Historic Photo: Two great liners, Olympic and Mauretania, about to die.
Two of the greatest-ever ocean liners are about to be sent to the scrap yards.
This historic photo is very sad, at least to anyone who appreciates the beauty, power and history of the great ocean liners of the 20th century. Across the sad mud flats where this lonely boat is abandoned, to the right, the ship painted white, is the great Cunard liner Mauretania, and to the left, the black ship is the White Star Liner Olympic. Although both of these ships were quite famous in their own right, both were overshadowed by being the sister ships to two infamous liners that perished in epic disasters. Mauretania‘s sister was Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine during World War I, and Olympic’s was of course the Titanic, sunk on its maiden voyage in 1912.