The " Dutch TITANIC ", laid down 1912 as STATENDAM, seized by the British Royal Navy to become the trooper JUSTICIA . A new book by historian Tamás Balogh is the first compendium about that liner, that never saw civil service, and was lost during WWI. While TITANIC is ostentatiously called the most luxurious liner, STATENDAM offered luxury features that recalled the grandness of lounges and luxuries of the German Ballin trio - e.g. a Main Lounge two decks high, between the first and second funnel, a two deck high Dining Room, as well a Wintergarden of one and a half deck hight. OLYMPIC Class only offered one deck high salons ... by Earl of Cruise b/w copy from a painting of the intended STATENDAM, the second in the fleet of HOLLAND AMERICA LINE - courtesy Peter Meersman, collector of the original painting The first STATENDAM (10,322 GT) was constructed and inaugurated in 1898 and had been sold to ALLAN LINE in 1911. When STATENDAM II was laid down in Belfast...
Austrian and Hungarian immigrants contributed immense to the US culture and economy. America, after its re-discovering by Christopher Columbus in 1492, was the first place of Austrian and Hungarian to immigrate to. It was the land of hope and possibilities, and the young USA, as the former colony, needed immigrants ... and these immigrants found vast opportunities in a country that was more or less "empitied" of humans, after the first contact with Europeans, and their, unknown to the indigen population and themselves, biological weapons - diseases for that the American natives had nothing to fight against, as they had been unknown to them, after eons of "isolation". by Earl of Cruise Emmigrants in the BALLIN STADT, a center for emmigrants initiated by Albert Ballin, after Cholera epidemiic in Hamburg 1892 - Source: BALLIN STADT Although some estimates suggest that the numbers of Austrians in the United States have represented less than one tenth of 1 p...