The Other Side of the Night Read Online Free PDF

hundred Third Class—there were no First Class cabins at all. Their dual roles as cargo and passenger ships were confirmation, if any were needed, of Cunard’s straitened circumstances: the line could no longer depend for its revenues on ships built exclusively for passengers, but as in its early days the company was once again looking to freighting as a way to help it stay solvent. In the first few years of the 20th century Cunard needed to earn every pound it possibly could.
    The third ship of this trio, the Carpathia, joined the Ivernia and Saxonia in 1903. Her keel had been laid down on September 10, 1901 at the Wallsend shipyard Swan & Hunter, and she was launched on August 6, 1902. An interesting sidelight to her construction was that while the Carpathia was taking shape in one of the yard’s gantries, at the other end of the shipyard archaeologists had begun excavating the recently-discovered eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient Roman boundary between Britannia and Caledonia (Britain and Scotland)—a fascinating juxtaposition of the ancient world and the modern. As the Carpathia was just barely larger than 14,000 tons, the Saxonia remained the largest ship in Cunard service until the Caronia made her appearance in 1905.
    In her role as a cargo carrier, the Carpathia was a bit more specialized than her two sisters. Designed to carry refrigerated food, in particular meat, she had been built with three large refrigerated holds, as well as one for her own provisions. Her powerplant was identical to that of the Ivernia and Saxonia , a pair of ten-cylinder quadruple expansion engines turning two propellers, which gave her a top speed during her sea trials of just over 15 knots.
    Like her two sisters, the Carpathia was originally designed to carry just Second and Third Class passengers. Despite the absence of First Class berthing, the standard of the accommodations was remarkably high: rather than imitate the gilt-and-marble extravagance of the German ships, Cunard placed a premium on quiet comfort. Even in Third Class there were features normally found only in higher classes on other companies’ ships–-they included a smoking room (the usual practice was for Third Class smokers to make do with taking their nicotine on the open deck, quite an impossible feat in anything but clear weather), a bar, a ladies’ sitting room and a dining saloon spacious enough to serve 300 people at one sitting—quite large as a standard for any class of passengers at the time. Second Class had similar amenities, somewhat more opulent in decor, of course, and it also had a library.
    While the term “steerage” was still used more-or-less interchangeably with “Third Class,” the circumstances that greeted Third Class passengers in the first decade of the 20th century were a far cry from the “dank ’tween decks” of sixty years before. The culmination of the trend begun by William Inman a half-century earlier, the accommodations aboard the Carpathia were typical of a new consciousness of the value of Third Class passengers to the Cunard Line.
    William Inman, a Liverpool shipowner who formed the line which bore his family name, had revolutionized the immigrant trade in the mid-19th century. While the rest of the steamship industry focused their efforts on luring First Class travelers aboard their ships, Inman recognized the potential market that emigrants represented, especially the Irish, and decided that the time had come to take advantage of the opportunity. Rather than compelling them to cross the Irish Sea to embark at Liverpool or Bristol, he began embarking them at Queenstown (now Cobh), which sat on a small harbor on the south Irish coast.
    Charmingly, Inman’s wife took on a very active role the business, creating the ships’ interiors as well as drawing up their sailing schedules. She also made it her business to look after the welfare of Inman passengers: on one occasion she disguised herself as an emigrant on