cruise ship nightmare videos

Carnival passengers recount ‘nightmare’ cruise as storm floods ship

Videos showed the carnival sunshine cabins and hallways flooding and ceilings leaking.

Matthew Branham and his fiancée, Madison Davis, were lying by a Carnival Sunshine pool on Friday aboard a cruise returning to Charleston, S.C., from the Bahamas when an announcement came over the loudspeaker. The captain was expecting rougher weather that evening, but there was nothing to worry about. So Branham and Davis didn’t worry.

As the day went on, “We noticed it started getting cooler in the afternoon — much, much cooler,” said Branham, 25, of Castlewood, Va. “And then it was like a switch was flipped, and it literally turned into a nightmare.”

En route back to Charleston Friday night into Saturday, the Carnival Sunshine navigated into a strong storm system that battered the southeast over the holiday weekend. Videos emerged on social media showing cabins and hallways flooding, shop floors littered with destroyed merchandise and leaking ceilings . Passenger Brad Morrell snapped a photo of an automated instrument map reporting a 69 knot, or 79 mph, wind.

#CarnivalSunshine : Due to return to Charleston, South Carolina this Saturday, May 27, 2023, has been delayed due to severe weather. The ship is currently off the South Carolina coast and holding position, unable to return to the port because of high winds & rough seas. #cruise 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/2B6HlAn2yD — ∼Marietta (@MariettaDaviz) May 28, 2023

Carnival said in a statement that the weather was unexpectedly strong, causing conditions that were rougher than forecast, but that its fleet operations center team, which relies on outside meteorology resources for itinerary planning, “coordinated to keep the ship in its safest location.”

“Attempting to sail out of the large front could have been dangerous,” the statement continued. “The ship proceeded to the port as soon as the weather began to clear.”

Strong Southeast storm slams Carolinas

Carnival said the captain made “several announcements about the weather and the delay it caused in returning to Charleston, asking guests to use extra precaution while walking around the ship.” Additionally, “some of the worst weather occurred in the overnight hours when announcements are not typically made, but guests and crew were safe.”

The ship’s medical staff did help a “small number” of guests and crew members who needed minor assistance following the storm. Despite the significant damage and a delay in schedule, Carnival Sunshine embarked on its next five-day Bahama sailing on Saturday.

From their sea-view room, Branham and Davis watched as waves surged over their window and braced themselves as the 892-foot-long ship lurched in the storm.

“Waves were hitting the boat so hard that it was like an earthquake experience, jarring you like a really rough roller coaster — even in the middle floor,” Branham said.

They were told to stay in their cabins. Meanwhile, Branham said, TVs were falling off walls, and glassware was sliding off shelves and shattering on the floor. “You could not stand up in your room,” he said. “You could be thrown from the bed.”

They packed up their belongings when their floor started to flood and took shelter in a main lobby area.

“All of the employees were sprinting downstairs with life vests,” Branham said. “There were little kids besides us screaming and crying and throwing fits.”

Throughout the storm, Branham wondered why there weren’t more announcements from Carnival staff. Besides the warning of rougher seas earlier Friday and one Saturday morning after they’d weathered the storm, Branham said they weren’t given any official updates on their situation. When he asked workers what was going on, they told him not to worry.

⁦⁦ @CarnivalCruise ⁩ #carnivalsunshine still 75mph winds at 9:25am. Sitting and spinning in the Atlantic. pic.twitter.com/NITCO2l9Ss — FlyersCaptain™®© (@flyerscaptain) May 29, 2023

“But you see rooms flooded, and you can pick up a handful of sand and you’re kind of like, ‘What in the world? Why is nobody telling us anything?’” Branham said.

Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer and cruise industry legal expert, says his firm has been contacted by some Carnival Sunshine passengers who were injured during the storm, including a man who says he was struck by a door and broke his foot. Others have asked him about the potential for a class-action lawsuit.

While Walker said passengers should make their complaints known to Carnival, he doesn’t believe filing a lawsuit would be an efficient next step. Instead, impacted passengers can ask Carnival for a refund or a credit for another cruise, although there’s no guarantee the cruise line will grant such requests.

Pete Peterson, owner of Storybook Cruises , which is affiliated with Cruise Planners, said cruise ships keep a close eye on weather developments and will adjust their itinerary depending on the severity of the storm.

“Cruise lines monitor the weather all the time. They’re not going to put their passengers in harm’s way,” said Peterson, who has been a cruise adviser for more than 20 years and has sailed on nearly 60 cruises. “Obviously, some cruise lines are better at doing this than others.”

In 2016, Royal Caribbean’s Anthem of the Seas returned to port after cruising into a “bomb cyclone,” which damaged the ship amid winds gusting to 100 mph. The ship sailed into the remnants of Hurricane Hermine seven months later, causing additional problems.

To ensure the safety and comfort of its passengers, a cruise ship can alter its course and circumvent the rough weather system. In stormy conditions, the crew can deploy the stabilizers, which will prevent the ship from rolling and bucking.

“You don’t experience the up and down,” Peterson said. “It’s not as rough a ride.”

Both approaches can add to a cruise line’s expenditures, Peterson said. Stabilizers slow the vessel, thereby consuming more fuel. Sailing around the storm can take longer than the original route and disrupt the company’s cruise schedule, leading to delays or cancellations. The cruise line may have to reimburse passengers or provide them with future credits because of the inconvenience.

“When they do something like that, it’s going to cost them money,” Peterson said.

Craig Setzer , a meteorologist and hurricane preparedness specialist, said that even with the hurricane-like conditions and flooding, “I would never be in doubt of the vessel’s integrity,” he said. “Cruise ships are structurally very, very sound and can survive a lot. They’re really rugged.”

Matthew Cappucci contributed to this report.

More cruise news

Living at sea: Travelers on a 9-month world cruise are going viral on social media. For some travelers, not even nine months was enough time on a ship; they sold cars, moved out of their homes and prepared to set sail for three years . That plan fell apart, but a 3.5-year version is waiting in the wings.

Passengers beware: It’s not all buffets and dance contests. Crime data reported by cruise lines show that the number of sex crimes has increased compared to previous years. And though man-overboard cases are rare, they are usually deadly .

The more you know: If you’re cruise-curious, here are six tips from a newcomer. Remember that in most cases, extra fees and add-ons will increase the seemingly cheap price of a sailing. And if you happen to get sick , know what to expect on board.

Watch: Passengers Sick And Terrified As Storm Floods Carnival Sunshine Cruise Ship

A cruise ship nightmare came to life when rough coastal storms struck the Carnival Sunshine cruise ship over the weekend, flooding its decks and hallways and leaving passengers vomiting and terrified. The ship’s return to the port was also delayed due to the rough weather.

The aftermath aboard Carnival Sunshine after a severe storm. The crew from Deck 0-4 evacuated to the theater, and anywhere they could rest… the crew bar destroyed. pic.twitter.com/MqsDJYvrSG — Crew Center (@CrewCenter) May 28, 2023

Per Fox Weather, a powerful storm off the southeastern coast of the United States hit the cruise ship returning to Charleston from a weekend trip to the Bahamas. The storm was accompanied by huge waves, heavy rains and strong winds that hit the ship with their mighty force.

“You could smell people being sick walking down the halls,” one passenger told the Daily Mail.

A crew member said that, fortunately, all passengers were safe during the incident. It was mentioned that some crew and guests required medical assistance onboard during the storm, but casualties were prevented. The weather delayed their arrival on Sunday, so the ship’s next voyage was also delayed.

Some guests were more frustrated than others. Sharon Tutrone, professor at Coastal Carolina University and a passenger onboard the Carnival Sunshine, tweeted, “We didn’t wait it out. We sailed right into [the storm] and spent 11 hours pitching, diving, and rolling,”

“We were surrounded by lightning, and the ship took a huge hit by a wave and sounded like it split in two.”

Pictures shared online by passengers show water gushing down the hallways and stairwells. The shops on the ship looked like they were ransacked by wind and rain.

Another passenger Daniel Taylor stated that he went to an onboard venue to enjoy a show when the captain announced that they would be travelling through rough weather.

@CarnivalCruise #carnivalsunshine The morning after the storm. 9:07am. pic.twitter.com/MbbgtP5yLc — FlyersCaptain™®© (@flyerscaptain) May 29, 2023

He said he could hear the sound of the ship hitting huge swells over the music, and it was scary.

“Stage lights mounted on the ceiling began to shake, the disco ball started swinging, and the LED wall on the stage,” which he estimated to be approximately 20ft wide and 3 feet tall, “began rolling side by side on its own.”

On the evening of Friday, by 8 pm, the crew began to evacuate the public decks, and between Friday and Saturday, the passengers lost their internet connections which terrified them more.

At 7:30 am the next day, the cruise director said the ship finally reached the harbour but was waiting to dock . It finally docked at 5:30 pm on Saturday, around 9 hours past its original schedule.

Reference: cbsnews, businessinsider, independent

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Watch: Massive rogue wave batters cruise ship in North Sea

A deadly storm in northern europe churned up a massive rogue wave which terrified cruise ship passengers on one vessel and disabled another ship. the cruise line initially reported no serious injuries, but german media reported that three passengers were taken to a hospital upon disembarking. passengers reported broken bones, scrapes and bruises..

Cruise ship rocked by massive rogue wave in the North Sea

Rough weather in the North Sea churned up massive waves which battered a cruise ship in the North Sea. "I love it," said the tour operator. "However, a few of my guests are not so happy."

A rogue wave terrified cruise ship passengers on the North Sea on Thursday as it towered over and tossed the ship, Tour Operator Thorsten Hansen told TMX.

"I love it," posted Hansen on social media . "However, a few of my guests are not so happy."

The video shows the rogue wave ahead of the Otto Sverdrup off the coast of Germany on Friday. The ship is over 450 feet long, 70 feet wide, almost 16,000 tons, and has eight decks, and still, the freak wave dwarfed the ship. The Otto Sverdrup can hold up to 500 passengers.

WHAT IS A ROGUE WAVE? THOSE MONSTERS OF THE OCEAN ARE MORE COMMON THAN YOU THINK

The rogue wave that tossed a Norwegian cruise ship.

(Credit: Thorsten Hansen/Tour operator and HX Hurtigruten Expeditions Agency /TMX / FOX Weather)

Storm Pia's hurricane-force winds punished the North Sea and much of Europe Thursday and Friday, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. The rough seas interacting with the ocean floor and coasts built up the rogue wave, which can be twice the size of surrounding waves, according to NOAA.

Hansen said the wave was the same one that hit a nearby cruise ship, the Maud, at about the same time. The wave smashed at least two windows on the bridge of the more than 16,000-ton ship, and the incoming seawater knocked out the navigation system and radar . It threw the ship with 266 passengers and 131 crew into darkness as the power failed, according to local media and the cruise line HX .

The crew was able to restart one motor, according to a trade paper .

WATCH: PLANES ABORT HARROWING LANDINGS IN ENGLAND AS STORM PIA RAKES US WITH 50-80 MPH GUSTS

File: A photo of the Maud at port before the accident.

(Refinitive Eikon, Magnus Thor Hafsteinsson / FOX Weather)

"Spent 4 hours in survival suits and life vests while the Danish Coastguard and local oil rigs sent out rescue boats to escort us and provide navigation as the crew manually steered the boat from the engine room," one passenger wrote on Facebook. "Hands down, one of the scariest nights of my life in gale force winds and 11 meter (36 feet) waves."

The ship was about 125 miles off the coast of Denmark on a trip from Norway to England.

PASSENGER KILLED AFTER ROGUE WAVE SMASHES INTO CRUISE SHIP

The purple shows the path of the ship from Norway to 120 miles off the coast of Denmark. The United Kingdom is to the west.

"There were about 20 minutes in which I thought the ship might capsize, it was rocking so much and we had no idea what had happened," an American passenger posted on X, formerly Twitter.

The cruise line initially reported no serious injuries, but German media reported that three passengers were taken to a hospital upon disembarking. Passengers reported broken bones, scrapes and bruises.

Storm Pia altered the course of the ship. Local media reported that about 200 people disembarked in Norway due to the bad weather before the accident.

The ship limped to Bremerhaven, Germany, where many passengers had to stay aboard due to limited flights out of the area.

VACATION TURNS INTO NIGHTMARE FOR A SEATTLE MAN AFTER ‘ROGUE WAVE’ PARALYZES HIM

Pia churned up huge surf swamping coastal towns. People walk on the pier in Hammerhavn near Sandvig on the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm, Denmark, on December 22, 2023, after storm Pia hit the country.

(PELLE RINK/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP / Getty Images)

HX reported that the ship is not expected to return to service until February after repairs.

Passengers and crew on the Otto Sverdrup were rushed off the vessel because Storm Pia flooding closed the harbor, according to Hansen.

High seas knocked containers from cargo ships as well. On Saturday, beaches in Norway were littered with goods.

HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER

Several containers stranded between Tranum and Slette beach, northern Norway, on December 23, 2023 after being lost in the North Sea during storm Pia.

(CLAUS BJOERN LARSEN/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP / Getty Images)

Elsewhere, Storm Pia blew over a 65-foot Christmas tree onto a woman, killing her, in Belgium, according to AP . Another person was killed by another falling tree in the Netherlands.

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Cruise turns into nightmare as powerful storm floods ship and leaves passengers vomiting

The ship arrived nine hours late after riding through the centre of a storm, article bookmarked.

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Vacation dreams turned to nightmares for some Carnival Cruise Line passengers when torrential rains flooded the ship over the weekend.

Carnival Sunshine was returning to Charleston on Saturday after a six-day Bahamas cruise when the ship was set upon by a storm . Torrential rains flooded the hallways of the ship and rough sea conditions made some passengers nauseous.

"You could smell people being sick walking down the halls," one passenger told The Daily Mail .

A Carnival representative said all of the passengers were safe during the incident.

"Carnival Sunshine's return to Charleston was impacted by the weather and rough seas on Saturday. Guests on board the ship were safe. Our medical staff helped a small number of guests and crew members who needed minor assistance," the company told WCIV . "The weather's prolonged impact on the Charleston area delayed the ship's arrival on Sunday, and as a result, the next voyage's embarkation was also delayed. We appreciate the patience and understanding of all our guests."

Some guests who experienced the voyage seemed more frustrated than patient.

"We didn't wait it out. We sailed right into [the storm] and spent 11 hours pitching, diving, and rolling," Sharon Tutrone, a professor at Coastal Carolina University and a passenger on board the Carnival Sunshine said on Twitter. "We were surrounded by lightning and the ship took a huge hit by a wave and sounded like it split in two."

In a follow-up tweet, she tagged Carnival and suggested that "maybe you should have a pilot onboard so we didn't have to sit and drift for 6 hours waiting."

Photos from the ship showed water rushing down hallways and stairwells, and on-board shops that look as though they've been ransacked due to the force of the storm.

Another traveler, Daniel Taylor, told The Daily Mail he went to see a show at an onboard venue shortly after the captain announced the ship would be traveling through inclement weather.

He recalled hearing the sound of the ship smashing against huge swells audible over the music.

"Stage lights mounted on the ceiling began to shake, the disco ball started swinging and the LED wall on the stage," which he estimated to be approximately 20ft wide and 3oft tall, "began rolling side by side on its own."

By 8pm on Friday evening the ship's crew began evacuating public decks. During the overnight hours between Friday and Saturday, the passengers lost internet connection, removing their ability to watch the weather on their own.

At 7:30am the next day, the cruise director reportedly confirmed to the passengers that the ship was at the harbour but needed to wait to dock.

The ship was finally docked again at 5:30pm on Saturday night, approximately nine hours past schedule.

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GALVESTON, Texas – A ferocious storm that struck a cruise ship while in the Gulf of Mexico Friday left at least one cabin flooded as torrential rains poured down.

Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas first encountered hail as the ship was heading back to its home port of Galveston, Texas.

Video from a passenger inside their cabin shows hail that can be heard striking the glass door and seen bouncing on a black chair outside and then falling onto a pool of water on the floor.

As heavy rains fall, water on the balcony can then floods into the cabin itself, soaking a path through the carpet, under a bed and leading to the door.

“Hope there’s nothing electrical that we’re gonna get electrocuted on,” said Jessica Helms, who filmed the flooding in her cabin.

She referred to the flooding as a “complete river” that extended across the hall to her neighbor’s room.

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Cruise turns into nightmare as powerful storm floods ship and leaves passengers vomiting

Vacation dreams turned to nightmares for some Carnival Cruise Line passengers when torrential rains flooded the ship over the weekend.

"You could smell people being sick walking down the halls," one passenger told The Daily Mail .

A Carnival representative said all of the passengers were safe during the incident.

Some guests who experienced the voyage seemed more frustrated than patient.

In a follow-up tweet, she tagged Carnival and suggested that "maybe you should have a pilot onboard so we didn't have to sit and drift for 6 hours waiting."

After 14 hours of high winds, rain and massive waves. The ship took a hit from a wave that sounded like the ship split in two. The @Carnival Sunshine is finally in Charleston. @Carnival maybe you should have a pilot onboard so we didn’t have to sit and drift for 6 hours waiting. — Sharon Tutrone (@SHARONTUTRONE) May 27, 2023

The aftermath aboard Carnival Sunshine after a severe storm. The crew from Deck 0-4 evacuated to the theater, and anywhere they could rest… the crew bar destroyed. pic.twitter.com/MqsDJYvrSG — Crew Center (@CrewCenter) May 28, 2023

Photos from the ship showed water rushing down hallways and stairwells, and on-board shops that look as though they've been ransacked due to the force of the storm.

Another traveler, Daniel Taylor, told The Daily Mail he went to see a show at an onboard venue shortly after the captain announced the ship would be traveling through inclement weather.

He recalled hearing the sound of the ship smashing against huge swells audible over the music.

At 7:30am the next day, the cruise director reportedly confirmed to the passengers that the ship was at the harbour but needed to wait to dock.

The ship was finally docked again at 5:30pm on Saturday night, approximately nine hours past schedule.

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Terrifying storm turns Carnival Sunshine dream cruise into nightmare: Passengers share the harrowing ordeal

Carnival sunshine nightmare: storm wreaks havoc on the cruise ship, leaving passengers terrified and vessel battered..

Passengers aboard the Carnival Sunshine cruise ship were left terrified and distressed as a powerful storm off the Southeast coast turned their dream vacation into a nightmare. The vessel, returning from the Bahamas over the Memorial Day weekend, encountered treacherous conditions, leaving passengers shaken and the ship battered.

Videos shared on social media captured the harrowing scenes onboard. One passenger, Brad Morrell, filmed dark clouds engulfing the sky and massive whitecaps thrashing the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was tossed by enormous waves, causing damage and chaos throughout.

Reports from passengers detailed water damage, broken glass, and flooded hallways resembling scenes from a disaster movie. The videos showcased flooded corridors strewn with debris, doors ripped off their hinges, and soaked pipes scattered on the floor. Crew members were forced to evacuate their flooded quarters, adding to the chaos and fear.

Carnival Cruise Line released a statement addressing the incident, attributing the delays and damage to the severe weather and rough seas. The ship's return to Charleston, South Carolina, was significantly impacted, resulting in delayed arrivals and subsequent departures. Some crew cabins were temporarily taken out of service due to water damage, but the public areas of the ship remained open and operational.

The cruise line expressed gratitude for the patience and understanding of all guests, assuring them that the ship's operations had resumed with a five-day Bahamas sailing. However, the disturbing images and accounts shared by passengers shed light on the alarming conditions they endured.

The storm responsible for the turmoil was being monitored by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) as a potential tropical or subtropical development. While it remained a non-tropical low, it unleashed its fury upon the Carnival Sunshine and the coastal areas it passed.

Ironically, forecasters from the NHC had visited the Carnival Cruise Line headquarters in Miami just days before the ship encountered the powerful storm. This raises questions about the cruise line's decision-making and preparedness, as it seems they were aware of the potential risks posed by the weather system.

As the low-pressure system moved inland over North Carolina and gradually weakened, its aftermath continued to dampen holiday plans along the mid-Atlantic and generated dangerous rip currents along the East Coast. The impact on the passengers, however, will likely last longer as they recover from the traumatic experience they endured during what was supposed to be a relaxing getaway.

The Carnival Sunshine incident serves as a chilling reminder of the unpredictable nature of the sea and the need for utmost preparedness and safety measures onboard cruise ships. As passengers recount their horrific ordeal, questions arise about the cruise industry's protocols and the steps taken to ensure the well-being of those onboard.

For now, the passengers and crew of the Carnival Sunshine can only hope to put this nightmare behind them and seek solace in the fact that they survived a terrifying brush with nature's fury on the high seas.

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'Pure Chaos' Erupts on Cruise Ship When Technical Issue Makes Boat Roll to Side for 1 Minute

A dream vacation turned into a nightmare for passengers on a Carnival Cruise Sunday night

A dream vacation turned into a nightmare for passengers on a Carnival Cruise on Sunday night.

According to CBS New York , a malfunctioning switchboard caused the Carnival Sunshine ship to tip onto its side shortly after the week-long journey began in Port Canaveral, Florida.

“I was shifting, falling out of my seat,” a passenger named Kyla Williams told the outlet. “This was very much the ship rolling to one side and everything falling down from that, and it was something you’ll never forget.”

She also said her husband had to hold her up so she wouldn’t fall.

Another passenger, David Crews, told CBS Orlando affiliate WKMG-TV that he initially “didn’t think anything of it, since it’s not uncommon for ships to rock back and forth.”

“But it didn’t rock back,” he continued. “It kept leaning. Plates and silverware started sliding off the tables. Then the tables themselves started to slide. Glasses and plates started to fall and shatter. At this point, it was pure chaos. Screams. Cries. Panic.”

Crews also shared several pictures of the incident, which showed an array of dishes and other supplies crashing to the floor.

According to a statement from Carnival obtained by PEOPLE, the boat reportedly leveled out after about a minute and then proceeded as usual.

“There was never any issue with the safe operation of the ship, and our officers quickly intervened to correct the situation,” the statement read.

One passenger tweeted, “Get me off this ship Carnival Sunshine. We just listed so bad that I am not comfortable being in this [ship] anymore. Water ran out [of] the pools glasses shattered in my room and drink spilled in my suitcase!”

RELATED VIDEO: Cruise Ship Battered by Rough Waters Due to Hurricane Michael

A few days later, as an apology, guests received $50 on-board credit, but many still opted to leave the ship early.

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Eight passengers stranded on African island after Norwegian cruise ship left without them

A dream cruise vacation has turned into a nightmare for eight passengers left stranded on the African island of São Tomé and Príncipe after their ship left without them because they were late to return from a private tour.

The tourists — six from the U.S. and two from Australia — were aboard the Norwegian Dawn, a Norwegian cruise line ship , which departed from Cape Town, South Africa, on March 20 for a 21-day voyage up the coast of Africa set to end in Barcelona, Spain, on April 10.

But on Wednesday, the group of eight tourists was late to return to the ship by more than an hour for the all-aboard time of 3 p.m. from a private excursion on the island, which was not organized by the cruise line.

Jay and Jill Campbell of South Carolina were part of the group that was left behind.

They said that their tour’s operator notified the cruise captain that they were going to be late to rejoin the ship and that the local Coast Guard tried to get them on the vessel but that they weren’t allowed to board.

As a result, the couple and the rest of the group have been stranded for days on the island off Nigeria, grappling with language, currency issues and complicated travel to catch up with the ship.

“The lovely people of São Tomé were very gracious, very hospitable. They had reached out as much as they could to help us find hotels,” Jay Campbell said on NBC's "TODAY" show Tuesday morning.

“We were able to get to a tour agency there to arrange flights to the next port of call. ... Very difficult process — you’re dealing with multiple languages, language barriers, you’re dealing with different currencies ... finding someone that even has dollars ... trying to get an agent to understand where we need to get to.

"It’s one of those ‘You can’t get there from here,’" he added.

A Norwegian spokesperson called the incident a “very unfortunate situation” and said, “Guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time.”

The cruise line said that after the guests failed to return, their passports were delivered to local port agents, in line with protocol. The company said it was working with local authorities to understand “the requirements and visas needed for the guests to reboard the ship at the next available port of call.”

On Monday, the guests had made arrangements to rejoin the ship in Banjul, Gambia, but the ship was unable to safely dock there because of “adverse weather conditions” and “tidal restrictions,” Norwegian said. The guests were then contacted and provided with information to rejoin the ship at Dakar, Senegal, on Tuesday.

Jill Campbell said they traveled through seven countries in 48 hours to arrive in Senegal on Monday night.

But the couple was reconsidering whether they even wanted to return to the cruise.

"We are considering whether or not we are going to board the ship. It is in dock here in Senegal," she said. "We believe there was a basic duty of care that they had forgotten about, so it does concern us."

"After what we witnessed, we truly believe that although there’s a set of rules or policies that the ship may have followed, they followed those rules too rigidly. I believe that they really forgot that they are people working in the hospitality industry and really the safety and well-being of the customers should be their first priority," she added.

Ultimately, the eight passengers did rejoin the cruise before 8:30 a.m. ET Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal, Norwegian told NBC News in an e-mail Tuesday evening, after this story originally published.

Norwegian said the passengers were responsible for making their own travel arrangements to rejoin the ship.

"Despite the series of unfortunate events outside of our control, we will be reimbursing these eight guests for their travel costs from Banjur, Gambia to Dakar, Senegal," a cruise line spokesperson said in a statement. "We remain in communication with the guests and are providing additional information as it becomes available."

A silver lining of the catastrophe was that the Campbells were able to connect with another Norwegian Dawn passenger — Julia Lenkoff, 80 — who was also left on the island, but for a medical reason.

Lenkoff was on a different day tour Wednesday. She had "medically disembarked" from the cruise to seek local treatment on that day, Norwegian said.

Norwegian said that its care team tried to call Lenkoff several times and was unable to reach her and that it worked with its port agent in São Tomé and Príncipe for updates on her health.

The Campbells met Lenkoff and were able to put her in contact with her family in California, who flew her home — a move Lenkoff's daughter said "saved her life."

"She's a world traveler. She travels all the time. So this was going to be one of her bucket list trips, because she's been to 120 countries so far, and she wanted to get to 130," her daughter, Lana Lenkoff Geis, said in an interview that aired Tuesday on "TODAY."

Norwegian said Lenkoff was escorted on a flight to Lisbon, Portugal, then put in the care of airport staff members to continue her journey back to the U.S., where she has safely returned.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess

By Doug Bock Clark

Image may contain Vehicle Transportation Boat Ship Cruise Ship Aircraft and Airplane

1. Cruising

They had no idea about the danger. Not as they crowded around the famous champagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted cruise passengers watched as golden bubbly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses, filled the stemware below. Then the drinks were passed out. Hand to hand to hand. Guests clinked coupes and posed for photos, making the evening feel momentous. It was their fourth night aboard the Diamond Princess —a floating city of a ship that had been churning south from Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still unaware of how much their journey would transform them, and even the world.

The Four Amigos, as a pair of American couples called themselves, skipped the champagne waterfall, which happens on almost every Princess Cruises excursion. The 60-something traveling companions had seen it before on their annual cruises together. They were happy to turn in early for the evening, thankful for this two-week break from their busy lives. Carl and Jeri Goldman run a mom-and-pop radio station that broadcasts local news and high school sports to a suburb of Los Angeles. Mark and Jerri Jorgensen oversee a rehabilitation center that specializes in pornography addiction in the red rocks of St. George, Utah. This year especially they needed the respite of the cruise. Recently, Jeri Goldman’s father had died; Carl had struggled with his health. None of them had been paying much attention to the news as they flew to Japan to board the ship. When they landed in Tokyo, Carl noticed an abnormal number of people wearing face masks, but he thought little of it.

Indeed, for the first four days, there seemed to be nothing amiss as the 18-story ocean liner powered south through the East China Sea. As it did, the ship’s 2,666 guests luxuriated in a dozen or so different restaurants, a multitude of bars and nightclubs, four pools, a spa, a casino, and more. All the while, an army of more than a thousand crew members stood ready to gratify their every whim.

Five days into the voyage, the ship docked in Hong Kong, and as the Four Amigos disembarked, health officials scanned their foreheads for fever with thermometer guns. Apparently, a mysterious virus was scything through mainland China. At first the People’s Republic had attempted to cover up the flu-like disease, but things had gotten so bad that in the industrial city of Wuhan, nearly 600 miles north, some 11 million people were being quarantined and local hospitals were bursting with casualties. In Hong Kong, so far, the response was modest. Foreigners were being screened at the ports, schools were suspended, and several Lunar New Year events had been canceled. But as the Four Amigos toured the city and watched a light show dazzle the city’s skyline, the throngs weren’t noticeably diminished. After all, you couldn’t halt life.

For a week more, the Diamond Princess cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed street food in Taiwan. But while there, panicky headlines and more temperature guns made the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they considered themselves safe, unaware that an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had coughed through the first third of the cruise before disembarking in Hong Kong—had been admitted to a hospital, where it was discovered that he was infected with COVID-19.

When the ship was two days away from returning home to Yokohama, a typo-riddled email from a Hong Kong port agent arrived in the inboxes of cruise line personnel, alerting them to the danger that had been found: “Would kindly inform the ship related parties and do the necessary disinfection in needed. Many thanks!”

Officials at Princess Cruises say the company had learned of the infected passenger hours earlier, when they were tipped off by a news report. Before long, they received another, clearer warning, this one sent by an epidemiologist from the government of Hong Kong. But seemingly nothing was done aboard the ship that aroused the concern of most passengers, including the Four Amigos. Cruise line officials maintain that the day after the ship received the first warning, its crew began sanitizing public areas more frequently, put out extra hand sanitizer, and switched buffet utensils more often.

Of course, such measures couldn’t be expected to do much against a virus that was currently crippling China—especially on a cruise ship, an environment designed to pack people in and then entertain them with communal activities. And the virus had already had ample time to attack people’s lung cells until they coughed it into the air, where it might linger in a mist for three hours. Then, if the virions weren’t inhaled, they could still settle on an elevator button or a roulette wheel and survive up to three days, waiting to hitchhike on an unsuspecting hand to an itchy nose. At this point in the cruise, the coronavirus could be anywhere and in anyone.

On what was supposed to be the cruise’s final night, February 3, while the Four Amigos were enjoying a multicourse meal in the mirrored Savoy Dining Room, they all agreed that they hoped the trip would never end. Suddenly the ocean liner’s intercom came to life. In his Italian-inflected English, the ship’s captain told all on board about the infected passenger. Accordingly, he said, when the Diamond Princess reached Yokohama, everyone would need to stay on the vessel for an extra day while Japanese health officials screened them. The Jorgensens gave each other a look that said: What does that mean for us? But soon enough, guests went back to their surf and turf. Before long, the baked Alaska was paraded out, accompanied by marching band music and diners festively waving their napkins.

The Four Amigos soon retired, but many of the other passengers continued their evening at the Skywalkers Nightclub or took in a show at the 740-seat theater. They were still on vacation, after all. Dealing with the real world could wait.

The Four Amigos: (from left) Mark and Jerri Jorgensen and Carl and Jeri Goldman.

2. Security

Growing up in claustrophobic Mumbai, India, Sonali Thakkar had been desperate to see the world. When a friend encouraged her to interview for a job with Princess Cruises, she hesitated. What Thakkar knew of cruises consisted of what she’d seen in Titanic —hardly an endorsement for a career at sea. But she ended up getting the job and loving it, spending her early 20s pinging between continents as a security patrolwoman aboard several Princess ships. The long hours she spent managing the gangway—monitoring those who boarded and disembarked—could be taxing, but after her shifts, she’d visit the top deck to take in the panoramic view of the ocean or a glamorous port city and the stress would melt away. Besides, she’d happily put up with a lot for the chance to earn about twice what she’d make at home.

Not long after the captain’s announcement, the 24-year-old Thakkar received an urgent call ordering her to the gangway. She had been off duty, but the ship had sped up to reach Yokohama early and now the city was in view. Soon she was standing at the weakly illuminated gangway, squinting into the liquid dark of the harbor while the ship anchored slightly offshore.

It was freezing outside, and down here by the waterline, Thakkar could hear none of the cheer of the parties going on hundreds of feet above. Her radio crackled, announcing the approach of several small Japanese boats, which drew alongside the hulking ocean liner. Even before the captain’s announcement, the crew had heard rumors of an infection, but Thakkar claimed that management told them not to worry. Now, as she counted roughly two dozen Japanese health care workers in protective gowns and masks being helped aboard by deck hands, she began to get an inkling of how bad things might actually be.

The Japanese officials were marched directly to the captain’s office. Not long before midnight, the captain reportedly returned to the intercom, finally ending the night’s revelry, ordering everyone back to their rooms.

In the morning, the Diamond Princess was subdued. The ship idled close to shore but never touched the pier, as if landing might infect Japan. Some of the guests still circulated between the restaurants, but many stayed close to their rooms as the Japanese health care workers fanned out across the ship to assess the virus’s spread. Passengers, including the Four Amigos, expected to disembark the following day. But when the next morning came, the captain’s voice again rang out from the speakers barnacled to the walls and the ceilings. Nine passengers and one crew member had tested positive for COVID-19. All passengers were to return to their cabins, where they would remain quarantined for two weeks by order of the Japanese government. Rather than release 3,700 potential vectors—who could infect Japan or their farther-flung homes—public health officials were transforming the Diamond Princess into a floating quarantine center.

Thakkar was given a mask and a new set of duties: patrolling the hallways in her naval-looking uniform. Guests would open their doors and, from their thresholds, ask what was going on. But all she could tell them was to go back inside and remain calm—she didn’t know anything more herself. Of course, Thakkar was concerned about contracting the illness. But she also told herself that she was no longer the timid girl who had never left India: She was a Princess Cruises security person, and she was going to do her duty—even if that had unexpectedly changed. Once she had guarded the passengers from the outside world; now she was protecting it from them.

The ship's crowded atrium during one of the cruise's many social events.

As Hong Kongers, Yardley Wong and her husband had been aware of the outbreak before many others on the ship—and the loss of a close friend to SARS, a similar virus, 17 years earlier, primed them to take this outbreak seriously. The 40-something couple had worn masks and practiced some social distancing measures since the start of the cruise; after the captain’s announcement, they locked themselves away in their cabin, even as many guests still roamed the ship.

While they waited anxiously for the Japanese health care workers to reach them, they ordered room service, and when it arrived, they sanitized the utensils before eating. Sometimes Wong heard the crinkle of plasticky protective gear in the hallway, and through the peephole in the door, she glimpsed blurry figures in surgical masks and gowns—though they always passed by.

Finally, around 11:30 p.m., officials arrived to take their temperature—and found no sign of fever, though it was hard to tell because the couple and the health workers barely spoke a common language. Wong and her husband went to bed thinking they were okay, but were woken by a knock at 4:30 a.m. This time the figures at the door had upgraded to hazmat gear: face shields, goggles, and shoe coverings. They swabbed the Wongs’ mouths. Wong then watched as her sample was inserted into a tray alongside what seemed like a hundred other vials—and she wondered what these tests meant about the virus’s spread. The pair managed a few more hours of restless sleep, until they were roused by another announcement from the captain. Everyone, he told the ship, would need to remain inside their cabins for the whole two-week quarantine.

For the Wongs, the world shrank to a room of about 150 square feet, much of that taken up by a queen-size bed. The cabin’s primary decoration was a big TV and two large mirrors hung facing each other to create the illusion of spaciousness. There were no windows, and this relatively cheap room was about as far from fresh air as possible: on an interior hall of a middle deck, near the laundromat. This wasn’t the sort of cabin highlighted in advertisements.

Wong and her husband might have endured this confinement easier if they hadn’t been traveling with their then six-year-old son, who was sharing their bed. To occupy him, they had the TV and an iPad, on which he played Fortnite . At first they used in-room exercise routines to burn off his energy, before passengers were eventually granted an hour each day on deck, during which time they tried to run him ragged while carefully staying six feet away from others.

But they couldn’t divert their boy's attention from the fact that the situation was quickly worsening. On the second day of the quarantine, the captain announced that the number of cases had doubled to 20. The following morning, February 7, there were 61. Fear stuffed the cramped room. The family still hadn’t heard back about the results of their tests and had to hope that no news was good news. Infected passengers, they had grasped, were being taken off the ship. Through their peephole, the Wong and her husband had watched neighbors be escorted down the hall with hastily packed bags by men in hazmat suits, presumably en route to Japanese hospitals.

The couple was terrified about what would happen if one of them tested positive. They were caring not only for their son but also Yardley Wong’s elderly parents in the cabin next door. The family worried about whether her frail father could survive an infection. A single vent supplied the Wongs’ room with air, which was so dry, Wong said, “you could make Italian cured ham with it.” The desiccated oxygen was giving her family raspy coughs—or was that the coronavirus?

Wong distracted herself by helping others. Using her fluency in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, she acted as a one-woman switchboard for older passengers who didn’t know how to use the internet, taking messages from family and friends via social media and then relaying them through the ship’s telephone lines. She appreciated that Princess Cruises was trying to ease the situation, making the ship’s usually expensive Wi-Fi available for free and offering psychological counseling over the phone. The company had already promised to refund the trip and pay for guests’ journeys home. Still, passengers were growing restive, blaming the cruise line for everything from a lack of clean bedsheets to lost medications, including essentials like insulin.

Meanwhile, Japanese officials were struggling with their response. Lacking enough kits to test everyone on board, they reportedly left feverish Americans in their cabins for multiple days before finally sending them to hospitals where they tested positive. Passengers were given N-95 masks and alcohol wipes, but this seemed risibly inadequate, given the rapidly growing number of infections. Day five: 69. Day six: 135. Many passengers felt underinformed, left to glean details from news reports based on leaks from the Japanese health ministry. Some hung banners off the side of the ship—one apparent bedsheet was painted with the plea for help: “Serious lack of medicine, lack of information.”

Eventually, Wong’s son asked her, “Am I going to get it?”

Normally, Wong would have tried to ease his worry, but she couldn’t deny reality. “If either of us gets it, we may not be able to see each other for a while,” she said. Her son started crying.

Later he said, “Mama, I don’t want to be here anymore. I just want to go home.”

Now she wanted to weep. “Just a few more days,” she promised him. “Just a few more days.”

4. “The Passenger Is King”

From the glass-walled bridge of the Diamond Princess, Captain Gennaro Arma endeavored to protect the souls entrusted to him. He had brought them to harbor but not yet to safety. Arma had been with the cruise line for more than 20 years and looked like the movie-star version of a gracefully aged captain. He’d grown up on the Italian coast, enchanted by his seafaring family’s stories, and landed a job as a Princess Cruises cadet not long after graduating from maritime school. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and when the Diamond Princess made its maiden voyage, in 2004, Arma was its senior second officer. By 2018, he was the captain, steering the vessel through typhoons by pointing the bow into the oncoming storm.

Arma was undaunted by high-stakes challenges—in fact, he relished them. But this was unlike anything he’d faced before. And now, rather than having the absolute authority that he typically had at the helm, he was following orders from both the Japanese government and his corporate command chain. He was working, he later told me, with “no playbook, no dedicated training, no dedicated protocol.” With the aid of Japanese officials and his crew, Arma was essentially trying to convert his ship into a colossal luxury hospital and oversee the logistics of food delivery, sanitization, and health care for a small city. In his daily P.A. announcements, he exhorted guests and crew alike to rise to the challenge, repeating the motto that it was only through pressure that coal became a Diamond Princess.

Image may contain Human Person Shelf Pants Clothing Apparel Flooring and Furniture

Ill-equipped workers tend to thousands of guests.

Most of the 1,045 crew members responded with enthusiasm to Arma’s leadership—at least at the beginning. Kitchen staffers pivoted from restaurant service to delivering three meals a day to 1,337 cabins. Dede Samsul Fuad, a gee-whiz 28-year-old Indonesian dishwasher, worked 15-hour shifts, scraping food off plates and steaming them in an industrial dishwasher. He had heard of doctors in Wuhan falling sick after working too hard, but the motto drummed into him by supervisors had always been “The passenger is king.” Fuad, Thakkar, and other members of the crew I spoke with took sincere pride in working hard during such a time of need. But it was also true that being a dishwasher or security guard on the Diamond Princess was a dream job that they couldn’t afford to lose—as it was for the other Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Ukrainians, Hondurans, Venezuelans, and other citizens of 48 mostly developing nations who made up the majority of the ship’s frontline staff.

Though masks and gloves were handed out, the crew had little training in dealing with a disease of this virulence. “Anybody would be scared for their life, because day by day more and more people were getting infected,” said an Indian crew member who asked for anonymity, as did other staff, afraid of retaliation from Princess Cruises. “And we knew people were dying.” The Indian man described colleagues delivering food and then running back to their cabins to jump into scalding showers or wash their hands in hot water until they hurt. As the days dragged on, the service workers began to question if their sacrifices were worth it.

Another Indonesian dishwasher described watching the virus tear through the large kitchen where he worked shoulder to shoulder with some 150 people—a number that declined as fewer showed up for work. A little less than a week into the quarantine, he started feeling ill. He wasn’t sure it was coronavirus, but he decided to quarantine himself in his tiny room for 15 straight days, reasoning that if Princess Cruises couldn't protect him, he’d protect himself.

Most of the crew were housed in quarters beneath the passenger decks. There were no giant windows with sweeping ocean views, no scintillating chandeliers. Hallways with exposed piping led to small rooms packed with bunk beds. The crew could quickly tell that their home was becoming a hot spot, especially the mess hall, where more than a hundred people at a time might visit the buffet. Later, a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention validated this fear, noting that in the early stages of the outbreak three-fourths of all the infected crew members were food-service workers—employees who could easily spread the disease to other crew and passengers.

Some staffers tried to take whatever precautions they could. An Indian man told me that he ate only packaged foods—and boiled all his own drinking water in his room with an electric kettle—and avoided getting sick. But he was lucky, and some of the employees accepted getting infected as inevitable. As the CDC report would later show, not long into the quarantine the disease was infecting more crew than passengers, who were hidden away in their cabins while the staff kept working.

For government officials and corporate leaders, the question of whether it was fair—or even safe—to quarantine the passengers but not the crew was obscured by the priority to keep the ship operational. And so the poor took care of the rich, and the citizens of less powerful nations served those from more powerful nations, and the Diamond Princess remained a miniaturized version of the global order—because what other way could things go?

Once all the passengers had been trained to stay in their rooms, Thakkar returned to her normal post at the gangway, where her main activity was now counting the infected passengers as they were escorted off the ship. Most of the infected walked to waiting ambulances, but some left on stretchers. On the eighth day of quarantine, she counted 39, bringing the total to 174. A native of the tropics, Thakkar had bundled up for the northern winter, but by the end of that shift, she was shivering—and coughing. She called the ship’s doctor, who ordered Thakkar to isolate herself in her windowless cabin.

Eventually, she tested negative, but her roommate was found to be positive and was taken away. Thakkar was left to worry what her own symptoms meant. She dreamed of home and the aloo paratha her mother made. On her phone, she scrolled through headlines about the virus’s dangers. Quarantines, it was becoming clear, are designed to protect only those on the outside—those on the inside have to fend for themselves.

Thakkar decided to take the situation into her own hands. She video-called an Indian news station. “We are requesting for help from Indian government,” she said in accented English, her face hidden by a surgical mask, her eyes bright with fear. She and other staff “do not want to stay in the same environment that we are, since we have found out there are coronavirus-infected people.”

Thakkar wasn’t the only one desperate enough to launch this kind of modern SOS, as a fellow Indian, a cook, had already been issuing video appeals via Facebook to the prime minister of India. Fuad, the Indonesian dishwasher, who was so resolute at the start, would also later beg his government to rescue him.

In making her plea, Thakkar joined hundreds of others broadcasting from the Diamond Princess, some with serious messages, others using their moment in the historical spotlight to write reviews of their every meal. Indeed, many passengers essentially streamed life on the inside with their smartphones. And what wasn’t being FaceTimed up close was being captured from afar by TV cameras set up onshore. Helicopters buzzed the ship and literal boatloads of journalists pulled alongside as international interest in the ordeal intensified. The world couldn’t look away because the coronavirus was now surfacing in scores of nations, and it was becoming clear that what Thakkar and the rest were suffering might provide a glimpse of what everyone would soon endure. Indeed, the number of Diamond Princess cases was exploding to such an extent that by day nine, when it reached 218, the ship had more cases than every nation in the world except China.

5. The Suite View

Six decks above where Thakkar was entombed, the Goldmans and the Jorgensens watched the drama unfold from their neighboring mini-suites. On their combined balcony, they had a view of men in hazmat suits marching passengers to ambulances, but it didn’t seem likely to them that they’d get sick. They were the kind of seniors who hit the gym rather than putting on pounds by the pool during cruises, who always took the stairs, and who still seemed to have more vigor than many people half their age.

Certainly the quarantine was an inconvenience: They had to frantically shuffle schedules and delegate business tasks back home. But they were able to work remotely, even if they had to wake up at 2 a.m. to account for the time difference. Otherwise, the quarantine had its bright spots: Fancy meals were dropped at their door, the balcony provided ample fresh air, and thanks to being in connected quarters, their best friends could come over whenever. Both couples’ suites contained two areas, each with its own TV, an essential convenience for the Goldmans, who could never agree on whether to watch sports (Carl Goldman) or the Hallmark Channel (Jeri Goldman) and would otherwise have (somewhat) jokingly bickered over the remote. Ultimately, the Americans recognized they were lucky, and they were determined to look on the bright side of things.

This mindful optimism was actually the origin of their friendship. The Goldmans and the Jorgensens had met about a decade before at a motivational life-coaching training. Together, all four now subscribed to a set of teachings that boiled down to “the law of nonresistance,” as they described it—fundamentally, making the best of the current moment. They had all used it to overcome the doldrums of middle age, and the Jorgensens taught a bit of it in their rehab center. Now, as Jerri Jorgensen said, “this is a chance for me to see if I’m ready to live what I’m teaching.”

To stay fit, they made an obstacle course and raced through their joined rooms, and they washed their laundry in the bathtub to reduce the workload on the crew. The four shared a similar, zany humor, and the husbands played goofballs to their deadpan wives to relieve everyone’s anxiety with laughter. Carl even began blogging his upbeat perspective of life on the ship: “My wife’s reaction to the toilet paper” being delivered “was like giving her a diamond ring.”

Unlike Thakkar, they never feared for their lives or livelihoods. They were healthy and had American passports and successful businesses, and a senator’s aide had personally assured them that their situation was being monitored. But as the four watched a movie on the evening of Valentine’s Day, not long before the quarantine was scheduled to end, Jerri Jorgensen became feverish. They didn’t call the ship’s medical center, figuring they’d see how she felt the next morning—and by then she was better.

Coincidentally, a knock rattled the door that morning. Several days earlier, the Jorgensens had been swabbed because Mark was taking immunosuppressants for a kidney transplant, putting him at increased risk for the coronavirus. Now the test results were being delivered by Japanese health workers in hazmat gear. They didn’t speak English, so they thrust a piece of paper toward Mark, showing a positive result. “Wow, okay, when do you need me?” Mark said. But the masked head shook no. It was Jerri Jorgensen who was being summoned. Jerri: a mountain biking and workout fanatic, who had her white hair done up in a fauxhawk, the Amigo who had always been the healthiest. On day 12, she became one of the 285 positives from the Diamond Princess.

Jerri wasn’t given long to load a backpack. She chose not to take anything sentimental—just her passport, wallet, some toiletries, and a book called The God Who Weeps. It taught an appropriate lesson for the time, she said, that “God is not this ruler with a magnifying glass, waiting for us to screw up so he can zap us, but sympathizes.”

It wasn’t an option for Mark to join her, and when the time came, Jerri told him, “See ya when I see ya,” trying to lighten the moment. Then, following the law of nonresistance, she let an ambulance bear her away, telling herself: Next adventure! She watched out the window as they drove four hours beyond Tokyo’s conurbation. The day darkened. Streetlights sharpened. She had no idea where she was being taken.

Not long after she left, the remaining Amigos found out that all of the 428 Americans aboard the “floating petri dish,” as Carl called it, were going to be evacuated by the United States government. Mark considered rejecting the offer, but eventually he and the Goldmans decided that there was no point in him waiting; he wouldn’t be able to see his wife in the hospital, anyway—and he could always fly back if she took a turn for the worse. For the first time, Carl’s lighthearted blog took on a dark tone. “We are shaken and devastated that we have been removed from our friend,” he wrote. “The next league of our journey may take days. I am uncertain when I will be able to post again.”

6. The Hot Zone

Even before the world’s attention fixated on the Diamond Princess, Dr. James Lawler knew what was coming. Lawler, a director at the Global Center for Health Security, had previously worked on pandemic preparedness in the White Houses of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As disturbing data had begun emerging from Wuhan, Lawler and numerous other infectious-disease experts and senior government officials had kept up a worried discussion on a private email chain titled “Red Dawn.” On January 28, while most of the world was oblivious to the exploding pandemic, Lawler had written darkly: “Great Understatements in History…Pompeii—‘a bit of a dust storm[,]’ Hiroshima—‘a bad summer heat wave[,]’ AND Wuhan—‘just a bad flu season.’ ”

But what, exactly, the federal government should do about the emerging pandemic, as well as the Americans trapped in increasingly dire straits on the Diamond Princess, was unclear. By early February, the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force was debating responses to the spiraling catastrophe. The CDC recommended not bringing the American passengers home—the thinking being that they might carry the disease with them to the United States, which still had very few confirmed cases, and Japan could capably handle the quarantine.

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Yardley Wong’s husband, Carlos Soto, and the couple’s young son on the ship’s deck during one of their rare moments outside of their cabin.

But as the number of infected ship guests exploded, one American passenger, Arnold Hopland, called his friend, Republican congressman Phil Roe of Tennessee. Hopland is a doctor, and his detailed testimony of the unfolding disaster convinced Roe that action needed to be taken. At a congressional briefing about the coronavirus, Roe managed to catch the attention of Robert Kadlec, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services, with promises of an “ace in the hole on this ship” who could offer “on-the-ground” intel.

An international conference call was arranged in which Roe and Hopland spoke with senior officials from the Trump administration, the CDC, and the State Department. From his room on the ship, Hopland made the case that he and other Americans could be safely repatriated and then quarantined in the United States. If they weren’t evacuated soon, he argued, they would be in danger. Congressman Roe backed Hopland up. “I’m an old country doctor,” said Roe, who once practiced as an ob-gyn, “and I was like, ‘Let’s get them off, or they’ll be infected.’ ” Kadlec and the others were convinced.

When the government decided to act, officials knew exactly whom to call: James Lawler, who combined years of scientific expertise with field experience in the world’s most dangerous hot zones. Along with a Harvard physician, Lawler took the reins of a squad of 15 professionals from Federal Disaster Medical Assistance Teams. Officials from the United States and Japan had already been discussing disaster-evacuation scenarios in preparation for the scheduled Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Now they activated those protocols to smooth the American medical team’s arrival. On Friday, February 14—around the same time Jerri Jorgensen was developing her fever—Lawler and his team assembled in the lobby of a Yokohama hotel.

Their plan was to test all the Americans aboard the Diamond Princess for the coronavirus—and then, 72 hours later, fly at least the uninfected ones out on chartered cargo jets. Those who tested positive would presumably be transferred to Japanese hospitals.

On Saturday morning, Lawler and three other American physicians followed a Japanese doctor onto the Diamond Princess. They were wearing special helmets and breathing oxygen fed from hoses via their hip-mounted respirators—high-end machines called PAPRs that Lawler considered so important that he had made a stopover in Los Angeles to acquire them on his way to Japan. But through his face shield, he watched their street-clothed guide “screwing around with” his surgical mask, surprised that another medical professional could be so cavalier.

As they marched through the cruise ship galleries—eerie as a circus turned into a crime scene—he noted that some of the Japanese health workers were not observing quarantine protocols. While a portion were outfitted in hazmat gear, others were simply wearing blue bonnets and surgical masks. He spotted passengers moving freely around some parts of the ship, and regularly clothed crew, wearing only masks, swabbing down the hallways. No wonder the disease had continued its wildfire spread. He began to worry about the Japanese health workers who were shuttling between the ship and the pier where the rest of his team waited. As soon as he disembarked, he warned the Americans to isolate themselves as best they could and to keep six feet away from the Japanese health care workers at all times.

Lawler wasn’t the only one who considered what he was seeing dangerous. Kentaro Iwata, an experienced Japanese virologist who visited the ship, later broadcast a video in which he described the quarantine as “completely inadequate in terms of infection controls.” Ultimately, at least six Japanese bureaucrats came down with the virus from the Diamond Princess, as did a Japanese health worker. And Japanese officials eventually acknowledged the quarantine was flawed.

On Saturday afternoon, Lawler learned that the evacuation planes previously scheduled to arrive Monday night were now going to be on the ground the next day—Sunday. His team’s ambitions to test everyone were reduced to making sure that all the passengers were healthy enough to endure long, uncomfortable flights home on cargo jets.

The next day, Sunday morning, Lawler’s response team divided into three units and spread out across the ship, checking the American passengers. Lawler estimated that he walked ten miles that day in his heavy gear. It was around 10 p.m. when Lawler tracked down the last American, in the crew quarters. When Lawler exited the Diamond Princess, his countrymen were filing off the ship in a cold rain, their luggage hauled toward a line of buses by Japanese in hazmat suits. Dozens of Americans decided to stay behind for various reasons, but those consenting to be evacuated were now headed to the airport.

As they left, Lawler rushed back to the hotel, packed, and then, together with the Harvard doctor, frantically searched the deserted streets for a taxi, worried they were delaying the evacuation flights. It was around 1 a.m. when they finally found a ride, and the cabbie earned a big tip by racing the wrong direction up one-way streets to the airport. But rather than missing their planes, the doctors found them empty, except for crew. Something was very, very wrong.

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The confusing scene as the Amigos—now down to three—finally exit the ship and make their way to the airport for evacuation on a cargo jet .

7. The Goat Rodeo

The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with the 325 other American evacuees, were still waiting on the buses. They had spent three hours idling on the pier and then, once they drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt. They were exhausted. And more problematically for the largely elderly passengers: The buses had no bathrooms.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the waylaid evacuees was being decided. Around the time the passengers were exiting the Diamond Princess, Japanese officials had blindsided their American counterparts with the news that some of the passengers boarding the buses had actually tested positive several days before. Soon many of the highest-level members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were arguing about what to do. Representatives from the CDC continued to fear spreading the virus. William Walters, the deputy chief medical officer for the State Department, wanted to bring everyone home anyway. Those urging the evacuation noted that the planes had been prepared with isolation units to contain the sick.

As the debate raged, the evacuees were demanding to be let off the buses, quarantine be damned, to find a bathroom. Carl was breathing so hard his masked breath fogged his glasses as he strained to control his bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally, a few were allowed to relieve themselves in bottles beside the bus or were brought to a nearby terminal.

In the end, Walters and the State Department won the argument. Kadlec, the official from Health and Human Services, supported Walters and said later that “the notion of leaving Americans behind at that stage of the operation was not acceptable.” But the CDC, still worried about airlifting the virus to America, disagreed with the decision so vehemently that it refused to be named in the news release announcing it. (Officials from the CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Finally, after the lengthy and complicated process of being cleared remotely by Japanese immigration, which contributed to the delay, the passengers rushed off the buses and made for the jets. From his vantage, waiting on one of the two planes, Lawler saw the incoming stampede of seniors. He had hoped for an orderly boarding, but instead the scene resembled “a goat rodeo,” he said, using a military term from his 20 years as a Navy doctor. “There was just chaos.”

As the crowd pressed onto the cargo plane, Lawler watched as sleep-deprived nonagenarians stumbled through rows of ancient airline seats, bolted into place across trip-hazard tracks that normally held pallets of supplies. Few people heeded his directions to sit. Instead, they fought toward four portable toilets that had been secured to the rear of each plane.

The holds of the toilets quickly filled; two soon reached capacity and were taped off. “The back of the plane just reeked,” said Mark. “People were throwing up back there. It was so disgusting.” Once in the air, Carl estimated, the line for the toilets on his plane ran about 50 people long and took 30 minutes to get through. Jeri Goldman said the “smell was unreal. We had to put ourselves under a blanket, it was so bad.” Jeri eventually escaped by knocking herself out with Benadryl, and Carl was so exhausted he fell asleep without aid.

But a few hours later, Carl woke, feverish. A temperature check, and then he was marched to the back of the plane, which had been cordoned off by a large plastic sheet, duct-taped to the fuselage. There he tried to ignore the coughs of the other passengers and the stench now emanating from right beside him.

Lawler was on the second plane, separate from the Three Amigos. During the 16 hours of flying, Lawler ministered to evacuees—continuing his two-day, nearly sleepless marathon of doctoring—and was not surprised when some started showing symptoms in the air. He had already guessed that many were still incubating, but once he had his orders that everyone was coming home, he thought this was for the best, given that America would have the capacity to quarantine and treat everyone effectively.

When the flights landed in America, CDC officials took over the care of the asymptomatic passengers, such as Mark, who deplaned and would be quarantined for two weeks on military installations. Meanwhile, the patients who’d tested positive at the last minute and mid-flight, as well as their spouses—including the Goldmans—continued on to Omaha, Lawler’s home base. When they arrived, Carl felt strong enough to deplane on foot, but he was instructed to get into a stretcher—which made for dramatic TV footage as he was wheeled across a tarmac packed with ambulances. Emergency vehicles convoyed the sick to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where Carl was transferred into America’s only federal quarantine unit. Finally the goat rodeo could end, and Lawler and his team took command of every detail of his patients’ treatments. Still, he was forgiving of the improvised repatriation. “Overall, that’s a remarkable feat,” he said. “It was the best anyone could do, given the circumstances.”

8. Homecoming

Carl Goldman was sealed away in an isolation room on a special floor of a medical building in downtown Omaha. The unit had last been used during the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and soon housed more than a dozen of the most serious American cases from the Diamond Princess —approximately as many confirmed cases as there were in the rest of the country at the time. To access the negative-pressure ward, Lawler and other medical officials donned top-level protective gear—PAPRs, Tyvek jumpsuits, and double gloves—all the while being monitored by another staff member to ensure each step was properly performed. When they exited, they showered in a specialized room.

Most of the time Carl communicated with his doctors through a double-paned window or a computer monitor and microphone. It was by video that he was informed that he had been officially quarantined by a second government, his own. Carl’s experience of the disease was relatively mild—mostly a low fever and a cough—so he sweated and drank voluminous quantities of Gatorade while also trying to keep his life as normal as possible, keying away on his iPhone, calling into work, and resolutely updating his blog.

As Carl’s quarantine extended, the number of infections worldwide boomed exponentially—into the tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then, with the undiagnosed included, most likely into the millions.

Soon it was announced that two elderly passengers from the Diamond Princess had perished from the virus. Then a third. Then a sixth. “Our vacation,” Carl blogged, “has now turned beyond tragic.”

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Carl Goldman is met by health care workers on the ground in Omaha after the lengthy evacuation flight from Japan.

A month blurred past. Carl’s fever faded, though it took longer for him to dislodge his cough. He paced, trying to regain his strength. As he improved, he was moved to a new room, which took him 14 steps to cross; eventually he was counting out 10,000 steps a day. He celebrated his 67th birthday with a cake slice topped by an unlit candle—no fire was allowed in the ward—and his doctors and nurses sang “Happy Birthday” over the camera feed. Lonely and homesick as Carl was, he considered himself fortunate, writing, “The blessing that tops the list is having total control of the television remote. That’s a first in my marriage.” As March progressed, he watched the coronavirus news constantly, trying to keep up with where the world was careening while he was in stasis.

Carl had long ago lost what the Four Amigos jokingly called “the Great Quarantine Race.” His wife, Jeri, had finished her quarantine nearby, but never tested positive, displaying a hardiness she attributed to a mushroom powder and four-times-a-week cryotherapy sessions. Before long, she was back in California, overseeing their radio station again, though feeling something like a leper, as her return sparked panic in their community.

The Jorgensens were also home. Jerri Jorgensen’s coronavirus infection had been luckily anticlimactic, and her greatest trial at the Japanese hospital occurred when Google mistranslated constipation while she was trying to communicate with her doctors. Once her 14 days were up, she flew home and was soon back to slickrock mountain biking. Not long after being quarantined on the military base, Mark Jorgensen had tested positive. He was airlifted to a hospital in Utah and then, as he had no adverse symptoms, eventually released to spend the rest of his quarantine at home, where he and Jerri cohabitated while wearing masks and staying six feet apart.

By the time Carl was released, in mid-March, the World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. America’s longest-serving quarantinee was a different man from the one who’d left for his cruise—his hair grown shaggy as that of a prophet returning from the wilderness. When he arrived home, his dogs licked him and his wife hugged him, and the physical contact alone felt like winning the lottery. That night, Jeri handed Carl the TV remote, for the first time, he claims, in their entire marriage. He selected the nightly news, filled with predictions of economic depression, and of a death toll worse than any war. It wasn’t just that he’d changed; the world had changed too.

9. The Locked Church

By the time Carl left quarantine, Jan Swartz, the president of Princess Cruises, had spent weeks sleeping with her phone at hand. Her days of crisis management began early and ended late. From 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., she commanded the company's response from a situation room its California headquarters. Twice she flew to Japan to keep closer tabs on the operation and greet disembarking passengers. But even when the Diamond Princess was finally emptied in Yokohama, her trials continued.

In early March, an outbreak discovered aboard the Grand Princess required 2,000 passengers to be quarantined. Later that month, some 2,700 passengers who’d disembarked from another ship, the Ruby Princess, were asked by the Australian government to self-quarantine—at least 22 deaths would be connected to this outbreak, and a homicide detective would later be tasked with investigating whether the crew had misled authorities. (In a statement, Swartz said that Princess Cruises would cooperate, calling the inquiry “an opportunity for all to learn from this tragic event.”)

Reporters for Bloomberg Businessweek found that executives at Princess and Holland America Line—which are run by the same parent company, Carnival Corporation—kept ships sailing despite being aware of the coronavirus danger. Roger Frizzell, the chief communications officer for Carnival Corporation, said it was “utterly absurd to believe a cruise vacation company had any foresight that COVID-19 would become a global pandemic when…governments and experts around the world had no such insight at the time.” Cruise ships operated by other companies were similarly caught up in the crisis. Eventually, the CDC would find evidence of at least 25 ships incubating the coronavirus, and an investigation by the Miami Herald would link 2,592 infections and 65 deaths to cruise ship outbreaks, while emphasizing that the true number was probably higher.

In mid-March, the day after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a worldwide pandemic, Swartz finally called a stop to all her cruises. Critics said the decision was long overdue. “We were making the decision as quickly as we could,” Swartz told me, “based on the information that we had.” Within a day, all other major cruise lines also called a halt. The cruise ship era had ground to a stop, and possibly ended forever, as the industry faces unprecedented legal and financial challenges.

Before long, Yardley Wong and her husband and son were settling back into a semi-normal version of life in Hong Kong—the whole family having dodged infection after their preemptive self-imposed quarantine. Hong Kong was successfully stamping out minor flare-ups of the virus, for after discovering its first case just three days after America found its own, it had quickly introduced many of the regulations that the United States would adopt only months later—social distancing, travel restrictions, and closing public institutions and schools. The decisive actions of Hong Kong and other places—such as Taiwan, South Korea, and New Zealand—meant they had just a tiny fraction of the cases in America. Their quick efforts had actually been informed by insights drawn from the Diamond Princess: As the ship became a self-contained floating experiment, it provided the world’s best data set on the virus, confirming crucial facts about how the disease spread, especially through asymptomatic carriers.

In late March, the CDC reported that out of the Diamond Princess ’s 3,711 passengers and crew, 712 had tested positive. Eleven Americans were still hospitalized in Japan. Nine people had died. These numbers were infinitesimal compared with the vast casualties steadily accumulating across the globe, but these were a few of the original germs from which a huge tragedy would grow.

Most regions were not dealing with their outbreaks as successfully as Hong Kong, especially America. “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it,” President Trump declared on March 10. “Just stay calm. It will go away.” Two days later, Lawler wrote to numerous senior government officials on the “Red Dawn” email chain and desperately urged implementation of stronger virus-control measures, similar to what “has worked in Hong Kong.” The 80-page email chain, first quoted in the New York Times, documents in extraordinary detail the White House’s failure to heed numerous warnings in time to stop the virus. “We are making every misstep leaders initially made…at the outset of pandemic planning in 2006,” Lawler declared. “We have thrown 15 years of institutional learning out the window and are making decisions based on intuition,” he wrote, predicting catastrophe. During his time working for Bush and Obama, Lawler had participated in simulations of similar pandemic scenarios, and what he was seeing now, he told me, was “kind of like watching a movie that you’ve watched before.”

When the time came for Captain Arma to leave the ship, the Diamond Princess was empty. Thakkar, Fuad, and many other crew members had been airlifted home by their governments—though long after the American evacuation, and only after they issued more pleas on social media.

Before bidding goodbye to the ship, Arma had stood alone on the glass-walled bridge. The normally stoic captain was emotional. He had been with the boat since it was built and had guided it safely through every storm, until this one. He felt like he understood what he called her “beautiful soul.”

One last time, he switched on the P.A., in order to speak to the ship itself. It wasn’t her fault, he told her. He promised that they would see each other again, and he wished her a good night, his words echoing in the vacant galleries and cabins. They had done their best, he and his ship—and like all good captains, he was the last person to leave. As he strode off the gangway in his crisp uniform, he was the very image of debonair fortitude. Except his true expression was hidden behind a protective mask.

It was a mid-March night when he returned to his seaside Italian hometown. Everything was locked down; the streets were deserted. At Italy’s overwhelmed hospitals, hundreds of patients were perishing every day. Arma asked his driver to stop at an ancient basilica, which held an icon that had succored seafarers for millennia, through medieval and modern plagues. In times like this, what more could a man do? The Catholic captain bowed his head, and outside the locked church, he prayed. For himself and his family. For the souls of his former passengers. For the dead, and for those still living.

Doug Bock Clark is a GQ correspondent.

A version of this story originally appears in the June/July 2020 issue.

They’d come to New Zealand’s Whakaari / White Island, a rugged fantasyland and active volcano, for stunning selfies and the thrill of danger. Then the worst-case scenario happened.

By Joshua Hammer

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photo of Icon of the Seas, taken on a long railed path approaching the stern of the ship, with people walking along dock

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

selfie photo of man with glasses, in background is swim-up bar with two women facing away

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

photo of elaborate twisting multicolored waterslides with long stairwell to platform

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

2 photos: a ship's foamy white wake stretches to the horizon; a man at reailing with water and two large ships docked behind

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

2 photos: 2 slices of pizza on plate; man in "Daddy's Little Meatball" shirt and shorts standing in outdoor dining area with ship's exhaust stacks in background

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

photo of sheltered sandy beach with palms, umbrellas, and chairs with two large docked cruise ships in background

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

photo from inside of spacious geodesic-style glass dome facing ocean, with stairwells and seating areas

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

photo of author smiling and holding soft-serve ice-cream cone with outdoor seating area in background

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Aerial view of a cruise ship moving through the ocean

5 Cruise Specific Nightmares (And How to Avoid Them)

Caroline Morse Teel

Caroline Morse Teel is the Managing Editor for SmarterTravel Media. Follow her adventures around the world on Instagram @TravelWithCaroline.

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The viral video of a woman getting stuck on a waterslide suspended over the ocean aboard a Norwegian Cruise Line ship got us thinking about nightmare situations that can only happen on a cruise ship.

From minor inconveniences like seasickness to bigger disasters, here’s how to avoid falling victim to five terrifying ship-specific scenarios.

Getting Stuck in a Waterslide Over the Ocean

Clear tube water slide on a cruise ship with ocean in background

Anyone with even the smallest amount of claustrophobia started sweating watching the recent video of a woman getting stuck in a section of the cruise ship’s enclosed water slide that was suspended over the ocean. However, the solution to not getting trapped in a waterslide might scare you even more—wear as little clothing as possible.

According to Royal Caribbean , the trick to smoothly and quickly making it down a slide is opting for a small swimsuit (like a speedo) as more fabric (like rash guards or bathing suits with more coverage) will cause more friction and slow you down.

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Missing the Boat

You’ve spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on your dream cruise, but if you miss the boat, all that money will go down the drain—and you’ll have to pay even more to get yourself home.

Cruise ships wait for no passengers, so never fly into port on the day that your cruise ship is scheduled to depart—if your flight is delayed or canceled, it’s highly likely that you’ll miss the boat. Always fly in a day or two early to give yourself a buffer (and to be able to explore the port city).

Likewise, when you’re off the boat for an excursion, be sure to double-check what time you have to be back, and plan to arrive well before the departure in case you run into traffic or other unexpected delays.

Falling Overboard

Man-overboard incidents are extremely rare on cruise ships. Cruise ships are specifically designed to prevent people from falling overboard, with safety measures like high railings and other barriers in plance. According to the Cruise Lines International Association (CLA), there were 212 man-overboard incidents between 2009 and 2019.

Falling overboard is extremely preventable on a cruise ship. Avoid drinking excessively (which can cause impaired judgment and coordination) and never climb or sit on railings on a cruise ship. Stay inside when there is bad weather or rough seas.

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Getting Seasick

Nauseous, vomiting, and dizzy—not exactly how you want to spend your vacation at sea. Unfortunately, if you’re prone to seasickness, this is how you might feel on a cruise.

Follow these tips to avoid getting seasick:

Pick a larger boat that is equipped with stabilizers, to minimize how much you’ll feel motion on board
Skip itineraries that spend a lot of time crossing open ocean (opt for a Caribbean cruise vs. a transatlantic one, for example)
Choose a cabin in the middle of the ship on a lower deck
Get fresh air
Stay hydrated
Avoid alcohol
Try medications—both prescription and over-the-counter medicines are available to combat seasickness, so check with your doctor about which one is right for you before leaving for your trip
Eat small amounts of bland food

At-Sea Quarantine

Whether it’s COVID-19 or Norovirus, viruses can spread quickly among large groups in enclosed spaces (like a cruise ship). If you come down with a contagious disease, you’ll likely be quarantined in your cabin for the remainder of the cruise, which will definitely put a damper on your vacation.

To avoid getting sick at sea, follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines :

Wash your hands often
Get plenty of rest
Drink lots of water
Leave the area if you see someone get sick
Wear a well-fitting mask indoors and in crowded spaces
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth

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The Norwegian Jewel, owned by Norwegian Cruise Line, in June 2005.

Norwegian Cruise captain refused to let eight passengers who were late reboard ship

Passengers, who have since rejoined vessel, missed scheduled departure time from São Tomé and scrambled to reunite with ship

Eight cruise passengers had to scramble to reunite with their cruise ship after being left behind in São Tomé and Príncipe.

The passengers, including a pregnant woman and a paraplegic traveller, missed their scheduled departure time from the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, about 250km off the coast of Gabon, after disembarking the Norwegian Dawn to take a local tour.

Another passenger in her 80s was reportedly late to the ship because she was receiving emergency medical treatment on the island.

The vessel, operated by Norwegian Cruise Lines, arrived in São Tome on Wednesday morning having departed Cape Town for the three-week cruise to Barcelona on 20 March.

The group’s private day excursions on the island ran overtime and, despite the efforts of the local coast guard, which motored the group to the ship before it set sail that afternoon, the captain would not allow the late guests to board.

Jill and Jay Campbell, from Garden City in South Carolina, described attempting to board the vessel after arriving late.

“We have never had an experience like this before,” Jill Campbell told ABC4 News .

“The harbour master tried to call the ship, the captain refused the call. We sent emails to NCL, the NCL customer service emergency number. They said, ‘Well, the only way for us to get in touch with the ship is to send them emails, they’re not responding to our emails,’” Jay Campbell added.

“The captain could have made an easy decision to turn one of the tender boats back, pick us up, safely load us, and then go on the way.”

The travellers’ passports were returned to them via port authorities. The group, which reportedly includes two Australians, had to leave their medication, bank cards and other belongings on board. The Campbells said they were the only members of the group with a Visa card and had paid more than $5,000 in their attempts to reach the ship.

They aimed to reboard the Norwegian Dawn in the Gambia the following Sunday but low tides prevented the ship from making the scheduled stop. The group reportedly travelled through six countries and eventually met the ship in Dakar, Senegal, the final west African port call of its journey, according to the cruise line.

“What we looked at was some type of van transportation for eight people, the quadriplegic woman included,” Jay Campbell told ABC15 . He described having to take a ferry to get into Senegal, and then a four-hour drive.

Australians Doug and Violeta Sanders were among the stranded passengers.

“It’s been the worst experience of our lives to be abandoned like that in a strange country, can’t speak the language,” Violeta Sanders told Seven’s Sunrise program.

“We have no money, our credit cards aren’t accepted.”

The 21-day cruise is due to end in Barcelona on 10 April.

A spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Lines said it was a “very unfortunate situation” and that it was the passenger’s responsibility to be back on board the ship no later than one hour before the ship’s scheduled departure time.

A Sydney travel lawyer, Anthony Cordato, said passengers needed to heed ships’ tight schedules.

“Terms and conditions would make returning to the ship on time essential,” he said.

“From a consumer’s perspective, it’s harsh but from a ship’s perspective, are you going to hold up the cruise for an hour or two because they were slow to get on board? Are you going to inconvenience 1,000 passengers for the sake of four?”

The cruise company said all eight guests had rejoined the ship.

In a statement, a spokesperson said: “On the afternoon of March 27, 2024, while the ship was in São Tomé and Príncipe, an African island nation, eight guests who were on the island on a private tour not organized through us missed the last tender back to the vessel, therefore not meeting the all aboard time of 3pm local time. While this is a very unfortunate situation, guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time, which is communicated broadly over the ship’s intercom, in the daily print communication and posted just before exiting the vessel.

“When the guests did not return to the vessel at the all aboard time, their passports were delivered to the local port agents to retrieve when they returned to the port, as per the regular protocol. Our team has been working closely with the local authorities to understand the requirements and necessary visas needed for the guests to rejoin the ship at the next available port of call. Given that these guests were on a private tour and did not return to the ship at the communicated all aboard time, they are responsible for any necessary travel arrangements to rejoin the ship at the next available port of call, per our protocol.

“While the eight guests made arrangements to rejoin the ship in Banjul, Gambia on April 1, 2024, unfortunately the ship was unable to safely dock in the destination due to adverse weather conditions, as well as tidal restrictions that require specific timing for safe passage. While we share in our guests’ disappointment, this modification was made with great consideration for their safety and that of our crew, which is our top priority. We contacted these eight guests regarding this itinerary adjustment and provided them with authorization to rejoin the ship at Dakar, Senegal on April 2, 2024.

“Despite the series of unfortunate events outside of our control, we will be reimbursing these eight guests for their travel costs from Banjur, Gambia to Dakar, Senegal. As of this morning, all eight guests have rejoined the ship.”

Sao Tome and Principe

‘Ridiculous’: Cruise act sparks huge debate

A huge debate has erupted on social media about a specific cruising rule after a group of passengers were stranded in Africa.

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A fiery debate has sparked after a cruise denied eight passengers, including two Aussies, to board the ship after they failed to make the 3pm cut-off time.

The Norwegian Dawn ship left the tourists on an African island, some without their possessions after the private tour they were on ran late.

The group have since boarded the Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) ship , but it’s ignited a fiery debate on whether the cruise should have waited for the passengers, who were about an hour late following delays with their private tour.

Norwegian Cruise passengers stranded after missing departure off African coast

Adam Glezer from Consumer Champion told news.com.au it was “ridiculous” the passengers, including a pregnant woman and someone who has a heart condition, weren’t allowed back on initially — even though the Norwegian Dawn was still at anchor in São Tomé and a coastguard took the group on tenders to the vessel.

“Each situation has to be treated on an individual basis — especially the passenger without their medication,” he said.

US couple Jay and Jill Campbell (above), as well as two Australians, were abandoned in São Tomé and Príncipe during a Norwegian Cruise Lines cruise.

He said despite the rules, “you need flexibility in situations like this”.

Jim Walker, a Miami-based maritime lawyer, also called out the cruise liner, accusing it of “making a point by abandoning the guests” because they booked a tour that wasn’t through the cruise.

“The reality is that cruise lines aggressively promote cruise sponsored shore excursions as a fundamental part of their business model, earning tens of millions of dollars a year in income,” he told news.com.au.

“To promote cruise sponsored excursions where they receive as much as 50 to 60 per cent of the profits, cruise lines state that if their guests paid for a cruise sponsored excursion, as opposed to an independent excursion, the company will guarantee that if the extrusion is late in returning to the cruise ship, it will wait so that the guests are not abandoned ashore.

“In this particular case, it appears that NCL made a point of abandoning these guests simply because they were on an independent excursion.”

The eight passengers reportedly booked a private tour that wasn’t organised through the cruise.

Mr Walker said NCL’s conduct is not only “harsh and uncaring”, but he believes their act was “mean-spirited and vindictive in nature”.

The debacle has caused a huge divide online with some taking the side of the passengers, while others have defended the cruise’s move in leaving the passengers behind in São Tomé.

“Weird that the captain wouldn’t let them board if it was still in port?” one person wrote on Facebook.

“Don’t feel sorry for them they know the rules. It costs the ships a fortune if they don’t leave on time. We have watched people left behind before in Asia. Last trip to NZ there was a very close call also,” wrote another.

@cruiseshiplawyer Nightmare Cruise: 8 Passengers Abandoned in African Island Nation! Can you believe it? My dream vacation turned into a nightmare when our cruise ship left us stranded in Sao Tome and Príncipe! Can't believe they left us behind with 8 other passengers.😞🚢 #campbellfamily #nightmarevacation #norwegiancruise #saotomeandprincipe #africa #passengerdelay #excursionmishap #cruisefail #cruisetok #cruiselaw #cruiselawyer ♬ original sound - Spencer Aronfeld

Other cruisers said being on time is a “simple” rule passengers need to follow, adding it’s why they only book tours through the ship.

“This is why you take a risk if you don’t go on a excursion you get through the ship Ruled need too be followed,” a third person wrote, while another added: “That’s why I would never take a cruise or organised tour ever, ever again, no freedom to do what you want, when you want.”

A TikToker and cruiser Candi Thomas unleashed on the passengers saying it was the responsibility of the passengers to make it back to the ship on time.

“For those of you who don’t cruise, let me tell you. Before you get off the ship there’s numerous announcements, You have it in your daily planning letter, there are signs … you have to be on board 60 to 90 minutes before that ship is departing,” she said.

Cruiser and TikToker Candi Thomas unleashed in a TikTok, saying the passengers were in the wrong for failing to make the ship on time. Picture: TikTok/iamshopgirl

According to The Points Guy , if you do not arrive at the port before the boarding window ends, a cruise ship “will most certainly leave without you”.

“Even if you are standing at the pier, waving frantically. That’s because a cruise ship’s departure time is carefully planned and more than just your vacation is at stake.

“Just like airplanes, cruise ships are on tight schedules — much tighter than you may realise.”

Norwegian Cruise Line responds

Norwegian Cruise Line said guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time. Picture: Michel Verdure

In a statement provided to news.com.au, the US based Norwegian Cruise Lines said while the ship was in São Tomé and Príncipe, an African island nation, eight guests who were on the island on a private tour “not organised through us” missed the last tender back to the vessel, “therefore not meeting the all aboard time of 3pm local time”.

“While this is a very unfortunate situation, guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time, which is communicated broadly over the ship’s intercom, in the daily print communication and posted just before exiting the vessel.”

The spokesperson said when the guests did not return to the vessel at the all aboard time, their passports were delivered to the local port agents to retrieve when they returned to the port, as per the regular protocol.

The tourists had made arrangements to rejoin the ship in Banjul, Gambia on April 1, but the ship was unable to safely dock in the destination “due to adverse weather conditions”.

The spokesperson told news.com.au it contacted the passengers regarding the itinerary adjustment and provided them with authorisation to rejoin the ship at Dakar, Senegal on April 2.

News.com.au understands the eight guests have now rejoined the cruise in Dakar, Senegal, Picture: Alamy

“Despite the series of unfortunate events outside of our control, we will be reimbursing these eight guests for their travel costs from Banjur, Gambia to Dakar, Senegal. We remain in communication with the guests and are providing additional information as it becomes available.”

The Jill and Jay Campbell, from South Carolina, were the only people to have their bank cards and more than a few dollars on them. They said they have spent $7500 on accommodation and food for their fellow castaways.

They explained they were late to the cruise because there was an issue on their private tour.

“They [tour] were like: ‘No problem, we can get you back within an hour,’” Mr Campbell, who is a schoolteacher.

The guide contacted the captain to say the group were going to be late. When they got back to port the ship was still anchored just off shore. But staff would not allow the passengers to board.

“The harbour master tried to call the ship, the captain refused the call,” Mr Campbell told ABC 4 News South Carolina .

“We sent emails to NCL, the NCL customer service emergency number, they said ‘Well, the only way for us to get in touch with the ship is to send them emails, they’re not responding to our emails.’”

Mr Campbell said the nation’s coastguard service then put all the passengers on a boat and sailed them out to the cruise ship, but still they were refused permission to board.

He told US broadcaster NBC’s the Today Show on Tuesday that the people of São Tomé and Príncipe had been “very gracious, very hospitable,” and had steered them towards hotels and travel agents.

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Nonetheless, he said, it had been a challenging experience, describing it as a “very, very difficult process”.

News.com.au understands the eight guests have now rejoined the cruise in Dakar, Senegal.

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Nightly news, american cruise passengers faced travel nightmare after being left behind.

The passengers were late for the scheduled departure, so the Norwegian Cruise Lines ship set sail without them from an island in Africa, leading to a days-long journey to catch up with the ship. NBC News' Erin McLaughlin reports. April 2, 2024

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20-year-old man missing after jumping off a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, report says

A 20-year-old man on holiday with his family went overboard from a Royal Caribbean cruise.
The man, who's been missing since early Thursday morning, may have jumped, a report said.
The US Coast Guard has launched a search operation.

A 20-year-old man who was vacationing with his family on a cruise may have jumped overboard, The New York Post reported.

Royal Caribbean confirmed that a passenger, whose identity has not been revealed, went overboard near The Bahamas at about 4 a.m. on Thursday and has been missing since then.

The US Coast Guard launched a search for the passenger on Thursday.

A Royal Caribbean spokesperson told Business Insider that the cruise line's "Care Team is providing support and assistance to the guest's family during this difficult time."

Bryan Sims, a fellow cruise passenger, told The New York Post that he'd hung out with the passenger in the hot tub until 3:30 a.m. Sims said the man appeared to be "pretty drunk."

Sims told the Post that after leaving the hot tub, they encountered the passenger's father while approaching the elevators.

"His dad was fussing at him for being drunk," Sims said.

Watch: Sub taking tourists to see the Titanic goes missing

Main content

City leaders in Miami trying to drum up new cruise ship business

MOBILE, Ala. ( WALA ) - Two days after Carnival Spirit left the Port City -- Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson, City Director of Transportation & Maritime Joe Snowden, and Visit Mobile President & CEO David Clark are in Miami for the annual “Seatrade Cruise Global 2024″ -- the leading event for all things cruise industry. Expect all of of the major players at the 4-day event. This time around -- Mobile has some leverage -- riding off the success of Carnival Spirit’s inaugural season.

“Good news spreads fast -- and when you have success and you get the Carnival with cruise lines coming back with the Carnival Spirit -- a new ship for Mobile with newer itineraries. It always kind of creates dominoes and other cruise people saying -- hey it’s successful in Mobile -- so we’ve actually had a couple of other calls recently -- so that’s exciting,” said Clark.

And if you have a connection to the cruise ship industry -- Seatrade Cruise Global -- is THE event you want to attend. At this year’s event -- expect more than 10,000 attendees, 600 exhibitors, more than 120 countries represented, and more than 240 speakers.

The Miami Convention Center serving as a backdrop for the cruise ship industry and stakeholders to explore different areas of the business: everything from elevating guest experiences, the latest cruise ship designs and interiors, as well as safety and security. And according to Seatrade Cruise Global’s website -- perhaps one of the most enjoyable perks in attending -- indulging in the future of cruise dining and specialty drinks.

But more importantly -- it’s another opportunity to go before all the major cruise lines. Mobile’s leaders are already meeting with Carnival and others for a chance to lock in a ship during the vacant six months.

“So there’s all the major cruise companies are there and we have preset meetings with a couple. And actually this time -- they called us first! So that kind of never happens. I’ve been doing this show -- going down to Miami for the past 7 consecutive years -- and that hasn’t happened yet. So that’s good news,” said Clark.

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