For many people, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer — and a time for dreaming about travel to far-off destinations.

It seems fitting, then, that the San Diego Maritime Museum chose this weekend to open a new exhibit — its first major gallery show since the COVID-19 pandemic — to highlight 100 years of ship travel and the great age of steam.

Saturday was the first full day for the public to see artifacts from such famous ocean liners as the Titanic, the SS Normandie, and the Empress of Britain. There’s a souvenir nail file from the SS Yale purportedly owned by Wyatt Earp. There’s a diary from a passenger on the last voyage of the Queen Mary, in 1967, to its current berth in Long Beach.

Prominently featured are colorful posters, menus, tickets and brochures from the museum’s collection of cruise ship memorabilia, one of the largest in California. Many have never been shown publicly.

Other items are on loan from Oceanside collector Peter Knego, who has spent two decades rescuing furniture, doors, staircase railings, lights and various fixtures from ship-stripping yards in India.

Called “Steam and Splendor,” the exhibit is staged on two floors of the museum’s 1898 Victorian-era steam ferryboat Berkeley.

“The way we enjoy ourselves at sea today has a long inheritance,” said Kevin Sheehan, a museum librarian who curated the show. “The artifacts and ephemera in this collection convey that.”

He said the exhibit tells several stories, starting with a nod to the museum’s most famous possession, the Star of India, which was launched in 1863 and spent a quarter-century transporting immigrants from London to New Zealand. It circumnavigated the globe 21 times.

The Star of India at the Maritime Museum in San Diego.

(Brittany Cruz-Fejeran/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

There’s a model of the sailing ship in one corner of the exhibit, marked with its original name: Euterpe.

“The people who emigrated on ships like Euterpe did so under difficult conditions,” Sheehan said, and lingering memories of those hardships presented challenges to ocean-liner executives hoping to attract passengers in the early decades of the 1900s.

The exhibit shows how the companies tried to convince people that steamships were fast and safe, a task made more difficult after the luxury liner Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 and sank, killing about 1,500 people.

A black shawl worn by one of the survivors, Carrie Constance Toogood Chaffee, is on display at the museum, near a model of the ship. She was a 47-year-old voice teacher from North Dakota. Her husband, Herbert, was among those who perished.

The black lace shawl that Titanic survivor Carrie Constance Toogood Chaffee was wearing when she stepped onto a lifeboat.

(Kristian Carreon/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)

When Chaffee returned to North Dakota, she had the family home demolished and built a new one to start a new life.

Liner companies had to reinvent themselves, too, after airplane travel became more popular. That’s another story told in the Maritime Museum exhibit.

“People were no longer willing to spend a week at sea to get somewhere,” Sheehan said.

Cunard tried to combat that with one of the most famous slogans in travel-advertising history — “Getting there is half the fun” — and the companies gradually shifted into what we recognize as today’s cruise industry: from destination travel to sightseeing journeys.

Museum visitor Margaret Clark, a University City resident, enjoyed the evolution captured by the exhibit’s artifacts.

“You really get this sense of how travel went from this arduous chore people did because they had to, into something people would do for fun,” she said.

Clark, an “old-boat buff” who’s had a membership to the museum for about 25 years, said she found many of the artifacts surprising — in particular a piano bar from the Carnival ship Tropicale.

“It was so beautiful and unexpected,” she said. “I was enthralled.”

Near the piano bar is a bit of pop culture — a bronze mermaid statue that appeared in numerous pool scenes on the TV show “The Love Boat.”

The bronze mermaid statue, created by Norwegian artist Per Ung, that was aboard MV Island Princess and also seen on the television series “The Love Boat.”

(Kristian Carreon/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Sheehan said the idea for the exhibit surfaced about six months ago when he was talking to a museum executive about the ocean liner and cruise ship ephemera in the archives. It’s about 60 linear feet of material, most of it donated by private collectors over the years.

“I suggested it was a pity that so many of these treasures had never been seen by the public,” he said.

The project snowballed when Knego, the Oceanside collector, got involved. Now it wasn’t just flat paper artifacts like advertising posters and ship menus and cabin diagrams. It was dining room chairs and the door to a “smoking room” and steamer trunks.

“The stuff Peter loaned us changed the nature of the exhibit,” Sheehan said, “enabling us to put the various objects in conversation with each other.”

Museum officials said the exhibit is scheduled to be open for one year.