AMERICA’S LONGEST SERVING LINERS

Famed Pacific shipping line Matson Navigation Company built its business transporting cargoes between California and Hawaii, starting with the three-masted schooner Emma Claudina in 1882. By the 1920s the company was expanding its passenger operations, seeking to increase its dominance in the Hawaiian market as well as building the burgeoning tourist trade. In 1927 Matson introduced a liner named Malolo, which proved a boon to the passenger business, carrying Californian celebrities to holidays in Hawaii at Matson’s new luxurious Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu

In 1926 Matson acquired long-time rival Oceanic Steamship Company, which operated routes to the South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia using three aging liners. Seeing the opportunity to modernise and expand the South Pacific service, Matson were awarded a mail contract from the US Government in 1928 on the condition that they added new, fast steamers to the route.

Matson immediately began planning the new ships, working with the designers at Bethlehem Steel’s shipyard in San Francisco. On 29 October 1929, as the stock market crashed at the beginning of the Great Depression, Matson finalised the construction contracts for two sisterships, to be built by Bethlehem Steel at its shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.