When Serbia Sailed the High Seas

It is a little known fact that once upon a time when steam shipping was
in its heyday and the main mode of intercontinental travel, one of the
top luxury ocean liners bore the name SS Servia. The story that follows
is an attempt to salvage from oblivion this great vessel that brought
Serbia much favourable publicity over the years as it battled the savage
waves of the North Atlantic.
The story begins with the Cunard Line, one of the leading ope-
rators of passenger ships on the North Atlantic for over a century, and
the only shipping company to operate a scheduled passenger service
between Europe and North America to this day. The company was
founded by a Canadian, Samuel Cunard of Nova Scotia.1) In 1839 Cu-
nard was awarded the first British transatlantic steamship mail con-
tract, and the next year formed the British and North American Royal
Mail Steam-Packet Company to operate the line's four pioneer paddle
steamers on the Liverpool-Halifax-Boston route. For most of the next
30 years, Cunard held the Blue Riband2) for the fastest Atlantic voyage.
However, in the 1870s Cunard experienced stern competition from
its rivals, the White Star Line and the Inman Line and began to falter
financially. To meet this challenge, in 1879 the firm was reorganized as
Cunard Steamship Company, Ltd. to raise capital. With the injection
of fresh capital the company immediately proceeded to place an order
for a new super vessel. The contract was award to J & G Thomson (later
John Brown & Company), a shipbuilding yard in Clydebank near
Glasgow, Scotland.
Thompson designed and built a vessel introducing many inno-
vations. With a double bottom, subdivided into 16 water-tight com-
partments, the ship was practically unsinkable. As long as at least two
of its compartments remained intact, the ship could stay afloat. She
was the first large ocean liner to be built of steel instead of iron, and
the first Cunard ship lit by electric incandescent lamps which had
been just invented by Thomas Edison. For these and other reasons,
maritime historians often consider her to be the first “modern” ocean
liner.3) With the length of 515 feet and a width of 52.1 feet she was the
second largest ocean liner of the time, surpassed only by Brunel's SS
Great Eastern. With her design and construction guided by Admiralty
specifications, she had many features that satisfied the requirements
for her to be placed high on the Admiralty's reserve list of the armed
auxiliary cruisers, where she could be called into service in times of
war. She had 5 decks, one of which was the promenade deck. She was
propelled by 3 expansion engines with a total horsepower of 10,300
IHP. When first tested she attained a top speed of 17.5 Kts and the best
average speed of 16.7 Kts, though she never attained the Blue Riband.
She was serviced by a crew of 298 and had passenger capacity of 480 1st
class and 750 steerage. It cost £256,903 to be built.
This ship was christened SS Servia and launched on March 1, 1881.
Its “godmother” was Elodie Lawton Mijatović. Servia is what English-
speaking people used to call Serbia before World War I. It was changed
by British journalists into Serbia at some point between August 1914
and April 1915. Servia smacked too much of servility, reminded the
English readers of “serfs” and was disrespectful for a valiant ally.4)
Elodie Lawton was a British author who lived in Boston in the
1850s, where she was an advocate of the abolitionist movement. In
1864, while on a trip to Germany, she met Čedomilj Mijatović who was
completing his studies in economics at Leipzig and they ended up
getting married. In 1865 they settled in Belgrade where Čedomilj, at
the age of 23, became a professor of political economy at the Belgrade
Velika Škola, the highest educational institution in Serbia at that time,
the predecessor of University of Belgrade. Over the next 40 years Čedo-
milj will leave an important imprint on Serbian history as a Serbian
statesman, economist, historian, writer, politician, and diplomat. He
was six times minister of Finance in the Principality/Kingdom of Serbia,
three times minister of foreign affairs and minister plenipotentiary of
Serbia to the Court of St. James's (1884–1885; 1895–1900, and 1902/1903),
to Romania (1894), and the Ottoman Empire (1900). Elodie, meanwhile,
after mastering the Serbian language became the first English-spea-
king female historian in Serbia. In 1872 she published The History of
Modern Serbia (London: William Tweedie) and in 1874, Serbian Folk-
lore (London: W. Isbister & Co). She translated Serbian national poems
of the Kosovo cycle into English and tried to organise them into one
national ballad: Kosovo: an Attempt to bring Serbian National Songs,
about the Fall of the Serbian Empire at the Battle of Kosovo, into one
Poem (London: W. Isbister, 1881).
Under his wife's influence, Čedomilj became Serbia's greatest all-
time Anglophile. Together, through their writings and publications,
they contributed a lot to the promotion of Serbia's history and culture
throughout the English-speaking world, while his translations of
important English works into Serbian made those works available to
the Serbian reading public. Indeed, he was probably the most active
and influential Serbian translator from English during the 19th
century. The bibliography of his translations includes about a dozen
titles. Most of them dealt with religious topics. That was his effort to
contribute to religious revival of the Serbian people. His translations
into Serbian include sermons of well-known British preachers such as
Dr. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Canon Henry Parry Liddon and Dr.
Macduff. He also translated John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and
Dr. David Brown’s
Commentaries to the Gospels. His translation of Henry Thomas
Buckle’s book History of Civilisation in England, was published in Ser-
bian in 1871 and influenced several generations of pro-Western Serbs.
Mijatović also published several of his own original works in
English: Constantine, the Last Emperor of the Greeks or the Conquest
of Constantinople by the Turks (A.D. 1453 (London: Sampson Low,
Marston & Company, 1892); A Royal Tragedy. Being the Story of the
Assassination of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Servia (London:
Eveleigh Nash, 1906); Servia and the Servians (London: Sir Isaac Pitman
& Sons, 1908); he co-authored with Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace,
Prince Kropotkin, and J. D. Bourchier A Short History of Russia and
the Balkan States (London: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company,
1914), and in 1917 he published The Memoirs of a Balkan Diplomatist
(London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassel and Co.). His
book Servia and the Servians together with his entries on Serbia in the
Tenth and Eleventh editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica served a
very important purpose of offering a favourable view of Serbia to the
Anglo-American public at the beginning of the twentieth century in a
very turbulent and decisive period in her history.
With Čedomilj always being close to the seat of power in Serbia,
the couple easily attracted and befriended many important and
influential Britons, some of whom left an inerasable mark on Serbia's
history and society.
One of such friends was the wealthy Scottish philanthropist
Francis Mackenzie. Mackenzie was a Scottish member of the Plymouth
Brethren, a Nazarene group. He travelled to Belgrade in 1876 to start
work for the British and Foreign Bible Society to foster religiosity
among the Serbian people. He stayed in Belgrade from 1876 till 1895
and became a prominent figure in Belgrade society. Over the years
he befriended many Serbian politicians and other prominent Belgrade
residents. While in Belgrade he managed to enlarge his already sizeable
wealth. He correctly predicted that Belgrade's city limits would spread
eastwards. In 1879, he bought a large piece of agricultural and swampy
land named, “Simić’s Majur”, from the son of Stojan Simic, president/
chairman of the Serbian Parliament for 7500 gold ducats. He parceled
this land out into building lots and sold them one by one. Out of the
money he earned, he built a large Peace Hall which was renowned for
political events.
He financed the publishing of Hrišćanski Vesnik (Christian Mess-
enger) the first monthly journal dedicated to religious revival in Serbia
which had been founded by Mijatović and Aleksa Ilić, a Belgrade priest.
____________________
1) The Cunard Line is no longer owned by Canadians. It is now a British-
American owned shipping company based at Carnival House in
Southampton, England, and operated by Carnival UK.
2) The Blue Riband is an unofficial accolade given to the passenger liner
crossing the Atlantic Ocean in regular service with the record highest
speed. The term was borrowed from horse racing and was not widely
used until after 1910. Under the unwritten rules, the record is based on
average speed rather than passage time because ships follow different
routes. Traditionally, a ship is considered a “record breaker” if it wins the
eastbound speed record, but is not credited with the Blue Riband unless it
wins the more difficult westbound record against the Gulf Stream
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Riband
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Servia
4) Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, London 1975, p. 175