—ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, “AMOURS DE VOYAGE” There is no mistake about it, the ocean is simply disgusting,” a first-class passenger wrote to his wife as he crossed the Atlantic on the White Star liner Teutonic in 1905. “We are nearing New York, in a fierce snowstorm which makes the ship roll atrociously . . . We have had what is considered a good winter passage, but oh, Lord, it’s been abject misery almost all the while for me. I’ve not been actually sick, but I have never been actually without the feeling that I might be . . . It seems seven weeks, seven months, seven years since I left you—one never sleeps properly. It’s like a feverish nightmare the whole way. Then if it approaches a calm there’s sure to be a fog, and then you have the hooter blown every two minutes and everyone gets as jumpy as fish.”1 This was the sort of experience that a new generation of superliners was meant to stop. Cunard enlisted a government subsidy to build its famous trio of ships—variously described as leviathans and ocean greyhounds—the Lusitania, Mauretania, and Aquitania: the first two of these had their maiden voyages in the autumn of 1907.
