Credit where credit's due

'All of the 265 cabin passengers felt that it was in some way to their credit', the American journalist Richard Harding Davis wrote in Harper's Weekly, 'that the boat on which they chanced to cross [the Atlantic] beat the record, as individuals seem to feel they are deserving of your admiration because they have not slept for two nights...  As the writer of this article was one of the 265, he feels this pride, and though possibly had he been left at Liverpool the City of Paris might still have done as well, he wants the fact that she did so well, and that he was on board when she did it, generally circulated through the medium of this paper'

 

- On the record-breaking Liverpool to New York passage in 1892 - just under five days and 16 hours - of the steamship City of Paris. Quoted in 'The Ocean Railway' by Stephen Fox, 2003