Most people who have had little experience with the sea, and many who have travelled on it, have little idea of the size of ships. Probably this is due to the fact that we see so much mention made of the world’s greatest ships, with their tonnage and their other measurements, and so little of the thousands of ships that carry the bulk of the world’s passengers and practically all of the world’s freight. Our newspapers refer frequently to ships of thirty or forty or fifty thousand tons, but rarely do they mention the ship of 3,500 or 4,000 tons. Consequently, with such frequent mention of the giant liners before us, our tendency is, naturally enough, to imagine that they are typical of the sea, which is a very great error. In the transatlantic service there were, in 1924, but ten steamships of more than twenty-five thousand tons. On other routes none of them exists. It is as if we thought all buildings small because they do not equal in size St. Peter’s in Rome, or Versailles in France, or the Woolworth Building in New York, for the greatest steamers are as much greater than the average as St. Peter’s is larger than the little parish church, as Versailles is greater than the average home of a country gentleman, as the Woolworth Building is greater than the countless thousands of office buildings that house the great majority of business offices. Yet these great ships, trifling in number though they are, are properly of interest to stay-at-homes and travellers alike, to landlubbers and sailors. The thing to remember, however, is that from the viewpoint of world commerce they are comparatively unimportant, and that the world could much more readily carry on its great affairs without these gigantic sea-borne palaces than without the smaller passenger ships and the countless thousands of “tramps” that roll and pitch and plod across the Seven Seas and make possible the commerce upon which the modern world depends. [Illustration: THE _MAJESTIC_ _Formerly the German liner_ Bismarck. _It is now the property of the White Star Line._]