Yet, strange as it may appear to the
ineffable hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-
Atlantic Passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not
consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way
from South America; this being the service she was engaged upon. Of her
speed I know nothing, but it must have been the average of the period,
and the decorations of her saloons were, I dare say, quite up to the
mark; but I doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round
the Press, because that was not the fashion of the time. She was not a
mass of material gorgeously furnished and upholstered. She was a ship.
And she was not, in the apt words of an article by Commander C.
Crutchley, R.N.R., which I have just read, "run by a sort of hotel
syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain,"
as these monstrous Atlantic ferries are. She was really commanded,
manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and
last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to relate
will show.
She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full, just like
the _Titanic_; and further, the proportion of her crew to her passengers,
I remember quite well, was very much the same.
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