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| The Biggest Ships in the World Behold, the Masters of the Sea! Humanity has always had a certain fascination with the world's largest objects, and ships are earth's largest, man-made moving machines. Ever since the first steamships set off to cross the Atlantic, the eyes of the people have gazed at length at the biggest of these mammoth machines. Names like Great Eastern, Celtic, Mauretania, Titanic, Imperator, Normandie, and Queen Mary, have been on the tip of every tongue. The prize of being "largest" no longer sails with passenger liners. Many of the modern-day cruise ships such as the Carnival Destiny and Grand Princess have been in the spotlight for their size, but none can hold a candle to the world's truly largest vessels: the industrial-sized supertankers used to transport oil from one country to the next. The larget passenger ship at the moment may be Princess Cruise's Grand Princess (This title has since been passed to a few other cruise ships, but at the moment I do not have the resources to find out exactly which one!), but the title of THE largest is held by the supertanker Jahre Viking. |
| This wonderful graphic was used by permission from www.avidcruiser.com. |
| My research for this page has gone on into the wee hours of the night, and still I run into walls regarding this subject. One passenger ship was bragged to be the world's largest, when another had a slightly larger gross tonnage. Books seem to contradict themselves by saying that one ship holds the title for this period, when a year EARLIER, a ship was launched with a larger gross tonnage. I have abandoned the idea of listing in absolute order the largest passenger ships in the world successively. Below is a list of passenger ships that claimed to hold the title whether the claim was truthful or not. After all, they were still among the largest ships built. (Keep in mind that Isambard Brunel's Great Eastern held the record of the world's largest ship ever built from 1858 to 1901. The large ships listed under her were the world's largest existing ships, since the Great Eastern was scrapped in 1888.) |
| Great Eastern1858: 18,000 grt // Campania 1893: 12,950 grt // Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse 1897: 14,392 grt // Deutschland 1899: 16,502 grt // Oceanic 1899: 17,272 grt // Celtic 1901: 20,904 grt // Baltic 1904: 23,884 grt // Cedric 1903: 24,000 grt // Kaiserin Auguste Victoria 1906: 24,581 grt // Lusitania 1906: 31,550 grt // Mauretania 1907: 31,938 grt // Olympic 1910: 45,324 grt // Titanic 1911: 46,329 // Imperator (Berengaria 1922) 1913: 52,117 grt // Vaterland (Leviathan 1922) 1914: 54,282 grt // Bismarck 1914 (Majestic 1922): 56,551 grt // Normandie 1935: 79,000 (82,799) grt // Queen Mary 1936: 81,235 grt // Queen Elizabeth 1940: 83,673 grt |
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