Footnotes

• Like so many of the Inman Line's steamers, their third City of New York, 10,499 tons, was a handsome ship as well as being the first twin-screw passenger liner to ply the North Atlantic. Built by Thomson's of Glasgow in 1888, she measured 560 feet in length with a 63 foot beam, and was originally constructed with three funnels. The first vessel to exceed 10,000 tons gross since Brunel's colossal Great Eastern of 1858, she actually became the largest ship in the world when that obsolete leviathan was finally broken up in 1889. City of New York's maiden voyage to her name-sake destination was in August 1888 and she captured the 'Blue Riband' for the fastest Atlantic crossing twice before being transferred to the American Line following the collapse of the famous Inman Company early in 1893. Renamed New York and given revised passenger allocations, she maintained a regular Southampton to New York service – apart from a brief spell as the U.S. Navy's auxiliary cruiser Harvard during the Spanish-American War of 1898 – until 1901 when she was extensively remodelled. This modernisation included the loss of one funnel, but she was back in service in 1903 to resume her Southampton to New York sailings and remained on that route until she altered her U.K. port to Liverpool when war broke out in 1914. Requisitioned as an American government armed transport for two years in 1917, she was temporarily renamed Plattsburg until returned to her owners in 1919. Once the post-War shipping boom began to fade, the ageing liner was sold to the Polish Navigation Company of New York in 1921 but, after only two further years in service, was broken up in Genoa in 1923.

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Category: Fine Art / Marine Art

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