The ship was not the first boat.

At Queenstown, passengers for the great liners could make the last part of their approach on a smaller vessel: a tender. It carried them out from shore to the ocean-going ship. Embarkation was a journey of its own.

Look at the people gathered on this tender in a photograph from about 1903. The crowded deck brings the word “passenger” back to human scale. Each person occupied a place in the transfer; the liner lay beyond this smaller boat.

James boarded at Queenstown on 13 October 1904. This earlier photograph lets us see the kind of transfer associated with the port. It is not a photograph of James or his particular departure.