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warehouse spruced up for the occasion with bunting and flags. Immediately
adjacent to it sat the Marine Building, then the tallest building in the Empire, and
in walking ashore I observed a nicely laid-out city, but with some curious features
(such as pubs – though in England most would qualify only as rather shabby bars
– having separate entrances for ‘men’ and ‘women and escorts’) and singularly
ugly busses. A few passengers boarded and we sailed for Seattle.

Seattle was a very different proposition. A port more spread-out than
Vancouver, one quickly realised that it played a different geographical role from
that Canadian port. Vancouver was the end of the rail line across the country,
the coast north of the city being sparsely inhabited because of the mountainous
topography. In many respects Vancouver is quite remote, the nearest city of any
size, other than Seattle, being Calgary, over 650 miles away to the east over the
Rockies. Seattle, on the other hand, is not only an important industrial city (the
home of Boeing for example, and is a well-known intellectual hothouse) but it
also provided air and sea access to Alaska, the largest state in the United States,
purchased in 1867 for about 2 cents an acre, and which had been admitted to
the union only in 1959. Alaska being politically and physically isolated from the
contiguous states by western Canada, Seattle was a major transportation centre,
which by 1964 had become of considerable economic importance to the US; the
discovery of gold had created a maelstrom of activity from the 1890s, later to
be supplanted by commodities, in particular lumber and, as referred to earlier,
the discovery of oil on the state’s north slope. This concentration on trade and
commerce to the north was apparent in the number and newness of bulk carriers
and ferries that monopolised the wharves and slipways of this industrious
harbour; there were even small passenger ships engaged in Alaska cruises!

But of immediate significance was the fact that the day had been designated
‘Oriana Day’. Though not an insignificant passenger port, Oriana was by all
measures the largest passenger ship to visit to that time, and it must be said that
the civic authorities had made much of our arrival. Whether or not the Terminal
was inferior or superior to that of Vancouver could not easily be seen, so festooned
with people, banners and flags was it. The effort to welcome even extended to the
officers; I was fortunate enough to be offered the day out with the representatives
of the local tug company, who bundled us into taxis and took us around the city
and over the longest floating bridge in the world (how true that representation
was I did not know; I had not even heard of any other such bridge). We witnessed
a city facing the future with a high degree of confidence, for less than two years
before our arrival the Seattle World’s Fair had been a striking success; friends
of our parents – the Daveys – had attended because of the propinquity of
Vancouver, where their daughter and son-in-law resided, he being Canadian and
working for Canadian National Railways (CNR) and having been sent to UK to
see how a small country could efficiently manage such a complex rail system as
was Britain’s. She (Gog, the English having a curious propensity for creating pithy

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