For over 20 years, the Greyhound of the Seas, the Cunard Liner "Mauretania" held the record for the fastest Transatlantic crossing. Much loved and admired, after two decades as the pinnacle of ocean liners, her time came to end. First laid up and then, in a fanfare of nostalgia, consigned to the breaker's yard in Rosyth, she ended her life at the hands of a breaker's torch. Although modern historians revile such an ignominious fate, the "Mauretania's" demise helped to rekindle local industries, her steel helping to build the next generation of ocean liner - and her sumptuous fittings being snapped up by owners of stately homes and public houses to give future generations a hint as to the luxury the "Mauretania" once embodied. To this end, this slim volume recounts the end of the ship's life and the ensuing demolition process, an epilogue often overlooked in many books due to its obvious distasteful nature to ocean liner enthusiasts.

With his vast collection of photographs and memorabilia, combined with his skill as a writer, Newell truly makes the ships and memories of them become living personalities. How Jack London, Count von Luckner, Sir Ernest Shackleton and all other intrepid adventurers of the sea would have gloried in this book; and present-day sea rovers, you, how you will glory in it! Here are the glamour, majesty and color of the most exciting things ever built—the mammoths of the sea. Gordon Newell’s salty stories and fine photos bring these monarchs and superliners to life so completely, that you hear once more the deep-throated whistle blasts as the ships knife their way out of the fog, one after another. “I am not recording affection for the Mauretania as President of the United States, but as civilian Franklin D. Roosevelt who loves the sea, its ships and the men who sail them...” writes F.D.R. in his story “Queen with a Fighting Heart.” Author Gordon Newell shares these sentiments. “The Kronprinz Wilhelm” he writes, “was not a ship to give up easily. Night was falling, the darkness would give her a fighting chance. The last of the fuel was shoveled into the furnaces. The worn-out engines were breaking their hearts for the ship...out of the night she came, the sky glowing red above the crowns of her belching funnels. The white glow of acres of foam at her bow. The guns of the British cruisers swung around.”

Responding to Titanic's distress calls in the early hours of 15 April 1912, Captain Arthur Rostron raced the Cunard liner Carpathia to the scene of the sinking, rescued the seven hundred survivors of the world's most famous shipwreck and then carried them to safety at New York. After twenty-five years at sea, the competence and compassion Rostron displayed during the rescue made him a hero on two continents and presaged his subsequent achievements. During the First World War he participated in the invasion of Gallipoli and commanded Cunard's Mauretania as a hospital ship in the Mediterranean and a troop transport in the Atlantic. As her longest-serving master he commanded that legendary vessel in transatlantic passenger service through most of the 1920s. Rostron retired in 1931 as the most esteemed master mariner of his era, celebrated for the Titanic rescue, decorated for his war service, and knighted for his contributions to British seafaring. This account uses newspaper reports, company records, government documents, contemporary publications and memoirs to recount Rostron's seafaring life from his first voyage as an apprentice rounding Cape Horn in sail to his retirement forty-four years later as commodore of the Cunard Line. Set within the context of his times and featuring particulars of the ships in which he served and commanded, this is the first comprehensive biography of Arthur Rostron before, during and after his year as captain of the Carpathia.