Fancy a wee sail?
Recently, BBC Scotland’s TV news ran an item about the arrival of the cruise ship Queen Mary 2 in Greenock. As it happens, I know that only a few days earlier an equally grand cruise liner – but one with no Scottish connection of any kind – had docked in the same location. How do I know? Because a little earlier, after two weeks on board, I had disembarked from the Royal Princess in Southampton before it set off for Scotland, continuing its month-long cruise from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, transatlantic to northern Europe.
I had crossed the Atlantic by sea once before. That was back in 1957 when, thanks to a Fulbright travel grant, I was able to board the original Queen Mary and sail from Southampton to New York in order to take up the Procter fellowship I’d been awarded to undertake postgraduate study in Princeton University in New Jersey. As I recall, the trip involved no more than five nights at sea, and as this was a time when the US government was doing all it could to encourage young Europeans to study in America, I was far from being the only excited Fulbrighter on board. Sailing from Fort Lauderdale to Southampton via the Azores, Cobh (near Cork in Ireland), Rotterdam and Zeebrugge (to allow a visit to Bruges), on the Royal Princess, proved to be a 2015 experience of an entirely different kind.
First and foremost was the quite unbelievable size and scale of the ship. Statistics are of only minor help, but in any case here they are: gross tonnage 142,714 tons; net tonnage 116,807 tons; length 1,082 feet; maximum number of passengers 4,222; maximum number of crew 1,378. Its construction (in Italy) completed in May 2013, the Royal Princess, with its 18 decks, has to be one of the world’s biggest ships. Looking down from a top deck to the quayside below, people seemed as small as ants. On board were no fewer than 13 restaurants and cafes. Passengers could spend all day doing nothing but eating – and the quality of the food was uniformly high.
For anyone more interested in drinking than eating, there were 11 bars and lounges of different kinds. (All meals were free – although four more specialised restaurants charged a $25 supplement.) Drinks on the other hand had to be paid for. No cash changed hands on board. All expenditure was logged on a kind of shipboard bank- card, and paid up on disembarkation. One deck was made up of a range of boutique- style shops selling expensive jewellery, watches, perfumery, alcohol, clothes, and works of art (of a kind).
Another (my least favourite) was a somewhat vulgar casino, with endless rows of flashing and noisy slot machines, as well as more traditional gaming tables. On the other hand the quality of décor in the public decks, with their immaculate light marble floors, water fountains, and grand sweeping staircases, was impressively high. A huge theatre staged films and a variety of forms of entertainment every day – including a daily, not over-demanding, lecture on historical events or figures.
The ship’s song and dance entertainment group were smart and professional, well choreographed and produced. But one would have had to be in a very ‘I’m on holiday determined to enjoy myself’ frame of mind, even to begin to like some of the other theatrical events.
Top decks 17 and 18 provided a range of suggested outdoor activities. Everywhere deck chairs were in place, hopefully allowing passengers to enjoy the Atlantic sun. On this cruise, however, the sun was not much in evidence – which meant that the three swimming pools were never busy, and the ever-attentive towel boys found little to do. Likewise the ‘movies under the stars’, shown on a huge outdoor screen viewed from decks 16 and 17, were only sparsely attended. But the activities I’ve mentioned represent only a fraction of what was happening on board every day.
Every morning beside my state room door (the Royal Princess had no cabins – all passengers occupied state rooms) a printed booklet materialised listing in detail everything I could to do that day: everything that is from ‘Bible study’ to ‘Aerobox Fitness Class’, ‘Mahjong Get-Together’, ‘Morning Trivia Challenge’, ‘Princess Pop Choir Rehearsal’, ‘Open Bridge Play’, ‘Flashmob Dance Class’, ‘Grapevine Wine Tasting’, ‘Snowball Jackpot Bingo’, ‘Early Evening Melodies with the Capriccio String Quartet’, ‘LBGT Get-Together’ – and so on and on and on. On the log for Monday 4 May there were no fewer than 92 activities for passengers to choose from. So given all this, why did I find myself so often wondering what to do?
Seeking an answer, I read an essay by the late lamented American novelist David Foster Wallace. Back in 1995 Wallace was sent on a ‘Luxury Cruise’ through the Caribbean by Harper’s Magazine. The article he subsequently published in Harper’s about his experience aboard what he called the ‘Nadir’ cruise ship (its actual name was the ‘Zenith’) was called ‘Shipping Out’. A little later it became ‘A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again’ – the title, and final section, in a collection of Wallace’s essays. American friends had suggested I’d find this piece amusing. In fact I found it distinctly unnerving.
Every impression I had of the Royal Princess, every insight I credited myself with, every observation I’d made concerning fellow-passengers, the crew, the forms of entertainment, the holiday camp atmosphere, my every reaction to the total ambience of the culture of cruising – was wonderfully present, in hugely superior and richly expanded form, in David Foster Wallace’s wittily excoriating essay. A great writer’s language and expression exist at a level far beyond anything a mere onlooker could aspire to, but in so many instances, in terms of an analysis of the cruising experience, reading his essay, we seemed to be, as it were, on the same boat.
As it happens, before writing his own account, Wallace had read a piece by Frank Conroy, a fellow writer whom he greatly admired, about the very cruise he was now enjoying. But Wallace hated Conroy’s work. Why? Because the cruise company’s public relations had hired ‘one of the USA’s most respected writers to pre-articulate and endorse’ the experience, ‘and to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal’. Now here I was, as a mere ‘lay perceiver and articulator’ responding to Wallace’s response to Conroy’s work. But the truth was that over and over again I found myself enthusiastically endorsing Wallace’s perceptions.
Describing the ‘Nadir’, Wallace wrote: ‘the vessel and facilities were…absolutely top-hole. The food was superb, the service impeccable, the shore excursions and shipboard activities organised for maximum stimulation down to the tiniest detail. The ship was so clean and so white it looked boiled’. ‘In one week’, he tells us, he ‘had been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles’. He might well have been talking about the Royal Princess. All of the cruise companies, he goes on, ‘offer the same basic product. This product is not a service or a set of services. It’s not even so much a good time (though it quickly becomes clear that one of the big jobs of the cruise director and his staff is to keep reassuring everybody that everybody’s having a good time). It’s more like a feeling’.
A feeling your cruise is meant to produce in you, ‘a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism’. Nothing has changed since 1995. Everything that Wallace was writing about then, I found myself experiencing in 2015. The patterns of cruise culture have clearly become fixed, a tried and tested routine which the passenger accepts and has come to expect. (I was struck – as Wallace was – by the number of fellow-passengers I met who had been on lots of cruises.) Cruising is well on its way to becoming a way of life.
Only in one respect did the Royal Princess experience differ significantly from that of the Nadir. Near the beginning of his essay, Wallace notes that Luxury Cruises ‘appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age 50+ people’. Well on the Royal Princess the average passenger age must have been significantly higher: 60+ at least. There were no young people. (I was told that among the 3,500 travellers, there were exactly four young children.) And, like me, almost all the passengers were, if not decrepit, at least distinctly old. (Unlike me, a very large number were also distinctly large.) What were they like? Friendly, companionable, outgoing, willing to share their sense of having a good time. At their best on the three formal nights, when we men wore dinner-jackets or lounge suits and the women long dresses, it was impossible not to imagine oneself back in that elegant, long-ago, Edwardian world of the lost Titanic.
What were they really like? I’m not sure what to make of a perhaps defining moment. One day the programme advertised for the huge interior theatre was ‘Selma’, the film about Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle in 1960s America. I went down a few minutes before it was due to start to find a notice on the theatre’s doors saying it was being prepared for that evening’s live entertainment. Nonetheless, the film was still advertised, and indeed minutes later the doors were opened. I went in and stayed to watch what proved to be a powerful and moving film. But when it ended, and the lights came up, the vast theatre proved to be totally empty. Amid that vast expanse of empty seats only a single couple rose up to leave. We waved to each other across the forlorn emptiness. Had others come before me and decided the showing had been cancelled? I’d like to think so, but could it be that to be returned to the world of ‘Selma’ was somehow incompatible with what comfortable cruising on the Royal Princess – or any other cruise liner – was all about?
By Andrew Hook | October 2015
