In Spring 1819, the S.S. Savannah, which had been built in her namesake city in Georgia, became the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. This was less impressive than it sounds, however, as the ship relied mainly on sails and used steam power only for about 11 percent of the trip. At less than 100 feet long, the ship was too small to carry enough coal to power the entire voyage.

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Nevertheless, this was a historic trip and it would be 18 years before a ship made the entire journey under steam. Canadian Pacific commemorated the trip with this menu cover, which it used for lunches on its trans-Atlantic steamers in 1961. This particular lunch menu was for September 8 on the Empress of England and offers at least as many items as the dinner menus on that voyage. Continue reading →

This menu is a tribute to Alexander MacKenzie, who in 1793 became the first European to cross the Rocky Mountains and reach the Pacific Coast. The building in the background is a “crofters cottage,” meaning the home of a tenant farmer, on the Island of Harris, where MacKenzie was born.

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The cover painting, as well as the paintings on the other menus in this series, is signed “Lendon.” A book of Canadian Pacific posters includes a 1930 poster by Lendon, but the authors of the book were unable to find out any information about him. The signature on that poster is “Lendon London,” indicating that the artist was from England, not Canada. Continue reading →

“Nef” is an unusual enough word that it isn’t in my spell-checker’s dictionary. Yet the on-line Merriam-Webster defines it as “an ornamental table utensil (as for holding a napkin, knife, and spoon) shaped like a ship.” The back of this menu admits that it “has no real bearing on the history of sailing ships. It is above all an example of the silversmith’s art.” But it is likely that people with nautical experience are most likely to encounter silver (and other) nefs.

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The Silver Nef menu is a part of a series that also included a man-of-war ship viewed from the rear and early steam locomotives. This particular menu was used on July 31, 1961 on the Empress of Canada, which had departed Montreal on July 27 and was scheduled to arrive in Liverpool on August 3. Continue reading →

Today’s menu features an English landscape painter named John Constable (1776-1837). The cover also shows Willy Lott’s Cottage, a house that was featured in several of Constable’s paintings and that survives today, partly because it was popularized by Constable. One of the paintings that featured the cottage, the Hay Wain, won a gold medal in Paris and today is considered one of the two most popular paintings in England.

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This particular menu was used on the Empress of England on June 16, 1957. This was for the “au revoir dinner” and page 2 of the menu includes a summary of the log of the six-day voyage. Continue reading →

The photo on this menu cover is taken from the same spot as the photo on a Canadian Pacific booklet that I estimated was published in 1948. However, the locomotives in the photos are quite different. Where the locomotive on the booklet is a 2-10-4 Selkirk that was built in 1938, the locomotive on the menu is a 4-6-4 Hudson that was probably built in 1937. CP used Selkirks to pull most of its passenger trains over the Rockies, and the Hudsons were only about 58 percent as powerful as the Selkirks, so the train being pulled in this photo must be smaller than normal.

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Unlike the Royal Hudsons built in 1937, this one isn’t semi-streamlined. If I read the number on the side of the locomotive correctly, it was 2817. Its sister locomotive, 2816, was recently restored to operation by Canadian Pacific and looks quite beautiful despite the lack of streamlining. I imagine that the photos of both the Selkirk and the Hudson entering the tunnel were taken by Nicholas Morant, though I didn’t find either one by glancing through a book of his photos. Continue reading →