RMS Oceanic was a transatlantic ocean liner built for the White Star Line. She sailed on her maiden voyage on 6 September 1899 and was the largest ship in the world until 1901. At the outbreak of World War I she was converted to an armed merchant cruiser. On 8 August 1914 she was commissioned into Royal Navy service. On 25 August 1914, the newly designated HMS Oceanic departed Southampton to patrol the waters from the North Scottish mainland to Faroe. On 8 September she ran aground and was wrecked off the island of Foula, in the Shetland Islands. Background In the late 1890s the White Star Line's existing prestige liners Majestic and Teutonic, both launched in 1889, had become outmoded due to rapid advances in marine technology: Their competitors the Cunard Line had introduced the Campania and Lucania in 1893, and from 1897 the German Norddeutscher Lloyd began introducing four new Kaiser-class ocean liners which included the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. In order to compete with these ships the White Star Line needed to produce a new flagship which could rival them. In 1897 White Star put Cymric into service. She was bigger than the Teutonic and Majestic, but not the largest in the world. Cymric was larger than Campania and Lucania, but not faster. Cymric introduced the strategy of luxury over speed. White Star Line used this strategy on the Oceanic. Design and construction Their new flagship Oceanic was built at Harland and Wolff’s Queen's Island yard at Belfast, as was the tradition with White Star Line ships, and her keel was laid down in 1897. She used the luxury over speed strategy, which first began with the Cymric in 1897. She was named after their first successful liner RMS Oceanic of 1870, and was to be the first ship to exceed Brunel's SS Great Eastern in length, although not in tonnage. At 17,272 gross register tons, the future "Queen of the Ocean" cost one million pounds sterling (), and required 1,500 shipwrights to complete. Oceanic was not however designed to be the fastest ship afloat or compete for the Blue Riband, as it was the White Star Line's policy to focus on size and comfort rather than speed. Oceanic was designed for a service speed of . She was powered by two four-cylinder triple expansion engines, which were when constructed the largest of their type in