The Admiral and the Ambassador Read Online Free PDF

fought its way through crisscrossing traffic of passenger coaches, scurrying pedestrians, and teamsters hauling heavy loads of barrels, crates, and the occasional steel beam. 6
    The Porters alit in front of the American Line dock at Pier 14, at the western foot of Fulton Street. The pier, only five years old, was a massive 125 feet wide. An ornate three-story facade hid a two-story, iron-framed barn of a building extending 720 feet out over the water on thick wooden pilings driven deep in the river bottom. A huge A MERICAN L INE sign ran the length of the roof ridge, easily visible from beyond the Hoboken Ferry dock to the north and the Jersey City Ferry dock to the south. On this morning, though, it was hidden on the south side by the two-year-old steamship
St. Paul,
whose forecastle was about the same height as a six-story building, with fore and aft funnels jutting even higher. As the Porters arrived, the funnels were spewing streams of smoke into morning sky in preparation for the 10 A M departure of one of its biweekly trips to Southampton, England.
    The
St. Paul
was one of eight steamships to leave New York that day; another eleven were putting into port. 7 A true luxury liner, the
St. Paul
and its nearly identical sister ship, the
St. Louis,
were the largest US-registered ships on the seas. Built in Philadelphia by William Cramp and Sons, the
St. Louis
launched in October 1894, and the
St. Paul
was pushed into the water six months later. Both were sleek-looking despite their sizes, about 550 feet long and more than 60 feet wide. It took about $3 million and fourthousand men to build each ship, with double-bottomed steel hulls, bulkheads to protect against sinking, and six wood-planked decks over steel beams.
    The
St. Paul
was built to move people as much as freight and could hold nearly 1,500 passengers, 320 of them in first-class staterooms on the main deck, 200 in second-class, and 900 in steerage. The first-class salon was large enough to hold all the first-class passengers at once beneath a large, domed ceiling, meant to resemble that of a ballroom in a luxury hotel. And the sister ships were fast. Each had made the crossing between New York and Southampton in six days. It was, at the time, the best ship America had to offer, and fitting for an ambassador’s trip to his overseas assignment. 8
    As departure time neared, the hustle and bustle around Pier 14 picked up. Stevedores scurried about the street-level floor to load the last of the freight, luggage, and provisions aboard while, upstairs, passengers checked in then crossed a level gangplank to the ship’s main deck. It was an innovation of the relatively new pier “separating passengers from the dust and dirt that accompanied the loading of cargo and provisions.” 9 Scores of well-wishers waved passengers aboard, and newspaper reporters buttonholed the best-known of the passengers for some final words to be duly noted in the papers’ next editions.
    The Porters had their own entourage of friends “who literally carried us on board the boat” and filled the family’s deck suite with flowers. 10 The family was traveling in style: the top fare of $750 a head bought a suite with a private bath, toilet, bedroom, and sitting area. Porter’s daughter Elsie was caught up in the swirl of excitement. As the privileged child of a wealthy New Yorker, she had traveled by ship to Europe before on a yearlong sojourn with her mother. On that trip, she knew she would return to the United States. This was a trip without a set end. For a seventeen-year-old girl, it was to be a grand adventure and would prove to be a critical juncture in her life.
    As the family moved about the ship, other passengers called out Porter’s name, as did news reporters seeking a last thought from the new ambassador before they were ushered ashore. Porter was likely the best known of the ship’s passengers but hardly the only famous face. John K. Gowdy, an