The background to this scene is similar as to how I came to the "United States" image, an old grainy 1951 movieclip on You-tube of an early morning arrival of the ss "Queen Elizabeth" in her home port of Southampton in southern England. The clip showed the liner being swung around toward the Ocean Terminal with the assistance of tugs . 

Having grown up in the port of Rotterdam the arrival and departure of the great Holland America liners was always a fascinating sight to behold, especially in the earlier days when many tugboats were required and most of them still of the steam variety. This produced a lot of steam and belching smoke that would partly obscure the liner and therefore made it look all the more impressive. Arrival and departure of the modern day cruise liners cannot hold a candle to that.

Somehow I always have kept those images in my head and looked for a way to capture that. Following the same path as I did with the "United States" image I took a screen shot of the frame that I felt captured it best. Vague on detail, but again I have lots of photos in my archive, but had to dig a little further to find more detailed images of the typical Southampton tug boats in order to render them properly.

As the film was in black and white, bringing in the colour is entirely my artistic prerogative.

The Queen Elizabeth also has a sad footnote to her story. After a short and failed stint as a hotel and tourist attraction in Port Everglades (Florida) she was sold to Chinese interests in Hong Kong and, while being converted to a floating university, caught fire, burned out and sank in the middle of Hong Kong harbour. Sad end for a marvellous ship with a marvellous history, but that is another story.