Tag: Famous Ships That Did Not Sink

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Famous Ships That Did Not Sink: The 'SS President Grant'

April 20, 2012 at 11:42 AM | by | Comments (0)

As you already know, this last weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Though yes, the sinking is a huge part of history, it's also not indicative of how ship travel actually was in the early 20th century. Not every ship sank. This week, we'll show you some notable ships that managed to stay afloat and still make their mark in history.

Today's ship that didn't sink: the SS President Grant of Admiral Oriental Line.

Have you picked up on a theme in our series so far? It's that, for all these notable ocean liners that didn't sink, they eventually ended up serving their time as troopships, mostly during World War I. Had the Titanic continued on, she probably would have gone the same route, possibly even eventually sinking from U-boat torpedoes.

Still we focus on one more ship that didn't sink, and this one isn't a veteran of the transatlantic route; the SS President Grant instead plied the waves between the US west coast and the Orient, specifically Japan and Hong Kong. As the Grant, the ship sailed for weeks with passengers bound for new lives, or just new adventures, on the other side of the world. As the USS Harris, which is what she became in 1940 with a conversion to a US troopship, she sailed with troops fighting World War II in the South Pacific, in North Africa, and even in the Aleutian Islands.

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Famous Ships That Did Not Sink: The 'RMS Queen Mary'

April 18, 2012 at 11:15 AM | by | Comments (0)

As you already know, this last weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Though yes, the sinking is a huge part of history, it's also not indicative of how ship travel actually was in the early 20th century. Not every ship sank. This week, we'll show you some notable ships that managed to stay afloat and still make their mark in history.

Today's ship that didn't sink: the RMS Queen Mary of Cunard Line.

Let's consider something a moment. When the 100th Anniversary of the Titanic sinking rolled around last week, it became apparent that the younger generations were filled with kids who though the Titanic was a fictional tale made up for the James Cameron movie. It was only the news coverage of the anniversary that made them realize that—whoops, hey—over 1,000 did actually die when a real ship hit a real iceberg and really sank.

Now think about the fact that a transatlantic liner of the same style, though much younger, is currently still afloat as a hotel, museum and event space in Long Beach, California. This ship is the Queen Mary and she's not a stage set or a fauxboat; she's a real ship with a really impressive history and, lucky for her, a real future still afloat.

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Famous Ships That Did Not Sink: The 'SS Kaiser Wilhelm II'

April 17, 2012 at 12:37 PM | by | Comments (0)

As you already know, this last weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Though yes, the sinking is a huge part of history, it's also not indicative of how ship travel actually was in the early 20th century. Not every ship sank. This week, we'll show you some notable ships that managed to stay afloat and still make their mark in history.

Today's ship that didn't sink: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Norddeutscher Lloyd line.

Back in the day, Norddeutscher Lloyd had it going on. Steamships, mail ships, luxurious transatlantic liners...they had them all. That is, they had them all until World War I broke out and many of those hulls found themselves docked in the wrong parts of the world. Such was the story of yesterday's featured ship, the Kronprinz Wilhelm. Today we continue with one its sister ships, Kaiser Wilhelm II, which first fired up the boilers in 1903 and used them to their limit to earn the Blue Riband in 1904, for fastest eastbound transatlantic crossing only two years after the Kronprinz had done the same.

The Wilhelm II had a quiet life of cruising paying passengers back and forth between Germany and the US, until the latter decided to keep her for good in 1917. She became the Agamemnon, a troopship that pushed thousands of US soldiers into Europe to fight the very people who had built her.

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Famous Ships That Did Not Sink: The 'SS Kronprinz Wilhelm'

April 16, 2012 at 11:33 AM | by | Comments (0)

As you already know, this last weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Though yes, the sinking is a huge part of history, it's also not indicative of how ship travel actually was in the early 20th century. Not every ship sank. This week, we'll show you some notable ships that managed to stay afloat and still make their mark in history.

Today's ship that didn't sink: Kronprinz Wilhelm of Norddeutscher Lloyd line.

Look, if you were building an ocean liner in the early 1900s, you had a lot of competition. To stand out, ships aimed to take home titles and prizes, like "longest ship" or "fastest transatlantic crossing." The latter was the real gem, and the prize for being the speediest ship between the UK and US was called the Blue Riband. It's what the Titanic was aiming to claim when it kept its boilers running high and sailing fast through an ice field. Whoops.

Alas, the Kronprinz Wilhelm and her 660' length first set sail in 1901 and took the Blue Riband in 1902 (the Titanic didn't sail and sink until 1912) with a crossing time of 5.5 days. Not too shabby, considering today's cruise ships still schedule a transatlantic "cruise" for a straight week.

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