Sticks and Stones

There’s something truly romantic about the roaring twenties and the ocean liners that gracefully glided across vast oceans to transport the rich, famous, and beautiful from one continent to another. In many ways, the ocean liner - specifically the Titanic, although it sank in 1912 - was the embodiment of the twenties: glorious, decadent, and doomed for failure. As the US sank into depression, fewer people could afford the lavish indulgence of spending weeks aboard a floating palace.

The popularity of commercial aviation around this time signalled a death-knell for ocean liners, which were no longer cost or time effective. Skipping past eighty years of transportation history and nowadays Royal Caribbean, Princess, Carnival, and even Disney are sailing huge malls-on-hulls across the tropical hotspots of the world. While a popular holiday, they have very little in common with the ocean liners of yore.

Despite the fact that cruises are far more profitable than trans-Atlantic voyages, Cunard sailed its three Queens (Elizabeth 2, Mary 2, and Victoria) into New York harbour last night; marking the first time three Queens have ever met. Those there on that below-zero-degrees Manhattan evening reported that it was truly a spectacle: a fine parade of ocean liners, not cruise ships. A simple comparison: ocean liner is to cruise ship as Waldorf Astoria is to Holiday Inn. Economists like to say we are in another Gilded Age; it only seems fitting that three vessels grand enough to exist harmoniously alongside the first Queen Mary should meet for the first and only time in New York harbour; barely miles from Wall Street where today, like eighty years ago, the rich keep getting richer.