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Without a single exception, all the Cunard Liners are noted for their seaworthy qualities, which have been admirably preserved by the existence of the company's engineering works at Liverpool; and the instructions for the navigation of the fleet are most complete and peremptory.
"Yes we are Americans." "I knew it I can always tell them. What ship did you come over in?" "Oh, yes Inman line. We came in the BATAVIA Cunard you know. What kind of a passage did you have?" "Pretty fair." "That was luck. We had it awful rough. Captain said he'd hardly seen it rougher. Where are you from?" "New Jersey." "So'm I. No I didn't mean that; I'm from New England.
Soon after the Great Western's first voyage a sturdy New England Quaker from Nova Scotia named Samuel Cunard went over to London to try and interest the British government in a plan to establish a line of steamships between the two countries. He succeeded in raising 270,000 pounds, and built the Britannia, the first Cunard vessel to cross the Atlantic. This was in 1840.
No, sir: not a minute. You've got to say yes now. Why not, I'd like to know? If you can allege a single reason No; I knew it. Then it's a go, eh? Because I count on you to ring up the Cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you'd better book a return on a boat from Marseilles. I say, Dad; it'll be our last time together, in this kind of way . Oh, good! I knew you would."
In 1839 the British Government awarded an Atlantic mail contract, with an annual subsidy of $425,000 to Samuel Cunard and his associates, and thereby created the most famous of the Atlantic steamship companies. Four of these liners began running in 1840 an event which foretold the doom of the packet fleets, though the warning was almost unheeded in New York and Boston.
"I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and White Star boats, when it's good weather," she went on, placidly. "I shouldn't want those people to think you were not up in the convenances." They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March flung out, "I shouldn't want them to think you weren't. There's such a thing as overdoing."
Under the unprecedented stress this was, perhaps, not unnatural; but it would have seemed less displeasing had they also occasionally showed concern for England's plight and peril. He disputed so long that many people had to stand waiting to be shown their seats. During deals at a game of bridge on a Cunard steamer, the talk had turned upon a certain historic house in an English county.
One brilliant, August noonday a Cunard ship steamed gallantly down the Mersey and out into the open sea. There were a great number of passengers on board every cabin, every berth, was filled. Every country under Heaven, it seemed, was represented.
All during the summer months they had seen the cloud gathering, and Irishmen caught by a legal technicality and forced into the system; but all this came to a climax when the cry of cowardice was raised at Liverpool, as five hundred young emigrants, who would never have been helped to live for Ireland in their own country, were suddenly held up by order of the Cunard Company which, as a matter of fact, owed nearly its whole prosperity to its coffin boats of the Famine days, and whose glaringly seductive posters had emptied Ireland, neither for America nor Ireland's sake, but purely to get the passage-money of the emigrants who were now asked to go instead and "help England to give Constantinople to Russia, even if it cost them their lives."
With the almost immediate transference of the original transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you nowhere else.
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