In view of the luxurious accommodations and princely surroundings to be found on the modern ocean palaces, it is interesting to look back now almost a hundred years to the time when the _Savannah_ was the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. True the voyage of this pioneer of steam from Savannah to Liverpool was not much of a success, but she managed to crawl across the sails very materially aiding the engines, and heralded the dawn of a new day in transatlantic travel. No other steamboat attempted the trip for almost twenty years after, until in 1838 the _Great Western_ made the run in fifteen days. This revolutionized water travel and set the whole world talking. It was the beginning of the passing of the sailing ship and was an event for rejoicing. In the old wooden hulks with their lazily flapping wings, waiting for a breeze to stir them, men and women and children huddled together like so many animals in a pen, had to spend weeks and months on the voyage between Europe and America. There was little or no room for sanitation, the space was crowded, deadly germs lurked in every cranny and crevice, and consequently hundreds died. To many indeed the sailing ship became a floating hearse. In those times, and they are not so remote, a voyage was dreaded as a calamity. Only necessity compelled the undertaking. It was not travel for pleasure, for pleasure under such circumstances and amid such surroundings was impossible. The poor emigrants who were compelled through stress and poverty to leave their homes for a foreign country feared not toil in a new land, but they feared the long voyage with its attending horrors and dangers. Dangerous it was, for most of the sailing vessels were unseaworthy and when a storm swept the waters, they were as children's toys, at the mercy of wind and wave. When the passenger stepped on board he always had the dread of a watery grave before him. How different to-day. Danger has been eliminated almost to the vanishing point and the mighty monsters of steel and oak now cut through the waves in storms and hurricanes with as much ease as a duck swims through a pond.