For just over a hundred years there was a regular passenger liner service across the Pacific connecting Australia and New Zealand with North America, the main terminal ports being San Francisco and Vancouver. This book describes the rather chaotic development of these services into a reliable and successful trade that flourished into the 1970s before the advent of the jumbo-jet led to a rather rapid decline and eventual termination of the trans-Pacific passenger liner. With his usual meticulous research, Peter Plowman describes the liners that traversed the Pacific and companies that owned and managed them. The main North American ports were San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company was the first to instigate regular operations, the route was then taken over by the Oceanic Steamship Company. This in turn became the Matson Line with its famous liners the Mariposa and the Monterey. The Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand used the Tahiti and Maunganui. Details of the liners are given, their voyages, changes of name and ownership and their eventual fate. The various company mergers and associations are covered (such as that of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand). Some of the liners were requisitioned during World War I and II. The Aorangi for example, survived the war. Her sister ship, the Niagara was victim to a mine.