Ebb Tide of Elegance : CROSSING & CRUISING, <i> By John Maxtone-Graham (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $30; 311 pp.)</i>

On the maiden voyage of the Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1969, Sir Basil Smallpiece, chairman of the Cunard Line, and his deputy, Lord Mancroft, summoned the American journalists aboard to a sailing-night cocktail party to explain the concept of manners. Not being used to good service ourselves, we were told, we would probably not be able to appreciate the very highest British standard that we would enjoy aboard the ship, but we should nevertheless be aware that it was there.

Reeling from this preemptive scolding of our nation and the undeserving passengers it was expected to provide to keep the ship afloat, we made our way to our assigned places at dinner. Although we had slunk away as soon as decently possible, the late sitting was in progress.

A waiter appeared immediately. “You’re late, love, so you’re going to have to wait,” he announced, and disappeared.

The gracious era whose last manifestation generous editors had sent us to capture (my less fortunate colleagues gave me a bon voyage present of the sheet music to “Nearer My God to Thee”) was already over.

Sir Basil left the QE2 by helicopter that first day, and jetted across the Atlantic to rejoin her for the gala New York welcome, thus exemplifying the modern businessman whose time was too valuable to spend on a ship. Passengers and stewards who recognized one another from the Queen Mary developed a naughty hand gesture (based on the QE2’s one funnel in contrast to the Queen Mary’s three), which they exchanged to express their shared disapproval of the design.

The QE2 was (and still is) continuing maritime tradition by sometimes crossing the Atlantic, but she was obviously at heart a cruise ship, intended for mass entertainment, not privileged transportation. The fine points were not even attempted.

Well, so what? What were all those nostalgia-soaked, luxury-mongering people--who perhaps should be reminded of the horrendous ocean voyages endured by their ancestors, so that their generation would have the discretionary income to travel--upset about? Crossing is no longer practical, but plenty of cruises are available for those who wish to be pampered at sea. John Maxtone-Graham’s book has “crusty North Atlantic devotees (who) sometimes sneer at present-day cruising” pegged right in the preface.

Maxtone-Graham has previously written separate books on crossing and cruising, as well as numerous other books about passenger ships, and this is a miscellaneous collection of minor notes and yarns, alternating descriptions of departed transatlantic ships with those of modern cruise liners. Although he interviews a retired French cabin boy, and reports that turn-of-the-century crew members habitually raped seasick steerage women, his chief subject is what has been and is now available to the leisure classes at their first-class (now democratically one-class) leisure.

But his stated thesis--that shipboard life is more or less the same as it has always been for the well-heeled passenger--is belied by his observations.

On one type of popular cruise, he denies that he hated the voyage as his friends had predicted, and then goes on to complain that “loudspeakers brayed relentlessly all week long, whether pitches for personalized cruise videotapes or songs howled by the Gazebo’s guitarist, whether the shrieks for shapeliest leg competition out on deck or the hysterics of a drag competition among beefy male passengers”; and to deplore “the vulgar camaraderie” of a piano bar with an Egyptian tomb theme and the decor of the Cats Lounge, in which one is “engulfed in a wasteland of monstrous pop detritus.”

Stop-and-start itineraries, high-pressure shopping and a general eagerness to fill the passengers’ time for them seem to characterize the standard cruise. But modern ships are bound to reflect modern culture, and a replica of an Edwardian ship would hardly be more out of place than one with Cleopatra’s Bar, where Maxtone-Graham only objected to a “roadhouse” atmosphere that “sabotages its inspired design.” And although he murmurs about passengers being treated like “children at camp,” nowhere does he suggest that someone who merely wanted to stare at the horizon would be conscripted to compete in a cross-dressing competition.

He seems, rather, to exhort those displaced transatlantic passengers to chose their cruise ships carefully, perhaps a smaller one with less obtrusive crowds and activities, so that they could stop complaining and go back to the good life. The old classic shipboard exertions of promenading, eyeing the other passengers, brooding romantically, overeating and napping in deck chairs with open books spread-eagled on the blanket are still available.

But as a maritime historian, which is to say someone who has an excuse other than recreation to be on shipboard for a third of each year, Maxtone-Graham may be in a unique position not to understand what it is that the disgruntled miss.

They miss being trapped on shipboard, forced to curtail their activities. Shipboard leisure was so pleasurable exactly because it was involuntary. They had to be on shipboard because they were going somewhere important, and they had to dabble in its luxuries because they were prevented by circumstances from doing anything much else.

These people may have had less in common with vacationers looking for a good time than with the narrator of “Moby-Dick,” who went to sea to drive off the spleen, regulate the circulation, treat a tendency to grow grim about the mouth, and brighten a damp drizzle in the soul. It’s not much help to offer to sell them “Call Me Ishmael” T-shirts and organize them into a whale-spotting competition.