Status Updates From Transatlantic: Samuel Cunar...

The American humorist known as Petroleum V. Nasby crossed on the City of Richmond in 1881. "Ocean travel is either monotonous or dangerous," he concluded. "A man is not a fish, and no man takes to water naturally." The only advantage of traveling by ship, said Nasby, was the absence of dust in the road.

The City of New York, flagship of this new Anglo-American company, was launched in March 1888. (She was appropriately christened by Lady Randolph Churchill, an American woman who married an English lord and produced their Anglo-American son, Winston Churchill)

"If the gentleman is very attentive to the lady," a Cunard stewardess explained, "then they are going to be married. If the lady is very attentive to the gentlemen, then they just have been married. If they do not seem to care anything about each other at all, then they have been married for some time!"

"Let me assure you," [H. B. Stowe] wrote afterward, "...that going to sea is not at all the thing that we have taken it to be." Disabled from any of her favorite pastimes, she could barely button a garment. "You lie disconsolate in your birth, only desiring to be let alone to die."