Sailing to America - passenger travel by sea, from the Sirius to the Titanic
By Karen V. Wasylowski On 15 April, 1912, on her maiden voyage, the magnificent Olympic Class Ocean Liner, RMS Titanic, struck an iceberg and sank, causing the deaths of 1,502 people. One of three majestic ships owned by the White Star Line, built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, she was the epitome of elegance, the grandest of her kind, and ultimately doomed to pass into history as the largest peacetime maritime disaster in modern history. However, Titanic wasn't the first steam engine to cross the 'pond' - by far. Nearly one hundred years before, in May 1819, the Savannah, a sailing packet with an auxiliary engine and collapsible paddle wheels, sailed from Georgia, USA, to make the first crossing of the Atlantic. She reached Liverpool in 633 hours, having steamed for only 80 of those hours, but her achievement greatly encouraged support for the steamship. By 1833 the Atlantic crossing time had been reduced to 22 days, a c...