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Home Page > Travel > Cruising > A Transatlantic Crossing with the Queen Mary 2

A Transatlantic Crossing with the Queen Mary 2

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Posted: Jan 21, 2010 |Comments: 0
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Day One

Driving up to the Port of Southampton’s Mayflower Terminal and catching first glimpse of the white-and-black hulled Queen Mary 2, the largest, longest, tallest, heaviest, and most expensive ship ever built, evoked considerable excitement and awe. Docked to port at a 50-degree, 54.25’ north latitude and 001-degree, 25.70’ west longitude and facing a 116.4-degree compass heading, the 17-decked leviathan, with a 1,132-foot length and 148-foot width, featured a gross weight of 151,400 tons and towered above the buildings with its balcony-lined façade, eclipsing it with its 236.2-foot height. Its draft extended 33.10 feet beneath the water line. The floating metropolis, complete with its staterooms, restaurants, shopping arcades, libraries, theaters, and planetariums, would bridge, in six days, the European and North American continents, the equivalent in hours to the duration of the aerial crossing by 747-400, itself then the world’s largest commercial airliner. But the oceanic crossing would yield civility, refinement, rejuvenation, emotional repair, and return to the slower, but more elegant era of steam ship travel—a journey, I would soon find out, would lead to a search for the maritime history of the past which had created the technology of the present.

Unlike the proliferation of modern cruise ships with their comparatively lower speeds and greater-volume, square-geometry hulls, the Queen Mary 2 had been designed as a next-generation successor to the 35-year-old Queen Elizabeth 2 and, as such, would have to offer the same year-round, passenger-carrying capabilities, predominately in the rough North Atlantic, with a design which sacrificed revenue-producing volume and lower construction costs of the traditional cruise ship for the required safety, speed, and stability of the ocean liner. Resultantly, it featured the same v-shaped hull configuration characteristic of the long line of its Cunard predecessors, constructed of thicker steel which carried a 40-percent greater cost than those of conventional cruise ships. Designed by Stephen Payne, whose inspirations for the bow had come from the Queen Elizabeth 2 and the brake wall from the Normandie, it was the first quadruple-screw North Atlantic ocean liner since the France of 1962. Payne himself, a naval architect born and raised in London, had been involved with the Carnival Holiday, Carnival Fantasy, and Rotterdam VI projects. The latter, incorporating a modified Statendam hull, had featured a less “boxy” hull shape than the traditional cruise ship, but had still been considerably removed a full liner design.

Intended for the primary Southampton-New York route, it incorporated dimensional restrictions dictated by the United States port, including a funnel height which cleared the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge by only ten feet and an overall length which exceeded the 1,100-foot pier of the Port of New York by 34 feet.

Constructed by Alstom Chantiers de l’Atlantique in St. Nazaire, France, which had also built the Normandie, and designated hull G32 by the shipyard, it had been the first Cunard liner ever constructed outside of the United Kingdom and, like Concorde, the world’s fastest and hitherto only supersonic airliner, became the second British-French collaborative transportation project intended for trans-Atlantic service, although via vastly different, if not opposite, modes.

Its interior offered unparalleled space and comfort. Of the 17 decks, the first four were for machinery, storage, and the 1,254-strong crew; 13 were for the 2,620 passengers; and eight contained balcony staterooms. Notable features included a Grand Lobby, the Royal Court Theatre, the Illuminations Theatre and Planetarium, the ConneXions Internet Center, the Queen’s Ballroom, a Winter Garden, nine major restaurants, 11 bars and lounges, an 8,000-volume library and bookstore, an Oxford University lecture program, performances by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, five swimming pools, sports venues, a Canyon Ranch Spa, a pavilion of shops, and a discotheque. These appointments would constitute my “home” for the next six days.

Symbolically reflected by its smaller QE2 predecessor berthed a considerable distance from its bow at the Queen Elizabeth 2 Terminal, the Queen Mary 2 represented a two-fold gross weight increase over its earlier-generation counterpart and, indeed, traced its lineage back to a long path of Cunard vessels which had spanned a 165-year period. I somehow sensed that the imminent crossing would not only be a journey of distance, but a return in time.

Gently vibrating at its spine, the behemoth laterally separated itself beneath from its berth below the metallic overcast at 1810, local time.

Unlike the conventional engine-propeller shaft technology of older-generation ships, the Queen Mary 2 was powered instead by four aft, hull underside-mounted Rolls Royce Mermaid electric-motor pods, each weighing 260 tons and containing four fixed-pitch, 9,900-pound, stainless steel blades, and collectively producing 115,328 horsepower. The forward, outboard pair was fixed and provided forward and astern propulsion, while the aft, inboard pair featured 360-degree azimuth capability and provided both propulsion and steering, obviating the need for the rudder. The advanced-technology system reduced both complexity and weight and increased internal hull volume by eliminating the traditional engine configuration’s associated equipment.

Three Rolls Royce variable-pitch, transverse-propeller bow thrusters, collectively producing 15,000 horsepower, provided port and starboard bow maneuvering capability at speeds of up to five knots. At eight knots, when their effectiveness had been exceeded, they were covered by 90-degree rotating, fluid-dynamic doors.

Led by dual water-sprout shooting tugboats, the behemoth oceanliner commenced its lumbering movement down the basin. Maintaining an 11.5-knot forward speed in the Solent, it commenced its starboard turn from 140 degrees at Calshots Reach at 1907, poised for the similar maneuver at Brambles.

Compressed into dark gray, the sun projected its glowing orange streaks outward through the thin, unobstructed strip on the western horizon. Assuming a 220-degree heading through the Thorn Channel, the Queen Mary 2 initiated its starboard turn to round the Isle of Wight.

The first dinner on board the elegant, maritime engineering triumph had been served in the 1,351-seat, three-story-high, dual-level Britannia Restaurant which had featured a grand, sweeping staircase, column supports, and a vaulted, back-lit, stained glass ceiling and was reminiscent of and inspired by the grand dining room salons of the 20th century French liners such as the Ile-de-France, the L’Atlantique, and the Normandie. The meal itself, served on Wedgwood bone china and in Waterford crystal, had included white zinfandel wine; cream of mixed mushroom soup with parmesan croutons; crusty rolls and butter; oak leaf and Boston salad with shaved carrots and sherry vinaigrette dressing; rack of pork with wild mushroom ragout, truffle mashed potatoes, morel sauce, and sauerkraut; warm apple strudel with brandy sauce; and coffee.

The thin line of orange lights outlining the coast traced itself behind the stern. Maintaining a 27-knot speed and a 250-degree heading, the rock-steady, 151,000-ton engineering mass plied the black channel and commenced its great circle course, from Bishop’s Rock in the Scilly Isles. Ahead lay the infinite Atlantic—and the path forged by every one of Cunard’s previous transatlantic liners. Tomorrow, I would begin tracing the historical one.

Day Two

Dawn greeted the lengthy liner as a tunnel of indistinguishable, moist gray. Encased between the morose cloud dome above and the navy sea slate below, which spat periodic white caps, the black-and-red funneled vessel penetrated the moisture-saturated morning, the rain-emitting sky and the swirling, eddying sea merging into seamless, wind-blustery, ship-bombarded drench.

Any undesired movement, however, was quickly, and invisibly, dampened by the two pairs of 15.63-square-meter Brown Bros/Rolls Royce fin stabilizers which were controlled by gyroscopic vertical reference instruments and extended as far as 15 feet from the hull to counteract ship roll.

Plunging into 348-meter-deep waters 98 nautical miles off of Ireland at noon, the Queen Mary 2 had traversed 418 miles since its departure from Southampton yesterday.

Current weather entailed intermittent, light rain with a clockwise movement to the west, predicted to drop to force 4. The present force-5, fresh breeze out of the south, coupled with an 11.2-degree Celsius air temperature, carried a 994-millibar pressure. The sea, with a moderate 4 state, maintained a 10-degree Celsius temperature.

Afternoon tea, held in the Queen’s Room, had been a British tradition and a delightful intermittence between lunch and dinner served on every Cunard crossing, the last personal one of which had been the 2002 eastbound journey on the Queen Elizabeth 2. The Queen’s Room itself, the largest ballroom at sea, featured an arched ceiling, twin crystal chandeliers, a velvet blue and gold curtain over the orchestra stage, a 1,225-square-foot dance floor, a live harpist, and small, round tables seating up to 562. Today’s presentation included egg, ham and cheese, cucumber, tomato, beef, and seafood finger-sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, and strawberry cream tarts.

Afternoon tea at sea could trace its lineage back some 165 years. Einstein’s theory of relativity somehow seemed to apply. Suspended between continent, landmass, and population, the ship seemed caught within a void, an arrested warp in which history seemed captured and in which the vessel reconnected with its past, as it once again replayed it, a separation from the present on land and an approach to its past on the sea. It was to this suspension of time, distance, and place that the threads of Cunard’s past indeed led. One man, who had lived some 200 years ago, had made the journey of today possible.

The name of that man, of course, had been the same as that which had graced a long line of ever-advancing Atlantic ocean liners, Samuel Cunard. Born on November 21, 1787 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as the son of Abraham Cunard, himself a carpenter at Halifax’s Royal Naval Dockyard, he had forged a maritime link upon physical entry into the world. His initial venture had entailed a Royal Mail contract award to transport mail over the Boston-Halifax-St. John’s route after cessation of the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States, while he later became involved with the first steam-powered vessel project intended for Atlantic crossings. Named the Royal William, the 160-foot-long, 1,370-ton ship had been inaugurated into service in August of 1931 between Quebec and Halifax, requiring 6.5 days for the journey.

The venture which had sparked his ultimate fame, however, occurred at the end of the decade when the British government had announced its intention to subsidize steam-powered mail service between England and the United States. In a formal proposal to fulfill the requirement, submitted on February 11, 1839, Cunard outlined a bimonthly, steam-powered service between England and Halifax operated by 300-hp ships making 48 annual crossings. Awarded a contract by the Admiralty in June for four 206-foot-long, 400-hp, 1,120-ton vessels ultimately to be designated the Acadia, the Caledonia, the Columbia, and the Britannia, he finalized plans to serve the Liverpool-Halifax-Boston route.

The latter ship, the Britannia, had actually been the first to be completed. The 207-foot-long, 34-foot-wide hybrid power ship, constructed of African oak and yellow pine at Robert Duncan’s Shipyard on the River Clyde in Scotland, had featured a clipper bow, three masts with square yards, and two mid-ship-located, black-and-gold paddle boxes which extended almost 12 feet from either side and contained 9-foot-wide, 28-foot-diameter paddles turning at 16 revolutions per minute and operating off of a 403-hp, two-cylinder, side-lever steam engine which burned 40 tons of coal per day exhausted through a single, aft smoke stack. The engine, requiring 70 feet of hull for installation, drew coal from a 640-ton bunker.

Of the four decks, the upper, or main deck, featured the captain and chief officer cabins, the pantry, the galley, the officers’ mess, the crew cabins, the raised, exposed bridge, and the dining saloon, which, at 36 feet long and 14 feet wide, had been the largest enclosed room on the ship. Two aft, circular staircases linked the dining hall with the second deck, which housed the gentlemen’s and ladies’ cabins, each with two bunk beds, a wash basin, a mirror, a day sofa, and a port hole or an oil lamp, with shared toilet facilities, equaling a 124-person capacity, of which 24 had been female. The cargo holds, located on either side of the engine yet another deck lower and capable of accommodating 225 tons, accompanied the sail locker, the mail room, the stores, the steward quarters, and the wine cellar in the stern. Coal had been stored on the fourth, or lowest, deck.

The 1,154-ton Britannia, inaugurated into scheduled service on July 4, 1840 from Liverpool to Boston with an intermediate stop in Halifax, operated the world’s first transatlantic steam ship service, carrying 63 passengers and taking 12 days, ten hours for the 2,534-nautical-mile crossing at an 8.5-knot speed, one third of the journey undertaken by pure-sail. After an eight-hour port suspension in Halifax, it continued to Boston in another 46 hours.

By January 5, 1841, all four Cunard ships had entered the fleet.

The Britannia itself made 40 round-trips before being sold to the Prussian Navy, which had converted it to a pure-sailing ship used for target purposes and renamed it Barbarossa. It was ultimately sunk in 1880. Nevertheless, it paved the way for a long line of Cunard liners to come.

Biting into the angry, dark-blue, white cap-spitting North Atlantic on a 272-degree heading at 1545 with its protruding, bulbous bow, the mighty Queen Mary 2 engineering triumph pitched on its axis at a 23.4-knot speed, the sun’s rays having been powerful enough to tear the singular cloud fabric into a puffy, white mosaic of aerial islands. The ship had reached a 50-degree, 12.036’ north latitude and 14-degree, 26.312’ west longitude coordinate.

That night’s dinner, served in the Britannia Restaurant, had included Merlot wine; smoked halibut mousse and jumbo shrimp on Russian salad; Lollo Rosso and apple salad with caramelized walnuts and cider vinaigrette; filet mignon and lobster tail with young roasted potatoes, polenta cake, and asparagus in hollandaise sauce; chocolate banana tart with mango sauce; coffee; and petit fours.

The Britannia, as a ship design, had been only the beginning, and would pale in comparison to the leviathan Cunard vessels produced in the 20th century.

Day Three

Continually bowled significant sea swells, the Queen Mary 2 had pitched through the dark blue, star-glittering night at its center of gravity like a seesaw, its bow pounding the mountainous wave troughs and projecting avalanche-white reactions at 45 degrees from its centerline.

Breakfast, eaten in the King’s Court with its multiple stations, had included a ham and pepper omelet, bacon, hashbrowned potatoes, a grilled tomato, white toast, and cranberry juice.

Negotiating 25- to 30-foot seas over the mid-Atlantic ridge, which covers the Continental Divide, the ship had sailed 590 nautical miles in the 24-hour period since 1200 noon yesterday, now pursuing a 263-degree heading, with 2,075 miles remaining to the New York Pilot’s Station.

Light rain showers were forecast to dissipate, with gradual clearing. The force-5 wind, out of the northwest, had produced 9-degree Celsius temperatures, with a 996.5-millibar pressure. The sea, whose moderate state had been registered a “4,” maintained a 12-degree temperature.

Gazing out toward the Atlantic’s infinity, I could not help but think that somewhere out there, if not in physical space, then in historical time, had been the first of the “huge” Cunard Atlantic liners which assuredly had passed this way during the beginning of the 20th century.

The design, the Lusitania, had had its origins as early as 1902 when J.P. Morgan had attempted to create a steamship conglomerate called the International Mercantile Marine by buying several existing companies, including the White Star Line. In order to ensure Cunard’s continued autonomy and dissuade its absorption into the ever-expanding corporation, the British Parliament had granted it a 20-year contract and subsidy to build two of the world’s then largest and fastest liners and, in the process, regain the speed record the Germans had captured with three of their twin-screw vessels.

Cunard, seeking tenders for the two ships from four shipyards, specified a 750-foot length, a 76-foot width, and a 59,000-hp capability attained by reciprocating engines driving triple screws. The contract, awarded to John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland, resulted in a 790-foott length and an 88-foot width, eclipsing the 30,000-ton gross weight by 2,500 tons for the first time, and employing turbine engine technology, also for the first time, with a 68,000-hp combined capability, exhausted, in an effort to emulate the Germans, through four funnels.

Construction, commencing in the fall of 1904, produced two of the largest, fastest, and most powerful Atlantic liners ever built with long, sleek designs; straight sterns; rounded bridges; and four raked funnels sporting 787-foot lengths, 87-foot widths, and 31,550-ton gross weights propelled by steam turbines geared to quadruple screws.

Accommodating 563 first class passengers amidships, 464 aft second class passengers, and 1,138 third, or steerage, class passengers in the forward portion of the hull, the first of the two new liners featured opulent appointments. A Georgian-style lounge sported light green colors, a marble fireplace, stained glass panes, and a 20-foot-high dome. The Veranda Café had latticed wall patterns and rattan furniture. The dining room, of dual-deck configuration, had been the first of its kind on a Cunard ship. The main lounge had been decorated with mahogany paneling, while the smoking room featured dark Italian walnut. The second class dining saloon also sported Georgian appointments and the drawing room had been decorated in the Louis XVI style. Featuring electricity for the first time, the Lusitania provided modern conveniences to its passengers, including two elevators.

On its second westbound crossing, the liner beat all speed records, averaging 23.993 knots and covering a 617-mile, single-day distance, although it ultimately broke the 26-knot mark, reaching New York in four days, 20 hours.

Its fate, however, was not to remain so successful. Departing England on its 202nd voyage on May 1, 1915 with 1,257 passengers, 702 crew members, and three stowaways, the ship had approached Great Britain, sailing ten miles off of Old Head of Kinsale when it had been broadsided by a German torpedo, listing forward and to starboard. Slipping oceanward at a 45-degree, bow-first angle, it hit bottom 18 minutes later, exploding and killing 1,201 on board, the result of a deliberate act of war.

Because not an outcrop of land is sighted during the six-day Atlantic crossing, the Queen Mary 2 seemed suspended in a void between two continents, the journey about course, speed, weather, sea state, distance, and interior life, the temporary, although ever-moving civilization atop the sea.

Soldiering on, the ship burned 3.1 tons of heavy fuel oil per hour at a 100-percent load to operate its diesel engines, or 261 tons per day at a 29-knot steam speed, while it used 6 tons of marine gas oil per hour to run its gas turbines, or 237 tons per day, drawing off of a 1,412,977-US gallon tank for the former and a 966,553-gallon tank for the latter.

Its fresh water supply, produced from seawater by 3 Alfa Laval Multi Effect Plate Evaporators, replenished itself at the rate of 630 tons per day, satisfying its 1,100-ton daily consumption. The potable water tank capacity equaled 1,011,779 US gallons.

A German-themed lunch, served in the King’s Court, had included bratwurst, bacon sauerkraut, cheese spaetzel, roasted potatoes, schnitzel, and black forest cake.

Maintaining a 261-degree heading and a 23.1-knot steam speed, the city at sea had reached a 49-degree, 43.705’ north latitude and 28-degree, 25.458’ west longitude position by 1500.

The Queen Mary 2’s Winter Garden, designed after the skylighted verandah cafes of the Mauretania, had featured a 60-by-25-foot trompe l’oeil ceiling depicting a lush, verdant gardens, paneled walls which looked through cast iron gates to rolling hills, and wicker furniture, and had been created to counteract the cold, gray, turbulent winter of the North Atlantic.

The Mauretania itself, the ship which had provided the Winter Garden’s inspiration, had been the second of the two early-20th century Cunard designs after the Lusitania. The nine-decked liner, accommodating 563 first class passengers in 253 cabins, 464 second class passengers in 133 cabins, and 1,138 third class passengers in 278 cabins, had featured its own opulent appointments. The first class smoking room, for example, located in the stern, had featured polished wood wall panels and plaster friezes. The lounge, located on the Boat Deck and measuring 80 by 53 feet, had been adorned with mahogany wall panels, gold moldings, long ceiling beams, gilt bronze, and crystal chandeliers. The library, featuring bay windows, had been decorated with sycamore paneling. The first class dining room, seating 330, had been configured with long, white clothed tables and revolving chairs, and was decorated with polished ash, teak-molded paneling, and arched windows, while the second class dining room, with parquet floors, featured Georgian oak paneling and carved cornices. A grand staircase, installed between the second and third funnels, connected five decks with the public rooms.

Entering service on November 16, 1907 between Liverpool and New York, the Mauretania had been retrofitted with four-bladed propellers two years later, in 1909, at which time it could attain maximum speeds of 26.6 knots. It had been only the first of several modifications. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, for instance, it had been repainted gray and briefly served as a troop ship, reliveried and returned to commercial service five years later in 1919, at which time it operated in company with the Aquitania and Berengaria, offering weekly east- and westbound service on the Southampton-New York route. It remained the fastest of the three.

Yet another modification, necessitated by fire, resulted in conversion to oil-burning engine technology and cabin reconfiguration, reducing both the second and third class passenger capacities.

In its 27 years of operation, during 22 of which it had held the North Atlantic speed record until it had been recaptured by the Bremen in 1929, the Mauretania had sailed some 2.1 million miles in transatlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean service before being usurped by two larger, more advanced Cunard liners. Making its last crossing on September 26, 1934, it was scraped the following year in Scotland.

That evening’s dinner, served in the Queen Mary 2’s Britannia Restaurant, had featured white zinfandel wine; baby shrimp thermidor on walnut brioche; cob salad with smoked chicken and bleu cheese dressing; roasted seabass with Mediterranean vegetables and olive tapenade; banana foster flambee with rum raisin ice cream and whipped cream; and coffee.

The Lusitania and Mauretania replacements, although larger, would prove a motley pair: although one had been the third in the series, it had been slower, while the other had been transferred from the fleet of the enemy, the Germans.

Day Four

Suspended in the middle of the Atlantic, the black-hulled leviathan pursed its Great Circle course on a 249-degree heading, eating the gray and foamy-white ocean with its bow with a 21.7-knot appetite. Four hundred seventy miles off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship negotiated 3,549-meter-deep waters, having covered 607 nautical miles in the 24-hour period since yesterday, now 1,615 miles from Southampton. At a current 47-degree, 34.066’ north latitude and 042-degree, 00.754’ west longitude position, it was 1,468 miles from its destination.

External conditions were mild: the air temperature, at 14 degrees Celsius, had been coupled with a force-4 moderate breeze out of the southwest and low level cloud, with a 989-millibar air pressure. The sea, whose state had been slight, had a 12.7-degree Celsius temperature.

If the triplet of early 20th-century Cunard liners could have sailed past the Queen Mary 2 in chronological order, the Aquitania would have trailed both the Lusitania and the Mauretania, the third of the long, sleek, quad-funneled vessels constructed by John, Brown and Company of Clydebank.

The 45,647-ton ship, with a 901-foot length and a 97-foot width, had been both larger and heavier than its two predecessors, resulting in a 3,200-passenger capacity. Launched on April 21, 1913, it had commenced trial runs 13 months later, achieving a 24-knot maximum speed, and entered commercial service on May 30, 1914 on the Liverpool-New York route.

Opulently appointed, it featured a long gallery which connected the main lounge with the smoking room decorated with a series of garden lounges; a carpeted, Louis XVI-style first class restaurant; a columned Palladian lounge, which spanned two decks; and the first pool ever installed on a Cunard ship.

Late to the North Atlantic, the Aquitania had sailed on the fringes of World War I and had been requisitioned by the government for military service as an armed merchant cruiser in August of 1914; but, because of its excessive size, had been recommissioned as a troop ship the following year. Reconfigured for ocean liner service after the war, the ship resumed its civil role in August of 1920, amending its capacity six years later, in 1916, when a major reconfiguration decreased the first class passenger complement from 618 to 610, increased the second class capacity from 614 to 950, and dramatically decreased the third class complement by some three-forths, from 1,998 to 640, in order to more accurately match passenger class demand.

Once again reconfigured to a 7,724-person troop ship during World War II, the Aquitania provided eight years of military service during which it had sailed 500,000 miles and carried more than 300,000 troops.

Arriving in Southampton on December 1, 1949, the multiple-role vessel ended 35 years of service, having sailed some 3 million miles on 443 voyages. It had been Cunard’s last quad-funneled design.

Lunch, back in the present on the Queen Mary 2, had been served in The Carvery, itself one of the King’s Court stations, and had included beef tikka masala, white rice, cauliflower in cheese sauce, and double chocolate fudge cake.

Although the Aquitania’s very long, mulitple-role, and fruitful career had ended in 1949, it had, for the most part, continued to operate in tandem, as originally conceived, with two other Cunard transatlantic liners, despite the fact that the Lusitania had been destroyed almost immediately after entering service. The third ship, however, emanated not from a Cunard blueprint given life by a ship builder on the Clyde, but instead by the very enemy which had necessitated its replacement.

Endeavoring to compete with the Cunard and White Star Line designs which now regularly plied the Atlantic, the Hamburg-America Line had laid the keel of a new breed of transatlantic liners on June 18, 1910, intended to be the largest-capacity, highest gross weight passenger ship ever built. The specifications were, for the time, staggering: measuring 919 feet long and 98 feet wide, the elongated, tri-funneled, 52,117-ton ship, designated the Imperator, had been powered by steam engines geared to four-bladed propellers feeding off of 8,500-tons of coal nourishing two 69- and 95-foot-long engine rooms, respectively. Accommodating 908 first class, 972 second class, 942 third class, and 1,772 steerage class passengers, the behemoth, steered by a 90-ton rudder, was christened on May 23, 1912 and entered commercial service 13 months later, on June 10, from Cuxhaven to New York with an intermediate stop in Southampton.

The Imperator featured a First Class winter garden with potted palm trees and a dual-deck indoor swimming pool.

Because initial service had demonstrated top-heavy conditions, its three funnels were shortened by nine feet during an autumn retrofit.

Ultimately banned from sailing because of World War I German atrocities, the ship had been moored in Hamburg for four years until a war reparation agreement resulted in its transfer to Cunard in 1919 as compensation for the German-sunk Lusitania. Rebased in Southampton two years later, in April of 1921, it had been subjected to an initial retrofit during which its coal-burning engine technology had been replaced with oil and it had been reconfigured with 972, 630, 606, and 515 first, second, third, and tourist passengers, respectively. Redesignated Berengaria, the ship joined the Mauretania and Aquitania, operating Cunard’s weekly transatlantic service. Although it had been originally planned to continue operating it until 1940, its antiquated wiring system, which resulted in persistent on-board fires, had precluded its anticipated service longevity, temporarily leaving only the Mauretania and Aquitania until a new breed of Cunard liners, to offer double the tonnage of the existing designs, could enter service. That ship, of course, bore the name of the current one: Queen Mary.

Dinner, served in La Piazza Restaurant on board the (present-day) Queen Mary 2, had included a mixed green salad with ranch dressing; artichoke hearts; vegetable moussaka; pasta with onions, mushrooms, black olives, garlic, and red tomato sauce; tiramisu; and coffee.

Dusk could be more accurately gauged by looking beyond the wooden deck with its Queen Mary I-reminiscent line of deck chairs and down toward the sea, rather than up toward the sky. The former, a reflection of the latter, had appeared a deep blue, mirroring the temporary brightness of the sky during the early-evening when the mountainous white cumulous formations had parted, creating a blue rift. It then rapidly metamorphosed into a dark blue and, momentarily, a cold, morose, winter gray, the prevalent environmental conditions of so many earlier transatlantic crossings, as the dark, billowing clouds reassembled into a tight, cohesive quilt, hindering even a momentary glimpse of the sun. Merging dimensionally with the ocean, the amorphous, referenceless void cacooned the floating city until visibility extended no further than ten feet from either of its sides. Two souls, well dressed, braved the fierce, blustering wind as they attempted, buttressed by the force, to circle the deck. Thus was life on a transatlantic crossing.

As the day bordered the midnight demarcation line, the ship crossed from the Newfoundland Basin to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and, effectively, reached the North American continent. Two days of steaming remained before it arrived at its terminus, the Port of New York.

Day Five

Wrestling the fierce currents of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland at 0800, the elongated titan thundered over the barreling gray surface, its peaks so high and frequent that they appeared white, snow-covered mountain crests. The pitch was tumultuous and unrelenting. Propelled at 24 knots, the vessel moved between troughs, pivoting on its center of gravity and pinnacling each crest with surmounting triumph, before exploding into its next valley with gravity-induced momentum, its axis of rotation sliding down the mountain of sea in partial aerial suspension at which time even the stabilizers failed to dampen its descending, momentarily sea-detached profile.

Speed perception was a function of distance: the lower one descended in the ship relative to the water line, the more rapidly did the gray surface seem to move by outside, its cascades of white froth and mist exploding directly on to the windows and portholes.

Death on the high seas, although at this writing still beyond conception, had briefly reduced my crossing to an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Before having retired to my cabin the previous evening, a passenger, whose name I have momentarily forgotten, had been continually paged, both in the theater and throughout the ship, with an increasing degree of urgency. During the early-morning hours, the liner, for a then unexplainable reason, had turned round, pursuing a heading which would have taken it back to the United Kingdom. It was later revealed that a man from Germany, who had been traveling with a group, had for some time been unlocatable, and his wife, who had not undertaken the journey with him, had been contacted in Germany where she ultimately discovered a suicide note. The man, who had been elderly and very ill, had apparently make the crossing for the purpose of taking his own life, and the ship had circled the area of suicide until a time beyond which he would have succumbed to hypothermia, even if he had survived the ocean plunge.

The incident, immediately transcending that initial hesitation between two strangers, had been the talk of the formal breakfast served in the Britannia Restaurant that morning.

The chosen area, along the Great Circle route in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, could not have been more hazardous and every predecessor Cunard liner had traced its path through it.

Glaciers descending the mountains on Greenland’s west coast calved with thunderous roars in to the Davis Strait, forming icebergs which are carried southward by the Labrador current, some 400 of which, rising 150 feet above the water line and weighing in excess of 100,000 tons, move as far south as the shipping lanes off of Newfoundland. During the April-to-July period, the area off of St. John’s is known as “iceberg alley.” Because of the size of the smaller bergs and their associated field ice, they are particularly difficult to spot, posing a significant hazard to any ship undertaking a transatlantic crossing during this time and justly earning the area the title of “North Atlantic graveyard.”

Further exacerbating the conditions had been substreams of differential-temperature waters which originate along the continental edge of South America, near the equator, where tradewinds propel them toward the channel between Cuba and the Florida Keys. Accelerating, they follow the 30- to 50-mile-wide eastern seaboard at 2- to 6-mph speeds toward the North Carolina coast where the actual substreams form, flowing toward Nova Scotia at a 150-million-cubic-meter-per-second rate.

It is on the Great Circle route, east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, that the collision between the warm Gulf Stream and the cold Labrador current takes place, producing divergent temperatures which themselves create rain, gales, squalls, mist, tumultuous waves, winter hurricanes, and cyclones. Off of the southeastern tip of Newfoundland, at Cape Race, summer sea fog, sometimes lasting weeks, shrouds icebergs from visual perception.

Oblivious to these conditions, the 151,400-ton Queen Mary 2 negotiated its course by means of its pods and bow thrusters, whose electricity had been supplied by a common, high voltage main switchboard, which produced an 11,000-volt, 60-hertz, 3-phase current. The current itself had been supplied by four Wartsila W46 V1646C, 16.8-Mw diesel generators and two 25.0-Mw General Electric LM2500+ gas turbines.

The morning’s intrigue, once digested and discussed, enabled greater focus on the abundant breakfast served in the Britannia Restaurant, which had included grapefruit juice, poached eggs, crisp bacon, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, sautéed potatoes, white toast, croissants, French bread, butter, coffee, and peach pastries.

By late-morning, the long, majestic, red-and-black-funneled liner, of 165-year lineage to the vessel which had lent its name to the massive restaurant, carved its trench beneath bright, blue skies in the equally-reflected deep blue sea, leaving a snow-white wake behind its stern, which itself stretched back to the countless crossings of all the Cunard liners which had preceded it.

If the Berengaria had been “huge,” no adjective could describe the size of its replacement, which emanated from an original blueprint and not from an existing hull. The ship, which had been a pure and original Cunard design, had not only launched a new breed of liners, but an altogether new period known as the “era of the four queens.” The design, of course, had been the first to bear the name of the current ship, the Queen Mary.

Incorporating the technological advancements of 86 years of Cunard maritime design, the new flagship, whose origins can be traced to 1926 when a replacement for the Mauretania had first been envisaged, had been intended as the first of two 1,000-foot-long liners which would be fast enough to permit five-day crossing schedules and hence obviate the need for the Lusitania/Berengaria-Mauretania-Aquitania trio. Although the keel had first been laid on January 31, 1931 for a ship then designated hull 534 in the John Brown and Company Shipyard on the Clyde, the depression halted its construction a year later, on April 3, 1934, intermittently permitting the Normandie to take the title as both the first 1,000-footer and the first 60,000-ton+ liner which, as the current fastest to cross the Atlantic, earned it the Blue Ribband. During December of the previous year, it had been announced that Cunard would merge with the White Star Line, forming Cunard White Star Limited, the former having designated all of its ships with the “ia” ending and the latter having used the “ic” ending, such as in “Titanic.” The name “Queen Mary” would be the first to eliminate both.

Launched on September 26, 1934, the sleek, elongated, three-funneled ocean liner, with a 1,018-foot length and 118-foot width, had featured an 80,774-ton gross weight and had been powered by four quadruple-expansion steam turbines connected, via propeller shafts, to four external, 35-ton, manganese bronze, four-bladed propellers grouped in pairs.

The elegant interior appointments featured more than 50 varieties of wood, such as English yew, bird’s eye maple, ivory white sycamore, Pacific myrtle, African cherry, and pearwood. The ship’s Sun Deck, sporting an open promenade with access to all 24 lifeboats, ended at the small, intimate Verandah Grill, which offered an alternative, a-la-carte menu dining experience with views overlooking the stern. The enclosed Promenade Deck, located immediately below, featured the main public rooms, including a forward, 21 window paned Observation Lounge and Cocktail Bar directly under the bridge; a studio, lecture room, writing room, and library on the port side; and a drawing room, a second writing room, and the children’s playroom on the starboard side. The main entrance hall, located behind, spanned the width of the ship and was accessed by glass doors on either side from the promenade and configured with a shopping arcade.

The travel bureau and the suites were located one deck below, on Main Deck, while A through H Decks were set even lower in the hull, and accessed by Empire wood-paneled corridors.

The dining salon, measuring 160-feet-long and 118-feet-wide and seating 800, was located on C Deck and featured a high ceiling, colonnades, and a 24-by-13-foot mural of the Atlantic Ocean with a crystal glass, electronically-operated model of the Queen Mary to indicate its position during transatlantic crossings. The cabin class swimming pool, located on D Deck, had featured golden quartzite, and a walking alleyway led to the crew accommodations, workshops, and storerooms.

Inaugurated into service on May 27, 1936 on the Southampton-Cherbourg-New York route, the Queen Mary recaptured the Blue Ribband from the Normandie three months later on a westerly crossing, attaining a 30.63-knot speed between Bishop’s Rock and Ambrose Light, becoming the fastest, largest, and heaviest superclass liner until the title had been overtaken by its transatlantic counterpart, the Queen Elizabeth. Although it had carried 56,895 passengers during its first year of service, the storm clouds of World War II thwarted its continued civil operation, the last of which, from Southampton, had occurred on August 30, 1939.

Repainted, the now drab, military version, unofficially dubbed the “Gray Ghost,” sailed from New York to Australia in order to assume its role as a troop ship, maintaining transatlantic ferry service by 1943, in July of which it carried a record 16,683 troops on a single crossing.

Decommissioned from military service on September 27, 1946 and returned to Cunard, the ship had been reconfigured as a passenger liner with accommodation for 711 first, 707 cabin, and 577 tourist class guests, resuming weekly scheduled transatlantic service on July 31, 1947 between Southampton and New York, with the Queen Elizabeth.

Usurped not by a newer or more advanced nautical design, but by an aeronautical one instead, the Queen Mary, recording ever-decreasing passenger loads and plummeting revenues, operated its last scheduled service from New York on September 22, 1967, having made 1,001 crossings, during which time it had sailed 3.7 million miles, had carried 2.1 million passengers, and had earned $600 million in revenues.

Its last-ever operation occurred later that year, on October 31, when it embarked on a 39-day repositioning journey from Southampton with 1,040 passengers round the southern tip of South America to its new, permanent Long Beach, California, mooring where it assumed its role as a hotel and tourist attraction.

Sailing 140 nautical miles into the Grand Banks of Newfoundland by 1200 noon, the present Queen Mary 2, pursuing a 250-degree heading and a 24-knot steam speed, had been positioned 115 miles south/southeast of Cape Race, having covered a paltry 431 miles since yesterday’s position report because of the morning’s attempted rescue. Negotiating rough seas with moderate swells amid cold, 3-degree Celsius temperatures, the ship had traversed 2,046 miles since its departure, with 1,040 remaining to the New York Pilot’s Station.

The Queen Elizabeth, the second of the two designs intended for Cunard’s weekly, bi-directional transatlantic service, completed the world’s most famous pair of ocean liners, but, contrary to initial belief, had not been an identical sister to the Queen Mary, but an entirely separate design, sporting, for example, only two versus four funnels and 12 as opposed to 24 boilers. Its keel, first laid on December 4, 1936 in Clydebank, resulted in an almost two-year construction period, leading to initial launch and naming on September 27, 1938. Weighing only 40,000 tons at the time, the 1,031-foot-long, 118-foot-wide ship, with a 38-foot draft, had been moved to its fitting out pier. However, the Queen Elizabeth, like her sister, immediately fell victim to the war and, upon order by Winston Churchill, had been dispatched to New York, departing on February 6, 1940 and berthing, still unfitted and with only essential plumbing, next to the Queen Mary one month later.

After an eight-month mooring, during which time it had been converted into a military ship, the Queen Elizabeth had sailed to Singapore and ultimately operated weekly transatlantic troop transfers between New York and Gourack, Scotland, carrying as many as 15,000 servicemen who slept in tiered, canvas bunks during two daily shifts.

Returning to Southampton on June 16, 1946, the 83,673-ton troop ship had been reconverted into a luxury liner, accommodating 823 first, 662 cabin, and 798 tourist class passengers, and operated its first civilian scheduled service four months later, on October 16. Although the Queen Elizabeth had been almost as popular as its Queen Mary counterpart, with most passengers crossing on one in one direction and on the other in the other direction, the traffic pendulum had begun to swing toward the British and the US transatlantic jetliners, with the first monetary losses being recorded in the early-1960s until economic reality could no longer support their continued service. Operating its last crossing in October of 1968, the Queen Elizabeth had briefly served as a hotel and a museum in Port Everglades, Florida, but neglect and financial burden quickly terminated the venture, leading to its sale to C Y Tung, a Taiwanese shipping tycoon, who invested $6 million in its conversion into a floating university. Fires, whose origins could not be pinpointed, erupted on January 9 and 10, 1972, while the ship had been in Hong Kong Harbor and excessive water applications only resulted in its capsize and ultimate demise.

Nevertheless, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth would remain the most famous Cunard liners to have ever sailed.

Dinner had been served in the Queen Mary 2’s Todd English Restaurant, a small, 156-seat, reservations-only venue located in the stern which harked back to the days of the original Queen Mary’s Verandah Grill. The Mediterranean-inspired cuisine had included Riesling white wine; lobster and baby corn chowder with whipped parsnip, black truffles, and potatoes; asparagus tart with caramelized onions, Fontana cheese, brown butter, and morel vinaigrette; rack of lamb with confit of shank crepenette, assorted salads of roasted red pepper, chickpea, cucumber and yogurt, and rouille with black olive sauce; hot, molten chocolate cake surrounded by raspberry sauce and cold vanilla ice cream; and coffee.

Night ordinarily draped its veil over day, diminishing and ultimately eradicating all light. With the persistent, unrelenting cloud deck of the North Atlantic winter, however, no light or color marked the daily transition. Instead, like a flipped light switch, the transformation was little more than a protracted denouement from gray to black, the external horizontal environment providing no reference for hue change. Like a falling curtain, the day seemed symbolic of the curtain which had definitively fallen on the Golden Era of transatlantic liners…

As the calendar day eclipsed another, the Queen Mary 2 assumed a 249-degree heating and a 25.6-knot steam speed, now southeast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Day Six

Shrouded in fog throughout the night and continually piercing the engulfing darkness with its forlorn horn, the mighty liner, internally configured as a city at sea with its almost 4,000 inhabitants, penetrated the void of mist in which neither light nor external reference could be glimpsed. The 150,000-ton behemoth, swallowed by the elements, had paradoxically been reduced to but an infinitesimal speck as it inched closer to the North American continent.

Maintaining a 250-degree heading in a slight sea 210 nautical miles east of Cape Cod and a 26-knot steam speed at 1200 noon, the Queen Mary 2 had sailed 648 miles since its position report 24 hours ago, now 2,694 miles from Southampton with a 388-mile gap remaining to the New York Pilot’s Station.

Lunch, served in the Lotus Restaurant station of the King’s Court, had included chicken, scallion, and vegetables; basmati rice; soba noodles with scallions and light peanut satay; egg fried rice; and chocolate, graham cracker crust squares.

By 1500, the cold front had, in ernest, passed. The skies, unraveling into remarkably bright blue ones, left not a cloud vapor and 11-degree temperatures. The sea, a brilliant, deep blue, barreled at the apartment-lined ship from the starboard side, inducing a rhythmic roll which even the extended stabilizers could not fully dampen. Pursuing a 253-degree course and a 24-knot speed, the ship, now in the outer perimeter of the Gulf of Maine, had reached a 40-degree, 44.853’ north latitude and 068-degree, 11.27’ west longitude position, the latter having unwound, like a clock, from its 001-degree Southampton coordinate. Only a few degrees of longitude remained before the ship reached Ambrose Light.

With the vessel now due east of Connecticut, the transatlantic crossing, the suspension between continents, and the return to the opulent and elegant Golden Age of transatlantic liner lifestyle, was rapidly ending.

The speed and technological advancement of more modern ocean liners, such as the France, the United States, and the Rotterdam, coupled with changing travel patterns, ultimately usurped the most famous pair of Queens ever to ply the seas, prompting both a Cunard replacement and serious consideration over whether a replacement should be designed at all.

Their successor, a modernized version of the Queen Elizabeth designated the Q3, featured a 990-foot length, able to accommodate 2,270 passengers, and a 75,000-ton gross weight, as detailed by June 1, 1960 design plans. Its engines, largely based upon those of the original Queen Elizabeth and generating between 85,000 and 95,000 shaft horsepower to permit 28.5-knot speeds, had been configured with two six-bladed, 31.75-ton, 19-foot-diameter propellers, each driven by an independent set of turbines, while two sets of double reduction geared turbines were supplied with steam from three 278-ton high-pressure water tube boilers producing 850 pounds-per-square-inch of pressure with 1,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures.

An examination of trans Atlantic passenger load factors, however, seriously questioned the economic viability of such a design. During 1957, for instance, the ratio of set-to-air traffic had been 50:50, while eight years later, in 1965, only 14 out of every 100 passengers actually crossed by sea. Unable, therefore, to justify the size and expense of the original version, a scaled-down design, designated the Q4, had been announced on October 19, 1961. Featuring a reduced, 55,000-ton gross weight, the ship, small enough to negotiate all existing waterways, inclusive of the Panama and Suez Canals, and versatile enough to assume the dual role of Atlantic liner and cruise ship, had been intended as a floating resort, a destination in and of itself, thus introducing a new concept of sea travel. The contract, awarded to John Brown and Company of Clydebank because of low construction cost and early delivery date, had been signed on December 30, 1964.

Its keel had first been laid the following year, on July 2, in the same berth which had incubated the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth and the ship, named the Queen Elizabeth 2, or QE2, had been launched on September 20, 1967. Because of the fate which had befallen its predecessors—namely, the sublimation of the Queen Mary into a hotel and a museum and the purchase of the France and the United States by Norwegian Cruise Line for operation as cruise ships—it had been then considered the last great transatlantic ocean liner to have been built.

Producing 50,000 hp less than the Queen Elizabeth it replaced and operating off of two versus four propellers, the QE2 nevertheless reached 29.5-knot speeds on its initial trails off the Scottish coast.

The 12-decked, 70,327-ton ship, constructed of 1 1/8-inch-thick steel and sporting a single funnel, stretched 963 feet in length and had been delivered to Cunard on April 20, 1969 at a 29 million pound cost. Inaugurated into scheduled, passenger-carrying service the following month, on May 2, between Southampton and New York with an intermediate port-of-call in Le Havre, the third of the eventual quartet of Queens completed its crossing in four days, 16 hours, 35 minutes at a 28.02-knot average speed, carrying 1,400 passengers.

Although the type enjoyed 17 years of successful service, its steam turbine engines, which had essentially been the same type to have powered the original Britannia of 1840, had burned some 200 tons of fuel per day and had become increasingly cost- and maintenance-intensive. Operating its last transatlantic crossing from New York on October 20, 1986, it was withdrawn from service for conversion to diesel engine technology.

A 180 million pound contract, signed with Lloyd Werft of Bremerhaven, Germany, entailed conversion of all public rooms, passenger cabins, and crew accommodations, and installation of nine 9-cylinder, MAN-B&W medium-speed, 220-ton diesel engines producing 10,625 kW or 14,242 hp of power at 400 revolutions per minute, four of which were installed in the forward engine room and five of which were installed in the aft engine room on anti-vibration mountings. Propulsion motors, each weighing 295 tons and producing 44 mw of power at 144 rpms, were connected, by 250-foot-long shafts, to two 22-foot, variable-pitch, five-bladed, outward-turning, 19-foot-diameter, 42-ton propellers which were controllable either from the bridge or from the engine room. Two four-bladed, variable-pitch, 6.55-foot-diameter bow thrusters, installed 18 feet apart in self-contained tunnels which passed laterally through the hull 18 feet below the water line, were driven by a 1,000-hp electric motor and recessed behind hydraulically-operated, hydrodynamic doors at idle power. Four 12-foot-long, 70-square-foot in area, aft-extending, hydraulically-operated stabilizers were stored behind dual-side hull recesses, while steering was accomplished with a single, 75-ton, semi-balanced rudder.

The Queen Elizabeth 2, requiring 179 days for the conversion, had been re-delivered to Cunard on April 25, 1987 and continues to ply the world’s oceans 36 years after it had first entered service, replaced on the transatlantic route only by the ship in which I presently sailed.

Indeed, the present Queen Mary 2 had been the culmination of maritime technical development which had commenced with the wooden-hulled sailing packets of the 19th century. These had later incorporated wooden paddle-wheeled, reciprocating steam engines. Iron, replacing wood as the primary hull construction material, had permitted increased strengths of considerable proportions, thereby paving the way to larger designs with higher gross weights and an increasing number of decks. Higher length-to-width ratios, coupled with propeller propulsion, reduced water resistance and enhanced steam speeds, while compound steam engines, dual screws, and steel construction material pinnacled ocean steamship technology in 1895. Turbine engines, computer-aided design, global positioning systems, azipods, and gas turbines all combined into a single design which could be collectively classified ship, transportation means, machine, edifice, and floating metropolis with interior appointments so opulent and facility offerings so extensive that any connection with the sea had been completely severed in a pleasant disorientation the moment one boarded the vessel.

Technological advancement, however, had not been arrested with maritime design, but had perpetuated throughout all other transportation forms: the transatlantic crossing, for instance, had required six days by sea, but only six hours by subsonic air and three by supersonic air. Speed had been proportionally increased, time had been reduced, and the earth had, in the process, been artificially shrunk. But civility had also been lost…

Only hours remained in which to enjoy it before the Port of New York loomed ahead.

The last dinner at sea, served in the Britannia Restaurant, had included Pinot Grigio white wine; smoked trout mousse, waldorff salad, and chive crème fraiche; roasted tomato soup with basil cream; roasted Vermont turkey, whipped root vegetables, and Madeira cranberry reduction; hazelnut amaretto pudding with sauce anglaise; and coffee.

Angled toward the ship from the forward, starboard side lay the lighted path, like a cracked glass threshold, across the ocean surface from the unobstructed, cylindrical sun, which had commenced its dusk-preemptive descent toward the western horizon, a path, perhaps, to night, the Port of New York, and the crossing’s termination—a sunset symbolic to the end of transatlantic liner passage which could now only be singularly relived aboard the Queen Mary 2. Settling toward the horizon, it emitted a pronounced orange glow and rendered the sea a reflective, icy-blue mirror. A slowly lumbering cargo ship, aged with rust, lurked off the right side, its speed an appalling attempt at dominance over that of the balcony-lined leviathan. The sun itself, a burning orange ball, dripped behind the Atlantic’s perimeter, leaving only an orange and chartreuse aftermath of energy.

Except for the arcing white smoke plume emanating rrom the charcoal and red funnel, no cloud condensation marred the night sky, its intense, velvet black pierced by periodic star glitter.

At midnight, the Queen Mary 2 passed south of Montauk Point, Long Island.

Day Seven

Entering New York Harbor off of Ambrose Light at 0330, the still-slumbering giant sailed under the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge one hour, 15 minutes later, pursuing a 006-degree heading at a lumbering, 9.3-knot cruise speed. First light, tinged with orange, appeared behind the jewel-glittering superstructures of Manhattan off the starboard side. At 0540, now maintaining a 33-degree heading, the ship skated over the blue sheet of reflective Hudson River glass at 3.6 knots, passing the needle-thin point of the Empire State Building.

Commencing its laborious starboard turn by means of its rotating azipods, the behemoth moved into its Pier 88 berth facing a 118-degree heading, casting its post-dawn mooring lines at a 40-degree, 45.982’ north latitude and 073-degree, 59.917’ west longitude coordinate parallel to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum and its satellite barge paradoxically sporting the Concorde, registered G-BOAD, in British Airways livery, which, as the ultimate transatlantic crossing means, had represented the pinnacle of commercial aeronautical development begun with the subsonic, pure-jet airliners which had preceded it. They had been the singular reason for transoceanic sea travel’s demise. The cost-to-speed ratio had proven too high for Concorde and it, like the original Queen Mary, had been withdrawn from service and reduced to a museum exhibit. But the Queen Mary’s next-generation successor, the Queen Mary 2, had been alive, in active transatlantic service, and in high demand, leaving one to wonder if the ship had somehow not replaced the aircraft in an ultimate historical cycle. The Queen Mary 2 would depart in the evening on its eastbound crossing with fare-paying passengers. The Concorde would remain stationary, as an exhibit.

My journey had been both a physical and historical one, encompassing distance and time, forward motion and backward values, a time warp entry in to the Golden Age of transatlantic ocean liner travel replete with opulence, sophistication, elegance, and civility, an historical recapture, and hence re-experience, of early-era values and an examination, perhaps in vain, of the reason for their demise.

Although speed had reduced crossing times, facilitating increased activity and accomplishment, its perceived value increase could only be equated with monetary value, resulting in gains of earthly possessions, but compromises of the soul, the intrinsic, unearthly entity behind every body. This compromise had been the pivot point between a human being and a human doing. Seemingly ratios of the two, the soul and the body have wrestled with each other since the first human walked on the planet, forgoing spiritual fulfillments for bodily pleasures, in an inherent conflict between the worlds to which they belong—Heaven and earth. The more one immersed himself in the latter, the more he lost the former. So completely had entire societies attempted to do so, such as the Holy Roman Empire, that they had completely fallen, losing the very source which had created them.

Walking down the gangplank, I turned and looked at the giant ocean liner which had carried me 3,082 nautical miles across the Atlantic. Perhaps I will cross again someday, I thought…

Retrieved from “http://www.articlesbase.com/cruising-articles/a-transatlantic-crossing-with-the-queen-mary-2-1757926.html”

(ArticlesBase SC #1757926)

Robert G. Waldvogel -
About the Author:

A graduate of Long Island University-C.W. Post Campus with a summa-cum-laude BA Degree in Comparative Languages and Journalism, I have subsequently earned the Continuing Community Education Teaching Certificate from the Nassau Association for Continuing Community Education (NACCE) at Molloy College, the Travel Career Development Certificate from the Institute of Certified Travel Agents (ICTA) at LIU, and the AAS Degree in Aerospace Technology at the State University of New York – College of Technology at Farmingdale. Having amassed almost three decades in the airline industry, I managed the New York-JFK and Washington-Dulles stations at Austrian Airlines, created the North American Station Training Program, served as an Aviation Advisor to Farmingdale State University of New York, and devised and taught the Airline Management Certificate Program at the Long Island Educational Opportunity Center. A freelance author, I have written some 70 books of the short story, novel, nonfiction, essay, poetry, article, log, curriculum, training manual, and textbook genre in English, German, and Spanish, having principally focused on aviation and travel, and I have been published in book, magazine, newsletter, and electronic Web site form. I am a writer for Cole Palen’s Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York. I have made some 350 lifetime trips by air, sea, rail, and road.

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How to break into freelance writting

312 News — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:06:17 +0000

How to break into freelance writting

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A noble vocation, “freelance” writing takes it name from the
days (rather, “knights”) of yore! Those not in the service of a monarch
sometimes hired out their services. Some were said to carry business
cards inscribed: “have Lance – Will Travel.”

Seriously, for those who feel the calling freelance writing can be
both enjoyable and rewarding – to say nothing of what it can do for “ye
old ego.”

Freelance writing encompasses an endless variety of both
subjects and approaches to writing: stories for local
newspapers, magazines, children’s publications, technical
journals, romance novels, resume’s advertising copy – even
crossword puzzles (now they have computer programs for these).

Everyone is qualified to write something! About the only
absolute prerequisite is the ability to explain yourself.

The brightest technician who cannot adequately explain his techniques or the potential of his experimentation is of
questionable value to the profession, his employer or
evensociety.

Of course, to break into the higher income potential,
experience, talent and a good knowledge of the language are
essential.

From there, style, consumer demand, marketing, education and plain,
old fashioned luck are factors that usually, but
certainly not always govern how far one can go. Even so,, there is
still, plenty of room for all types and levels of writing — because
there are all levels and interests of readers.

Writing even short articles or instructions requires, as the saying
goes, one percent inspiration; 99 percent perspiration. Work on your
item every single day — preferably for regular hours. Research,
rephrase and rewrite until you are satisfied.

Do not ask the opinions of others — especially during the writing
stage. You don’t need to know how 15 other people would put it — you
simply want to YOUR ideas from YOUR perspective on paper in the best
way you can.

Other opinions can be needless distractions and disheartening; they
can prevent you from following through on your idea and becoming
entwined with someone else’s. If you want advice, get
it before starting your project –or after it is finished.

A few of the more obvious outlets for freelance writers are
magazines, newsletters, advertisers, newspapers, children’s
publications, and trade journal.

Getting into this field may be more difficult than asking your
home town newspaper if they will accept (and possibly pay for) a
short article you have written – and hopefully, to write others
on assigned or your choice topics.

When trying this technique, look around for subjects that would
be of interest to the readership of the publication in question.
This approach may not be the most rewarding financially, but it
can get you started and help build your confidence and
reputation.

If you have an area of expertise that you would like to
concentrate on, write to publishers of applicable trade journals
and magazines in the field.

Ask them for information on items they buy from freelance
writers. Always include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE)
to expedite a reply. Most will tell what they pay, how long the
like their articles and some will include a writer’s guide that
spells out their terms and exactly what they like.

For an up-to-date, annual listing of publishers, look for the
WRITER’S MARKET in your public library.

Probably the most useful tool for a freelance (or any other, for
that matter) writer is a word processor. If you don’t have one,
GET ONE and learn to use it. Get a standard word processing
program, output can be input to publisher programs!

Without a word processor, you will have to work at least twice
as long and hard.. Make sure your computer is IBM compatible (it
can be most any off-brand or clone, so long as it is 100% IBM
compatible.

You can probably get a complete used setup for $500 or so that
will do nicely. An IBM XT (8026) compatible is about the
smallest (and oldest) equipment that will allow you to use a
good, universally accepted word processing program like Word
Star or Word Perfect.

Many publishers will accept manuscripts on disk, so long as they
are in a “standard” program and system. The publishers can then
“import” your data copy directly into typeset or desktop
publishing with his specialized computer program!

If you area poor typist, get a touch typing program — some of
them are really fantastic: you can learn or improve your typing
while playing a game!

Most people can get 30 words per minute in a week; more with
extra time and effort. When using a typewriter or trying to
write in longhand,, the pages get messy and often out of order
as they are edited and re-edited, and have to be done over
frequently.

Unfortunately, when you do one page over, the page lengths never
come out right, so the whole thing has to be retyped. A word
processor takes care of all that, plus spelling, looking up
words in the Thesaurus, margins, page numbering, uniform
formatting, etc.,as a matter of routine.

As soon as you decide to get a computer and word processor, join
a local IBM compatible USERS CLUB. The members will be happy to
advise you. You will be able to ask all the questions you want
to get unbiased answers and assistance.

Although it would be nice to have an expensive, up-to-date model
with a fancy color monitor (video display) and a jet laser
printer, there are plenty of used PC’s on the market starting
around $500 that would do fine for your efforts.

Look under Computers and Software in the classified want-ads for
100% IBM compatible models. Also, check on close-outs and
“clones” (computer magazines usually have many advertisements
for these.

As a minimum you will need an IBM compatible computer (minimum
512 is needed for a standard word processing program), a disk
drive (360K) and a printer. A 9-pin dot matrix will do, but of
course a 24 pin is much better (and more expensive). A daisy
wheel printer will produce letter quality print but will not
handle graphics (logos, illustrations or fancy print) and is not
recommended.

The top of the line is the jet laser, which can cost several
thousand dollars with the associated equipment and programs. A
hard disk (20 to 40 MB would be very good — and is required for
the newer word processing programs), ot at least a second disk
drive.

Although the 3 1/2″ disks are becoming popular, they are not yet
totally standard, so better get a 5 1/4 floppy drive (preferably
with 1.2 megabyte drive — only about $20 more on a new
computer). If you can afford it, get a 640K memory computer –
this will let you process more information at a time. All of
these suggestions can be fully explained at the by members of a
users club.

While the final copy of your manuscript should be either typed
or letter quality print (usually 24 pin dot matrix, daisy wheel
or jet laser) for the best possible impression, many editors
will now accept a clearly printed, double spaced 9 pin dot
matrix, or a disk version in Word Start or Word Perfect program.

If you have a 9 pin dot matrix printer, be sure and ask the
editor if they will accept it first. Otherwise, have a friend
with abetter printer run the manuscript off for you!

The WRITERS DIGEST is THE trade magazine for journalistic
writers, the AMERICAN BOOKDEALERS EXCHANGE serves more
self-publishers and perhaps those interested in the mail order
market.

Several books on writing are offered by various discount book
suppliers (see Business Sources). One (BOOKDEALER) Has one
called “Writing for Non-Professionals” (#70867) that sells for
$2.95. The WRITERS HANDBOOK (THE WRITER, Inc.) Lists over 2,000
buyers of written material – complete with publisher names,
addresses, editors, size and type of material desired, plus
other valuable information of interest to freelance writer.

A potential problem area for creative writers is how to protect
your material. The old tale about mailing it to yourself is a
good story, but not adequate! Some experts suggest that one good
reason for copyrighting is to keep from being sued for
publishing your own material!

At any rate, copyright protection is uncomplicated, cheap and
technically automatic for material created after March 1st,
1989. It is strongly recommended, however, that you at least
display the fact that it is copyright protected, so any
infringements will not be “innocent.” Just include the word
Copyright (or Copr.) or a little c in a circle the first year of
publication, and the name of the copyright owner.

There is no fee for this protection (which lasts for the
lifetime plus 50 years) for works created after Jan. 1st, 1978).

The only “catch” is that while you can prosecute a pirate, you
cannot sue for damages unless the copyright is registered with
the copyright office.

Therefore, to obtain true copyright protection, it is necessary
to register your material. This can be done either before or
after it has been published. If it is unpublished at the moment
you sign the copyright application send in the application and
one copy of your manuscript.

If it has already been published, send two copies. In both
cases, the registration fee is $10.

For more information, see Copyrights in the next section. If it
has already been published, send in two copies. This $10 not
only protects your material here in the U.S.A.: it also extends
to about 80 countries who are signatories to the March 1, 1989
Berne Convention treaty. Not bad for a $10 investment.

BUSINESS SOURCES

REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS, Copyright Office, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC 20559. To register an UNPUBLISHED manuscript,
send one copy of it, a check or money order for $10 and a
completed application Form TX, all in the same envelope or
package.

For additional information, write Copyright Office, Information
Section LM-401, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20559, or
call their hotline: 202/479-0700.

COPYRIGHT OFFICE, Publications Section, LM-455, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC 20559. This is where you write to get
the forms to apply for copyright – or call their hotline:
202/298-9100.

THE WRITERS DIGEST, 205 W Center St.,Marion, OH 43305. Trade
magazine for writers.

THE WRITER, INC.,Box 892, Boston, MA 02117. Publishes THE
WRITERS HANDBOOK.

AMERICAN BOOKDEALERS EXCHANGE, Box 2325, La Mesa, CA 92401.
Offers publication support for writers.

AMERICAN AMATEUR PRESS ASSOCIATION, 5009 Dickens Ave.,Tampa, FL
33629. Publishes AMERICAN AMATEUR JOURNALIST for aspiring
writers.

F W PUBLISHING CO., 9933 Alliance Rd.,Cincinnati, OH 452442.
Publishes WRITERS MARKET, an annual listing of 4,000 buyers of
the written word.. Available at most libraries.

PUBLISHERS CENTRAL BUREAU, Box 1187, Newark, NY 07102. Discount
books (reference, novels, history, etc.)

PERSONAL PUBLISHING, Box 390, Itasca, IL 60143. Trade magazine
for desktop publishers – oriented to MCIntosh users.

ALDUS CORPORATION, 411 First Ave.,S-200, Seattle, WA 98104.
Sells Pagemaker programs for McIntosh System. *$495).

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, 31 East 2nd St.,Mineola, NY 11501. Discount
books, clip art, stencils, etc.

QUILL CORPORATION, 100 Schelter Rd.,Lincolnshire, IL 60917-4700,
312/634-4800. Office and computer supplies.

NEBS, 500 Main St.,Groton, MA 04171, 800/225-6380. Office and
computer supplies.

SWEDCO, Box 29, Mooresville, NC 28115. 3 line rubber stamps -
$3; business cards – $13 per thousand.

ZPS, Box 581, Libertyville, IL 60048-2556. Business cards and
letterhead stationery. Will print your copy ready logo or
design, even whole card.

WALTER DRAKE, 4119 Drake Bldg.,Colorado Springs, CO 80940. Short
run business cards, stationery, etc. Good quality but no choice
of ink or color.
_________________________________________________________________

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(ArticlesBase SC #3624)

Brad J. Tamitnowson -
About the Author:

Brad J.Tameitnowson Full reprints rights. http://root-canal-dentis
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]]>

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William Blake

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Posted: Jul 16, 2010 |Comments: 0
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Early life

The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in Blake’s work. Here, the demiurgic figure Urizen prays before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as the Continental Prophecies.

William Blake was born in 28 Broad Street, London, England on 28 November 1757, to a middle-class family. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Blake’s father, James, was a hosier. William never attended school, and was educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. The Blakes were Dissenters, and are believed to have belonged to the Moravian Church. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life.

Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a practice that was then preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten Heemskerk and Albrecht Drer. His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school but was instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing. During this period, Blake was also making explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.

Apprenticeship to Basire

On 4 August 1772, Blake became apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street, for the term of seven years. At the end of this period, at the age of 21, he was to become a professional engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the period of Blake’s apprenticeship. However, Peter Ackroyd’s biography notes that Blake was later to add Basire’s name to a list of artistic adversariesnd then cross it out. This aside, Basire’s style of engraving was of a kind held to be old-fashioned at the time, and Blake’s instruction in this outmoded form may have been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.

After two years Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London (it is possible that this task was set in order to break up a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow apprentice), and his experiences in Westminster Abbey contributed to the formation of his artistic style and ideas; the Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour, painted funeral effigies and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that “the most immediate [impression] would have been of faded brightness and colour”. In the long afternoons Blake spent sketching in the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by the boys of Westminster School, one of whom “tormented” Blake so much one afternoon that he knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground, “upon which he fell with terrific Violence”. Blake beheld more visions in the Abbey, of a great procession of monks and priests, while he heard “the chant of plain-song and chorale”.

The Royal Academy

On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school’s first president, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds’ attitude towards art, especially his pursuit of “general truth” and “general beauty”. Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the “disposition to abstractions, to generalizing and classification, is the great glory of the human mind”; Blake responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that “To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit”. Blake also disliked Reynolds’ apparent humility, which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds’ fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Gordon Riots

Blake’s first biographer Alexander Gilchrist records that in June 1780, Blake was walking towards Basire’s shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison in London. They attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building ablaze, and released the prisoners inside. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during this attack. These riots, in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism, later came to be known as the Gordon Riots. They provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III, as well as the creation of the first police force.

Despite Gilchrist’s insistence that Blake was “forced” to accompany the crowd, some biographers have argued that he accompanied it impulsively, or supported it as a revolutionary act. In contrast, Jerome McGann argues that the riots were reactionary, and that events would have provoked “disgust” in Blake.

Marriage and early career

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786)

In 1782, Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become his patron, and Catherine Boucher, who was to become his wife. At the time, Blake was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, “Do you pity me?” When she responded affirmatively, he declared, “Then I love you.” Blake married Catherine who was five years his junior on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary’s Church, Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an ‘X’. The original wedding certificate may still be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass window was installed between 1976 and 1982. Later, in addition to teaching Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she would prove an invaluable aid to him, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.

At this time George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, became an admirer of Blake’s work. Blake’s first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published circa 1783 . After his father’s death, William and his brother Robert opened a print shop in 1784, and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson’s house was a meeting-place for some of the leading English intellectual dissidents of the time: theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Richard Price, artist John Henry Fuseli early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and American revolutionary Thomas Paine. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the French and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France. In 1784 Blake also composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.

Blake illustrated Original Stories from Real Life (1788; 1791) by Mary Wollstonecraft. They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, but there is no evidence proving without doubt that they actually met. In 1793′s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

Relief etching

In 1788, at the age of 31, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, a method he would use to produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and, of course, his poems, including his longer ‘prophecies’ and his masterpiece the “Bible.” The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name).

This is a reversal of the normal method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to the acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching, which Blake invented, later became an important commercial printing method. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for most of his well-known works, including Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.

Engravings

A study in 2005 of Blake’s surviving plates showed that he made frequent use of a technique known as “repoussage” which is a means of obliterating mistakes by hammering them out by hitting the back of the plate. This discovery puts strain on Blake’s own assessment of his abilities as well of those of admirers and may also help to explain why some of Blake’s work took so long to complete.

Later life and career

Blake’s marriage to Catherine remained a close and devoted one until his death. Blake taught Catherine to write, and she helped him to colour his printed poems. Gilchrist refers to “stormy times” in the early years of the marriage. Some biographers have suggested that Blake tried to bring a concubine into the marriage bed in accordance with the beliefs of the Swedenborgian Society, but other scholars have dismissed these theories as conjecture. William and Catherine’s first daughter and last child might be Thel described in The Book of Thel who was conceived as dead.

Felpham

Hecate, 1795. Blake’s vision of Hecate, Greek goddess of black magic and the underworld

In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex (now West Sussex) to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake wrote Milton: a Poem (published between 1805 and 1808). The preface to this work includes a poem beginning “And did those feet in ancient time”, which became the words for the anthem, “Jerusalem”. Over time, Blake came to resent his new patron, coming to believe that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry, and preoccupied with “the meer drudgery of business”. Blake’s disenchantment with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced Milton: a Poem, in which Blake wrote that “Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies” (3:26).

Blake’s trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a physical altercation with a soldier called John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but also with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King. Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed, “Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.” Blake would be cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, “The invented character of [the evidence] was … so obvious that an acquittal resulted.” Schofield was later depicted wearing “mind forged manacles” in an illustration to Jerusalem.

Return to London

Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) is one of a series of illustrations of Revelation 12.

Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (18041820), his most ambitious work. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Blake approached the dealer Robert Cromek, with a view to marketing an engraving. Knowing that Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek promptly commissioned Thomas Stothard, a friend of Blake’s, to execute the concept. When Blake learned that he had been cheated, he broke off contact with Stothard. He also set up an independent exhibition in his brother’s haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in the Soho district of London. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims), along with other works. As a result he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt has called a “brilliant analysis” of Chaucer. It is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. It also contained detailed explanations of his other paintings.

The exhibition itself, however, was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review, in The Examiner, was hostile.

He was introduced by George Cumberland to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell he met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. This group shared Blake’s rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age. At the age of 65 Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job. These works were later admired by Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt, and by Vaughan Williams, who based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing on a selection of the illustrations.

Later in his life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit; this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.

Dante’s Divine Comedy

The commission for Dante’s Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the ultimate aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake’s death in 1827 would cut short the enterprise, and only a handful of the watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form. Even so, they have evoked praise:

‘[T]he Dante watercolours are among Blake’s richest achievements, engaging fully with the problem of illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even higher level than before, and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the three states of being in the poem’.

Blake’s The Lovers’ Whirlwind illustrates Hell in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno

Blake’s illustrations of the poem are not merely accompanying works, but rather seem to critically revise, or furnish commentary on, certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.

Because the project was never completed, Blake’s intent may itself be obscured. Some indicators, however, bolster the impression that Blake’s illustrations in their totality would themselves take issue with the text they accompany: In the margin of Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions, Blake notes, “Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature & not the Holy Ghost.” Blake seems to dissent from Dante’s admiration of the poetic works of the ancient Greeks, and from the apparent glee with which Dante allots punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the grim humour of the cantos).

At the same time, Blake shared Dante’s distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of power, and clearly relished the opportunity to represent the atmosphere and imagery of Dante’s work pictorially. Even as he seemed to near death, Blake’s central preoccupation was his feverish work on the illustrations to Dante’s Inferno; he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he possessed on a pencil to continue sketching.

Death

Monument near Blake’s unmarked grave in London

On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are I will draw your portrait for you have ever been an angel to me.” Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house, present at his expiration, said, “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel.”

George Richmond gives the following account of Blake’s death in a letter to Samuel Palmer:

He died … in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.

Catherine paid for Blake’s funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five days after his death on the eve of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary at the Dissenter’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields, where his parents were also interred. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and John Linnell. Following Blake’s death, Catherine moved into Tatham’s house as a housekeeper. During this period, she believed she was regularly visited by Blake’s spirit. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but would entertain no business transaction without first “consulting Mr. Blake”. On the day of her own death, in October 1831, she was as calm and cheerful as her husband, and called out to him “as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now”.

On her death, Blake’s manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham, who burned several of those which he deemed heretical or too politically radical. Tatham had become an Irvingite, one of the many fundamentalist movements of the 19th century, and was severely opposed to any work that “smacked of blasphemy”. Sexual imagery in a number of Blake’s drawings was also erased by John Linnell.

Since 1965, the exact location of William Blake’s grave had been lost and forgotten, while gravestones were taken away to create a new lawn. Nowadays, Blake grave is commemorated by a stone that reads “Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757-1827 and his wife Catherine Sophia 1762-1831″. This memorial stone is situated approximately 20 metres away from the actual spot of Blake grave, which is not marked. However, members of the group Friends of William Blake have rediscovered the location of Blake’s grave and intend to place a permanent memorial at the site.

Blake is now recognised as a saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial was erected in Westminster Abbey, in memory of him and his wife.

Development of Blake’s Views

Because Blake’s later poetry contains a private mythology with complex symbolism, his late work has been less published than his earlier more accessible work. The recent Vintage anthology of Blake edited by Patti Smith focuses heavily on the earlier work, as do many critical studies such as William Blake by D. G. Gillham.

The earlier work is primarily rebellious in character, and can be seen as a protestation against dogmatic religion. This is especially notable in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which Satan is virtually the hero rebelling against an imposter authoritarian deity. In the later works such as Milton and Jerusalem, Blake carves a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while retaining his earlier negative attitude towards the rigid and morbid authoritarianism of traditional religion. Not all readers of Blake agree upon how much continuity exists between Blake’s earlier and later works.

Psychoanalyst June Singer has written that Blake’s late work displayed a development of the ideas that were first introduced in his earlier works, namely, the humanitarian goal of achieving personal wholeness of body and spirit. The final section of the expanded edition of her Blake study The Unholy Bible suggests that the later works are in fact the “Bible of Hell” promised in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Regarding Blake’s final poem “Jerusalem”, she writes:

[T]he promise of the divine in man, made in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is at last fulfilled.

However, John Middleton Murry notes discontinuity between Marriage and the late works, in that while the early Blake focused on a “sheer negative opposition between Energy and Reason”, the later Blake emphasized the notions of self-sacrifice and forgiveness as the road to interior wholeness. This renunciation of the sharper dualism of Marriage of Heaven and Hell is evidenced in particular by the humanization of the character of Urizen in the later works. Middleton characterizes the later Blake as having found “mutual understanding” and “mutual forgiveness”.

Religious views

Blake’s Ancient of Days. The “Ancient of Days” is described in Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel.

Although Blake’s attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day, his rejection of religiosity was not a rejection of religion per se. His view of orthodoxy is evident in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a series of texts written in imitation of Biblical prophecy. Therein, Blake lists several Proverbs of Hell, amongst which are the following:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

In The Everlasting Gospel, Blake does not present Jesus as a philosopher or traditional messianic figure but as a supremely creative being, above dogma, logic and even morality:

If he had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,

He’d have done anything to please us:

Gone sneaking into the Synagogues

And not used the Elders & Priests like Dogs,

But humble as a Lamb or an Ass,

Obey himself to Caiaphas.

God wants not man to humble himself

Jesus, for Blake, symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity: “[A]ll had originally one language and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.”

Blake designed his own mythology, which appears largely in his prophetic books. Within these Blake describes a number of characters, including ‘Urizen’, ‘Enitharmon’, ‘Bromion’ and ‘Luvah’. This mythology seems to have a basis in the Bible and in Greek mythology, and it accompanies his ideas about the everlasting Gospel.

“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.”

Words uttered by Los in Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

One of Blake’s strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy. In A Vision of the Last Judgement, Blake says that:

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory.

One may also note his words concerning religion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve, c. 1825. Watercolour on wood.

Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a distinct body from the soul, and which must submit to the rule of soul, but rather sees body as an extension of soul derived from the ‘discernment’ of the senses. Thus, the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul; elsewhere, he describes Satan as the ‘State of Error’, and as being beyond salvation.

Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and particularly with sexual repression: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” He saw the concept of ‘sin’ as a trap to bind men desires (the briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life:

Abstinence sows sand all over

The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,

But Desire Gratified

Plants fruits & beauty there.

He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind; this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ: “He is the only God … and so am I, and so are you.” A telling phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”. This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and equality in society and between the sexes.

Blake and Enlightenment Philosophy

Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Due to his visionary religious beliefs, Blake opposed the Newtonian view of the universe. This mindset is reflected in an excerpt from Blake’s Jerusalem:

Blake’s Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the “single-vision” of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll which seems to project from his own head.

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe

And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.

Blake also believed that the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which depict the naturalistic fall of light upon objects, were products entirely of the “vegetative eye”, and he saw Locke and Newton as “the true progenitors of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ aesthetic”. The popular taste in the England of that time for such paintings was satisfied with mezzotints, prints produced by a process that created an image from thousands of tiny dots upon the page. Blake saw an analogy between this and Newton’s particle theory of light. Accordingly, Blake never used the technique, opting rather to develop a method of engraving purely in fluid line, insisting that

a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its

Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job.

Despite his opposition to Enlightenment principles, Blake thus arrived at a linear aesthetic that was in many ways more similar to the Neoclassical engravings of John Flaxman than to the works of the Romantics, with whom he is often classified.

Therefore Blake has also been viewed as an enlightenment poet and artist, in the sense that he was in accord with that movement’s rejection of received ideas, systems, authorities and traditions. On the other hand, he was critical of what he perceived as the elevation of reason to the status of an oppressive authority. In his criticism of reason, law and uniformity Blake has been taken to be opposed to the enlightenment, but it has also been argued that, in a dialectical sense, he used the enlightenment spirit of rejection of external authority to criticize narrow conceptions of the enlightenment.

Assessment

Creative mindset

Northrop Frye, commenting on Blake’s consistency in strongly held views, notes that Blake “himself says that his notes on [Joshua] Reynolds, written at fifty, are ‘exactly Similar’ to those on Locke and Bacon, written when he was ‘very Young’. Even phrases and lines of verse will reappear as much as forty years later. Consistency in maintaining what he believed to be true was itself one of his leading principles … Consistency, then, foolish or otherwise, is one of Blake’s chief preoccupations, just as ‘self-contradiction’ is always one of his most contemptuous comments”.

Blake’s “A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows”, an illustration to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).

Blake abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: “As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various)”. In one poem, narrated by a black child, white and black bodies alike are described as shaded groves or clouds, which exist only until one learns “to bear the beams of love”:

When I from black, and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear

To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;

And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him, and he will then love me.

In one poem, The Book of Thel, Blake questioned the necessity of life which is believed to be an elegy to his dead newborn daughter.

‘O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?

Why fade these children of the spring, born but to smile & fall?

Blake retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life, and social and political statements are often present in his mystical symbolism. His views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the Church. His spiritual beliefs are evidenced in Songs of Experience (1794), in which he distinguishes between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God (Jesus Christ in Trinitarianism), whom he saw as a positive influence.

Visions

From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The first of these visions may have occurred as early as the age of four when, according to one anecdote, the young artist “saw God” when God “put his head to the window”, causing Blake to break into screaming. At the age of eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, Blake claimed to have seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” According to Blake’s Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home and reported this vision, and he only escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a lie through the intervention of his mother. Though all evidence suggests that his parents were largely supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake’s early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber. On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them.

The Ghost of a Flea, 1819-1820. Having informed painter-astrologer John Varley of his visions of apparitions, Blake was subsequently persuaded to paint one of them. Varley’s anecdote of Blake and his vision of the flea’s ghost became well-known.

Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake’s works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual centre of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. In addition, Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels. In a letter to William Hayley, dated May 6, 1800, Blake writes:

I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate.

In a letter to John Flaxman, dated September 21, 1800, Blake writes:

[The town of] Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses. My Wife & Sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace… I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels.

In a letter to Thomas Butts, dated April 25, 1803, Blake writes:

Now I may say to you, what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else: That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals; perhaps Doubts proceeding from Kindness, but Doubts are always pernicious, Especially when we Doubt our Friends.

In A Vision of the Last Judgement Blake writes:

Error is Created. Truth is Eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.

William Wordsworth remarked, “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”

D.C.Williams (1899-1983) said that Blake was a romantic with a critical view on the world, he maintained that Blake’s Songs of Innocence were made as a view of an ideal, somewhat Utopian view whereas he used the Songs of Experience in order to show the suffering and loss posed by the nature of society and the world of his time.

General cultural influence

Main article: William Blake in popular culture

Blake’s work was neglected for almost a century after his death, but his reputation gained momentum in the 20th century, both from being rehabilitated by critics such as John Middleton Murry and Northrop Frye, but also due to an increasing number of classical composers such as Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams adapting his works.

Many such as June Singer have argued that Blake’s thoughts on human nature greatly anticipate and parallel the thinking of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, although Jung dismissed Blake’s works as “an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes.”

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg and songwriter Bob Dylan. Much of the central ideas from Phillip Pullman’s famous fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials are rooted in the world of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In wider culture Blake’s poetry has been set to music by popular composers. It has been especially popular with musicians since the 1960s. Blake’s engravings have also had significant influence on the modern graphic novel.

Bibliography

Illuminated books

William Blake’s portrait in profile, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, published 1794

c.1788: All Religions Are One

There Is No Natural Religion

1789: Songs of Innocence and of Experience

The Book of Thel

17901793: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

1793-1795: Continental prophecies

1793: Visions of the Daughters of Albion

America a Prophecy

1794: Europe a Prophecy

The First Book of Urizen

Songs of Experience

1795: The Book of Los

The Song of Los

The Book of Ahania

c.1804.1811: Milton a Poem

18041820: Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Non-Illuminated

1783: Poetical Sketches

1784-5: An Island in the Moon

1789: Tiriel

1791: The French Revolution

1797: The Four Zoas

Illustrated by Blake

1791: Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life

1797: Edward Young, Night Thoughts

1805-1808: Robert Blair, The Grave

1808: John Milton, Paradise Lost

1819-1820: John Varley, Visionary Heads

1821: R.J. Thornton, Virgil

1823-1826: The Book of Job

1825-1827: Dante, The Divine Comedy (Blake died in 1827 with these watercolours still unfinished)

On Blake

Peter Ackroyd (1995). Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 1-85619-278-4.

Donald Ault (1974). Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton. University of Chicago. ISBN 0-226-03225-6.

(1987). Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas. Station Hill Press. ISBN 1886449759.

G.E. Bentley Jr. (2001). The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08939-2.

Harold Bloom (1963). Blake Apocalypse. Doubleday.

Jacob Bronowski (1972). William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Routledge and K. Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7277-5 (hardcover) ISBN 0-7100-7278-3 (pbk.)

(1967). William Blake, 1757-1827; a man without a mask. Haskell House Publishers.

G. K. Chesterton (1920s). William Blake. House of Stratus ISBN 0-7551-0032-8.

S. Foster Damon (1979). A Blake Dictionary. Shambhala. ISBN 0-394-73688-5.

David V. Erdman (1977). Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-486-26719-9.

Irving Fiske (1951). “Bernard Shaw’s Debt to William Blake.” (Shaw Society)

Northrop Frye (1947). Fearful Symmetry. Princeton Univ Press. ISBN 0-691-06165-3.

Alexander Gilchrist, Life and Works of William Blake, (second edition, London, 1880) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN 9781108013697)

James King (1991). William Blake: His Life. St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 0-312-07572-3.

Benjamin Heath Malkin (1806). A Father’s Memoirs of his Child.

Peter Marshall (1988). William Blake: Visionary Anarchist ISBN 0-900384-77-8

Blake, William, William Blake’s Works in Conventional Typography, ed. by G. E. Bentley, Jr., 1984. Facsimile ed., Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 9780820113883.

W.J.T. Mitchell (1978). Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-691-01402-7.

Victor N. Paananen (1996). William Blake. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7053-4.

George Anthony Rosso Jr. (1993). Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of The Four Zoas. Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8387-5240-3.

G. R. Sabri-Tabrizi (1973). The eaven and ell of William Blake, (New York, International Publishers)

June Singer, The Unholy Bible: Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious (SIGO Press, 1986)

Sheila A. Spector (2001). “Wonders Divine”: the development of Blake’s Kabbalistic myth, (Bucknell UP)

Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, (London, 1868)

E.P. Thompson (1993). Witness Against the Beast. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22515-9.

W. M. Rossetti (editor), The Poetical Works of William Blake, (London, 1874)

A. G. B. Russell (1912). Engravings of William Blake.

Basil de Slincourt, William Blake, (London, 1909)

Joseph Viscomi (1993). Blake and the Idea of the Book, (Princeton UP). ISBN 0-691-06962-X.

David Weir (2003). Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance, (SUNY Press)

Jason Whittaker (1999). William Blake and the Myths of Britain, (Macmillan)

William Butler Yeats (1903). Ideas of Good and Evil. Contains essays.

References

^ Frye, Northrop and Denham, Robert D. Collected Works of Northrop Frye. 2006, pp 11-12.

^ Jones, Jonathan (2005-04-25). “Blake’s heaven”. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,1469584,00.html.

^ Thomas, Edward. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917, p. 3.

^ Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. 2007, p. 85.

^ Wilson, Mona. The Life of William Blake. The Nonesuch Press, 1927. p.167.

^ The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge. 2004, p. 351.

^ Blake, William. Blake’s “America, a Prophecy” ; And, “Europe, a Prophecy”. 1984, p. 2.

^ Kazin, Alfred (1997). “An Introduction to William Blake”. http://www.multimedialibrary.com/Articles/kazin/alfredblake.asp. Retrieved 2006-09-23.

^ Blake, William and Rossetti, William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake: Lyrical and Miscellaneous. 1890, p. xi.

^ Blake, William and Rossetti, William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake: Lyrical and Miscellaneous. 1890, p. xiii.

^ Marshall, Peter (January 1, 1994). William Blake: Visionary Anarchist (Revised Edition ed.). Freedom Press. ISBN 0900384778.

^ poets.org/William Blake, retrieved online June 13, 2008

^ a b c Bentley, Gerald Eades and Bentley Jr., G. William Blake: The Critical Heritage. 1995, page 34-5.

^ a b Raine, Kathleen (1970). World of Art: William Blake. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20107-2.

^ 43, Blake, Peter Ackroyd, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995

^ Blake, William. The Poems of William Blake. 1893, page xix.

^ 44, Blake, Ackroyd

^ Blake, William and Tatham, Frederick. The Letters of William Blake: Together with a Life. 1906, page 7.

^ Erdman, David V. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (2nd edition ed.). p. 641. ISBN 0-385-15213-2.

^ Gilchrist, A, The Life of William Blake, London, 1842, p. 30

^ Erdman, David, Prophet Against Empire, p. 9

^ McGann, J. “Did Blake Betray the French Revolution”, Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.128

^ “St. Mary’s Church Parish website”. http://home.clara.net/pkennington/VirtualTour/windows_modern.htm#Blake. “St Mary’s Modern Stained Glass”

^ Reproduction of 1783 edition: Tate Publishing, London, ISBN 978 185437 768 5

^ Biographies of William Blake and Henry Fuseli, retrieved on May 31st 2007.

^ Kennedy, Mave, Art historian dents image of William Blake, engraver – 2005-4-18. Retrieved 2009-7-6.

^ Bentley, G. E, Blake Records, p 341

^ Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 1863, p. 316

^ Schuchard, MK, Why Mrs Blake Cried, Century, 2006, p. 3

^ Ackroyd, Peter, Blake, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995, p. 82

^ Damon, Samuel Foster (1988). A Blake Dictionary

^ a b Blake, William. Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works. 1998, page 14-5.

^ Wright, Thomas. Life of William Blake. 2003, page 131.

^ The Gothic Life of William Blake: 1757-1827

^ Lucas, E.V. (1904). Highways and byways in Sussex. Macmillan. ASIN B-0008-5GBS-C.

^ Peterfreund, Stuart, The Din of the City in Blake’s Prophetic Books, ELH – Volume 64, Number 1, Spring 1997, pp. 99-130

^ Blunt, Anthony, The Art of William Blake, p 77

^ Peter Ackroyd, “Genius spurned: Blake’s doomed exhibition is back”, The Times Saturday Review, 4 April 2009

^ Bindman, David. “Blake as a Painter” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, Morris Eaves (ed.), Cambridge, 2003, p. 106

^ Blake Records, p. 341

^ Ackroyd, Blake, 389

^ Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, London, 1863, 405

^ Grigson, Samuel Palmer, p. 38

^ Ackroyd, Blake, 390

^ Blake Records, p. 410

^ Ackroyd, Blake, p. 391

^ Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision, pp. 1-20

^ “Friends of Blake homepage”. Friends of Blake. http://www.friendsofblake.org/home.htm. Retrieved 2008-07-31.

^ “Coming up – William Blake”. BBC Inside Out. 2007-02-09. http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/london/series11/week5_healthy_living_working.shtml. Retrieved 2008-08-01.

^ Tate UK. “William Blake’s London”. http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/learnonline/blakeinteractive/lambeth/london_05.html. Retrieved 2006-08-26.

^ The Unholy Bible, June Singer, p. 229.

^ William Blake, Murry, p. 168.

^ “a personal mythology parallel to the Old Testament and Greek mythology”; Bonnefoy, Yves. Roman and European Mythologies. 1992, page 265.

^ Damon, Samuel Foster (1988). A Blake Dictionary (Revised Edition). Brown University Press. p. 358. ISBN 0874514363.

^ Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. 2003, page 226-7.

^ Altizer, Thomas J.J. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. 2000, page 18.

^ Blake, William. Proverbs of Hell, via The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. 1982, page 35.

^ Blake, Gerald Eades Bentley (1975). William Blake: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & K. Paul. p. 30. ISBN 0710082347.

^ Baker-Smith, Dominic. Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia. 1987, page 163.

^ Kaiser, Christopher B. Creational Theology and the History of Physical Science. 1997, page 328.

^ Jerusalem Plate 15, lines 14-20 Complete Works of William Blake Online

^ *Ackroyd, Peter (1995). Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. p. 285. ISBN 1-85619-278-4.

^ Essick, Robert N. (1980). William Blake, Printmaker. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 248.

^ Letter to George Cumberland, 12 April 1827 Complete Works of William Blake Online Blake is referring to his Illustrations of the Book of Job, often considered his artistic masterpiece.

^ Colebrook, C. Blake 1: The Enlightenment William Blake Retrieved on October 1st 2008

^ Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, 1947, Princeton University Press

^ Blake, William and Rossetti, William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake: Lyrical and Miscellaneous. 1890, page 81-2.

^ A Blake Dictionary, Samuel Foster Damon

^ a b c Bentley, Gerald Eades and Bentley Jr., G. William Blake: The Critical Heritage. 1995, page 36-7.

^ a b Langridge, Irene. William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work. 1904, page 48-9.

^ Blake, William. Complete Writings with Variant Readings. 1969, page 617.

^ John Ezard (2004-07-06). “Blake’s vision on show”. The Guardian. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1254856,00.html#article_continue. Retrieved 2008-03-24.

^ Letter to Nanavutty, 11 Nov 1948, quoted by Hiles, David. Jung, William Blake and our answer to Job 2001. http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/pdf’s/Microsoft Word – Jung paper.web.pdf, retrieved 13 December 2009

Secondary sources

External links

Poems by William Blake at Poetry Archive

William Blake on BBC Poetry Season

Works by or about William Blake in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Works by William Blake at Project Gutenberg

An Archive of an Exhibit of his Work at the National Gallery of Victoria

Ch’an Buddhism and the Prophetic Poems of William Blake

Contents, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake edited by David V. Erdman

See Blake’s notebook online using the British Library’s Turning the Pages system (requires Shockwave).

Tate’s online resource on William Blake with notes for teachers

The recent re-discovery of the location of William Blake’s grave

www.William-Blake.org 128 works by William Blake

The William Blake Archive, a hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The William Blake Archive’s searchable edition of Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

William Blake and Visual Culture: A special issue of the journal ImageText

William Blake Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Free scores by William Blake in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)

Index entry for William Blake at Poet’s Corner

Archive of William Blake exhibit, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

v  d  e

Romanticism

Culture

Bohemianism Ossian Romantic nationalism Wallenrodism

Literature

Almeida Garrett Andersen Blake Bryant Burns Byron Chateaubriand Coleridge Cooper Eichendorff Espronceda Foscolo Goethe Grimm Brothers Hawthorne Heine Hoffmann Hlderlin Hugo Irving Jean Paul Keats Kleist Krasiski Lamartine Larra Leopardi Lermontov Malczewski Manzoni Mickiewicz Musset Nerval Norwid Novalis Oehlenschlger Poe Pushkin Schiller Scott M. Shelley P.B. Shelley Shevchenko Sowacki Madame de Stal Stendhal Tieck Wordsworth Zhukovsky Zorilla

Music

Alkan Auber Beethoven Bellini Berlioz Berwald Chopin Flicien David Ferdinand David Donizetti Field Franck Glinka Halvy Kalkbrenner Liszt Loewe Marschner Mhul Mendelssohn Meyerbeer Moscheles Paganini Rossini Schubert Schumann Thalberg Verdi Wagner Weber

Philosophy and aesthetics

Coleridge Feuerbach Fichte Goethe Mller Schiller A. Schlegel F. Schlegel Schleiermacher Tieck Wackenroder

Art

Blake Briullov Constable Corot Dahl Delacroix Dsseldorf School Friedrich Fuseli Gricault Goya Hudson River School Leutze Martin Michaowski Nazarene movement Palmer Runge Turner Ward Wiertz

Architecture

Gothic Revival National Romantic style

  Age of Enlightenment

Realism

v  d  e

William Blake

Literary works

Early writings

Poetical Sketches An Island in the Moon

Songs of Innocence

and Experience

Unique to

Songs of Innocence

Introduction The Shepherd The Ecchoing Green The Little Black Boy The Blossom Laughing Song A Cradle Song Night Spring A Dream On Anothers Sorrow

Unique to

Songs of Experience

Introduction Earth’s Answer The Clod and the Pebble The Sick Rose The Fly The Angel My Pretty Rose Tree Ah! Sun-Flower The Lilly The Garden of Love The Little Vagabond London A Poison Tree A Little Girl Lost To Tirzah The School Boy The Voice of the Ancient Bard

Paired poems

Nurse’s Song Infant Joy The Lamb Holy Thursday Holy Thursday The Chimney Sweeper The Little Boy lost The Little Boy Found The Divine Image The Little Girl Lost The Little Girl Found The Tyger The Human Abstract Infant Sorrow

Prophetic

Books

The continental

prophecies

Europe a Prophecy America a Prophecy The Song of Los

Other

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell The Book of Thel The Book of Ahania The Book of Urizen Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion Milton a Poem The Book of Los The Four Zoas Visions of the Daughters of Albion The French Revolution

The Pickering

Manuscript

Auguries of Innocence The Mental Traveler The Crystal Cabinet

Mythology

Ahania Albion Bromion Enion Enitharmon Fuzon Grodna Har Hela Leutha Los Luvah Orc Spectre Tharmas Thiriel Tiriel Urizen Urthona Utha Vala

Art

Paintings and prints

Relief etching Nebuchadnezzar Descriptive Catalogue The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne The Ghost of a Flea The Great Red Dragon Paintings Illustrations of Paradise Lost Illustrations of the Book of Job Illustrations of The Divine Comedy The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides Illustrations of On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity A Vision of the Last Judgment Newton Original Stories from Real Life The Ancient of Days
The Ancients

Samuel Palmer Edward Calvert Frederick Tatham George Richmond John Linnell

Criticism and scholarship

Scholars and critics

Peter Ackroyd Donald Ault Harold Bloom S. Foster Damon David V. Erdman Northrop Frye Alexander Gilchrist Geoffrey Keynes E. P. Thompson

Scholarly works

Life of William Blake Fearful Symmetry Blake: Prophet Against Empire Witness Against the Beast

Wikimedia

Blake at Wiktionary Blake at Wikibooks Blake at Wikiquote Blake at Wikisource Blake at Commons Blake at Wikinews

Persondata

NAME

Blake, William

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

SHORT DESCRIPTION

Poet, Painter, Printmaker

DATE OF BIRTH

28 November 1757

PLACE OF BIRTH

London, England

DATE OF DEATH

12 August 1827

PLACE OF DEATH

London, England

Categories: William Blake | 1757 births | 1827 deaths | Artist authors | British vegetarians | English anarchists | English painters | English poets | English printmakers | English Swedenborgians | Christian mystics | Mythopoeic writers | People from Soho | Prophets | Romantic artists | Romantic poets | Writers who illustrated their own writing | English DissentersHidden categories: Wikipedia semi-protected pages | Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

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Why VoIP Phone System is Better than a Landline

312 News — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:39:43 +0000

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Why VoIP Phone System is Better than a Landline

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Thinking about switching to a VoIP service? Here is some information that should help with the process of finding a VoIP provider:

Understanding what VoIP System Is: VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is a phone system that instead of using a landline to make calls, it uses an Internet connection to receive and place calls.

Significant Savings for Businesses: Hosted VoIP phone systems route calls through an off-site provider or auto-attendant, eliminating the need for expensive or space-consuming hardware. VoIP cuts phone bills and improves communication between employees, management, clients, and vendors. A recent study tracking the impact as Intel switched to a company-wide VoIP system found that productivity increased between 134% to 500% – a savings of $312,000 a year.

Advanced Features than Landlines: VoIP has capabilities that landline systems just can’t match. VoIP allows you to track call by hold time, time on the call, transfers, allows for teleconferencing, computer-based dialing, and easy call transfers between offices in different cities. Calls can be even forwarded from an office phone to a cell phone or a computer, allowing constant contact using a single number.

Billing and Costs:

Most VoIP phone requires a subscription fee, which can be as little as $10. Some services are free if you already have an existing Internet connection. Software is probably where you would see the most expense because you need them to accommodate advanced features and programs..

Deciding on a Provider: Some companies that specialize in VoIP are Vonage, RingCentral, GotVMail, OneBox, while some phone service providers such as AT&T also offer VoIP solutions. Another place to look is Resource Nation, who provides free tools, tips, and purchasing advice for business owners and entrepreneurs in over 100 business categories.

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Home Page > Travel > Kitzbuehel Austria For Snow Destination

Kitzbuehel Austria For Snow Destination

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Posted: Jul 25, 2010 |

Scenic Kitzbühel is everything an alpine resort should be: a charming village with a medieval center, a world-famous après-ski mecca, and a ski run regularly used on the World Cup circuit. Whether you go to Kitzbühel to ski the Hahnenkamm or to party all night (or both), Kitzbühel doesn’t disappoint.

The village is situated at the southern foot of the Kitzbüheler Horn, about 100 kilometers (63 miles) from Innsbruck. The area around Kitzbühel has turned up archaeological evidence of human habitation as far back as the Bronze Age. During the time of the Roman Empire, it became a major crossroads for merchants and travelers. The first records of the village of Kitzbühel date back to 1271. The area didn’t become a tourist destination until 1902, when construction started on a major hotel. Franz Reisch organized the Association of Winter Sports and staged Kitzbühel’s first public ski race.

That’s the old news in Kitzbühel. Here’s what’s new: improvements in lifts and snowmaking facilities for the 2005/2006 season. Old T-bars are being replaced with a state-of-the-art chair lift equipped with child safety devices. Also new this season is the “Panoramabahn Kitzbüheler Alpen,” an eight-seat mono-cable circulating gondola. The resort is also increasing its snowmaking system. Work is underway on a new water reservoir. Man-made snow will cover the ice increasing the amount of terrain by 30 hectares and improving the condition of the snow at the Resterhöhe ski area.

Now, back to the basics – Kitzbühel offers over 145 kilometers (90 miles) of trails with 39 percent designated for beginners, 46 percent for intermediates, and 15 percent for advanced skiers. There are four main mountains: the Hahnenkamm, theKitzbüheler Horn, the Bichlalm, and Pass Thurn. While it is a great resort for intermediates, experts are not left out. They can test their skills on the famous World Cup Streif run (on Hahenkamm) and there is plenty of off-trail terrain to explore. Skiers can even have their speed clocked with radar on the Pengelstein. There are also steep trails around the Ehrenbachgraben bowl and also on the Rettenstein at Pass Thurn.

Kitzbühel is home to the popular Ski Safari circuit, marked by elephant symbols. The circuit allows skiers to explore the entire area between Hahnenkamm and Pass Thurn. A recently installed 3S (tri-cable) continuous loop cableway allows skiers to complete the circuit in both directions without taking off their skis. The Ski Safari covers 35 kilometers (22 miles) of runs.

Snowboarders are most likely to head for the Kitzbüheler Horn. In addition to free-riding terrain, there’s a half-pipe and funpark. There’s a boarder-cross near the Brunellenfeld lift with a 95-meter (312-foot) vertical drop and at least 14 obstacles. The Red Eagle Snowboard Academy in Kitzbühel is a great place to learn and perfect snowboarding skills.

The Kitzbühel area is a good choice for cross-country skiers. Kitzbühel offers 30 kilometers (19 miles) of groomed trails. With the trails of the surrounding towns added on, there is a total of 120 kilometers (75 miles) of groomed trails to explore. Snow hikers and snowshoers find over 100 kilometers (62 miles) of well-maintained hiking trails. Free guided hikes are available during the week as well as special torchlight and photography hikes.

Visitors enjoy other winter activities, as well. Tobogganing, indoor and outdoor ice skating, tubing, and sledding add to the fun. Riding in a horse-drawn sleigh is a romantic way to see the spectacular scenery surrounding Kitzbühel. There are a lot of things to see and do in Kitzbühel. In addition to shopping, visitors can tour several medieval churches. There are spas, the Cable Car Museum, a casino, art galleries, and an alpine zoo.

The village is filled with brightly painted houses, many dating back to medieval times. Visitors can browse through trendy shops and stop for coffee and pastry at one of the many cafés. The only hard part about dining out is deciding where to go. There are more than 100 restaurants in Kitzbühel. Food choices range from Tyrolean, Mexican, and Chinese to Italian, Swiss, and even American. Many great restaurants are found in the town’s four-star hotels.

Some people choose Kitzbühel just for its party atmosphere. Famous for its wild après-ski, the town draws the rich and famous from around the world. Bars and discos keep the fun alive all night. There are, however, quiet pubs for those looking for a more romantic evening.

Kitzbühel is preparing for its opening celebration, with special events planned for December 8 – 11, 2005. Whether you come to ski and snowboard, party or shop, Kitzbühel is the ultimate fun alpine resort.

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Jeanie Smith -
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