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Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room for the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone to her meals sick from shore to shore until the gods ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery paradise where the billows ceased from troubling and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged
It was composed of over fifty ships, twenty-two of which were "liners," and carried eighteen hundred guns altogether. The army comprised between eleven and twelve thousand men, including a small force of provincial rangers. The fortress, which had been considerably strengthened since 1745, was defended by over three thousand regular troops, and a small number of Indians and inhabitants.
The next year the Cunard Company increased their liners' horsepower, and the Admiralty again increased their subsidy. The contract, now made to run for ten years, provided a subsidy of one hundred and seventy-three thousand three hundred and forty pounds per fifty-two round trips a year. The Americans were pressing them closer.
The steamer was the Marie Henriette, a large and luxurious boat, whose state-rooms on deck vie with the glories of the Cunard and White Star liners. One of these state-rooms, the best, was evidently occupied, for every curtain of its windows was carefully drawn.
The American collier and a big cargo-boat lay with the reflections of their anchor-lights quivering on the swell, but there was no passenger liner to be seen. A man came to moor the launch when they landed, and Jake asked if the vessel he described had called. "No, señor," said the man. "The only boats I know like that are the Cadiz liners, and the next is not due for a fortnight."
Finally he looked at me strangely and said, "Perhaps we had better try to build a model." I was so excited by the thing that I couldn't sleep that night. I kept dreaming of power stations, ocean liners, even automobiles, being operated by balls bouncing back and forth in cylinders.
In the case of various big liners, more than 500 feet long, no accurate range could be made for shelling at from three to five miles the usual shelling distance while at eight miles the vessels melted into the ocean-mists. But the first trials of the system were conducted at Newport, in 1913, in conjunction with Lieutenant Kenneth Whiting, of the submarine flotilla.
As was somewhat natural, the commercial gentry there did not relish having their valuable cargo pitched unceremoniously to Neptune, and preferred to send what they had by boats which did not contrive to meet burning emigrant liners. This, of course, was quite unreasonable of them, but one can only relate what happened. And then the second part of the prophecy evolved itself naturally. Messrs.
In those days there were passenger steamboats that would take one from the meadows of Hampton Court past the whole spectacle of London out to the shipping at Greenwich and the towed liners, the incessant tugs, the heaving portals of the sea.... His time was far too occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these expeditions he had planned, but he had many walks that bristled with impressions.
To the watcher in space, they were mere moving, snaky lines of barely distinguishable dots that shivered and seemed to writhe in the refractions of the air. Passing over them, seeming to pass almost through them in this strange perspectiveless view, were the shadowy forms of giant space liners, titanic streamlined hulls.
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