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Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in TRANSATLANTIC, a book full of great tidbits, is that none of the great passenger liners celebrated in its pages are afloat today. Those that are in existence are rusting away quietly at the bottom of the North Atlantic --- the Titanic being the most renowned of the wrecks, but hardly alone. None of the others are left, being victims of time or of sinking or of the knacker's yard. The genius of historical preservation stretches back to the age of sail --- USS Constitution, USS Constellation, HMS Victory --- and forward to the age of flight --- the Wright Brothers' Flyer, a contemporary of many of the great transatlantic ocean liners, is extant at the Smithsonian --- but seems to have skipped the age of steam.
If the great liners are remembered at all, they will have to be remembered in the pages of TRANSATLANTIC, and the book is certainly monumental enough for that.
Author Stephen Fox has written a thick book but an immensely valuable one. TRANSATLANTIC begins at the dawn of its era, when steam engine technology and metalworking knowledge became advanced enough to imagine a great ship, powered by steam, independent of wind and tide, crossing the cold and forbidding distances of the North Atlantic and linking the Old and New Worlds. TRANSATLANTIC is the story of Samuel Cunard and Isambard Brunel, one a hardheaded businessman, the other a pioneering engineer, who built competing lines for the transatlantic traffic.
Fox describes the technological problems of building a ship that could, just for starters, carry enough coal to make the passage without refueling. Additionally, Cunard and Brunel had to build their ships strong enough to survive the buffeting of the North Atlantic storms, as well as building their enterprises strong enough to withstand the political storms of Washington and London. (The government contracts for carrying the transatlantic mail were crucial to building the great steamships.)
As the transatlantic steam traffic improved in its reliability, the new shipping lines faced a new and unprecedented set of problems. One was the need to balance competing interests on board with the new class of ship's engineers contending with captains and crew with vastly more saltwater experience. Another was the need not only to upgrade the experience of passengers but also to compete with ever-more lavish accommodations aboard competitors' ships. Most crucial, however, was the balance between speed and safety.
One feature of the age of steam, well documented in TRANSATLANTIC, was the frequent races between the great liners, with each ship on each voyage determined to break the New York-to-Liverpool record. The cost of such speed could be, and occasionally was, the safety of the ship, as captains raced through their fuel and took dangerous detours through iceberg country. And every so often --- described in harrowing detail by Fox --- there would be an accident or a significant loss of life, often under mysterious and unexplained circumstances.
The difficulty with TRANSATLANTIC is that there are not nearly enough shipwrecks in its 493 pages; there's much more focus on the growth of the steamship lines and the men who built them. For an oceangoing book, TRANSATLANTIC can be dreadfully dry at times, with too much emphasis on the genuinely uninteresting Cunard family and the changing fortunes of its competitors. Long passages on such things as engineering associations and ships' discipline certainly could have been excised with no appreciable loss.
Where TRANSATLANTIC shines, though, is in Fox's explanation of what it must have been like to sail on the great ocean liners. Fox is fortunate in that so many great writers of the period, including Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, sailed aboard these great ships, and wrote extensively about their experiences. Fox weaves their tales together with those of more prosaic passengers to present a complete and gloriously vivid picture of what it must have been like to sail the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, whether at the captain's table or down below in steerage.
Perhaps the only other possible complaint about TRANSATLANTIC is that there are not nearly enough photographs in the book illustrating the transatlantic liners. It could be, of course, that what photographs there were have passed out of history as completely as the ocean liners themselves. But what we are left with is a magisterial and majestic account, and the reader cannot, in good conscience, honestly ask for much more than that.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes movie reviews at http://www.txreviews.com/.
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