Day One

                Driving up to the Port of Southampton’s Mayflower Terminal and catching first glimpse of the white-and-black hulled Queen Mary 2, the largest, longest, tallest, heaviest, and most expensive ship ever built, evoked considerable excitement and awe.  Docked to port at a 50-degree, 54.25’ north latitude and 001-degree, 25.70’ west longitude and facing a 116.4-degree compass heading, the 17-decked leviathan, with a 1,132-foot length and 148-foot width, featured a gross weight of 151,400 tons and towered above the buildings with its balcony-lined façade, eclipsing it with its 236.2-foot height.  Its draft extended 33.10 feet beneath the water line.  The floating metropolis, complete with its staterooms, restaurants, shopping arcades, libraries, theaters, and planetariums, would bridge, in six days, the European and North American continents, the equivalent in hours to the duration of the aerial crossing by 747-400, itself then the world’s largest commercial airliner.  But the oceanic crossing would yield civility, refinement, rejuvenation, emotional repair, and return to the slower, but more elegant era of steam ship travel—a journey, I would soon find out, would lead to a search for the maritime history of the past which had created the technology of the present.

                Unlike the proliferation of modern cruise ships with their comparatively lower speeds and greater-volume, square-geometry hulls, the Queen Mary 2 had been designed as a next-generation successor to the 35-year-old Queen Elizabeth 2 and, as such, would have to offer the same year-round, passenger-carrying capabilities, predominately in the rough North Atlantic, with a design which sacrificed revenue-producing volume and lower construction costs of the traditional cruise ship for the required safety, speed, and stability of the ocean liner.  Resultantly, it featured the same v-shaped hull configuration characteristic of the long line of its Cunard predecessors, constructed of thicker steel which carried a 40-percent greater cost than those of conventional cruise ships.  Designed by Stephen Payne, whose inspirations for the bow had come from the Queen Elizabeth 2 and the brake wall from the Normandie, it was the first quadruple-screw North Atlantic ocean liner since the France of 1962.  Payne himself, a naval architect born and raised in London, had been involved with the Carnival Holiday, Carnival Fantasy, and Rotterdam VI projects.  The latter, incorporating a modified Statendam hull, had featured a less “boxy” hull shape than the traditional cruise ship, but had still been considerably removed a full liner design.

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