Aboard a Steam Ocean Liner

Very little seemed more of an out-of-body experience than listening to my mother, her sisters and their mother talking about “Taking the Boat”. It was never this or that ship, this or that year. Just “On the Boat”. Practically speaking, any of it seemed that special to me. After all, everyone knew about cruise ships – even back then. At least, we knew that some people, clearly having too much time, enjoyed spending weeks, months even, on a trip that would take only hours by plane. An odd hobby then. Some mental re-engineering later, and I would remember that, once upon a time, back when they all were very young, somewhen between Napoleon and the Vietnam War, humanity had to sail to travel. It all seemed only once removed from paddling or rowing. 

“Cool story … How were the lifeboats?”. That question always puzzled the sorority, although it seemed pretty basic to me when it came to cruise ships. These practicalities were beyond the whole point to them.

Because these steam ocean liners, these 1930s and 1940s oceanic trips, came with their own mystique. It was true for my family, to anyone else who travelled on them, and it is still true to  anyone who hears about them. Mystique… The word is overused, that is a fact. But how else could you describe travelling on these ocean liners? These steamship cruises came with their own unique sights, sounds, rites, activities, words; their own unique time even. Today, a flight would take you off-grid for a mere few hours, maybe a day and a half at best. Going back home or back to your posting on a boat trip would take you off the mainstream timeline for weeks. Travelling aboard a steam ocean liner: a self-contained time, a parallel reality that only briefly existed for a crossing. 

And so my mother, her mother, would try and fail to hand over the experience down generations on generations. How not to? 

Try imagining yourself on a deck in the middle of the Atlantic in 1949. 

You have first to change scale. 

The biggest ships of the time, such as the steamship ship class Albertville of the CMB (Compagnie Maritime Belge), would have 240 passengers and 140 crew. A Boeing 747 in its latest generation carries a maximum of 524 passengers. One planeload. Modern cruise ships, such as the AIDAnova, has 6600 passengers on board. Now, look around you in 1949, on the main deck or in the Smoking Room. The sights are clear, personnel available, the service immediate; everything aboard a steam ocean liner can only have made it feel exclusive and personal. Not necessarily luxury, but exclusivity. 

What then to do onboard? A modern cruise, such as the AIDAnova quoted earlier, has no less than 16 bars, 18 restaurants and 21 swimming pools. Pro rata the passenger load, these are around 300 to 400 passenger per. The Albertville itself would have maximum 200 per. The Orient Express, not the Shinkansen. Furthermore, these steamships were named, celebrated, put on postcards and used as company advertisement: each experience would add to their individual qualities, endlessly compared, discussed, even decades after they were scrapped. 

And so each steamship used would have their picture taken, stored religiously, and its particularities reminisced as often as pure family events. 

And beside their personality, in any discussion, each of these ships would instantly be tagged by its nationality: they had been Belgian, French, Portuguese, German. Europe is obvious to some. An objective, material fact. In the memories of Being on the Boat, Europe came out more as a series of common chronologies, historical events, and maybe some values. You would live for a while in the familiar yet peculiar world of another European culture. Reams and reams of doctoral papers argue what makes Europe a territorial, economic, political, cultural, religious, social…entity? After all, this is what the Europe Union was built to address, through a unified political system. But, beyond that? Individual cultures did not dilute into a new one. We can instantly bag and tag each other. Nations endure. Just take the most basic and the most sophisticated: food and luxury. Now, add to these national adjectives, such as English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese,… Italian food, French luxury, Belgian food and German luxury. Did not each of these bring instantly to your mind crystal-clear images? Deep-rooted, irrepressible, atavistic images? A prestige hotel in France and England won’t ever be the same. Maybach is not Rolls Royce. 

How did the depth of this ever become obvious to me? 

Take one of the main highlights of the probable honeymoon trip of my grandparents, in 1929. They crossed in the Red Sea and, as tale and tradition has it, saluted the “famous” SS Adolph Woermann, a legendary German luxury steam ocean liner. The ship herself would later become a victim of WWII, scuttled by her captain instead of falling into British hands. At the time, my grandparents were aboard the SS Nyassa, a Portuguese operated luxury steam ocean liner. It was actually itself a former WWI German prize luxury vessel. 15 years after her capture, you could still see the German markings inscriptions on the walls. 

The verdicts handed over down generation on these steamships? The German service and accommodations were unrivalled, the Portuguese food was excellent, the Belgian deck games were best, but the real treat? Being called memsahib on the British ships. 

A continent of cultures wrapped up into the retelling of one encounter. 

Final Note: My grandfather took many 8mm videos of their day-to-day life on the various steam ocean liners. These videos are  now fully restored and digitalized. I will be posting them on my social media accounts shortly.

Daily  on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Stay tuned!

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