It occurred to me that before long there will not be many people left who remember what it is like to travel by ship 1. Not unlike how by the late 19th and early 20th centuries very few people would have known what it was like to travel long distances by stage coach. Railways came into existence only in the 1820s but they had developed so much in Britain by the late 1840s that in his historical novel Vanity Fair, written between 1847-8 but set around the period of the Napoleonic Wars, prior to the arrival of the railways, William Makepeace Thackeray was moved to observe
To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader’s children … For them stage-coaches will have become romances 2
It is interesting though that the experience of air travel is rather more like travelling by stagecoach whereas the experience of a sea voyage would be more like going by train. More space, more luggage and greater freedom of movement. Whereas trains and steamers improved over stagecoaches and sailing ships both in terms of comfort and speed, flying is faster but less comfortable than sea travel. At least when you compare the extremes. Excluding duration, even the most luxurious journey on first class or in a private aeroplane cannot compare to experience of a luxurious ocean-liner in the comfort dimension 3.
Whenever you consider paradigm shifts in technology it can be insightful to look at the transition period between two technologies. The continued importance of sea travel in the 1960s is apparent in Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. After marrying an extremely wealthy American heiress, the young working class narrator, Michael Rogers, who has been presented as a symbolic figure of the era, embarks on a new existence where he soon finds out how small planes have made the world for the rich
I had felt, in my ignorance and credulity, that people who were in America were a long way away. I’d never realised that Ellie’s relations and business connections thought nothing of taking a plane over to England for twenty-four hours and then flying back again.
Yet ships continue to have a role in the lives of such individuals. When Ellie’s American lawyer visits them, she asks if he flew and he replies
‘No, I had a very pleasant trip across on the Queen Mary’
Later when Michael himself travels to America, he tells us that “sailed to New York” and asked about his mode of return answers
Flying? I said no, I wasn’t flying, I was going by sea. ‘I’ve got to have a little time to myself,’ I said. ‘I think a sea voyage will do me good.’
Maybe it’s in line with Michael’s observation earlier in the book that the super-rich have no reason but to have the best of everything. When you are not in a hurry and your time’s your own, the ideal mode of travel might well be a luxurious liner.
For the typical flyer taking commercial airlines, the time involved at the airport, commuting to and from the airport which is often located on the outskirts of a city, and waiting for connections, can end up causing an eight or ten hour flight to occupy an entire day. So if you come up with some form of transport that is perhaps slower than a long-haul flight but a lot more comfortable, people might well trade-off the lengthier journey for an order of magnitude improvement in comfort and possibly less expense 4.
There are already such alternatives for flights of lower durations. A notable example is the Eurostar train which takes longer to reach Paris from London than flying but takes you from one city centre to another. The greater convenience more than outweighs the increased duration.
But the example that got me thinking about this idea was the high-speed Indian train from Chennai to Coimbatore, introduced in 2023, that makes the journey in under 6 hours 5. Compared to the relative durations of flying from London to Paris and the Eurostar, this train journey is significantly longer than the under 1 hour flight between Chennai and Coimbatore. However the time consumed by trips to and from the airport in a busy Indian city, which sometimes takes longer than the flight itself, plus the need for an advance arrival diminish the speed advantage of flying and increase the appeal of train travel with its cost and comfort benefits.
In the days before flights became the norm, the duration of sea voyages did not hinder either tourists or busy business people because they were accustomed to the rhythm of travelling slowly and had factored it into their lives 6. You could make a similar statement about train travel before domestic flights became widespread. Now that remote and asynchronous working widely accepted, maybe people could get used a different pace of travel once again.
- People still go on long sea voyages of course. such as for pleasure e.g. cruises or for environmental reasons but the days when sea voyages were a standard means of long distance travel is long gone. ↩
- Later Thackeray gives us a sense of the difference made by railways when he muses about the distance to Brighton, visited by some of the characters early in the novel, "which used to be seven hours distant from London at the time of our story; which is now only a hundred minutes off; and which may approach who knows how much nearer" ↩
- Assuming travellers are comfortable with the motion of a boat and in the absence of disturbances like storms. However frequent travellers would be less affected by such factors. ↩
- The HyperLoop, one of the most high profile ideas in transport innovation promises a considerably faster and smoother journey than a train but at the cost of reduced freedom of movement. I would personally not accord too much importance to smoothness of journey in determining comfort. Modern trains tend to move relatively smoothly and people usually get accustomed to their rhythm fairly soon. ↩
- For instance, I recall reading about the laying of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph line in the 1850s and 60s and how Cyrus West Field, who was the key driving force behind the endeavour, made over thirty Atlantic crossings during that time; and this was in the infancy of steamships when trans-Atlantic voyages took weeks not days. ↩
- Indeed, even overnight trains between the two cities which were widely used before the advent of budget airlines were actually rather convenient and comfortable. You slept on the train and reached the destination the next morning. Even though the total journey duration was lengthy it did not really waste time since it overlapped with your bedtime. ↩