One of the earliest of her type, she was designed as a transatlantic liner and mail ship for Allan Line, built in Scotland, and launched in 1904 as RMS Virginian.

She was a technological and commercial success, but was only a 502 GRT excursion steamship making short-sea trips in and around the Firth of Clyde, and her running costs – and hence passenger fares – were higher than those of her competitors with conventional reciprocating engines.

[1] However, in October 1903 Allan Line announced that it had ordered a pair of new 10,000 GRT liners, that they would be turbine-powered, and that they would have the same three-screw arrangement as King Edward.

[2] And on 28 January 1904, seven months before Victorian was launched, the Government of Canada announced it had awarded Allan Line a transatlantic mail contract.

But Workman, Clark did not find enough labour to build both ships in time, so the order for Virginian was transferred to Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse on the River Clyde.

[13] When RMS Titanic sank on 15 April 1912, Virginian was about 178 nautical miles (330 km) north of her, steaming in the opposite direction.

[19] Captain Gambell said Virginian passed where Titanic sank "at a distance of six or seven miles", but could get no closer as "The ice was closely packed... and there would have been great danger in going nearer.

[15][16][17] On 29 May 1914 Canadian Pacific lost the liner RMS Empress of Ireland in a collision with the collier Storstad, and 1,024 people were killed.

[4] SAL had carried significant numbers of Swedish migrants to the USA, but in the 1920s new US immigration laws affected the transatlantic trade.

[28] On 8 January 1935 while Drottningholm was docking in fog at West 57th Street Pier in New York a steel cable fouled one of her propellers.

[4] In 1925 Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller sailed to the USA on Drottningholm, leaving Gothenburg on 26 June and arriving in New York 10 days later.

[33][34] In January 1939, Niels Bohr sailed to the USA on Drottningholm, carrying with him the news about the discovery of nuclear fission.

[38] On 3 February, 150 Finnish-American and Finnish-Canadian volunteers to fight for Finland in the Winter War sailed on Drottningholm from New York.

[39] In March 1940 Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn from German-occupied Poland reached New York aboard Drottningholm.

[4] The discrepancy may be because in August 1945 Drottningholm reverted from charter trips to her regular commercial Gothenburg – New York route, but she continued to carry refugees from Europe to North America.

On her first eastbound voyage she left from New York on 7 May 1942 for Lisbon carrying Bulgarian, German, Italian, Romanian nationals including ambassadors and diplomats.

[43] Drottningholm started her second eastbound crossing from Jersey City on 3 June 1942[44] carrying 985 Axis nationals, including diplomats.

On 12 June she reached Lisbon, where she was held to await trains from Axis countries carrying people for repatriation to the Americas.

They included 470 US citizens, 110 South American diplomats and nationals, and a group of Canadian women rescued from the Egyptian liner Zamzam, which the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis had sunk in April 1941.

First to be released was the reporter Ruth Knowles, who had escaped execution by the Gestapo after spending a year serving with the Chetniks resisting the German and Italian occupation of Yugoslavia.

Her white hull was emblazoned on both sides with her name and "Sverige" ("Sweden") in huge capital letters, between them were stripes of blue and yellow, the colours of the Swedish flag, and above them was the word "Diplomat".

[52] On 15 or 16 March 1944 Drottningholm reached Jersey City from Lisbon with 662 passengers including 160 civilian internees from Vittel internment camp, 35 or 36 wounded US servicemen and a group of US diplomats from the former Vichy France, which Germany and Italy had occupied since November 1942.

[53] 900 UK civilians and PoWs were brought by train under International Red Cross protection from German-occupied countries to Lisbon.

[54][55] However, by summer 1944 the French Resistance was at its height, sabotaging rail and road transport in France, and especially in the southwest toward the Spanish frontier.

The Allied PoWs would be brought by sea and land to Gothenburg, where they would embark on Drottningholm, Gripsholm and the UK troop ship Arundel Castle.

She had landed the Channel Islands and UK nationals in Liverpool[65] by 23 March[66] and was then due to take the Argentinians and Portuguese to Lisbon and the Turks to Istanbul.

[64] On 11 April she arrived in Istanbul, carrying 137 Turkish Jews who had been released from Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as part of a prisoner exchange.

[72] On 29 October 1946 SAL announced that at the end of the year it would sell Drottningholm and that her buyers would register her in Panama and operate her between Genoa and Argentina.

She weathered three storms, was forced to heave to for 43 hours and was covered with ice when she reached New York two days late on 11 February 1948.

The liner was 50 years old by then and, other than the shore tender SS Nomadic, was the last surviving ship in connection with the Titanic incident as well as the last former member of the Allan Line.