These new vessels are the motor ships. In fifteen years they have grown from experimental craft to great and powerful liners capable of holding their own against all comers. The _Aorangi_, a great liner of 23,000 tons displacement, now operating on the Pacific, and hundreds of other motor ships of scores of types point dramatically to the end of the era of steam. CHAPTER VI STEAMSHIPS OF MANY TYPES Of the super-giant ships there were, in 1924, but ten, but as one starts looking for smaller ships, he finds them much more numerous. Under the British flag alone there are about two hundred ships of ten thousand or more tons. In the entire world there are about twenty-nine thousand steamships of five hundred tons or more. It is this enormous fleet to which we now must turn in order that we may continue our ever-widening story of the development of ships. And with this vast fleet we shall include the countless thousands of still smaller steamers that serve as many thousand masters in a great diversity of ways. The ships to which I shall refer in this chapter are so diverse in size, in duties, and in model that it almost seems that the only thing they have in common is their universal ability to float on the surface of the water. First there are the mail liners, which differ in few things other than size from the huge vessels I have described in Chapter V. And even in size they are more or less comparable, as they are from twelve or fifteen thousand tons to twenty-five thousand. As a class they are hardly less luxurious than their greater sisters, and their speed is only slightly less. And aside from these two things there is no essential difference, except that they are more numerous and are less expensive to build and to operate. And, too, they are less expensive to travel on, which is a blessing for those of us who cannot afford to pay the rates of the giant liners.