same viscous soup for every meal, and even though one
of Richard's shipmates shattered a bone while out on deck when a wave leaped over the bow and crushed
his leg, Richard says he vastly preferred living on a freighter to living on this cruise ship. Cruise ships, in
his eyes, have almost zero to do with actual seafaring. He'd never in a million years want Captain Romeo's
job.
“Way too many people bothering you,” he says. “I want to be a freighter captain, and to do as little as
possible. Just suntan up on monkey island”—the roof above the bridge, at the very pinnacle of a container
ship—“and maybe read a book, or look at the sky.”
I'm with Richard.
IN the ship's small, leather-armchaired library is a book titled The Only Way to Cross , in which author
John Maxtone-Graham describes the glories of the great ocean liner age. It's hard to imagine it now, but in
1920 an oceangoing steamer left the port of New York every twenty minutes. Some were affordable means
of transport, which returned from Europe full of newly arrived immigrants. Others were elegant, floating
social parlors, with huge Roman baths and Empire-style ballrooms.
After World War II, shipping companies competed to build ever more opulent, ever more powerful pas-
senger liners. The zenith came in the summer of 1952, when the massive liner United States set a new
transatlantic speed record. She made the eastbound crossing in three days, ten hours, and forty minutes—an
average of nearly forty-one miles per hour.
The United States was a tremendous success. And by 1969, she was out of service. The airplane had
killed her.
It all began with the Graf Zeppelin , which in 1928 became the first commercial passenger airship to cross
the Atlantic. Though it presaged a revolution in long-haul travel, this blimp posed no immediate threat to
the ocean liner industry. It made the journey from Germany to New Jersey in 111 hours—more than a full
day longer than it took the United States to get from New York to Great Britain—and it could only carry
forty-three crew and twenty passengers.
In the 1930s, the improved designs of planes like the Douglas DC-3 made air travel cheaper and faster.
But by 1939, airplanes still represented only 2 percent of all American commercial passenger travel. And a
transatlantic flight still lasted a rather bumpy twelve hours.
The Boeing 707 was the airplane that changed everything. It cut the transatlantic crossing down to only
six or seven hours—a far more tolerable amount of time to be trapped in a cramped, vibrating cabin. The
707 debuted in 1958. That same year, for the first time, more passengers crossed the Atlantic by air than
by sea. By 1960, airplanes owned 70 percent of the transatlantic passenger business. By 1970, it was 96
percent.
These days, there's not a single year-round transatlantic passenger service by ship. The Queen Mary
2 still offers a functional (though, at five and a half days, somewhat leisurely compared to the United
States ) crossing between New York and Southampton most weeks of the spring, summer, and fall. But each
November, Cunard sends her south to run a bunch of pleasure jaunts around the Caribbean. She's forced to
moonlight as a tawdry cruise ship to make ends meet.
The final chapter of The Only Way to Cross laments the sad fates of the grand old liners. The original
Queen Mary was turned into a floating museum in Long Beach, California. On her final cruise—from
New York, around the horn (because she was too fat to fit through the Panama Canal), and on to the West
Coast—“the ship passed through tropical latitudes for which she'd never been designed,” writes Maxtone-
Graham. You can feel his prim embarrassment for her when he adds that on this final voyage “scandal