LONG LIVE THE QUEEN

Why fly for five speedy hours, when you can sail across the Atlantic over seven sumptuous days? Guy Trebay savors the passage of time aboard the last of the great transatlantic ocean liners.

- Guy Trebay

BELOW Canapés served on a silver platter aboard the Queen Mary 2.

OPPOSITE The terrace pool on Deck 8.

FOR THE LONGEST TIME I couldn’t figure out why anyone would take an ocean liner. Look what happened in the movies. Shelley Winters walks gaily up a gangway (The Poseidon Adventure) and the next thing you know she’s swimming through the ballroom of a ship turned upside down. Passengers on the Britannic book a jolly holiday (Juggernaut) and, faster than you can say “lifeboat,” discover there are bombs below deck. Or try this: Kate Winslet is a snooty debutante in first class who falls for a poor artist in steerage (Titanic). Things look promising for the star-crossed pair until...well, cue the iceberg.

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Lounging on Deck 7; dinner service in the Britannia Restaurant; inside the ship's bridge; Cunard attendants at the ready.

Ill-fated love, terrorists, con men—like the grand hotels that were also once staples of cinema and stage, ocean liners are reliable backdrops for every cliché known to the machinery of melodrama. “Being in a ship,” as the English writer Samuel Johnson once remarked, “is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

What Dr. Johnson could not have predicted, however, is how an ocean liner would one day prove to be a bastion of luxury—a rarefied and littleappreciated means of getting from here to there. As it happens, this has never been truer than now, when the scores of ocean liners that once plied the seas between New York City and Southampton, England, have dwindled to a solitary vessel: the Queen Mary 2.