The interaction between Europe and America had been one of the most dynamic factors in world history for four hundred years, and Lord’s story taps into that, in particular the links between Britain and the United States, with a common language. They had fought together undefeated in the recent war, and one was in the process of handing over the mantle of world power with a generally liberal reputation to the other. Practically all white Americans had ancestors who had emigrated in ships like the Titanic, and millions more had crossed the Atlantic both ways in wartime. Yet the era of the great liner was about to end. The Boeing 707 began its service in 1957 and for the first time it was more economical to cross by air. The liner had a slow death paralleling the Titanic herself, but regular scheduled transatlantic services had ended by 1973.
Today just as many people take to the seas in cruise ships but somehow they do not have the same mythology. Passengers’ motives might range from pure hedonism to intellectual discovery, but even at its best the modern cruise does not have the sense of purpose of the great liner bridging the old world and the new, the isolation of those aboard in a closed society for days at a time, the stark divisions by class. And, of course, voyaging today is much safer than it was a hundred years ago. Loss of life in the Costa Concordia disaster of 2012 was mercifully small, but even so there are echoes of the Titanic—scramble for lifeboats, apparent neglect of duty by those in authority and heroism by others.