The Ocean Railway

Until Sam Cunard came along with his first paddle steamer, a crossing of the Atlantic from Europe to North America took six weeks. Steam cut that to six days and also offered a style of sailing comfort never known before. Steamship passengers thought they had found Heaven, that travel could not possibly get better than this. And for the best part of a century it couldn't - but along with the triumphs came a number of disasters. Stephen Fox has evoked the spirit of the early steamship era, starting with the traditional 'packets' of the 1820s and moving forward to the Lusitania, the Mauretania and the Titanic. The tales of engineers, crew members and passengers are told in colourful detail with extracts from diaries and other writings (including those of Dickens and Emerson). The age of Victorian entrepreneurial zeal truly linked the old world and the new, allowing millions of emigrees to travel cheaply and so set up fresh lives for their families in America. It was this influx of people that turned America into a turn-of-the-century power that would have been unthinkable only 70 years earlier. In detailing the remarkable story, Fox shows how egos often clashed to the extent of bitter rivalries between engineers and designers. Such competition proved to be good for the industry, and certainly for those who sailed on the ships. The floating palaces became 'a kind of third human environment, neither land nor sea but partaking of each, and bridging them in unprecedented ways'. This new form of culture permeated the attitudes of passengers and crew and became jealously preserved throughout the century- a snobbery of the ocean. Fox's book is rich in technical and social detail, charting a defining century in human migration. (Kirkus UK)