Photographs, 1840 to 1920
Fox Talbot’s SS Great Britain in Bristol. Brunel before the launching chains of the Great Eastern. Le Gray’s brig in the moonlight. Stieglitz’s Steerage, Hurley’s Endurance lit up at night in the ice, and the Titanic’s lifeboats beside the Carpathia. The first eighty years of the camera at sea.
This chapter of Ships in Paintings holds 82 works. For each one you will find the artist and, wherever the records allow, the date and where the original is kept; then what the ship brings to the picture, and the real ship behind it when there is one. See all 1,331 works on one page.
Marea can build any of these ships as a scale model, with the maximum detail the scale permits, finished to be inspected. We can build her as the artist saw her: the same rig, the same sails set, the same colours. It isn’t a copy of a painting. It’s the ship, stepping out of it.
This database was put together by Ai Refloat™, Marea’s own artificial intelligence, from the records of museums, maritime archives and published sources. Ai Refloat is still young & like any teenager, it can be a little volatile and unpredictable at times, but above all, it is learning fast. So this list may well contain mistakes and we welcome the input of everyone who knows these paintings, photographs and ships better than we do: listening, correcting and learning is one of the many ways we work towards perfection in this craft.
When no free image of a work exists, we show instead the museum or the place where the original can be seen.
Have you spotted a mistake? Tell us which painting, photograph or ship, and we will amend it accordingly. Tell us here
The works
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Great Britain Named ship
SS Great Britain in Bristol Harbour, April 1844
Photographer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 to 1877)
Medium Calotype
In April 1844 William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the calotype, photographed Brunel's new ship fitting out alongside the Gasworks quay in Bristol's Floating Harbour. It is the first photograph taken of Great Britain and is believed to be the first photograph ever taken of a ship. The two firsts meet in one grainy image: a pioneering iron screw steamer, her six masts and funnel rising above the water, recorded by a pioneering medium. The ship herself survives at Bristol today.
The real ship Great Britain was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel for the Great Western Steamship Company and launched at Bristol in 1843, the first large ocean-going ship to combine an iron hull with a screw propeller; in 1845 she became the first iron steamer to cross the Atlantic, in 14 days. She is now a museum ship in Bristol.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: William Henry Fox Talbot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Sandy Linton's fishing boat Unnamed
Sandy (or James) Linton, his Boat and Bairns (Newhaven 45), about June 1845
Photographer David Octavius Hill (1802 to 1870) and Robert Adamson (1821 to 1848)
Where to see it National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (PGP HA 297)
Medium Salted paper print
Scotland's first photographic studio turned from ministers and notable figures to the fishing village of Newhaven, below Edinburgh. Here the fisherman Sandy Linton leans on the bow of his boat, its home port lettered on the planking, while his children sit at his feet. The National Galleries of Scotland note how often Hill and Adamson photographed fishermen with their sons, showing skills handed down through the generations. The boat is livelihood and inheritance at once, caught in the warm browns of the salted paper print.
“Hill and Adamson often photographed the fishermen with their sons.”
The vessels The boat is a Newhaven fishing boat of the 1840s; the men of the village caught the fish, and the fishwives carried the catch uphill to sell in Edinburgh.
Sources National Galleries Scotland · Wikipedia
Image: David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
The brig Palacea Named ship
Palacea Brig Hove Down, Malta, 1 May 1846
Photographer Calvert Richard Jones (1804 to 1877)
Where to see it Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
Medium Calotype
Calvert Jones, a Welsh painter of seascapes who moved in Henry Fox Talbot's circle, travelled with his camera to Malta and on 1 May 1846 photographed the brig Palacea hove down, pulled over on her side at the quay. It is a working scene rather than a heroic one, and a painter's choice: the camera looks up into a tangle of slanting masts, yards, blocks and rigging above the stone bollards, the ship at her most vulnerable. Jones is credited with taking the first photograph in Wales, and here the new art looks closely at a sailing vessel.
The real ship Palacea was a brig, a two-masted square-rigged vessel, photographed while hove down at Malta in 1846; nothing more of her history is recorded.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Calvert Richard Jones, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Transports and sailing ships in Balaklava harbour Unnamed
Balaklava Harbour, the Cattle Pier, 1855
Photographer Roger Fenton (1819 to 1869)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (Roger Fenton Crimean War photographs)
Medium Photographic print from glass negative
Fenton set out for Balaklava on 20 February 1855 with five cameras, seven hundred glass plates and a wine merchant's van turned into a darkroom, and landed there in March. At the cattle pier a three-masted ship lies moored above a quay crowded with huts, tents, carts and horses, the bare Crimean hills rising behind. Ships like her carried everything the army before Sevastopol needed. Fenton left the Crimea in late June with more than 350 negatives, and presented prints to Queen Victoria that August.
The vessels The vessel is an unidentified sailing transport of the kind that supplied the British army through Balaklava in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856.
Sources Library of Congress · The Met · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Diamond and HMS Wasp Named ship
The Diamond and Wasp, Balaklava Harbour, March 1855
Photographer Roger Fenton (1819 to 1869)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019.349)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
Balaklava was the Black Sea harbour through which the British supplied the siege of Sevastopol, and the British press carried claims of mismanagement there. Fenton, sent out by the publisher Thomas Agnew with a letter of introduction from Prince Albert, answered with this view of a busy, orderly port: HMS Diamond and HMS Wasp overseeing the transports, rowing boats, a large stack of crates and a rail track in the foreground. The warships are the calm centre of the picture, emblems of a harbour under control.
The real ship Diamond and Wasp were Royal Navy ships at Balaklava in 1855, where they oversaw the movement of transports into and out of the harbour that supplied the British army before Sevastopol.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the source
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Sailing boats leaving Le Havre Unnamed
Boats Leaving the Port of Le Havre (Bateaux quittant le port du Havre), 1856 to 1857
Photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820 to 1884)
Where to see it Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Medium Photograph (albumen print from glass negative, as catalogued for Le Gray's other Le Havre views)
Le Gray's most famous work dates from 1856 to 1858, especially his seascapes, and this view at Le Havre belongs to that moment. A line of sailing vessels stands out towards the open sea, their dark sails silhouetted against a bright, clouded sky, while the jetty on the right, with its lighthouse and a crowd of onlookers, frames the harbour mouth. Light breaks across the water beneath the hulls. Boats leaving harbour gave him the movement, light and human purpose that made these seascapes famous.
The vessels Unidentified sailing vessels, from small cutters to square-rigged ships, leaving the port of Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine in the 1850s.
Sources gallica.bnf.fr · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Gustave Le Gray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
A brig under sail Unnamed
Brig on the Water (Brick au clair de lune), 1856
Photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820 to 1884)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1976.645.1)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
A single brig sails on a sheet of silvered water beneath a great mass of cloud. Le Gray made it from one negative, not the two he later combined, relying on the sea's reflective surface and the look of twilight or moonlight to hold sky and water together. The ship gives the picture its whole scale and stillness: take it away and there is only light. It became one of the most famous and widely distributed photographs of the nineteenth century, a success in England as well as France.
“800 copies subscribed for in two months.”
The vessels The vessel is an unidentified merchant brig, the common two-masted, square-rigged coasting and trading ship of the mid-nineteenth century.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
La Reine Hortense Named ship
La Reine Hortense, Yacht de l'Empereur, Havre, 1856
Photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820 to 1884)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005.100.273)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
Le Gray photographed Napoleon III's yacht in the port of Le Havre in July 1856, just before she sailed for Greenland and Spitzbergen on an expedition led by Prince Napoleon. The Met notes how her rigging and guys seem to secure her perfect place in the frame. Le Gray used a new technique here, the glass plate negative and the albumen print, to give limpid air and extreme clarity of detail: a fitting method for a portrait of a ship on the eve of an Arctic voyage.
The real ship La Reine Hortense was the imperial yacht of Napoleon III; in the summer of 1856 she carried Prince Napoleon's expedition from Le Havre towards Greenland and Spitsbergen.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Great Eastern Named ship
The Bow of the Great Eastern, 1857
Photographer Robert Howlett (1831 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005.100.12)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
Before the attempted launch of 3 November 1857 Howlett photographed the great hull on the shore at Millwall, and the Met describes the bow rising like a cliff over the marshy Isle of Dogs. It is a ship seen as architecture, or as geology: there is no sea, only iron, timber and mud, and a vessel six times larger than any built before. Nine engravings made from Howlett's photographs filled a special number of the Illustrated Times devoted to the ship, then called Leviathan.
“like a cliff over the marshy landscape of the Isle of Dogs”
The real ship Great Eastern was designed by Brunel and built by John Scott Russell and Co. at Millwall on the Thames. Driven by paddle wheels and a screw, 692 feet long and by far the largest ship ever built when she was launched in 1858, she laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 and was broken up on Merseyside in 1889. Her sideways launch took some three months.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the source
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Two sailing boats entering the port of Sète Unnamed
The Broken Wave, Sète (La Vague brisée, Mer Méditerranée), 1857
Photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820 to 1884)
Where to see it Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Medium Photographic print from glass negative
In April 1857 Le Gray worked at the port of Sète and made a series of seascapes whose effects of sun, cloud and water stunned his contemporaries and brought him international recognition. The most famous, The Great Wave, shows no ship; its upright companion, The Broken Wave, does. Two small sailing boats make for the harbour past the end of the mole while a wave bursts white over the rocks in front, and they turn a study of weather into a scene of boats coming home.
The vessels The two vessels are unidentified small sailing boats with lateen sails, entering the port of Sète on the Mediterranean.
Sources The Met · Wikipedia (FR) · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Gustave Le Gray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Great Eastern Named ship
Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, 1857
Photographer Robert Howlett (1831 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005.100.11)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
The ship is present only as its chains, and that is the strength of the picture. Brunel stands before the massive links wound round the checking drums that restrained his Great Eastern on the slip at Millwall, top hat on, cigar in mouth, trousers and boots spattered with mud. Howlett made it for the Illustrated Times, which had commissioned him to record the building of the largest ship in the world. The Met calls it a memorable depiction of the engineer as hero, and the iron behind him says everything about the scale of what he was trying to launch.
“memorable depiction of the engineer as hero”
The real ship Great Eastern was designed by Brunel and built by John Scott Russell and Co. at Millwall on the Thames. Driven by paddle wheels and a screw, 692 feet long and by far the largest ship ever built when she was launched in 1858, she laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 and was broken up on Merseyside in 1889.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Great Eastern Named ship
Men at Work Beside the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, 18 November 1857
Photographer Robert Howlett (1831 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005.100.839)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
Made on 18 November 1857, two weeks after the launch of the Great Eastern had begun on 3 November, this photograph belongs to the same campaign as Howlett's portrait of Brunel. Here the figures are the workmen, set beside the launching chains that were meant to control the hull's slide sideways towards the Thames. Moving the ship into the water took some three months, and Howlett's pictures record a vessel so large that her launch became a national drama.
The real ship Great Eastern was designed by Brunel and built by John Scott Russell and Co. at Millwall on the Thames. Driven by paddle wheels and a screw, 692 feet long and by far the largest ship ever built when she was launched in 1858, she laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 and was broken up on Merseyside in 1889.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
A paddle or screw steamer at sea Unnamed
Steamboat (Vapeur), 1857
Photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820 to 1884)
Where to see it Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Medium Photograph
Among the seascapes of 1856 to 1858 that made Le Gray's name is this view of steamers at sea. A ship with masts and a funnel trails a long plume of black smoke across a calm sea, a smaller steamer ahead of her, the smoke drifting along the horizon like a second line of cloud. Where the brig of his earlier picture belongs to an old maritime world, these steamers bring the age of iron and coal into the same silvery light. Le Gray, trained as a painter, has been called the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century.
The vessels The vessels are unidentified steamships of the 1850s, one of them still carrying masts for sail.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Gustave Le Gray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
French and British fleets in the roads of Cherbourg Unnamed
The French and English Fleets, Cherbourg, August 1858
Photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820 to 1884)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013.159.37)
Medium Albumen silver print from glass negative
In August 1858 Le Gray went to Cherbourg and Brest to photograph the naval exercises of the French and English fleets. He treats the great warships as he treated clouds, as shapes in a wide field of sea and light, and the Met's curators note that their small size in the frame suggests toy boats afloat in a bath. That is the charm and the unease of the picture: some of the most powerful machines of the age, reduced to delicate silhouettes on a shining roadstead.
“a bit of child's play with models afloat in a bath.”
The vessels The ships are warships of the French Navy and the Royal Navy, photographed at Cherbourg during the naval exercises of August 1858; they are not individually identified.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Monitor Named ship
The Original Monitor after her Fight with the Merrimac, 9 July 1862
Photographer James F. Gibson (born 1828)
Where to see it Boston Public Library (Print Department; DPLA 68cf47b2037f9c0a71962b8d2cbf7f7c)
Medium Albumen stereograph
Gibson photographed part of Monitor's deck and turret in the James River on 9 July 1862, four months after Hampton Roads, with officers standing and sitting at ease beside it. The camera records what that battle had done: dents in the turret plating near the gun port, where the shot of the Confederate ironclad struck and failed to break through. Those marks are the evidence of a new age at sea. The view was later sold as a stereograph in the War Memories catalogue of 1890.
“near the port-hole can be seen the dents made by the heavy steel-pointed shot from the guns of the ‘Merrimac.’”
The real ship Monitor, designed by John Ericsson with a revolving turret designed by Theodore Timby, was built in 101 days in Brooklyn and fought CSS Virginia to a stalemate at Hampton Roads on 9 March 1862, the first battle between ironclads. She foundered under tow in a storm off Cape Hatteras on the last day of 1862.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: James F. Gibson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Monitor Named ship
Sailors Relaxing on Deck of USS Monitor, James River, 9 July 1862
Photographer James F. Gibson (born 1828)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (Civil War Glass Negatives, cwpb.01062)
Medium Glass plate negative (stereo pair)
Four months after her battle with CSS Virginia, Monitor lay in the James River and James F. Gibson brought his camera aboard. The crew gather on the low iron deck in front of the riveted turret, a canvas awning spread above it: some sit reading, two men bend over a board game, others stand and watch the camera. It is a rare view of ordinary life aboard the first ironclad of the United States Navy, and it carries a sadness the men could not know, for before the year was out Monitor foundered off Cape Hatteras.
The real ship Monitor, designed by John Ericsson with a revolving turret designed by Theodore Timby, was built in 101 days in Brooklyn and fought CSS Virginia to a stalemate at Hampton Roads on 9 March 1862, the first battle between ironclads. She foundered under tow in a storm off Cape Hatteras on the last day of 1862.
Sources Library of Congress · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: James F. Gibson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
CSS Alabama Named ship
Captain Raphael Semmes Aboard CSS Alabama, Cape Town, August 1863
Photographer Unknown photographer (carte de visite mount of E. Burmester, Cape Town)
Where to see it Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington (NH 57256 KN)
Medium Albumen print, lightly tinted, on carte de visite mount
When Alabama called at Cape Town in August 1863 she was the Confederate raider that had been capturing and burning Union merchant ships across the Atlantic. Her captain, Raphael Semmes, stands on deck beside the ship's 110-pounder rifled gun, while his executive officer, First Lieutenant John Kell, waits by the wheel behind him. The print, lightly tinted and mounted as a carte de visite by a Cape Town studio, has the assurance of a ship at the height of her career, ten months before Kearsarge sank her off Cherbourg.
The real ship Alabama was built in secrecy in 1862 by John Laird Sons and Company at Birkenhead, launched as Enrica and commissioned as CSS Alabama on 24 August 1862. Under Semmes she raided Union shipping from the North Atlantic to the East Indies until USS Kearsarge sank her off Cherbourg on 19 June 1864.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Onondaga Named ship
James River, Virginia: Monitor USS Onondaga, Soldiers in Rowing Boat in Foreground, 1864
Photographer Unknown photographer (Brady collection, Civil War Glass Negatives)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (cwpb.01514)
Medium Glass plate negative (1 negative, 2 plates)
Onondaga spent her entire active career with the James River Flotilla, covering the water approaches to Richmond, and a Civil War photographer found her there in 1864. The monitor lies low in the river, her tall funnel and canvas awnings rising above a hull that barely shows, the Stars and Stripes flying aft. In the foreground a crew of soldiers sits in a wooden rowing boat drawn up by the shingle. The contrast is the picture: a small boat full of men beside an iron warship that is almost all deck and turret.
The real ship Onondaga, an ironclad monitor, was commissioned in 1864 and served with the James River Flotilla, fighting at Trent's Reach. After the war she was bought by France and served as a coastal defence ship, becoming a guard ship in 1898; she was sold for scrap in 1904 and demolished in 1905.
Sources Library of Congress · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Great Eastern Named ship
Great Eastern at Heart's Content, July 1866
Photographer Robert Edward Holloway (died 1904), probably
Where to see it Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's (Archives and Special Collections, digital collection arch_geog)
Medium Photograph
Brunel's giant was unprofitable as a liner, but within a few years she was put to laying underwater cable, and in 1866 she laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable. In July that year a photographer, most likely Robert Edward Holloway, recorded her at Heart's Content in Newfoundland, where the cable came ashore. She lies in the bay with other vessels moored alongside, one of her great paddle boxes plain to see, while a fenced field and the little settlement frame the scene. The largest ship of her age has become the ship that joined two continents.
The real ship Great Eastern was designed by Brunel and built by John Scott Russell and Co. at Millwall on the Thames, launched in 1858 as by far the largest ship yet built, driven by both paddle wheels and a screw. After unprofitable years as a liner she laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866; she ended as a floating music hall and advertising hoarding in Liverpool and was broken up on Merseyside in 1889.
Sources collections.mun.ca · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Robert Edward Holloway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Cutty Sark Named ship
Cutty Sark at East Circular Quay, Sydney, c. 1885
Photographer Unknown photographer (A. D. Edwardes Collection)
Where to see it State Library of South Australia, Adelaide (PRG 1373/2/95)
Medium Photograph
Once steamers had taken the China tea trade, Cutty Sark turned to carrying wool from Australia, and for ten years she was the fastest ship in that trade. Here she lies at the east side of Circular Quay in Sydney, one of the ships of John Willis and Son of London, moored among other deep-water sailing ships beneath the Hill, Clarke and Co. warehouse, built in 1883, which dates the picture. The print belongs to the A. D. Edwardes Collection of about 8,000 photographs, mostly of sailing ships, and it catches the clipper at work in her Australian years.
The real ship Cutty Sark, a composite ship, was built at Dumbarton in 1869 by Scott and Linton, completed by Denny, for John Willis of London. After the tea trade she carried wool from Australia, was sold to Portuguese owners in 1895 and renamed Ferreira, was bought back and restored in 1922, and is displayed in dry dock at Greenwich.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Sailing ships and fishing boats in Whitby harbour Unnamed
Whitby Harbour, c. 1885
Photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853 to 1941)
Where to see it Cleveland Museum of Art (1996.244)
Medium Carbon print, toned, from glass negative
Sutcliffe made his living as a portrait photographer in Whitby and resented having to photograph holidaymakers; his lasting work was the town and the people who lived and worked there. Here sailing vessels and fishing boats lie in the harbour, their loosened sails hanging, masts crowding the frame, the town rising in haze behind. The toned carbon print softens it all into a single atmosphere. A founder member of the Linked Ring, the brotherhood that promoted photography as an art, he gave these working boats the attention a marine painter would.
The vessels The vessels are unidentified sailing vessels and fishing boats of the kind that used Whitby harbour in the 1880s.
Sources Cleveland Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Norfolk wherries at Cantley Unnamed
Cantley: Wherries Waiting for the Turn of the Tide (Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, plate XXIV), 1886
Photographer Peter Henry Emerson (1856 to 1936)
Where to see it Cleveland Museum of Art (1986.190)
Medium Platinum print
Emerson's first album, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads of 1886, made with the painter T. F. Goodall, gathered forty platinum prints of life in the East Anglian marshes. Here three trading wherries lie by a brick house at Cantley, their tall sails set and mirrored in still water as they wait for the turn of the tide. Emerson argued for a naturalistic photography that portrayed rural subjects simply and directly, and the quiet of the scene is the point: boats, water and a clouded evening sky held in the soft greys of platinum.
The vessels The Norfolk wherry was a single-masted trading boat of the rivers and broads of East Anglia; those shown here are unnamed.
Sources Cleveland Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Marshman's rowing boat Unnamed
Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff, 1886
Photographer Peter Henry Emerson (1856 to 1936)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005.100.726)
Medium Platinum print from glass negative
A marshman rows home across still water at dusk, seen from behind, his small boat loaded with a bundle of cut marsh growth, the schoof stuff of the title. His oars stretch out level on either side and his reflection falls straight down into the water. Emerson, who argued for a naturalistic photography of country life, made this in 1886, and the scene holds the man, his boat and the flat reed-fringed horizon in perfect balance. In a country made of water, the boat is his cart and his road.
The vessels An unnamed small working rowing boat of the Norfolk Broads, used here to bring home a load cut from the marsh.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Reed boat on the Norfolk Broads Unnamed
Towing the Reed, 1887 to 1888
Photographer Peter Henry Emerson (1856 to 1936)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1994.520.1)
Medium Platinum print
Emerson spent the late 1880s photographing the working life of the Norfolk marshes, and reed, cut from the beds and moved along the waterways, was one of its harvests. This platinum print of 1887 to 1888 records reed being towed along the marsh waters. He argued for a naturalistic photography that showed rural subjects simply and directly, in reaction to the staged sentiment of Victorian art photography, and the scene has the calm clarity of a naturalist's observation. The boat is a humble one, a tool of the marsh economy, treated with complete seriousness.
The vessels An unnamed working boat of the Norfolk marshes, of the kind used to carry cut reed along the dykes and broads.
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Victoria Named ship
HMS Victoria Sinking after Collision with HMS Camperdown, 22 June 1893
Photographer Staff Surgeon James Alexander Collot (died 1894)
Medium Photograph
During fleet manoeuvres near Tripoli on 22 June 1893, the flagship Victoria collided with HMS Camperdown and quickly sank. Staff Surgeon James Collot photographed her last moments: her stern rises steeply from the water amid a cloud of smoke and spray, while HMS Nile steams on the left of the frame. The image is stark and still, and it needs no comment. In all, 358 of her crew were lost, among them Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet; one of the survivors was her executive officer, John Jellicoe, later commander at Jutland.
The real ship Victoria was the lead ship of a class of two battleships, renamed from Renown during construction for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. On completion she was the largest, fastest and most powerful ironclad afloat and the first battleship propelled by triple-expansion engines. She sank after colliding with HMS Camperdown on 22 June 1893.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Staff Surgeon James Alexander Collot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Fram Named ship
Fram in the Ice (Fram i isen), 14 July 1894
Photographer Fridtjof Nansen (1861 to 1930)
Where to see it National Library of Norway, Oslo (bldsa 3c186)
Medium Photograph
Nansen's plan was bold: build a ship the ice could not crush, freeze her in off Siberia and let the current carry her across the Arctic towards the Pole. His own photograph records the experiment from inside it, Fram held among hummocks of summer pack in July 1894, her masts reflected in a pool of meltwater. Her hull was shaped so that pressing ice would push her upward rather than crush her. The ship is at once laboratory, home and proof of an idea, caught by the man who dreamed it.
The real ship Fram was designed and built by the shipwright Colin Archer of Larvik and launched in 1892 for Nansen's Arctic expedition of 1893 to 1896; her wide, shallow hull was shaped so that pressing ice would push her up. She later carried Sverdrup and Amundsen and is preserved at the Fram Museum in Oslo.
Sources flickr.com · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Fridtjof Nansen, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Wreck of USS Maine Named ship
American Divers at Work, Coming Up, Maine Wreck, Havana Harbour, 1898
Photographer Strohmeyer and Wyman (publishers); Underwood and Underwood
Medium Stereograph
After the explosion of 15 February 1898 the ruined Maine lay in Havana harbour, and American divers were sent down to the wreck. This stereograph, made to be seen in depth through a viewer at home, shows the divers' platform among tangled rigging and wreckage, one man in a copper helmet being helped by his tenders beside a salvage vessel. Cards like this carried the disaster into American homes while newspapers were blaming Spain and calling for war.
The real ship Maine sank in Havana Harbour after an explosion on 15 February 1898, which contributed to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War that April; evidence points to an internal coal bunker fire rather than a mine.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Strohmeyer and Wyman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Floating wash house on the Seine Unnamed
Bateau Lavoir on the Seine (Bateau lavoir sur la Seine), 1898 to 1899
Photographer Eugène Atget (1857 to 1927)
Where to see it The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1.1969.1713)
Medium Photograph
Atget, who had joined the merchant navy as a young man, set out to document the architecture and street scenes of Paris before modernisation swept them away, and the bateaux lavoirs belonged to that disappearing city. These were great boats moored to the bank and turned into public wash houses; many Parisians thought them an eyesore, and they would soon vanish from the Seine. Here one lies against the quay under its curved roofs and tall chimneys, a sign for the baths above the door. Atget recorded it with the same patient clarity he gave to every shop front.
The vessels A bateau lavoir was a pontoon or large boat anchored to the riverbank and converted into a public laundry; in the nineteenth century several were moored in the centre of Paris.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia (FR) · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Maine Named ship
The USS Maine Entering Havana Harbour, 25 January 1898
Photographer John C. Hemment
Source Published in Munsey's Magazine, November 1898; also National Archives, Washington (531001)
Medium Photograph, reproduced as halftone
Maine was sent to Havana to protect American interests during the Cuban War of Independence, and John C. Hemment photographed her steaming in past the lighthouse and fortress at the harbour mouth on 25 January 1898, two boys watching from a rock in the foreground. Three weeks later, on the evening of 15 February, she exploded and sank, killing 268 sailors. American newspapers blamed Spain and war followed in April, though evidence points to an accidental coal bunker fire. The picture shows a warship arriving on a routine mission, the prologue to a war.
“Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”
The real ship Maine, described as an armoured cruiser or second-class battleship, was ordered in 1886 and was the first US Navy ship named after the state; her construction took nine years. She exploded and sank in Havana Harbour on 15 February 1898; in 1911 the wreck was patched and refloated inside a cofferdam, then towed to sea and sunk.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: John C. Hemment, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Mohegan Named ship
The Wreck of the SS Mohegan on the Manacles, 1898
Photographer Attributed to the Gibsons of Scilly
Where to see it Gibsons of Scilly archive
Medium Photograph
Bound from Tilbury for New York on only her second voyage, the Mohegan ran onto the Manacles, the rocks off the Lizard, on the evening of 14 October 1898; 106 of the 157 people aboard were drowned. This photograph of the wreck is credited to the Gibson family of Scilly. It gives a quiet, sober face to the disaster: a ship built for safety at sea, with watertight bulkheads and eight lifeboats, lost within weeks of sailing under her new name.
The real ship She was built by Earle's Shipbuilding at Hull as the Cleopatra for the Wilson and Furness-Leyland Line, a combined passenger ship and cattle carrier with watertight bulkheads and eight lifeboats, and bought by the Atlantic Transport Line. After a troubled maiden voyage from London to New York in 1898 she was repaired, renamed Mohegan, and was lost on the Manacles on 14 October 1898.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Attributed to the Gibsons of Scilly, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
PS General Slocum Named ship
A View of the General Slocum on Fire off North Brother Island, 15 June 1904
Photographer Unknown photographer
Source Published in Harper's, 24 June 1904
Medium Photograph, published in Harper's
The General Slocum was carrying the congregation of St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, German-American families from Manhattan's Little Germany, to their annual picnic when she caught fire in the East River on 15 June 1904. The photograph published in Harper's shows her burning off North Brother Island with a fireboat on the scene, the excursion steamer of summer outings turned into a pyre. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people aboard died. Until Titanic, it was the worst maritime disaster of the century.
“A view of the General Slocum on fire off North Brother Island”
The real ship General Slocum was a side-wheel passenger steamboat built in Brooklyn in 1891 for New York excursion work. She burned and sank at North Brother Island on 15 June 1904; it remains the worst maritime disaster in the history of New York City.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Ellis Island ferry boat Unnamed
Italian Family on Ferry Boat, Leaving Ellis Island, New York, 1905
Photographer Lewis Hine (1874 to 1940)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014.554.20)
Medium Lantern slide
Hine led his sociology classes from the Ethical Culture School to Ellis Island, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day, and between 1904 and 1909 he made more than 200 plates there. This lantern slide shows an Italian family on the ferry boat as they leave the island for New York. The boat is the last vessel of a long journey, the threshold between the island and a new life. Hine came to see documentary photography as a tool for social change, and slides like this one served that purpose.
The vessels An unnamed New York harbour ferry of the kind that carried immigrants away from Ellis Island.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the source
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
An Atlantic emigrant liner (unidentified) Unnamed
Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner, 1906
Photographer Edwin Levick (1869 to 1929)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 97501073)
Medium Photographic print
Levick, a noted New York maritime photographer, looked down on the open deck of an Atlantic liner packed shoulder to shoulder with emigrants in coats, caps and shawls, a year before Stieglitz made The Steerage. Here the ship is not a silhouette but a crowded floor: rigging, lifeboats and ventilators frame a sea of faces. It is the ocean liner seen from below the saloon, among the people who filled her lower decks and her crossings.
The vessels The liner is not named in the Library of Congress record. Atlantic liners of the early twentieth century carried large numbers of emigrants in the cheapest class of passage.
Sources Library of Congress · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Dreadnought Named ship
The Launch of HMS Dreadnought at Portsmouth Dockyard, February 1906
Photographer Symonds and Co.
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 41435)
Medium Photograph
The ship whose name became a byword for a whole generation of battleships was launched at Portsmouth after only four months on the ways. King Edward VII christened her with a bottle of Australian wine that took several blows to break against the bow. The launch had been planned as a large festive occasion, but the court was in mourning, so a more sober ceremony marked the arrival of a revolution in naval power, the first battleship driven by steam turbines.
The real ship Dreadnought was built at Portsmouth Dockyard at great speed and launched on 10 February 1906. She was the first battleship to use steam turbines, following Charles Parsons' demonstration of the Turbinia at Spithead in 1897.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Symonds and Co., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
A merchant steamer's rudder in dock, Liverpool Unnamed
The Rudder, Liverpool, 1906
Photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882 to 1966)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (33.43.199)
Medium Gum bichromate over platinum print
Coburn, a young Boston-born photographer whose work Stieglitz published in Camera Work, spent 1905 and much of 1906 in England, and in 1906 showed his pictures in Liverpool. In The Rudder he turns his lens on the great blade on which a whole ship turns, printed in the soft, layered tones of gum over platinum. Stieglitz kept this print in his own collection, and a halftone of the same picture is with it at the Met. A single piece of a ship's gear becomes the whole subject, a port seen through one working part.
The vessels The vessel is unidentified: a ship in the port of Liverpool in 1906.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the source
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Kansas and USS Vermont (the Great White Fleet) Named ship
The Atlantic Fleet Steaming in Column, Departing Hampton Roads, December 1907
Photographer C. E. Waterman, Hampton, Virginia
Where to see it Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington (NH 92091)
Medium Photograph
In December 1907 the sixteen battleships of the United States Atlantic Fleet, hulls painted a stark white, set out on a voyage around the globe ordered by Theodore Roosevelt to display the nation's new naval power. Waterman, a photographer from Hampton, Virginia, recorded the line steaming in column, probably as it left Hampton Roads, with Kansas leading Vermont. Black smoke pours back from every funnel over the long procession of white hulls, and the whole purpose of the voyage is there in one frame.
The real ship The Great White Fleet of sixteen battleships sailed around the globe from 16 December 1907 to 22 February 1909 by order of President Roosevelt. Kansas (BB-21) and Vermont (BB-20) were among its battleships.
Sources Naval History and Heritage Command · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: C. E. Waterman, Hampton, Virginia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Lusitania Named ship
Lusitania Arriving in New York on her Maiden Voyage, 13 September 1907
Photographer Bain News Service (George Grantham Bain Collection)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (Bain Collection, cph.3a10885)
Medium Photograph
On 13 September 1907 Cunard's new Lusitania arrived in New York at the end of her maiden voyage, sailing past Battery Park while crowds packed the waterfront below. She was then the largest passenger ship in the world, and that year she won the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing, held by German ships for a decade. Seen from above, the liner glides behind the ferry piers, smoke trailing across the harbour. Eight years later her sinking off Ireland would help turn American opinion towards war, and this arrival gained a weight no one watching could have imagined.
The real ship Lusitania was launched for Cunard in 1906 and briefly the largest passenger ship in the world; she won the Blue Riband in 1907. On 7 May 1915 she was torpedoed by U-20 off the Old Head of Kinsale and sank in about 18 minutes, with the loss of 1,198 lives.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Bain News Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Mauretania Named ship
Mauretania at Full Speed on the Measured Mile, 1907
Photographer Unknown photographer (Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson collection)
Where to see it Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Newcastle (DS.SWH/4/PH/7/6)
Medium Photograph
Mauretania was built for Cunard by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on the Tyne, and this photograph from the builders' records shows her at full speed on the measured mile in 1907. Dense black smoke pours back from her four funnels and a white wave curls from her stem as she drives through calm water close to the shore. The picture belongs to shipbuilding collections added to UNESCO's UK Memory of the World register. It shows the ship that would hold both Atlantic speed records for twenty years, proving her speed for the first time.
The real ship Mauretania was built for Cunard by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend and launched in 1906. She took the eastbound Blue Riband in December 1907 and the westbound record in 1909, holding both for 20 years; she served as a hospital ship and troopship in the First World War, was retired in September 1934 and scrapped at Rosyth in 1935.
Sources flickr.com · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Unknown author, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Kaiser Wilhelm II Named ship
The Steerage, 1907
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (33.43.419)
Medium Photogravure
In June 1907 Stieglitz sailed for Europe in first class aboard Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of the largest and fastest ships in the world, and looked down from the upper deck on the steerage passengers below. He ran to his cabin for his camera, found he had only one glass plate prepared, and made a single exposure. The liner gives the picture its bones: a white gangway bridge cutting across, a mast with its cargo booms rising into the sky, stairs and iron machinery framing the crowd. The Met calls it his signature work, proclaimed as his first modernist photograph.
“I saw shapes related to each other. I was inspired by a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”
The real ship Kaiser Wilhelm II was launched at Stettin on 12 August 1902 for Norddeutscher Lloyd and won the Blue Riband for the eastbound crossing in 1904. Laid up in New York from 1914, she was seized in 1917 and became USS Agamemnon, later USAT Monticello, and was scrapped in 1940.
Image: Alfred Stieglitz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Dreadnought Named ship
HMS Dreadnought with Awning Rigged, Anchored in the Thames Estuary, July 1909
Photographer Unknown photographer
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (P30)
Medium Glass plate negative (gelatine dry plate)
Dreadnought's entry into service in 1906 was such an advance that her name came to stand for a whole generation of battleships. The National Maritime Museum's plate shows her from the port quarter at anchor off Southend in July 1909 for the Thames Naval Review, awning rigged amidships and aft, boat booms out and ensigns flying, with the Admiralty despatch vessel Surprise to the right. Small boats pull around her in a choppy sea. It is a peacetime show, the ship whose launch had helped spark a naval arms race with Germany now on public display.
The real ship Dreadnought, credited to Admiral Sir John Fisher, entered service in 1906 as the first battleship of her era with a uniform main battery of 12-inch guns and the first capital ship powered by steam turbines, the fastest battleship in the world on completion.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic (under construction) Named ship
Keel Supports for Olympic and Titanic, Harland and Wolff, 8 May 1909
Photographer Robert John Welch (1859 to 1936)
Where to see it National Museums NI, Harland and Wolff Collection, Belfast (HOYFM.HW.H1330)
Medium Glass plate negative
Welch was hired by Harland and Wolff to photograph the building of Olympic, Titanic and Britannic, and on 8 May 1909 he recorded the keel structure for the first of the sisters taking shape beneath the great steel gantry at the Belfast slips. There is no hull yet, only the long spine of the bottom structure on its supports and the lattice of the gantry overhead, sharp in the sunlight. A photographer better known for Irish landscapes, megaliths and natural history brought the same clear eye to the birth of the largest ships of their day.
The real ship Olympic and Titanic were built side by side at Harland and Wolff, Belfast, for the White Star Line; Titanic was lost on her maiden voyage in April 1912.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Robert John Welch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
New York harbour ferry boat Unnamed
The Ferry Boat, 1910
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (58.577.29; another print titled After Working Hours, The Ferry Boat, 49.55.12)
Medium Photogravure
In 1910 Stieglitz photographed one of the steam ferries of New York harbour at the end of the working day, the version the Met titles After Working Hours, The Ferry Boat. The boat pulls away from the slip packed with commuters in straw hats, its tall black funnel and pilot house softened by haze, while a cluster of pale pilings fills the foreground. The composition is built from the curve of the piles and the broad stern of the ferry, and the crowd turns an ordinary crossing into a picture of the modern city on the move.
The vessels An unnamed steam ferry of New York harbour, a double-ended passenger boat of the kind that carried commuters across the rivers in the early twentieth century.
Sources The Met · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Preussen Named ship
The Five-Masted Ship Preussen Ashore near Dover, 1910
Photographer Unknown photographer
Where to see it State Library of Victoria, Melbourne (H99.220/2132)
Medium Photograph
Preussen, built for the Hamburg firm of F. Laeisz, was the only five-masted full-rigged ship of her time, and she came to grief not off Cape Horn but in the Channel. On the night of 5 November 1910 the cross-Channel steamer Brighton tried to cross her bows and rammed her, carrying away her bowsprit and fore topgallant mast. A November gale defeated attempts to bring her into Dover, both anchor chains broke, and she was driven onto the rocks of Crab Bay. The photograph of the stranded giant beneath the chalk reads like the end of the age of sail.
The real ship Preussen was built by Joh. C. Tecklenborg at Geestemünde and launched on 7 May 1902 for F. Laeisz of Hamburg, sailing on her maiden voyage to Iquique in Chile. With her keel broken at Crab Bay she could not be salvaged; the master of Brighton was found responsible and lost his licence, and a few of her ribs still show at low spring tides.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Mauretania Named ship
Outward Bound, The Mauretania, 1910
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (49.55.10); another print in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-F-2005-107-226)
Medium Photogravure
Three years after The Steerage, Stieglitz turned his camera on Cunard's Mauretania in New York harbour: beyond a row of white bollards on the pier, the long four-funnelled liner lies on grey water. He published the picture in Camera Work in October 1911, in an issue of sixteen photogravures he called snapshots, in which, the Met writes, he declared his allegiance to straight photography. The liner carries that argument: no soft focus, no painterly haze, a modern machine in a modern harbour, the romance of the crossing without a single passenger in view.
“Stieglitz announced his allegiance with the new credo of ‘straight photography’”
The real ship Mauretania was built by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on the Tyne and launched in 1906. She took the eastbound Blue Riband in December 1907 and the westbound record in 1909, holding both for twenty years, served as a troopship and hospital ship in the First World War, and was scrapped at Rosyth in 1935.
Sources The Met · Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Terra Nova Named ship
Ponting Cinematographs the Bow of the Terra Nova Breaking through the Ice Floes, 1910 to 1911
Photographer Herbert Ponting (1870 to 1935)
Medium Photograph (published in Scott's Last Expedition, 1913)
Ponting wanted film of Terra Nova's bow cleaving the ice floes, so the bosun and Petty Officer Williamson rigged planks ten feet out from the starboard side of the forecastle. This photograph shows him lying at the end of them, his camera on its tilting table hung in ropes above the sea, a sailor watching from the rail as the ship pushes into the pack. He wrote that he hung on as the ship bumped into the floes, gripping the camera with one arm and turning the handle with the other. It is a portrait of the old whaler forcing her way south and of an early Antarctic film-maker at work.
“Spread-eagling myself on the end of these planks, I had a field of view clear under the overhanging prow.”
The real ship Terra Nova was built in 1884 for the Dundee whaling and sealing fleet and carried Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910; she returned to sealing off Newfoundland and in September 1943, damaged off Greenland, was set alight after her crew were rescued and sunk by gunfire.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Herbert Ponting, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Terra Nova and Fram Named ship
Scott's Expedition Ship Terra Nova Visiting Fram in the Bay of Whales, February 1911
Photographer Amundsen's South Pole expedition
Where to see it National Archives of Norway (Riksarkivet), Oslo
Medium Photograph
Returning westward along the edge of the Great Ice Barrier in February 1911, Scott's Terra Nova came upon Amundsen's expedition camped in the Bay of Whales. Amundsen was courteous and hospitable, and Terra Nova went back to Cape Evans with the news. This photograph, taken by the Norwegian expedition, sets the two ships in one frame: Fram's dark hull and rigging close at the left, dog teams and sledges on the ice, and Terra Nova lying off beyond them. It shows both rivals for the Pole together, months before one party would triumph and the other die on the way home.
The real ship Fram, designed and built by Colin Archer and launched in 1892, carried Amundsen's South Pole expedition and is preserved at the Fram Museum in Oslo. Terra Nova, a Dundee whaler of 1884, carried Scott's expedition and was sunk off Greenland in 1943.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Amundsen's South Pole expedition, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Terra Nova Named ship
The Terra Nova Icebound, c. 1911
Photographer Herbert Ponting (1870 to 1935)
Where to see it Private collection (sold at Christie's, London, 8 October 2014, sale 5506, lot 102)
Medium Blue-toned carbon print
Ponting sailed with Scott's last expedition, the first time a professional photographer was taken on an Antarctic expedition, and he preferred glass plates to film for the quality they gave his icescapes. In this large print, signed and titled by him in pencil, Terra Nova rises above a wind-carved ridge of ice, her canvas hanging loose from the yards and her crew small figures along the rail. Ponting also filmed the voyage with one of the first portable cinematographs used in Antarctica, and his images of the ship shaped how the expedition would be remembered.
The real ship Terra Nova was built in 1884 for the Dundee whaling and sealing fleet, helped free Scott's Discovery from McMurdo Sound in 1903, and carried the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910. She returned to sealing off Newfoundland and in September 1943, damaged and taking water off Greenland, was set alight after her crew were rescued and sunk by gunfire.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Herbert Ponting, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Terra Nova Named ship
The Terra Nova off Cape Evans with Capsizing Berg, January 1911
Photographer Herbert Ponting (1870 to 1935), attributed
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (PXA 157, album annotated by T. Griffith Taylor)
Medium Vintage photographic print (album)
In January 1911 Terra Nova lay off Cape Evans on Ross Island while the shore party set up the expedition's winter camp. Here she is moored at the edge of the sea ice beside a great berg that has turned over, its underside worn smooth and hung with icicles, while tiny figures work on the floe beyond. The print comes from an album of the expedition annotated by the geologist Griffith Taylor. Few pictures show so plainly the scale of the ice that surrounded the little whaler, yards bare, in her Antarctic anchorage.
The real ship Terra Nova was built in 1884 for the Dundee whaling and sealing fleet and carried Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910; she was abandoned and sunk off Greenland in 1943.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Herbert Ponting, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Mildred Named ship
The Masts and Sails of the Schooner Mildred Submerged off Gurnard's Head, April 1912
Photographer Gibson and Sons of Scilly
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (G14011, Gibsons of Scilly Shipwreck Collection)
Medium Glass plate negative
The Gibsons of Scilly photographed shipwrecks, and their shipwreck collection is now at the National Maritime Museum. Here the wooden schooner Mildred has sunk in Treen Cove, close to Gurnard's Head, yet her jibs, mainsail and fore topsail are still set, standing out of a quiet sea above a hull that has vanished completely. The effect is uncanny: a ship still under sail with nothing beneath her. She had run aground in dense fog at midnight on 6 April 1912.
The real ship Mildred was a wooden three-masted schooner built in 1889. On passage from Newport to London with a cargo of basic slag, she ran aground in dense fog near Gurnard's Head in Cornwall at midnight on 6 April 1912 and sank in Treen Cove.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Gibson and Sons of Scilly, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Titanic's lifeboats Named ship
Rescued Lifeboats, All That Is Left from the Great Ship Titanic, New York, April 1912
Photographer Unknown photographer
Where to see it John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane (1-169523)
Medium Photographic print
When Carpathia reached New York on the evening of 18 April 1912 she first stopped at the White Star Line's Pier 59 and offloaded thirteen of Titanic's lifeboats before going on to the Cunard pier to land the survivors. Here the empty boats lie in a row beside a pier shed, a few men standing in them. They are the only part of the great ship that ever reached New York, and the title printed with the photograph says so plainly. Small open boats, they carry the whole weight of the disaster.
“Rescued lifeboats, all that is left from the great ship Titanic”
The real ship Titanic carried twenty lifeboats, enough for 1,178 people. Carpathia took thirteen of them aboard and offloaded them at the White Star Line's Pier 59 in New York; their later fate is not recorded.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic Named ship
Sister Ships Olympic and Titanic, Belfast, 6 March 1912
Photographer Robert John Welch (1859 to 1936)
Where to see it National Museums NI, Belfast (Welch negative H1637)
Medium Photograph (glass plate, Welch no. H1637)
Robert Welch, hired by Harland and Wolff to photograph the building of its great liners, caught the two sisters together at Belfast on 6 March 1912. Olympic had lost a propeller and needed the dry dock, so Titanic, still being fitted out, had to be moved out to make room for her. For a moment the two ships lay side by side, almost identical, one already in service and one yet to sail. Seen now, the pairing carries a weight Welch could not have known.
The real ship Olympic and Titanic were built side by side by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line; Olympic entered service first, and Titanic, the second of the three Olympic-class liners, sank on her maiden voyage in April 1912.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Robert John Welch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Carpathia Named ship
Survivors of Titanic aboard Carpathia, April 1912
Photographer Bain News Service (George Grantham Bain Collection)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (George Grantham Bain Collection, LCCN 2001704332)
Medium Photographic print
On an open deck of the Cunard steamer Carpathia, a group of Titanic survivors stands wrapped in dark coats, safe at last. Carpathia had raced through the ice field in the night, arrived two hours after the sinking and taken more than 700 people from the lifeboats. The picture carries none of the drama of the wreck, only its aftermath: a working liner suddenly turned into a place of waiting. She reached New York in heavy rain on the evening of 18 April 1912.
The real ship Carpathia was built by Swan and Hunter at Wallsend and made her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Boston in 1903. After the Titanic rescue her captain, Arthur Rostron, was knighted; she was torpedoed three times by U-55 off the southern Irish coast on 17 July 1918, with the loss of five crew.
Sources Library of Congress · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Bain News Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Titanic Named ship
Titanic Leaving Queenstown, 11 April 1912
Photographer Francis Browne (1880 to 1960)
Medium Photograph
Browne, a young Jesuit, was given a ticket by his uncle for the first legs of Titanic's maiden voyage, from Southampton to Queenstown by way of Cherbourg, and photographed life aboard with tireless curiosity. Offered a passage on to New York by fellow passengers, he asked his superior's permission and was refused. On 11 April he left the ship at Queenstown, and this picture shows the liner lying off the Irish coast that day, a small boat in the foreground. When news of the sinking came, his photographs appeared in publications around the world, and this quiet view became one of farewell.
“GET OFF THAT SHIP”
The real ship Titanic was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line, the second of the three Olympic-class liners and the largest ship afloat when she entered service. On her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York she struck an iceberg and sank in the early hours of 15 April 1912; of about 2,208 people aboard, some 1,500 died.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Titanic Named ship
SS Titanic Leaving Southampton, April 1912
Photographer Unknown photographer
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Medium Photograph
Titanic's maiden voyage began shortly after noon on 10 April 1912, when she left Southampton for New York, and this print from the National Maritime Museum records her going. Across the top someone has written in ink that she is leaving Southampton on her first and last voyage, words added once the outcome was known. Below them the liner moves out past tugs and small craft, immense, new and untroubled. The picture's power lies in that gap between the calm of the moment and the handwriting above it.
The real ship Titanic was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line, the second of the three Olympic-class liners and the largest ship afloat when she entered service. On her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York she struck an iceberg and sank in the early hours of 15 April 1912; of about 2,208 people aboard, some 1,500 died.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Unknown author, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Titanic's Lifeboat 14 and Collapsible D Named ship
Titanic Lifeboat No. 14 Approaching Carpathia with Collapsible D in Tow, 15 April 1912
Photographer Louis Mansfield Ogden (1867 to 1946)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (Lord MacQuitty Collection, LMQ/1/12/1)
Medium Photograph
Louis Ogden photographed the scene of the Titanic disaster from the deck of Cunard's Carpathia on the morning of 15 April 1912. Here Lifeboat 14 comes towards the ship with Collapsible D in tow, the survivors crowded low in the boats on a grey, rippled sea. These small open boats are all that remained of the largest ship afloat. Carpathia reached the scene about an hour and a half after the sinking and took aboard all 710 survivors, and Ogden's set of twelve pictures, now at the National Maritime Museum, records that rescue as it happened.
“the scene of the TITANIC disaster, taken from the deck of the CARPATHIA”
The real ship Lifeboat 14 and Collapsible D were among the boats carried by Titanic. Carpathia, a Cunard liner, arrived about an hour and a half after the sinking and had rescued all 710 survivors by 09.15 on 15 April 1912.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Louis Mansfield Ogden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Titanic's Lifeboat 6 Named ship
Titanic's Lifeboat 6 Rowing towards Carpathia, 15 April 1912
Photographer Louis Mansfield Ogden (1867 to 1946)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (LMQ/1/12/1/1-12)
Medium Photograph
Taken by Louis Ogden from the deck of Carpathia, this is one of the few photographs of Titanic's boats at the moment of rescue. Lifeboat 6, launched at 12.55 am with room for 65, holds about two dozen people; among them was Margaret Brown, with Quartermaster Robert Hichens in charge and the lookout Frederick Fleet. Seen from high above, the small white boat is alone on a wide, choppy sea. It tells the story of the half-empty lifeboats in a single image.
The real ship Lifeboat 6 was one of Titanic's wooden lifeboats, launched from the port side by Captain Smith and Second Officer Lightoller at 12.55 am on 15 April 1912. It was one of the last boats to reach Carpathia, coming alongside at 8 am.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Louis Mansfield Ogden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Titanic Named ship
Titanic's Starboard Anchor Being Raised, Queenstown, 11 April 1912
Photographer Francis Browne (1880 to 1960)
Medium Photograph
Browne took this as he disembarked at Queenstown on the tender Ireland: the side of Titanic seen from close below, her starboard anchor being raised on its chain, water pouring from outlets in the plating. It is the view of someone who has just stepped off, looking along the vast riveted hull. On board he had photographed the gymnasium, the Marconi room, his own cabin and passengers on the decks. This is his last close view of the ship before she sailed for New York without him.
The real ship Titanic was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line, the second of the three Olympic-class liners and the largest ship afloat when she entered service. On her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York she struck an iceberg and sank in the early hours of 15 April 1912; of about 2,208 people aboard, some 1,500 died.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Audacious Named ship
The Crew of HMS Audacious Being Taken Off, 27 October 1914
Photographer Unknown photographer (passenger aboard RMS Olympic)
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 75585)
Medium Photograph
This is the loss the Admiralty tried to hide. The new dreadnought Audacious struck a German mine off the coast of County Donegal, and the White Star liner Olympic came to help, her boats joining those of the cruiser Liverpool to take off the crew while her captain proposed a tow. Many Americans aboard Olympic were beyond British jurisdiction, and they took photographs and even a moving picture. For the rest of the war Audacious stayed on the public lists as if nothing had happened, while pictures like this showed her sinking.
The real ship Audacious was the fourth and last King George V-class dreadnought, completed in 1913. She struck a mine on 27 October 1914 and sank after towing attempts failed; her crew were saved, but a petty officer on the cruiser Liverpool was killed when she later exploded. She remains the largest warship ever sunk by a naval mine.
Sources Imperial War Museums · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Storstad Named ship
The Storstad's Crushed Bow after the Collision with the Empress of Ireland, 1914
Photographer Unknown photographer
Where to see it Private collection
Medium Photograph
The Empress of Ireland was gone in fourteen minutes. This photograph shows the other ship in the story: the Norwegian collier Storstad, which struck the liner's starboard side amidships in fog in the St Lawrence at 1.56 am on 29 May 1914. Her bow is crushed and torn open, her name still legible on the hull and men on deck behind the damage. Storstad stayed afloat; the liner took 1,012 of the 1,477 people aboard with her. The broken stem shows the force of the blow.
The real ship Storstad was a Norwegian collier. The Empress of Ireland, built by Fairfield at Govan on the Clyde, sank near the mouth of the St Lawrence on 29 May 1914 on passage to Liverpool, the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SMS Emden Named ship
The Wreck of SMS Emden on North Keeling Island, c. 1914 to 1919
Photographer Allan C. Green (1878 to 1954)
Where to see it State Library of Victoria, Melbourne (Allan C. Green collection)
Medium Photograph
For two months in 1914 the light cruiser Emden raided the Indian Ocean, capturing nearly two dozen ships and attacking Penang. It ended at the Cocos Islands on 9 November, when HMAS Sydney caught her, shredded her superstructure and shot away her two rearmost funnels and her foremast; Captain von Müller ran her onto the reef of North Keeling Island to save his crew. Green's photograph shows the battered hull beyond the surf, a group of men standing on the shore before it, a wreck the sea was already taking apart.
The real ship Emden was built at the Kaiserliche Werft in Danzig, launched in May 1908, and served mainly with the East Asia Squadron at Qingdao. Run onto the reef on 9 November 1914, her wreck had almost completely broken up by 1919; the remains were broken up in situ by a Japanese salvage company in the early 1950s.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SMS Blücher Named ship
SMS Blücher Capsizing at the Battle of Dogger Bank, 24 January 1915
Photographer Unidentified photographer aboard HMS Arethusa
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 22687); US National Archives (ARC 533748)
Medium Photograph
Taken from the deck of the British cruiser Arethusa, this photograph shows the German armoured cruiser Blücher rolling over in her last minutes, her crew crowded along the side of the upturned hull, her guns pointing at the sky. Slowed by British gunfire, she was abandoned by her squadron and struck by 70 to 100 heavy shells and several torpedoes before capsizing at 13.13. British destroyers closing to rescue survivors withdrew when a German zeppelin, mistaking the dying Blücher for a British battlecruiser, tried to bomb them.
The real ship Blücher was the last armoured cruiser built for the Imperial German Navy, at the Kaiserliche Werft in Kiel between 1907 and 1909. She was sunk at the Battle of Dogger Bank on 24 January 1915, the only ship lost in the engagement; estimates of her dead range from 747 to around 1,000.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Photographer aboard HMS Arethusa, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Endurance Named ship
Dogs and the Crushed Endurance, Ocean Camp, Weddell Sea, November 1915
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (Slides 22/13)
Medium Glass lantern slide
After the pressure of the ice crushed her, the crew abandoned Endurance and camped on the floe, and Hurley photographed what was left of her from Ocean Camp, with the expedition's sledge dogs in the foreground. Wrecked and held in the ice, she still dominates the frame. It is a photograph of an ending, taken shortly before she slipped under on 21 November 1915, and it carries a strange mixture of loss and endurance.
The real ship Endurance was built as Polaris at the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway, and launched in December 1912; Shackleton bought her in January 1914 for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, she was crushed on 27 October 1915 and sank on 21 November; her wreck was found in March 2022 at a depth of 3,008 metres.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Endurance Named ship
Endurance under Sail Trying to Break through the Pack Ice, Weddell Sea, 1915
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (ON 26)
Medium Paget process colour plate
Before the ice closed around her, Endurance tried to force her way through the pack towards Vahsel Bay, and Hurley recorded her with her square sails set among the floes. He made it on a Paget plate, one of the early colour processes he used in Antarctica, so the scene survives with a trace of real blue sky and white ice. The picture shows the ship at her most purposeful, a wooden vessel pressing into a frozen sea, and it gains its force from what we know came next.
The real ship Endurance was built as Polaris at the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway, and launched in December 1912; Shackleton bought her in January 1914 for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, she was crushed on 27 October 1915 and sank on 21 November; her wreck was found in March 2022 at a depth of 3,008 metres.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Irresistible Named ship
The Last Moments of the Irresistible, Dardanelles, 18 March 1915
Photographer Royal Navy photographer aboard HMS Lord Nelson (unidentified)
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (copy)
Medium Photograph, published in The War Illustrated, 1 May 1915
On 18 March 1915, the day the Allied fleet tried to force the Narrows, Irresistible struck a mine that flooded her and stopped her engines, and she drifted helplessly under the Turkish guns. Photographed from the battleship Lord Nelson, she lies listing heavily and abandoned in the strait, smoke rising from her. The War Illustrated printed the photograph that May with a caption of its time, all tragic glory; what the ship brings is the end of an old navy's certainty, a battleship of 1898 undone by a mine in a narrow sea.
“This impressive photograph, replete with the tragic glory of war, shows the ill-fated Irresistible”
The real ship Irresistible was laid down at Chatham in April 1898, launched that December and completed in 1901. Sent to the Dardanelles in February 1915, she was mined on 18 March; the destroyer Wear took off most of her crew under fire, attempts by HMS Ocean to tow her failed, and she sank with around 150 of her men killed. Ocean was herself mined the same day.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Royal Navy photographer aboard HMS Lord Nelson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Lusitania Named ship
The Last Photograph of Lusitania, Leaving New York, 1 May 1915
Photographer G. R. Rance
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 48349)
Medium Photograph
Taken from HMS Glory in New York harbour as Lusitania steamed out on 1 May 1915, this is the last known photograph of the liner before she was torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale six days later. She sailed the day after a German embassy warning had appeared in the newspapers, in some cases beside Cunard's own advertisement. Seen from far off she is only a long hull and four funnels on grey water, a great ship doing her ordinary work. For anyone who knows what followed, the calm of the picture is hard to bear.
The real ship Lusitania was launched for Cunard in 1906 and took the Blue Riband in 1907. The German submarine U-20 torpedoed her on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale; she sank in 18 minutes, and only 763 of the 1,960 people aboard survived, about 128 of the dead being American. The sinking contributed to the United States entering the war in 1917.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Endurance Named ship
A Mid Winter Glow, Weddell Sea (showing the Endurance), 1915
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Medium Glass Paget plate phototransparency (colour)
Hurley made many pioneering colour images of the Endurance expedition with the Paget process, and here it catches what black and white could not: the lilac and rose glow of a winter sky over the frozen Weddell Sea. Endurance sits small and dark among ridges of pressure ice, her masts a fine tracery against the light, with a channel of open water in the foreground. The colour gives the trapped ship a tender, painterly beauty in the months when her crew still waited on the ice.
The real ship Endurance, a three-masted barquentine originally named Polaris, was built at the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway, and launched in 1912; Shackleton bought her in January 1914. Trapped in pack ice, she sank in the Weddell Sea on 21 November 1915, and her wreck was found on 5 March 2022 at a depth of 3,008 metres.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Frank Hurley, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Endurance Named ship
The Rigging of the Endurance Encrusted with Rime Crystals, 1915
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Medium Glass Paget plate phototransparency (colour)
Frozen into the Weddell Sea, Endurance grew a coat of ice: every shroud, stay and ratline is thickened with white rime crystals against a deep blue sky. Hurley recorded it on a Paget colour plate, one of the pioneering colour images he made on the expedition, looking up from the deck into the masts, with a ship's boat slung on its davits in the foreground. It is an intimate picture, almost a still life, the familiar ropes of a working ship turned into something strange and beautiful while she lay trapped in the ice.
The real ship Endurance, a three-masted barquentine originally named Polaris, was built at the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway, and launched in 1912; Shackleton bought her in January 1914. Trapped in pack ice, she sank in the Weddell Sea on 21 November 1915, and her wreck was found on 5 March 2022 at a depth of 3,008 metres.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Frank Hurley, No known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Endurance Named ship
Shackleton's Ship Endurance Illuminated at Night, Weddell Sea, 1915
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (PXA 715)
Medium Gelatin silver print
In 1915, with Endurance held fast in the ice of the Weddell Sea through the dark Antarctic winter, Hurley lit the ship at night with twenty flashes. Every rope and spar, coated in rime, stands out white against the black sky, as if the ship were made of frost. It is a portrait of Shackleton's ship taken while she still seemed safe; before the year was out the ice would crush her. When she was lost Hurley saved 120 of his glass plate negatives and smashed about 400 others.
The real ship Endurance was built as Polaris at the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway, and launched in December 1912; Shackleton bought her in January 1914 for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, she was crushed on 27 October 1915 and sank on 21 November; her wreck was found in March 2022 at a depth of 3,008 metres.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Eastland Named ship
The Steamer Eastland Being Righted in the Chicago River, 14 August 1915
Photographer Chicago Daily News photographer
Where to see it Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News negatives collection (DN-0064980); copy in the Library of Congress
Medium Glass plate negative
On the morning of 24 July 1915 the Eastland, loaded with 2,500 passengers from Western Electric's Hawthorne Works bound for a company picnic, rolled onto her port side while still at the wharf between Clark and LaSalle Streets, in water only 6 metres deep. 844 people died within sight of the city centre. A Chicago Daily News photographer made this plate three weeks later, on the day she was raised: the hull still on its side, cranes, tugs and smoke around her, the ship now a salvage job in the middle of a working river.
The real ship Eastland was built by the Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron, Michigan, after an order of 1902. After the disaster she was raised on 14 August 1915, sold to the Illinois Naval Reserve, converted into the gunboat USS Wilmette and used for training on the Great Lakes until she was scrapped after the Second World War.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Chicago Daily News photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
James Caird Named ship
Party Leaving on the James Caird, Elephant Island, 24 April 1916
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (Slides 22/48)
Medium Glass lantern slide
On 24 April 1916 Shackleton and five companions set out from Elephant Island in the James Caird, a 22.5-foot boat from Endurance, to sail 1,300 kilometres across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia for help. Hurley photographed the men left behind on the beach, waving their caps as the boat grew small on the sea. Many historians regard the voyage as the greatest small-boat journey ever completed. The picture is all hope and risk, a tiny hull against the vastness of the sea.
The real ship James Caird was one of the three boats saved from Endurance, named by Shackleton after Sir James Key Caird, the Dundee philanthropist whose sponsorship helped finance the expedition. She reached the south coast of South Georgia after a voyage of 17 days, and has been displayed at Dulwich College since 1922.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
Yelcho Named ship
Relieving of Marooned Men by Chilean Tug Yelcho, Elephant Island, 1916
Photographer Frank Hurley (1885 to 1962)
Where to see it State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (Slides 22)
Medium Glass lantern slide
After three failed attempts in other ships, Shackleton came back for his men on Elephant Island aboard the small Chilean Navy tug Yelcho, commanded by Luis Pardo. On 30 August 1916 the fog lifted, the camp was sighted, and within an hour a small boat, in two trips, had brought the whole Elephant Island party aboard. No vessel in the Endurance story is humbler, and none more welcome: a tug built on the Clyde for towing and lighthouse supply, bringing the long wait to an end.
The real ship Yelcho was built in 1906 by Geo. Brown and Co. of Greenock on the Clyde as a tug and cargo vessel for a Chilean company, and sold in 1908 to the Chilean Navy, which used her at Punta Arenas as a tug and to supply the lighthouses. Under Captain Luis Pardo she rescued the Elephant Island party on 30 August 1916.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
RMS Olympic (HMT Olympic) Named ship
HMT Olympic in Dazzle Camouflage, c. 1917 to 1918
Photographer Unknown photographer
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 21592)
Medium Photograph
Titanic's elder sister spent the First World War as the troopship HMT Olympic, which earned her the nickname Old Reliable, and like many ships she was painted in dazzle, a scheme meant to mislead an enemy about her course. This photograph, held by the Imperial War Museums, shows the familiar four-funnelled profile broken by sweeping curves and wedges of light and dark that run across hull and funnels alike. During that service she rammed and sank the submarine U-103. The same hull that recalls Titanic's elegance here becomes a piece of wartime abstraction.
The real ship Olympic, lead ship of the White Star Line's three Olympic-class liners, was built at Belfast and served from 1911 to 1935, including service as the troopship HMT Olympic in the First World War, when she rammed and sank U-103. She was withdrawn on 12 April 1935 and her scrapping was completed by 1939.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Leviathan (formerly SS Vaterland) Named ship
Leviathan Leaving for France with 11,000 American Troops, 1917 to 1918
Photographer US Army photographer (unidentified)
Source Reproduced in Mary C. Gillett, The Army Medical Department 1917 to 1941 (US Army Center of Military History)
Medium Photograph
Leviathan steams out for France with 11,000 soldiers aboard, the troopship farewell of 1917 and 1918 on the grandest scale. Her first transport voyage, in December 1917, took 7,250 men; the numbers grew to 10,500 by the summer of 1918 and, with double bunking, to 14,000, and she was fast enough to cross without escort. The German liner that had lain idle in American waters since 1914 was now carrying an army across the Atlantic.
The real ship Vaterland was launched on 3 April 1913 for the Hamburg America Line, laid up at Hoboken on the outbreak of war in 1914 and seized in 1917. As USS Leviathan she made ten round trips transporting more than 119,000 troops to Europe.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: US Army photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Intrepid, HMS Iphigenia and HMS Thetis Named ship
Aerial Photograph of the Blockships in the Canal Entrance after the Zeebrugge Raid, April 1918
Photographer Unidentified photographer (assumed Royal Naval Air Service)
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 20648B)
Medium Aerial photograph
On 23 April 1918 the Royal Navy tried to block the port of Bruges-Zeebrugge by sinking old cruisers in the canal entrance. Seen from the air afterwards, the three blockships Intrepid, Iphigenia and Thetis lie where their crews scuttled them, small dark shapes in the channel between the piers. The photograph also holds the harder truth: the ships were sunk in the wrong place, and within a few days the Germans had opened the canal to submarines at high tide.
The real ship Intrepid, Iphigenia and Thetis were old cruisers stripped out at Chatham for use as blockships in the raid of 23 April 1918. Two of the three were scuttled in the narrowest part of the Bruges to Ostend canal.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Argus Named ship
HMS Argus in Dazzle Camouflage, 1918
Photographer Unknown photographer (US Navy)
Medium Photograph
Dazzle, credited to the marine artist Norman Wilkinson, was meant not to hide a ship but to mislead an enemy about her course. Few ships wore it more strikingly than Argus, photographed from the air in harbour in 1918 with a Renown-class battlecruiser in the distance. Her long, flat-sided hull becomes a field of bold stripes and curves under the bare flight deck. The picture catches the moment when war and modern art met: Picasso claimed that Cubists had invented dazzle, and Edward Wadsworth supervised the painting of over 2,000 ships.
The real ship Argus was converted from an ocean liner that was under construction when the First World War began, and became the first aircraft carrier with a full-length flight deck that allowed wheeled aircraft to take off and land. She served in the Royal Navy from 1918 to 1944.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS O'Brien (DD-51) and a troop transport Named ship
USS O'Brien Bringing in a Convoy, in Dazzle Camouflage, 1918
Photographer Unknown photographer (US Navy), taken from USS Pocahontas
Where to see it Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington (NH 82973)
Medium Photograph
Photographed from the transport Pocahontas in 1918, the destroyer O'Brien comes in with a convoy, and both she and the transport following her wear dazzle. Her crew crowd the forecastle and signal flags fly from her foremast as she cuts through calm water, sailing boats and a distant headland behind. The broken patches of light and dark across her hull and funnels break up her outline in exactly the way the scheme intended. It is dazzle seen in service, on a working warship at the end of an Atlantic crossing.
The real ship O'Brien, lead ship of her class, was laid down by William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia in 1913 and launched in July 1914; after the United States entered the war in April 1917 she patrolled the Irish Sea from Queenstown. She was decommissioned in 1922 and sold for scrap in 1935.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SS Minnekahda Named ship
Steamship Minnekahda in Dazzle Camouflage, 4 December 1918
Photographer Second Lieutenant George H. Lyon
Where to see it National Archives and Records Administration, Washington
Medium Photograph
Three weeks after the Armistice, Second Lieutenant Lyon photographed the troopship Minnekahda from the liner George Washington as it left New York for Europe, while Minnekahda was coming in carrying American troops home. Soldiers line every rail of her long hull. Her dazzle, designed for a war that had just ended, slashes the whole ship in diagonal bands, and the picture holds the war's end in the passing of two ships going opposite ways.
The real ship Minnekahda was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the Atlantic Transport Line: laid down in 1914, launched in 1917 and completed as a troopship in March 1918. She later worked as a cargo ship and, from 1921, a liner, and was scrapped in Scotland in 1936.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Second Lieutenant George H. Lyon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SMS Szent István Named ship
Szent István Capsizing off Premuda, 10 June 1918
Photographer Unidentified photographer (Austro-Hungarian Navy; image courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization)
Where to see it Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington (courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization)
Medium Photograph and film still
Two torpedoes from the Italian motor torpedo boat MAS 15 were enough. For about three hours Szent István's crew fought the flooding while her sister Tegetthoff stood by, and film footage and photographs were made of her last half-hour, some by Linienschiffsleutnant Meusburger of Tegetthoff with his own camera. This image shows the great dreadnought heeling steeply, her sister close by, a small boat and men in the water between them. Hers is the only battleship sinking filmed in the First World War, and one of only two on the high seas ever filmed.
The real ship Szent István was built at the Ganz Danubius yard in Fiume, launched in 1914 and commissioned in December 1915, the only ship of her class built in the Hungarian half of the empire. She capsized off Premuda at 6.12 am on 10 June 1918 with the loss of 89 men and lies upside down at 66 metres, a protected site of the Croatian Ministry of Culture.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
HMS Vindictive Named ship
HMS Vindictive after Returning to Dover from the Zeebrugge Raid, April 1918
Photographer British official photographer (unidentified)
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (Q 55568)
Medium Photograph
Vindictive was the old cruiser that carried the storming parties to the Zeebrugge mole, fitted out at Chatham for the assault. Back at Dover after the raid, this photograph shows one of the two 7.5-inch howitzers and the Stokes mortars mounted to support the landing parties against the German battery at the seaward end of the mole. She came home, unlike the blockships left in the canal, but only for a few weeks: on 9 May she was sunk as a blockship at Ostend.
“HMS VINDICTIVE after returning to Dover following the Zeebrugge Raid”
The real ship Vindictive was an old cruiser specially equipped at Chatham for the raid of 23 April 1918, when she led the diversion against the Zeebrugge mole. She was sunk as a blockship in the Second Ostend Raid on 9 May 1918.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: British official photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
USS Leviathan (formerly SS Vaterland) Named ship
Leviathan Docking with 12,000 Returning Troops Aboard, 2 April 1919
Photographer Western Newspaper Union photographer
Where to see it US National Archives, College Park (Demobilization series, NAID 26433441)
Medium Photograph
The largest passenger ship in the world had been built for the Hamburg America Line; laid up at Hoboken in 1914 and seized in 1917, she carried American soldiers to France under her new name. In the spring of 1919 the traffic ran the other way. This homecoming picture shows her decks packed with some of the 12,000 men she brought back, among them soldiers of New York's famous 69th Infantry. The liner built as a showpiece of German shipping ends the war crowded with returning Americans.
“She brought back 12,000 men from all parts of country.”
The real ship Vaterland was launched on 3 April 1913 for the Hamburg America Line and was then the largest passenger ship in the world. Commissioned in the US Navy in 1917 and renamed Leviathan, she made ten round trips carrying more than 119,000 troops to Europe, and brought soldiers home until September 1919.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Western Newspaper Union photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SMS Bayern Named ship
Scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow: SMS Bayern Down by the Stern and Sinking, 21 June 1919
Photographer C. W. Burrows, Royal Navy official photographer
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (SP 1626)
Medium Photograph
Interned at Scapa Flow while the peace was negotiated, the High Seas Fleet was sent to the bottom by its own crews on the order of Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, who feared the ships would be seized or the war resumed. Burrows caught the battleship Bayern going down by the stern, the moment a navy chose to disappear rather than be handed over. She sank at 14.30. By five in the afternoon 52 of the 74 interned ships were gone.
The real ship Bayern was the lead ship of Germany's last class of dreadnoughts, mounting 38 cm guns; she was mined in the Gulf of Riga in October 1917 and interned at Scapa Flow in November 1918. After the scuttling she lay on the bottom until September 1934, when she was raised, towed to Rosyth and scrapped.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: C. W. Burrows, Royal Navy official photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photographs 1840 to 1920 · Photograph
SMS Hindenburg Named ship
Scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow: The Upper Works of SMS Hindenburg above the Water, 21 June 1919
Photographer C. W. Burrows, Royal Navy official photographer
Where to see it Imperial War Museums, London (SP 1635)
Medium Photograph
The battlecruiser Hindenburg was the last of the interned fleet to go down, at five in the afternoon, and her captain had arranged for her to sink on an even keel, so that her funnels, masts and upper works stayed above the surface of Scapa Flow. Burrows' photograph shows that drowned silhouette: a modern capital ship reduced to a landmark in an Orkney anchorage. The salvor Ernest Cox later bought her, with Seydlitz and a flotilla of destroyers, for the steel in their hulls.
The real ship Hindenburg was a battlecruiser of the Imperial German Navy, scuttled at Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919. The firm of Cox and Danks bought the rights to her in 1924; after several failed attempts she was raised on 23 July 1930 and towed to Rosyth, where she was broken up between 1930 and 1932.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: C. W. Burrows, Royal Navy official photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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