SS Cymric was a steamship of the White Star Line built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast and launched on 12 October 1897.
History
Design
Cymric had originally been intended to be an enlarged version of SS Georgic (1895),[1] being a combination of a passenger liner and livestock carrier, with accommodation for only First Class passengers. During the stages of her design layout, it became clearer to the designers at Harland & Wolff that combining passengers and livestock had become rather unpopular, so the spaces designated for cattle were reconfigured into Third Class accommodations. Cymric retained her relatively small and lower-powered machinery, intended to drive the ship at the slower, more economical speeds of a cargo-liner. When her livestock spaces were removed in favour of more passenger accommodation, the high internal volume provided by the former cargo space and the relatively small machinery space (as opposed to the more speed-orientated passenger liners of the time, which dedicated a large proportion of their hull space to boilers and engines) produced a ship that was relatively slow for a passenger liner but with much more interior space and an uncommonly high degree of comfort.