It may be a sign of the success of Canadian Pacific world cruises that the company hired Maurice Logan to paint the cover of the 1926-27 advertising booklet rather than a then-unknown artist such as Holling Holling or Richard Allen Fish. This cover art wraps around to the back and further to a flap on the back that can be used to cover part of the front, and the artist’s signature is prominently visible on the front cover instead of discreetly hidden in a corner.
Click image to view and download a PDF of this booklet from the University of British Columbia Chung collection. Click here to download an 11.2-MB PDF of this wraparound cover.
A California painter and illustrator well known for his use of bright colors and a “loose impressionistic style,” Logan had painted posters and booklet covers for the Southern Pacific at least since 1920, when SP published this poster. Canadian Pacific commissioned him to do the cover art on this booklet as well a full-page painting of CP steamships’ red-and-white checkered flag on page 3. This page also says, “Book designed by Louis Treviso” and “Paintings by Maurice Logan.” About Louis Treviso I can find no information.
Further inside the 52-page booklet are 22 double-page paintings illustrating various cruise destinations and carefully leaving enough white space to allow for text. Though the booklet implies these were also by Maurice Logan, none of them have his signature and one (on the spread for Rome) is mysteriously signed with a K in a circle.
These paintings are the same style as a series of Canadian Pacific menus issued between 1928 and 1931 that were painted by “in-house” (they then worked on commission but later CP hired them full-time) artists Charles James Greenwood and Gordon Fraser Gillespie. It is possible that only the wraparound cover and page 3 are by Logan, though it is hard to be sure as even the menus paintings were clearly influenced by Logan. Who “K” was is hard to say as the first or last names of only a few Canadian Pacific artists started with a K and none of them painted anything like this style.
The booklet also has two drawings of steamships, the Empress of France and Empress of Scotland. These are unsigned but are of a similar style to a series of menus issued in the 1930s. Some of those menus are signed by Albert Cloutier, but I suspect the drawings in this booklet were done in-house.
As in 1925-26, this worldcruise used the Empress of Scotland. Both this booklet and the 1925-26 booklet also briefly discuss a Mediterranean cruise on the Empress of France. The 1927 Mediterranean cruise was 64 days long, more than half of which were spent in ports, and visited many of the same cities reached on the world cruise. Unlike the world cruise, which started and ended in New York, the Mediterranean cruises started in New York and ended in Southampton.
The 1926-27 world cruise started a day earlier and ended two days later than the 1925-26 cruise. This 132-day itinerary allowed for more than 55 days in various ports. The only other substantial change to the 1925-26 cruise was that this one spent a day-and-a-half in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles; apparently the city on the Bay was a more popular place to visit than the one in southern California.
Click image to view and download a PDF of this booklet from the University of British Columbia Chung collection.
Passengers on the 1925-26 world cruise received an 88-page booklet describing the included and optional excursions that were available at each port. For 1926-27, CP instead issued separate booklets for each major port, a dozen of which are in the Chung collection. They all have the same cover design so I’m only illustrating one above. To download ones for Madeira, Egypt, India, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Singapore, Manila, Shanghai, Peking, and Japan, click on the city or country name. It seems likely that booklets were also prepared for Gibralter, Algiers, Monaco, Naples, Hawaii, San Francisco, Panama, and Havana, but the Chung collection is either missing such booklets or hasn’t yet digitized them.
The Chung collection does not have a copy of the passenger list for this cruise. A copy from other sources reveals that the cruise attracted 489 passengers plus 8 servants. This was only slightly fewer than the 514 (plus 12 servants) in 1925-26. I don’t have passenger lists for 1925 or 1928-29, but otherwise it appears that no other CP world cruises ever carried more than about 440 passengers, and most carried a lot fewer.