The liner S.S. Madonna in the Bay of Naples

The Madonna was built on the Tyne by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson in 1904 and launched on 23^rd January 1905. Registered at 5,537 tons gross, she measured 431 feet in length with a 48 foot beam and carried accommodation for 54 First Class and 1,650 steerage passengers. Although ordered by the Fabre Line of Marseilles for their North Atlantic emigrant service, she sailed under British colours for her first year of operations (thereby dating this work to that brief period) and only transferred to the French flag in June 1906. Her regular sailings from Marseilles to New York (via Naples) were interrupted by the Great War and when peacetime services resumed in 1919, she changed her intermediate Mediterranean port to Oran. Her final Atlantic crossing took place in March 1925 after which she ran a service on the West coast of Africa before being scrapped in Italy in 1934.