After the Civil War, European companies dominated the transatlantic route. Supported by state mail contracts and construction subsidies, Cunard and its competitors made spectacular profits from carrying immigrants in cramped squalor and wealthy travelers in opulence. In 1871, Thomas Ismay, a cantankerous but shrewd Liverpool businessman, founded the White Star Line in a partnership with the Irish shipbuilder Harland & Wolff. Ismay’s company showcased British white-glove service to wealthy Americans, pleasing even the finicky historian Henry Adams, who marveled at how the transatlantic liner represented human progress.11 Another was a haughty, Hartford-born banker named John Pierpont Morgan. The young man was so impressed with the White Star Line that he dreamed of one day buying it.
Across the North Sea, two German companies, Norddeutscher Lloyd, based in Bremen, and the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft, known as HAPAG, captured the lion’s share of the immigrant trade. HAPAG in particular profited immensely from transporting “huddled masses,” many of them Jewish pogrom refugees, from Eastern Europe to America. Packing immigrants into steerage bunks at twenty-five dollars a head translated to spectacular profits. The wünderkind of the German shipping business was a brilliant, diminutive Jew named Albert Ballin. Appointed HAPAG’s managing director in 1899, Ballin was a self-made man who strove to make his ships perfect. When ships like his Kaiserin Auguste Victoria or Amerika were in port, he prowled all over them, making note of the slightest deficiencies in service or appearances. He even hired the Ritz-Carlton company to operate specialty first class restaurants on board.12
The heated competition between Great Britain, Germany, and eventually France during the late nineteenth century spurred great technological advances, as lines plowed their vast profits into building bigger and faster ships. Progress was astounding. Liners grew from 3,000 gross tons to 10,000 gross tons, and lengths doubled from 300 feet to nearly 600.[3]
Ship construction moved from wood to iron, auxiliary sails were dropped, and paddle wheels were abandoned for the screw propeller. By the 1880s, first-class passengers could dine and read in public rooms lit by electricity, and enjoy hot and cold running water in their cabins. Engine technology also advanced rapidly. By the 1870s, British engineers had perfected the so-called compound engine. Here steam would pass through a series of three or four cylinders before being ejected into the condenser. So-called triple and quadruple expansion engines allowed for more steam pressure, which meant more speed.13 As a result, travel time between Liverpool and New York was cut from two weeks to just over six days, and top speeds approached 20 knots, double the speed of the first paddle-wheel liners. Ships were now boasting two screw propellers rather than just one.
Following the Civil War, a lone American steamship company was left to brave Atlantic waters. Philadelphia’s Clement Griscom had attracted the backing of the Pennsylvania Railroad and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which saw a transatlantic service as a means to pick up where railroads ended, at the water’s edge. In 1871, Griscom’s American Steamship Company commissioned Cramp Shipyard to build four liners to carry passengers, oil, and bulk cargo between Philadelphia and Liverpool. Griscom, a bewhiskered, florid-faced Quaker, belonged to all the right Philadelphia clubs and had married a member of the famous Biddle family, but he also socialized with nouveau riche entrepreneurs like Peter Widener and drank a pint of champagne during the workday. Bored with the “proper Philadelphian” professions of medicine and law, Griscom intended to make a big splash on the world stage with his ships. To do it, he needed vast quantities of capital, as well as political support from Washington.
At first, Griscom faced near failure. His American Steamship Company lost so much money that the Pennsylvania Railroad refused to provide the additional cash Griscom needed to stay in business. An appeal to the federal government also failed. To keep going, the Philadelphia shipper negotiated a $100,000-a-year mail subsidy from the Belgian government for a new venture: the International Navigation Company, also known as the Red Star Line.14 Still somehow in business, Griscom then purchased the moribund British Inman Line in 1886 and ordered two new ships, City of Paris and City of New York, from a Scottish yard. At 10,000 gross tons each and with service speeds of over 20 knots, they were the largest and fastest ships of the day. Both captured the Blue Riband with ease, but they did so as “British ships,” thanks to American navigation laws that protected American industry. In a maneuver meant to protect American shipbuilders from cheaper foreign competition, Congress forbade foreign-built ships from flying the Stars and Stripes. The law backfired, however, as American ship owners either sold out their shipping interests (like Vanderbilt) or operated foreign-built fleets under foreign flags (like Griscom). When it came to building and operating ships, America remained at a major competitive disadvantage—European governments subsidized their passenger fleets, while the United States did not.
Griscom was undeterred and decided to use his now-famous ships to leverage a mail subsidy out of Washington. He told Congress that if his liners were granted American registry, he would kill the Inman Line, make the two vessels part of the fleet of a renewed American Line, and then build two new ships in an American yard. Congress agreed and passed a bill in 1892 that gave Griscom a mail subsidy of $12,400 per crossing.15 The following year, the crews of the renamed New York and Paris raised the American flag on their sternposts, and at the William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company in Philadelphia, workers laid the keel plates for two new ships—St. Louis and St. Paul.
The American public hoped that their new transatlantic liners would take the Blue Riband from the current holder, the Cunard liner Lucania, whose best time was 5 days, 7 hours, and 23 minutes—just 5 hours and 46 minutes faster than Griscom’s 1892 winner, Paris.16 But neither St. Louis nor St. Paul could match Lucania’s pace. The British ship kept the prize until 1897, when a great four-funneled beast from imperial Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, snatched it away. The Norddeutscher Lloyd ship had managed an average speed of 22.5 knots, nearly three knots faster than the American ships and more than a half a knot faster than Lucania. There was consternation in the British public as the Germans humbled the nation’s best engineers.
But the German triumph did not deter Clement Griscom. Teaming up with financier J. P. Morgan, the Philadelphian hoped to buy every single transatlantic shipping line, European and American, and merge them into a gigantic shipping trust based in New York. The two men made a perfect team. Like Griscom, Morgan was from an old-line family that had been wealthy for generations. His huge physique reflected a gargantuan appetite for food, rare books, art, and mistresses. A hideous outbreak of rhinophyma left his nose bloated and purple, a condition that made him avoid photographers. But Morgan possessed a genius for deal making. The financial mastermind of the American industrial trusts, Morgan believed that consolidation was the future of American business. To him, investing in steamships was a good deal more interesting than steel, sugar, and oil—they awakened a lust in him equal to his passion for art and women. The transatlantic liner was the era’s ultimate status symbol, and Morgan vowed to own as many of them as he could. And to get his hands on them, he needed Griscom’s shipping savvy.
3
For ships, a gross ton has nothing to do with weight. It is a cubic volume measure of a ship’s enclosed space (some areas are exempted from the calculation). In general terms, 1 gross ton (GT) equals 100 cubic feet of volume. In practical terms, the Pilgrim ship