Everywhere You Look

I set out to find a mildly-amusing historical artifact connected to today’s Presidents’ Day holiday. I figured I’d look for something about Lincoln, who I admire quite a bit more than I do Washington. (For those unfamiliar with the holiday: Washington’s birthday is February 22, Lincoln’s is February 12, and the Washington’s Birthday holidays has gradually become President’s Day. Since most US holidays have been turned into Mondays, the day off is usually disconnected from either date.) I found the Lincoln’s birthday dinner menu cover seen above at the NYPL web site and felt compelled to understand what it is.

The Hamburg-American Line (often called by its German acronym HAPAG) was a premiere North Atlantic steamship line serving Germany. I’ve heard of a few of their biggest ships, but I’d not heard of the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise; the menu illustration shows a ship that wason the small side for 1906, when this dinner took place. It turns out she had a short but interesting history: the Prinzessin Victoria Luise was a purpose-built pleasure cruise ship at a time when that was rare. Steamships were serious business in 1906, as they were the only way to cross oceans, and the frivolity of a modern cruise ship has little to do with the business of the liners of that era. Her cruises took place, as modern ones do, in warm weather: the West Indies and the Mediterranean.

So…why a dinner for Lincoln’s birthday? The passengers on HAPAG’s liners were typically people traveling between the US and Germany. If I had to guess, I’d have said that the cruise passengers would be Germans looking to escape the cold, but that doesn’t explain this dinner. Maybe, as one of the first cruise ships, she attracted an international clientele. My first impulse would be that there would have to be a lot of Americans for this dinner to make sense, but maybe not: in the era before ships had movies and pools and tennis courts, maybe it was necessary to look for reasons to have feasts. In any case, the ship ran aground and was wrecked less than a year after this dinner; the princess herself (Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter) lived until 1980.

There’s never any difficulty in finding an interesting story. They’re all around us, all the time, so you just have to look.