THE ATLANTIC CONFERENCE: HOW THE GREAT OCEAN LINERS WERE REGULATED

摘要

For anyone who loves the sea, that love is invariably shared with ships. When it was "the only way to cross," as John Maxtone-Graham put it in his classic book, people weren't worried about getting from here to there in measured hours. It was a splendidly different and civilized way of living if you were well off, and if you were an immigrant it didn't really matter. In those years before and just after World War Ⅱ, air travel was hardly a pinprick in an all-sea scenario. Cunard advertised eight-day cruises from U.S. ports for as little as $97.50, but the real cream-route for liners was the Atlantic. Italian Line ads tantalized you with "... every day is beach day on a Lido liner" like the Rex or the Conte di Savoia, and the Canadian Pacific let everyone know that their route to Europe from Canada was a thousand miles shorter than from New York. Lines boasted about their own brand of shipboard life— fine dining, sparkling entertainment, dancing and a host of other things. But to lure passengers, minimum rates in each class for each ship were a key, if not the paramount factor. Not everyone was rich. It was all very competitive.