MS Selandia

 ( Merchant Ships Of Denmark ) 

She was built at Burmeister & Wain in Copenhagen, and launched on 4 November 1911 before embarking on her maiden journey from Copenhagen to Bangkok on 22 February 1912. Selandia did not have a funnel; instead exhaust from her engines escaped through exhaust ports in the aft mast.

Built for cargo and passenger services between Scandinavia, Genoa, Italy, and Bangkok, Thailand, Selandia had "very ample and rather luxurious" cabins for 20 first class passengers, single-berth cabins of "exceptional size, with toilet and bath for every two cabins, and an extra feature is the servants' rooms, arranged in connection with private cabins."

She is frequently referred to as "the world's first large ocean-going diesel-powered ship", an "experiment," as previous powered vessels were driven by steam. The new motorships were described as "smokeless" and caused some to describe them as "phantom ships" with an incident during the trials for Selandia in which a captain of another ship ignored warnings and ran across her bows because he "saw no smoke." Some onlookers in London, perturbed by this new system, called it "the Devil Ship." The ship attracted curious crowds from London to San Francisco that were often skeptical of a deep ocean ship not powered by the commonly used triple expansion steam engine; yet within ten years there were over 2,000,000 deadweight capacity tons in commerce powered by diesel engines and British experts calculated the motorship had a 40% advantage in fuel costs, with fewer crew and steadier sea speeds.

There is evidence to say that the engine installation in Selandia was a world-first on numerous points, but she was not the world's first diesel-driven ocean-going ship, having been beaten to it by the Dutch tanker Vulcanus two years earlier.