The Cursed Steamship

Whilst an ocean crossing was a positive and transformative experience for millions of people across the ages, helping them to a new life or facilitating exploration and discovery, for countless others it has brought only terror and death. We take safe travel for granted, but not so long ago, crossing the oceans of the world was fraught with danger. At one time, each traveller had an equal chance of being consigned to Davy Jones’ locker as they did of reaching land again. The Atlantic could be a seaway of opportunity, or a black and fathomless void that would consume ships and their occupants. The President was just one of those doomed ships.

Even at its genesis, the steamship President could be said to have been cursed. Her designer, Macgregor Laird (one of the famous Birkenhead-based Laird shipbuilding family) was heavily in debt by 1840. He was already associated with disaster, having funded and participated in a failed expedition to explore the Niger river in which most of the 40 man-team had died of Scarlet fever. Now facing financial ruin, he decided on an all or nothing roll of the dice and began construction of what he intended to be the greatest steamship ever built. The result of Laird’s feverish desperation to avoid catastrophe was the President, a 2360 tonne paddle-steamer designed to capitalise on the brand new Liverpool-New York run. On paper, it seemed as if Laird’s gamble would pay off. The President was, at that time, larger than any other steamship, being the first such vessel to have three decks. It also possessed a hitherto-unseen level of luxury and artistry; from an ornately carved figurehead of George Washington (hence the name) to oil paintings, plush velvet couches and ornamental pillars even in the engine room, it seemed that no expense had been spared.

The supposedly triumphant President, newly completed in 1840.

Except expenses had indeed been spared. All these gaudy decorations were essentially papering over the cracks. The innovative triple-decked design made the ship top heavy and liable to roll in rough weather. The engine, manufactured in Liverpool, had been done on the cheap and was seriously underpowered for such as heavy ship. Furthermore, the emphasis on decoration in the engine room also undermined basic safety features; watertight hulls were weakened by the added weight of gilt wrought iron. Already, the President was off to an inauspicious start.

Very swiftly, the “curse” of the President began to take hold. The top-heavy and underpowered ship performed woefully. Her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York took 16 and a half days, almost double the average crossing time at that point. As soon as the ship limped into New York, her captain was immediately blamed for the mess and fired with immediate effect. The first Lieutenant took command for the return voyage but the second voyage was even more catastrophic. In four days, the ship managed barely 300 miles, meaning it would very quickly run out coal and would potentially be stranded in the Atlantic. Disaster was only averted when the Lieutenant swallowed his pride and made the choice to return to New York to re-fuel, eventually making the ship 15 days overdue. Once again, he was sacked upon arrival for his supposed incompetence. Barely a year into her career, the President was already regarded as a “cursed” vessel; incapable of keeping to scheduled sailings and a guaranteed ignominious end to many a maritime career. Even steamship enthusiasts were aghast, with the famous shipbuilder and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel sniping, “What on earth or water is the President about?!”. But this embarrassment was merely a bitter taste of the true horror to come.

Within a year, the President was already seen as a “cursed” vessel which would bring only doom to whoever sailed on it. 

After taking an unprecedented 3 weeks to reach New York in the spring of 1841, the President, now under her third captain, Charles Roberts, made ready to return to England. Roberts had made sure that his vessel was fully loaded with extra cargo and coal, both to prevent any need to turn back, but also to weigh the top-heavy steamship down. Roberts seems to have been oblivious of the obvious risks this would pose to his vessel. He also seemed oblivious to the need to repair the vessel. Whether down to the commander’s incompetence or Laird’s lack of funds, nobody had repaired the hull plates and the engine frame, which were both now bent out of shape after the last few rough crossings.

The President’s already alarming problems were compounded by omens and dark prophecies. Soon after departing New York, Laird’s New York agent and the captain’s brother, Richard (neither of whom had met one another) had identical, and identically chilling, nightmares. They dreamt of the President on a stormy sea; they saw a confused crowd on deck and Captain Roberts shouting orders. Before he could finish his orders both men claimed that suddenly everything went black and they each woke in a sweat, the sounds of screaming women echoing in their ears.

Was this the horrifying final scene on the deck of the President?

The last confirmed sighting of the President itself was just two days into the voyage, when a fishing vessel saw a dark steamship struggling against a storm and being carried along by waves the height of a five-storey building. It soon vanished from sight.

The President was last seen in waters like this…

When the President failed to arrive at Liverpool, initially nobody took much notice. After all the “cursed” steamship had let people down before and arrived weeks late previously. But after a few weeks, panic and rumour began to set in. Word spread that the President had suffered a mutiny, or been captured by pirates or had run ashore off Newfoundland. At the same time, word had now spread from America about the ominous twin nightmares, which only served to ramp up the terror and uncertainties of hundreds of family members of crew and passengers who desperately awaited news. The deathwatch of the President even escalated to the highest corridors; the Prime Minister asked to kept informed about the situation and Queen Victoria even asked that a special messenger be appointed to keep her informed about “the fate of those poor souls on the President”.

The young Queen Victoria, like so many others, was desperate for news of the cursed steamship. 

Those poor souls, 110 in total, had simply vanished into the ether, where they remain to this day. The steamship had simply vanished into the dark void of the North Atlantic, leaving not even a small trace or clue to what had happened. Even 177 years later, no one can explain what happened to cause the President to disappear. As supernatural as it may seem, the twin nightmares may be the closest we ever get to understanding what happened on the top-heavy decks of the President in the doomed vessel’s final moments. Once the deathwatch eventually fizzled out in the late summer of 1841, many commentators saw the ship’s disappearance as the fulfilment of a “curse”. A curse that had caused the ship to be poorly constructed; a curse that had ruined the crossing times and ended the careers of two captains; and a curse which had finally rebounded, destroying the doomed ship itself and condemning 110 people to an unknown watery grave…

The Ships That Never Sailed (Part 3)

6) ‘The Nuclear Ship’ (1963)

In the heady atmosphere of the late 1950s and early 1960s; amidst the competing themes of sunny baby-boomer-driven optimism and the dark shadow of the potentially apocalyptic Cold War, one force seemed to offer all answers to all people; Nuclear power. Nuclear energy seemed to be the key that would unlock the future. Naively, it was assumed that before long everything would be nuclear-powered; from trains to toasters. In particular it was believed that nuclear energy could revolutionise oceanic transport. President Eisenhower publicly extolled the potential of nuclear-powered vessels and called for the launching of “an atomic ship”.

Nuclear power was seen as the solution to every and any issue in the 50s. 

Early 1960s Britain, basking in the sunny rays emanating from nuclear-obsessed America, began to consider a nuclear-powered ocean liner. Although commercial transatlantic flights had become the norm by 1960, cutting journey times between the continents to hours rather than days, a rather out-of-touch Macmillan Cabinet still felt it was vital to maintain a prestigious British presence on the sea. Seeing nuclear power as the deus ex machina which would restore British maritime dominance and end the silly fad of flying, the government set up a special technical group and handed it £3 million of public money to design the national flagship of the future.

By 1963, the group had spent two years debating the merits of various reactor designs, and had produced a preliminary design for the ship itself. The design of the ship was very similar to P&O’s Canberra of 1961 and seemed to be as futuristic as the planned source of her power; 51,000 tonnes of white hull, aluminium superstructure, swept funnels and fibreglass lifeboats. In Parliament, Macmillan proudly announced that Britain’s ‘Nuclear Ship’ was on the way to becoming a reality.

Canberra of 1961: a very similar design to the Nuclear Ship (see top of the page)

Then, in mid-1964, an inquisitive MP privately asked the government for a status update on the ‘Nuclear Ship’. He received no reply. Before long it was clear that the whole project had stalled, and had essentially been allowed to wither and die. It is remarkable that the project had lasted so long given the the widening cracks appearing in the once untouchable nuclear edifice. The extreme downsides of nuclear power, particularly radiation had been exposed as early 1958, when the cast and crew of the the John Wayne film The Conqueror had proceeded to die one by one of cancer after exposure to nuclear radiation after filming in the military testing ground of the Nevada Desert. Aluminium-lined passenger ships, carrying over 2000 people, would certainly be at risk. More crucially, the one nuclear-powered passenger ship that was actually built, Savannah, had demonstrated how impractical Britain’s ‘Nuclear Ship’ would have been. Intended to demonstrate the benefits of atomic energy, the American Savannah began leaking radioactive material almost at once, causing havoc for the local environment of the ports the ship visited. In just one year, the ship had released 115,000 gallons of radioactive waste into the sea, as it was only able to store a fraction of that amount. What it could store would always have to be disposed of every time the ship docked. Unsurprisingly, major ports were unwilling to be used as dumping grounds for potentially lethal radioactive waste. Once this had become clear, and once it had become even clearer by 1964 that huge, fast transatlantic passenger ships were costly anachronisms, the British government quietly shelved the ‘Nuclear Ship’.

Savannah c. 1970. To this date, ( and unsurprisingly) the only commercial nuclear-powered ship. 

7) Seawise University (1972)

This giant vessel is again technically a cheat addition to ‘Ships that never sailed’. This ship in fact sailed for nearly 30 years, albeit under a different name, different owners, and for a different purpose. That ship was the famous Queen Elizabeth of 1940, sister of the Queen Mary and one the largest transatlantic ocean liners ever constructed. Despite helping to carry millions of American troops during World War Two before going on to provide Cunard with their most profitable years in the 1950s, Queen Elizabeth was a relic of a bygone age by the mid-1960s. The ship carried more crew than passengers, as travellers deserted to airlines, and Cunard retired the ship in 1968.

Queen Elizabeth in her heyday, c. 1955. 

The 85,000 tonne liner was initially sold to a group of American businessmen, who planned to copy the fate of Queen Mary, setting up the sister ship as a floating hotel in Florida. Quickly losing money, the businessmen put the liner up for auction, where it was snapped up by a mysterious but vastly wealth shipowner, Tung Chao Yung.

The mysterious Mr Tung.

A cargo ship owner from Hong Kong, by the late 60s, Tung was looking for a more philanthropic role. Having grown up in a war-torn and semi-feudal China, Tung believed passionately in the benefits of education. He saw the Queen Elizabeth as the perfect means to encourage and spread education, quite literally, across the seven seas. Tung’s plan was simple but bold; he would buy Queen Elizabeth and convert the giant liner into the world’s largest floating university.

The ship was renamed Seawise University, in a particularly egotistical yet strained pun on Tung’s initials; “C Y = See Why = Sea Wise” (….yes, I know). The newly rechristened Seawise University travelled to Hong Kong to begin the conversion process. The ship would be part of the World Campus Afloat (later renamed Semester at Sea program). The programme chartered ships to host a variety of university courses for international students. Courses were to be taught in lecture theatres converted from Seawise University’s former grand lounges and restaurants. Students and tutors would live on board, and go ashore at every port the ship called at to experience local culture wherever the ship docked. Tung was revolutionary in providing World Campus Afloat with a purpose-built, 85,000 tonne vessel (officially the largest ship in the world at that point) with capacity for thousands of students. Such a vessel would revolutionise the idea of education at sea and would benefit thousands of students all over the world. The £5 million conversion was due to be completed, and the Seawise University ready to depart, by February 1972.

Hong Kong residents woke up on the morning of January 9th 1972 to a huge column of smoke blanketing the entire harbour; Seawise University was ablaze. The inferno was out of control, and the huge quantities of water frantically pumped into the ship, destabilised the vessel. Before long, the largest ship in the world had rolled over and partially capsized.

Seawise University ablaze in Hong Kong harbour, 1972. 

To this day, no one knows for certain what, or who, started the fire. It was known that Tung was a Nationalist, and the shipbuilding unions he had to work with were dominated by Communist Party members. Their mutual contempt was thinly veiled and many have assumed that irate local Communists put Tung’s latest maritime venture to the torch. Alternatively, Tung himself may have been responsible; he had bought Seawise University for £3.5 million, and insured it for £8 million. There is a good chance the mysterious fire may have been an insurance fraud scam by the shadowy Tung.

Had Seawise University been spared the flames, the ship would have likely found itself an incongruous university. The World Campus Afloat programme didn’t attract enough students to fill Seawise University to capacity and the costs of transporting an 85,000 tonne vessel across the world for months at a time would surely have been ruinous. Nevertheless, the programme continues to this day, on a smaller scale, and has benefitted thousands of students over the past few decades. As for Seawise University itself; the charred wreck remained in Hong Kong harbour until being finally scrapped in 1975. Before then, the ship served one final, unforeseen purpose; the setting for the secret underwater MI6 base in the Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun.

Seawise University’s cameo as an unlikely secret base in the 1974 Bond adventure, Man with the Golden Gun. 

8) Phoenix/America World City (1983)

This final ship that never sailed is essentially what it says on the tin; a literal floating city. The unbuilt ship symbolises the height of 1980s commercial confidence. But the longevity of the project, and its continued development to this very day also suggest that it ironically has a greater chance than ever of becoming a reality.

The idea of having a city built as a ship was the brainchild of the wonderfully named Knut Kloster. A Norwegian naval architect, Kloster had previously taken the revolutionary step of converting the transatlantic ocean liner France into the first large, dedicated cruise ship in the 1970s. By 1983, Kloster was dreaming on an ever bigger scale. His initial design called for a ship that would be a staggering 1,250 feet long, and weigh a truly colossal 250,000 tonnes. With 21 decks (for perspective, the Titanic had just 8 decks), the Phoenix would have capacity for 5,200 inhabitants.

Initial concept art of the Phoenix, c. 1983. 

Yes, inhabitants, rather than passengers. Kloster envisioned Phoenix not as a cruise ship or express passenger liner, but as a floating city on which people would live and work. The superstructure was designed almost as three huge apartment blocks; every cabin would be a fully-fledged home. The Phoenix would offer everything a real city could offer. Kloster planned to include dozens of restaurants, shops and boutiques, art galleries, a spa and fitness center, 6 pools, a jogging track 800 metres long, a theatre of 2,000 seats, a casino, a place of worship, a library, a museum, a planetarium, TV and music studios, a university campus, a hospital facility, and a heliport. He also planned to allocate an area for Japanese residents, even providing a special communal garden. The ship would be far too large to enter most ports so Kloster also included several huge lifeboats which could carry 400 passengers each to act as buses, ferrying people from their home on ship to the mainland. With such staggering ambition, and lofty ideals, Kloster proclaimed that Phoenix would be “a cultural spaceship for education, exploration and enrichment, and a global forum for the advancement of international cooperation, understanding and exchange”.

Concept art, showing the lifeboat ‘busses’ transporting the Phoenix’s citizens.

Kloster’s vision was taken very seriously. He had proved himself a success with the France and was the founder of the Norwegian Caribbean Line. As a result, the Phoenix project continued to be developed and designs were perfected over the next few years. At one point a contract was even signed with the American Avondale Shipbuilders. The project began to lag however, as Kloster and his team continually changed their minds of methods of propulsion (nuclear power was once again, briefly, considered). All the while, it became clear just how expensive the project was going to be (an extraordinary figure of $1.2 billion emerged in 1990).

Concept art of one of the ship’s many conference and business centres.

The project gained a new lease of life in 1996 when Westin Hotels & Resorts backed a bid to resume development on the huge vessel, which they insisted be renamed America World City. The new name, and the stipulation that the crew had to be entirely American, was designed to appeal to the US government, from whom Westin and Kloster hoped to gain funding. The project again stalled in the early 2000s, by which time Kloster had retired and the potential funding from Washington vanished with the huge financial drain of the war on terror.

Despite this, Phoenix/America World City is an idea which is still floating (forgive the pun) around. As recently as 2013, a new company, operating under the name American Flagship had bought the rights to the ship’s designs and was lobbying the Obama administration to provide the much-needed funding to start construction. The company made a point of stressing that the ship could be built in sections, across America, providing much needed jobs during a time of economic decline.

With Trump in power and looking for nationalistic prestige projects to rally voters, America World City could once again be taken seriously by investors and politicians. Paradoxically, an even greater reason why the gargantuan city ship may become a reality at last is because it is no longer so innovate, and thus so improbable. Many of the features that Kloster designed, such shops, casinos, spas and planetariums are now common features of modern day cruise ships. Furthermore, size is no longer such a big issue (last pun, I promise). In 1983, the largest passenger ship was still the 85,000 tonne Queen Elizabeth. Last year, Harmony of the Seas was launched, weighing a staggering 220,000 tonnes. As of 2017, Phoenix/America World City no longer seems like such a pie in the sky idea, and consequently has a greater chance than every other ship on this list has ever had, of making the voyage from the drawing board to the ocean.

Will Phoenix/America World City one day become a reality?

The Ships That Never Sailed (Part 2)

4) Bretagne (1940)

The intense rivalry between Queen Mary and Normandie became far more than just a speed competition between two ships. It became a clash of national wills. Financed by the French government Normandie was sleek, modern and served as giant floating ambassador for France and French style in the 1930s. The stolid, sturdy and old-fashioned Queen Mary symbolised Britain’s long-established maritime supremacy. By 1937 however, it was Queen Mary leading the race both in terms of speed (averaging 32 knots across the Atlantic) and in profits. Cunard ordered a sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, to cement this commercial dominance. As Queen Elizabeth neared completion in January 1940, Cunard’s rivals Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (CGT) placed the order for their counter-challenge, Bretagne.

CGT was taking no chances with Bretagne. After Normandie was conclusively proven to be slower than Queen Mary, CGT directors demanded that Bretagne should be capable of achieving at least 35 knots. The new ship was also intended to literally overshadow the Cunard queens. Bretagne would be longer than Normandie, and significantly larger; surviving plans anticipated a colossal tonnage of 100,000.

CGT turned to Normandie’s designer, Vladimir Yourkevitch, to draw up plans for Bretagne. Yourkevitch, a young Russian naval architect who fled to France after 1917, was just as obsessed as Norman Bel Geddes with streamlining. Unlike Geddes, he actually got to build his design, to great acclaim. Normandie’s sleek welded hull, teardrop funnels and smooth superstructure were years ahead of typical ship design in the 1930s.

Vladimir Yourkevitch with models of his Normandie design, c. 1934. 

He planned to take this even further with the Bretagne project. He drew up two plans for the new superliner. The first design was essentially a larger version of Normandie, with only two funnels instead of three. The second was bold and revolutionary. In this design, Bretagne would have a single funnel, split into two up the sides of the vessel. This would create vastly more deck and interior space. Yourkevitch planned to capitalise on this space, and included a massive glazed area on the top deck, to be filled with however many a la carte restaurants and luxury suites CGT wished. Yourkevitch also stressed to CGT bosses that the radical new design would further boost Bretagne’s planned speed and would virtually guarantee a transatlantic triumph over the Cunard queens.

The first, more conservative design for Bretagne. The second radical design is at the top of the page.

Yourkevitch was surprised, if not totally devastated, when CGT directors branded his ideas “trop futuriste” and instead approved the first, more conservative design.  CGT scrambled to raise money for the project. Normandie’s construction had been funded by loans and subsidies from the French government, but the company had paid nothing back by 1940. Despite this, company executives were astonishingly confident (some would say utterly deluded) their government would step to finance the nation’s new flagship. Planning for Bretagne, and CGT’s attempts to secure funding came to an abrupt end in May 1940. The German invasion, collapse of the French Republic, and the subsequent occupation of CGT’s port of Le Harve for the next four years killed the Bretagne project in its cradle. By the time war finally ended, CGT had lost Normandie in a catastrophic fire in New York. Building Bretagne was now ultimately pointless and the project was officially cancelled in late 1945.

Model of Bretagne’s radical second design, showing the enormous glazed top deck. 

It is doubtful that Bretagne would have been a success if war had not broken out. Despite Normandie’s iconic nature, the ship was unprofitable and expensive to run; the even larger Bretagne would have been much the same. However, Bretagne’s second, radical design was very much ahead of its time and proved an accurate depiction of the future, with most cruise ships bearing a close similarity to Yourkevitch’s bold, but doomed, plan.

 

5) Amerika/Viktoria (1940)

Just as Bretagne, and indeed France, were being crushed in 1940, so Nazi Germany’s own superliner project was being perfected. Victorious in Europe, Hitler was at the height of his power in the summer of 1940, and believed that an enormous and fast passenger liner would be the key to securing the international prestige of the Third Reich.

The project dated back to 1937 when the Nazi government invited proposals from German shipping lines for ship designs which would boost Germany’s national prestige. Representatives from North German Lloyd (NDL) travelled to Berlin and presented to government ministers plans for (the surprisingly named, given the rabid nationalism of Nazi Germany) Amerika. The reichministers were pleased that NDL had understood their brief; Amerika was to be 1075 feet long and would weigh at least 80,000 tonnes. Much like CGT and Bretagne, NDL aimed for Amerika to travel at 35 knots, securing the honour of the fastest transatlantic crossing for Germany.

Amerika – this design includes the large yellow observation room in place of a crow’s nest.

Amerika’s design seemed initially similar to Bretagne. The ship would be sleek and streamlined and would feature a single funnel. Unlike Bretagne, this funnel would be massive and imposing. A novel element of the design was a large box-like structure instead of a crow’s nest which could act as an observation station for the captain. Amerika’s most radical departure was in its engineering. NDL’s engineers calculated that to achieve 35 knots, a massive output of 300,000 horsepower would be required. Consequently, Amerika would need huge engines and an unprecedented five propellers to generate sufficient horsepower. The fuel costs would have been immense, but the government was content to throw money at the project in the quest to establish German greatness on the high seas.

Tourist poster circulated in America c. 1938. A desire to present Nazi Germany as a sophisticated and attractive destination lay at the heart of the Nazis’ superliner project.

At the outbreak of war, the project was suspended. But with the German victories in 1940, and the seemingly inevitable defeat of Britain, Nazi leaders once more looked to the nascent superliner project as a way to cement the Third Reich as Europe’s new superpower. The ship was renamed Viktoria in order to celebrate military success but also to cater to Hitler’s increasing hostility to the USA and it’s material support for a beleaguered Britain. Plans briefly proceeded again and even a model was built and tested in Bremerhaven. However, by the autumn of 1940 it was clear that Britain was in no way defeated, and thus no end to the war was in sight. With the high seas blocked to German commercial ships, the Viktoria project was put on hold. Within a few years, Nazi Germany would be engulfed by the fires of war and the Amerika/Viktoria project disappeared into oblivion.

If ever completed, the launch of Amerika/Viktoria would have inevitably become another grand Nazi propaganda event, like this launch in 1938.

We have no way of knowing what Amerika/Viktoria would have been like if completed. But given the nature of building projects in Nazi Germany, it is not hard to imagine the Amerika/Viktoria; vast, stark and imposing, designed to reduce and overawe the individual. Despite never progressing beyond a model, the ambition of Amerika/Viktoria gives a glimpse of the hubris of a fascist regime at the height of its power.

 

 

Coming in Part 3: Nukes, Universities and Cities… all afloat! 

The Ships That Never Sailed (Part 1)

Any history buff or liner enthusiast will be familiar with the names of some of the world’s greatest ships. Titanic, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Normandie and United States are just some of these great vessels that have gone down in history as either tragic disasters or triumphs of engineering. But liners such as these may not have been so venerated if the plans of shipping companies around the world had come to fruition. Throughout the 20th Century, vessels were planned, designed, and even partially built which could have rivalled or even eclipsed the most famous of ocean liners. That they remained either plans on a drawing board or a collection of unassembled steel plates is a testament to the unpredictable nature of world events and particularly the destructive nature of the 20th Century.

1) Constitution (1916)

America came very close to building its own superliner decades before the famed United States of 1952. Ironically, the man who designed the pioneering United States was also the force behind a similar, stalled attempt in the early 1900s to spread the stars and stripes across the seas. William Francis Gibbs was fascinated with ships since childhood and despite lacking any formal training, became obsessed with naval architecture and grew up determined to one day design the ultimate ocean liner. Aged 30, he quit his legal career and joined with (some would say dragged along) his brother to design a then unheard of 1,000 ft long ship which he intended to submit to financiers. Essentially enthusiastic amateurs, the brothers Gibbs must have been amazed when both J.P. Morgan and the United States Navy offered to jointly finance their liner, tentatively given the not-exactly-thrilling name of Constitution.

William Francis (left) and Francis William (right) Gibbs (really!) c. 1919.

It was not hard to see why Morgan and the Navy were interested in Gibbs’ childhood dream. Constitution would have been an enormous vessel at 56,000 tonnes, and would have more than filled a recent Titanic-shaped hole in Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine company, which had financed the doomed liner. The fact that Constitution seemed to be modelled on (if not outright copied) from the Titanic’s design helped to convince Morgan representatives to sign off on the planned ship after just one meeting with Gibbs. The Navy also saw the advantages of having partial control over Constitution which would have travelled at a staggering 30 knots, a speed which no ship would exceed until 1936. Such a fast ship at the nation’s disposal could be advantageous if the United States were sucked into the war raging in Europe at the time.

It was the First World War which first stalled Gibbs’ grandiose plans. Although a large-scale model was built and tested in late 1916, the USA’s entry into the war in 1917 put a halt on any work relating to Constitution. The Navy’s attention shifted to warship construction and Morgan’s finances suffered as a result of the conflict, putting paid to any prospect of any investment into huge superliners.

Gibbs single-mindedly continued to work on the designs and lobbied for financial support to start work on Constitution. He had hoped that the end of the war in November 1918, and the USA’s new status as a world power would see a resurgence of interest in his beloved superliner. But suddenly Gibbs’ plans became irrelevant; the USA simply seized Germany’s largest liner, Vaterland, as war reparations. Renamed Leviathan, the former German vessel was only a little smaller and slower than the planned Constitution and only needed peacetime conversion to become America’s flagship. A quick and cheap conversion of an already functioning liner clearly outweighed the prospect of building an amateur’s design from scratch.

Leviathan (formerly Vaterland), the cheaper alternative to Constitution.

Gibbs would never give up on his dream of building America’s finest ship and developed his skills as a naval architect over the following decades. By 1950, he had the expertise as well as the passion and was well-placed to again approach the Navy, this time with his design for the legendary United States. Although Constitution had never really progressed beyond a test model, for Gibbs it was a very real project which taught him a lot of lessons, launched him on a path to a career as a successful maritime architect and ultimately, helped to eventually fulfil his childhood dream.

An older and wiser Gibbs looking at his masterpiece, SS United States.

2) Oceanic (1928)

Whilst the fierce rivalry on the Atlantic between ocean greyhounds Queen Mary and Normandie is well known and considered to be the golden age of the liner, it is less well known that the two giant ships were very nearly faced with a third rival. This lesser known third rival also has the distinction of being the only ship listed here on which construction actually began. As a result, White Star’s Oceanic is far more than just a forgotten set of plans and potentially could have transformed the history of transatlantic travel.

Ever since the Titanic disaster, her owners, the White Star Line, had limped along, their prestige and profits severely damaged by the unprecedented tragedy. White Star had lost a large portion of their fleet in the First World War and although the line joined Lord Kyslant’s shipping consortium in the 1920s, it was haemorrhaging money by the middle of the decade. The line’s directors were desperate; only a spectacular new flagship could stave off financial ruin and restore confidence in the company.

Initial plans didn’t tick the spectacular box. The first design for Oceanic (the third White Star ship to bear the name) was essentially a copy of the company’s Olympic – already 15 years old by this point. A second set of designs showed a more radical vessel, with a cruiser stern and squat funnels, but the projected size was only about 51,000 tonnes.

The third design for Oceanic; now at last suitably impressive for White Star.

A third set of plans finally gave White Star what they were looking for. Oceanic would retain the cruiser stern and three squat funnels, but would be a colossal 1050 feet long and weigh over 80,000 tonnes. Most significantly, it was intended the ship would have a service speed of 30 knots, and thus able to make the transatlantic crossing in less than 4 days. White Star’s directors, along with the head of the consortium, Lord Kyslant, were elated and placed the order with Harland & Wolff shipyard on June 18th 1928; construction began just ten days later. The date and rapidity of the work is especially significant as it gave White Star a valuable lead in the race to build the world’s greatest liner. Their rivals, Cunard and Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (CGT) were planning vessels of similar speed and proportions to Oceanic. These vessels, which would later become the Queen Mary and the Normandie, were still just sets of blueprints as Harland & Wolff’s workers were busy hammering rivets into Oceanic’s steel plates. It seemed inevitable that Oceanic would be the first of these huge, fast liners to debut and thus dominate the market.

Size comparison between Oceanic, Normandie and Queen Mary.

But Oceanic never debuted. It was often assumed that the Oceanic was one of the first high-profile victims of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The same financial crisis and subsequent Depression would see work stall on Cunard’s Queen Mary for almost 3 years. Work eventually resumed on Queen Mary; Oceanic was consigned to oblivion. The abrupt cancellation of the vessel actually predated the Wall Street Crash and was the responsibility of the ship’s (and White Star’s) owner, Lord Kyslant. Kyslant delayed progress on Oceanic just a few weeks after the ship’s keel was laid, arguing that the vessel should be fitted with diesel-electric engines instead of steam turbines (which he had approved of in the planning stages). After bitter arguments with Harland and Wolff’s exasperated designers, Kyslant won the argument, and wasted almost two months in the process. At the same time, it was discovered that Kyslant’s shipping combine was essentially a massive fraud. A Treasury audit revealed that the combine had been using its vital reserves to pay its directors, including Kyslant himself, generous dividends. Simultaneously, Kyslant had lied about company profits to attract investors. Far from a profitable combine, Kyslant’s shipping empire was utterly bankrupt and at least £10 million in debt. No sooner than the Treasury audit was complete, Kyslant was arrested and later tried and imprisoned for fraud. The revelation that there was literally not a penny left to finance construction doomed the Oceanic.

Accurate representation of Lord Kyslant’s financial and personal fortunes by 1929.

White Star and Harland and Wolff were able to scrape together additional funds, but not enough to complete the giant Oceanic. As a result, it was decided to scrap Oceanic and scavenge the materials to build two, much smaller vessels. Oceanic’s keel was cut into two, and from the two pieces eventually emerged Britannic and Georgic. Their profiles, and especially their short funnels, give some idea of how Oceanic may have looked.

Britannic in New York at the end of her career in 1960. 

 

Oceanic (even if she only existed as a collection of steel girders and plates) represents a great ‘what if?’ in the history of liners. Without Kyslant’s interference and then conviction, it seemed likely that Oceanic would have been completed well before Cunard’s Queen Mary and CGT’s Normandie. With a head start in the intense transatlantic competition, Oceanic may have been able to keep White Star afloat and restore its former glory. It is not inconceivable to imagine Oceanic becoming a symbol of national pride like the Queen Mary later would. Instead, four years after the cancellation of the project, an all-but ruined White Star Line was forced to merge with Cunard and thereafter the company would slowly vanish, as its fleet was gradually scrapped to way for more Cunard vessels. Oceanic was intended as the great renaissance for White Star; instead, she proved to be its downfall.

3) ‘Whale Ship’ (1932)

If Oceanic was a very real project that very nearly came to fruition, the so-called ‘Whale Ship’ was little more than an extremely imaginative pipe-dream. But although the vessel never travelled further than the planning stages, elements of the design were revolutionary would eventually found their way into a huge range of modern vehicles which we take for granted today. The bizarre ‘Whale Ship’ was simultaneously a pie in the sky and an accurate vision of the future.

The ‘Whale Ship’ was the product of the feverish imagination of Norman Bel Geddes. A Broadway musical set designer throughout the 1920s, Geddes opened up his own design studio in 1927. The studio was supposed to focus primarily on small commercial products such as cocktail shakers and radio cabinets. But quickly Geddes turned his studio into a design factory for his ever grandiose flights of fantasy. Geddes and his team began designing various fantastical projects; a bubble shaped car, a nine-deck amphibious plane, even an ultra-modern city Geddes named ‘Futurama’.

Norman Bel Geddes surveys his model of ‘Futurama’.

In 1932 Geddes showcased the model of his design for an ocean liner. His design was unlike anything yet conceived and was colossally ambitious. Resembling a giant torpedo more than a liner, Geddes dubbed his vessel the ‘Whale Ship’ due to the two giant ‘humps’ which were actually funnels, and the staggering size his ship would be. The vessel would be 1800 feet long and weigh 82,000 tonnes. Carrying 2000 passengers and 900 crew, the ship would be fast enough to reduce the journey between Europe and America to a single day.

Geddes was under no illusions. The grandiose and fantastical nature concept was unlikely to become a reality. The ‘Whale Ship’ and similar futuristic designs were mostly created to feature in Geddes’ 1932 book Horizons, presenting an art-deco-inspired view of what the future might bring. Nevertheless, the ‘Whale Ship’ captured the imagination of the public during the 1930s. Newsreels and featurettes such as the one linked below showcased Geddes’ model as the ocean liner of the future and took pride in extolling the speed benefits of its innovations.

Pathe 1935: The Liner of Tomorrow!

Posters and postcards heralding the ambitious designs of the future were popular in the 1930s.

Geddes’ design may never have sailed, but it did travel to Hollywood. The ‘Whale Ship’ (or at least a model of it) featured in the comedy film The Big Broadcast of 1938. Satirising the intense rivalry going on at the time between the Queen Mary and the Normandie, the film features a similar transatlantic speed race between the fictional ships Gigantic and Colossal. It is no coincidence that the model for Colossal is a carbon copy of the real Normandie, and Gigantic is clearly based on Geddes’ ‘Whale Ship’. Incidentally, Gigantic is shown to win the race, a screenwriting choice which hints at the popularity of Geddes’ innovative design.

The decidedly dodgy model of Geddes’ design featured in The Big Broadcast of 1938. 

Geddes knew full well his ship would likely never be built. What he perhaps didn’t anticipate was that many of the features of his liner would eventually become standard on virtually every form of transport. As can be seen from the ‘Whale Ship’ model, and his other designs, Geddes was obsessed with streamlining. The ‘Whale Ship’s’ hull was designed to reduce wind and water resistance as much as possible. In the 1930s, such aerodynamics were a novel idea. Today, ships, cars and planes are all streamlined as far as possible. In particular, modern trains, especially Japan’s bullet train, owes much to Geddes’ ship design. The ‘Whale Ship’ may have never progressed beyond a series of sketches and a couple of models but it has left an important and highly visible aerodynamic legacy all around us today.