ship happens

SHIP HAPPENS
No One Is Coming — Episode Transcript

Lance Still: A cruise ship is where you can watch the sunrise over the Mediterranean from a private balcony, eat breakfast prepared by a crew of two thousand, and be docked in a port you’ve never heard of by noon. It’s also where you can contract a virus that spreads through buffet tongs before anyone knows it’s there, lose your wallet with no police station to report it to, get scammed at the gangway before you’ve even left the ship, and discover that the person in the cabin next to you has been missing for six hours and nobody told you. There’s a water slide on the world’s largest cruise ship tall enough to qualify as a minor landmark. There’s also a morgue three decks below the pool. A cruise ship is where people fall in love, renew their vows, scatter ashes, celebrate sobriety, and occasionally commit crimes that take 15 years to prosecute because no one can agree on the jurisdiction. It is, depending on the day, the best vacation you’ve ever taken, and a compressed demonstration of exactly what happens when a temporary civilization meets pressure it wasn’t designed for. Almost 38 million people boarded a cruise in 2025. That’s nearly the entire population of Canada choosing voluntarily to leave the known world behind. 82% of them will do it again. In April 2024, novelist Gary Shteyngart wrote about the Icon of the Seas for The Atlantic in a piece called Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever. It went viral, partly because Shteyngart is very funny, and partly because the piece landed directly on the fault line of modern cruising. To one kind of traveler, the Icon was a miracle of engineering, the largest cruise ship ever built, a floating city with neighborhoods and water parks, theaters, restaurants, and enough entertainment to make the ocean almost besides the point. To Shteyngart, it was something closer to a floating mall with vertigo. He paid nearly nineteen thousand dollars for a suite that faced inward toward the ship’s shopping promenade instead of outward towards the sea. And one passenger told him she was afraid of the ocean, but on the Icon, she said, “You don’t even know that you’re on a boat.” That’s the key to the whole thing. The modern cruise ship is designed to make the ocean disappear. The gangway lifts. The city disconnects. You’re now on a vessel with its own power, food, water, security, medical care, waste systems, entertainment economy, and emergency protocols. It looks like vacation, but structurally, it is a temporary civilization. And when something fails, the resort disappears, and what’s left is a sealed city in the middle of the ocean. To understand what a cruise ship actually is and what it can become, you have to start where the modern maritime disaster starts. Not with a buffet or a norovirus or a man overboard in international waters with no one watching. You have to start with ice and a ship that couldn’t sink.

ACT ONE: TITANIC AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN DISASTER CRUISE

Lance Still: Every disaster at sea lives in the shadow of one ship, not because it was the worst, not because the most people died, but because it was the first time the modern world looked at what it had built, what it believed, and watched it go under anyway. The Titanic didn’t just sink. It took the idea of unsinkable with it. But what is left behind was something useful, a set of questions that maritime safety has been trying to answer ever since, about ice, visibility, and what people do when the conditions appear so favorable they become extremely treacherous. Tim Maltin is a British author, historian, and broadcaster, and one of the world’s leading experts on the Titanic. He’s written three books on the subject. He has spent decades studying the Titanic as a real event, not a myth: the weather, the visibility, the radio communications, the assumptions, and the decisions made in the dark. It’s such a compelling story. Clearly, it captured your imagination, and what did cause it?

Tim Maltin: To not underwhelm your listeners, it was caused by the weather. The weather was unbelievably clear, unbelievably calm. There was a lot more ice in the area where Titanic sank than they were used to. In fact, they counted more than 25 icebergs that were more than 200 feet high on every point of the compass, and there was, in fact… People don’t really realize this. They think of Titanic hitting a lone piece of ice, a lone iceberg, which, don’t panic, she did. That is correct. But, um, only seven minutes sailing time away from where she collided was, in fact, an impenetrable barrier of ice, uh, three miles wide and 75 miles long. So there was, in fact, no way through to New York that night without actually coming to a stop. The light bends downwards around the curvature of the earth, and that raises what we call a false horizon, and it makes a band of mist around the horizon, and it was that that delayed, not just delayed the sighting of the iceberg for crucial moments, but also crucially, and almost more importantly, I would say, it delayed and confused what a ship only 10 miles away, the Californian, actually thought they saw, and it prevented a very heroic rescue from, from taking place. So in a nutshell, it was the atmospheric conditions that night caused by unusual weather. But then you asked me something, uh, which is a brilliant question as well. You know, why are we talking about Titanic today? And I think I’ve got an answer for that as well, which is, um, it’s the perfect tragedy The ancient Greeks had this idea that humans are trying our best to strive, to use our ingenuity to overcome nature and prolong our lives and, and, and be better at all sorts of things. So that’s why we’re talking about Titanic today. It’s a touchstone for the human condition itself.

Lance Still: Titanic sank on April 15th, 1912. Within two years, the world had the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, the framework that still governs maritime safety today. 24-hour radio watch became mandatory. The International Ice Patrol began charting icebergs in the North Atlantic. Lifeboat requirements changed. Titanic did not end the fantasy of luxury at sea. The ships got bigger. The regulations got more specific

ACT TWO: THE SHIP AS A FLOATING CITY

Lance Still: The Titanic carried approximately 2,200 people. It was 882 feet long. It had a swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a gymnasium, and a squash court. By any measure of its time, it was an extraordinary machine. It was also, by the standards of what came next, almost quaint. The cruise industry that emerged in the decades after Titanic started as transportation and then became something else entirely. Ships stopped being the fastest way to cross an ocean and started being the point of the crossing itself. But the idea of going to sea purely for pleasure is older than most people realize. Mark Twain took one of the early North American cruises in 1867 aboard a wooden paddle steamer called the Quaker City, and wrote about it with a mixture of delight and exasperation that has characterized cruise writing ever since. The first purpose-built cruise ship launched in 1900. Prohibition sent Americans to sea in the 1920s to drink legally beyond the three-mile limit. Some ships simply floated in international waters for days. The destination was booze. After World War II, as commercial flights made the transatlantic crossing obsolete, the great ocean liner companies had a choice. Retire or reinvent. Most reinvented. But in the ’70s, only about half a million people took a cruise holiday every year. Cruising was still widely considered, as one industry insider put it, “A vacation for the nearly dead or newly married.” And then Hollywood got involved. In 1972, The Poseidon Adventure arrived in cinemas. A 90-foot rogue wave capsizes a luxury ocean liner on New Year’s Eve. Right as the band is playing and the champagne is flowing, and 1,400 people are about to ring in the new year, the ship flips upside down. A small group of survivors have to climb through the inverted wreckage, which is now the floor, to reach the hull, which is now the ceiling, to escape. Poseidon Adventure didn’t just sell tickets. It launched an entire decade of disaster cinema. Airport, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno. The 1970s were obsessed with the fantasy of catastrophe, with ordinary people tested by extraordinary circumstances, with the question of who survives and why. And then five years later, The Love Boat offered a different answer. The formula was simple. Passengers came aboard with problems. The problems got solved. Everyone left happy. Before The Love Boat, cruising was a niche activity. After, Princess Cruises was selling out ships and having to build new ones. Forty new cruise ships were constructed in the 1980s. By 1997, five million people a year were cruising. The show introduced American viewers to Sydney, to the Great Wall of China, to the Acropolis. The ship was a paradise. It was also a portal. As one of the show’s writers put it, The Love Boat created the cruise industry because you had 50 million people watching each week, and they all wanted to go on a cruise. The same decade gave the world a ship as a death trap and a ship as a paradise. Both versions stuck. Growing up in New England, it wasn’t on his radar, but he knew what cruising was supposed to be. Daniel Klein is co-editor-in-chief of The Street and editor-in-chief of Travel Host’s Come Cruise With Me. He has covered business, travel, and the cruise industry for decades, with a focus on how people actually spend their money and what they get for it. Dan did not take his first cruise until 2019. Since then, outside the COVID shutdown, he has sailed at least once a month, often writing from cruise ship coffee shops. Here’s what he has to say about why the right cruise matters.

Daniel Klein: Cruising was, you know, The Love Boat. It was older people, you know, falling in love, which-… by the way, makes no sense ’cause they, they didn’t live in the same place, and they didn’t have smartphones back then. So I never really understood The Love Boat.

Lance Still: The industry that followed took the luxury and the scale and the promise of the liner and built it into something available to anyone who could afford a ticket. And then it kept building. In 2009, Royal Caribbean launched Oasis of the Seas, and the ship did something that still sounds insane if you say it plainly. It had neighborhoods. Actual neighborhoods. There was a central park, an open-air garden with thousands of living plants and trees. There was the boardwalk with a carousel and an aqua theater. Titanic had been designed as the most luxurious way to cross the Atlantic. Modern cruising kept the luxury and changed the premise. The ship was no longer the way across. The ship was the thing. It’s the old saying about life being the journey, not the destination, made literal. In this case, the journey has seven pools, a casino, a water park, and a man in cargo shorts asking if lobster night is included.

Daniel Klein: I think it’s changed in that the cruise ship has become the destination. Cruise ships used to be a place to sleep and have dinner, more of a hotel with some entertainment, and it took you to places. Now, that type of cruising is certainly possible. Go, go cruise Viking in Europe, which I, I highly recommend to people. Go on, you know, mid-size and, and smaller Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian ships, and they’ll go to more interesting destinations a lot of the times. But if you want to get on the ship because you like bars and entertainment and restaurants and water slides and, and that, you don’t have to get off the ship. People often ask me, “Where are you going?” And my answer is usually, “I don’t know.”

Lance Still: In January 2024, Royal Caribbean launched the Icon of the Seas. It is more than three and a half football fields long, nearly 20 stories high, and more than five times the size of Titanic by volume. It can carry up to 7,600 passengers across 20 decks. With eight neighborhoods, seven pools, a water park, and an ice rink. It cost $2 billion to build. Behind all of that is the machinery of a floating city. More than 2,300 crew members keep it running. On a typical day, the ship serves around 10,000 meals and 6,000 cups of coffee, while making millions of gallons of fresh water from the sea over the course of a voyage. It looks like a vacation. It runs like a city. And like any city, it is only as good as the systems keeping it alive.

ACT THREE: DISEASE

Lance Still: Every time a ship docked in a new port, it brought whatever was living on it: cargo, passengers, rats, bacteria. The sea has always been one of the most efficient delivery systems for infectious disease ever invented, and the people living around ports figured that out long before anyone knew what a pathogen was. The Black Death arrived in Europe in 1347 on 12 Genoese trading ships that docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. The sailors who weren’t already dead were covered in black, oozing boils. The port authorities ordered the ships out of the harbor immediately, but it was too late. The plague spread across Europe over the next five years and killed between 30 and 60% of the continent’s population. Venice, one of the great trading ports of the medieval world, decided it needed a system. Ships arriving from plague-infected ports were required to anchor offshore and wait. They chose 40 days, partly for religious reasons, the 40 days of Lent, the 40 days Christ spent in the desert, and partly because 40 days comfortably exceeded the plague’s incubation period. Quarantina, the word we still use today. Dr Charlotte Hammer is an applied infectious disease epidemiologist and public health emergency specialist at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Anticipatory Epidemiology Lab at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, serves as course director for the MPhil in Global Risk and Resilience, and is a fellow of Downing College. In other words, Charlotte studies what happens when disease meets instability. So when I asked her what makes a cruise ship different from every other environment she works in, she started with the obvious problem: You can’t just leave.

Charlotte Hammer: You have basically floating mini cities that are closed and semi-captive, so the people can’t easily get away. You have sustained contact over days, maybe even weeks, so it’s not this transient mixing that you would have, say, in an airport or even on a short-haul flight. So you have people in really long-term and pretty close contact because it’s also usually high density. It’s a multi-use environment, so you do sort of everything together with everyone in sort of the same spaces, which means you can have all kinds of exposure pathways. So in simple terms, fomites are objects or surfaces that carry infectious pathogens from a person to another. They’re not inherently dirty, they just pose the potential for cross-contamination. So you can almost think of this as an indirect handshake. So instead of hand to hand, you have hand to thing to another hand, and then very often in between of that, hand to mouth, hand to eyes, hand to somewhere in the face. If you actually pay attention to how often you touch your face and your mouth, that is quite alarming.

Lance Still: Elevator buttons, handrails, casino machines, buffet tongs, theater seats, bathroom doors. On a ship carrying thousands of people through the same spaces, these objects become part of an invisible choreography. Hand to rail, rail to hand, hand to face, person to person. Norovirus is the floor-level cruise illness. Fast, miserable, and perfectly suited to the shared choreography of ship life. It can survive on surfaces for days. It takes very few viral particles to infect someone. And hand sanitizer, the ubiquitous cruise ship defense, turns out to be less useful than most people think.

Charlotte Hammer: Hand sanitizer is always an add-on. Hand sanitizer does not replace hand washing. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers are less effective against non-enveloped viruses like norovirus. So they reduce how much norovirus, but they might not get rid of it entirely. They also do not get rid of dirt. This sounds really stupidly simple, but it is a fact. So you might have visible dirt or microscopic dirt on your hands, say after bathroom use, and that cannot be washed away with hand sanitizer. And obviously, then you have sort of a bit of a behavior risk of thinking, “Oh, everything’s fine. I have my hand sanitizer. I don’t need to wash my hands.” Whereas the hand washing actually does break your transmission pathway. If you do it right for the right amount of time with soap, you actually get rid of the vast, vast majority of the pathogen because you have not only the, the chemical side of it, you also have mechanical removal.

Lance Still: Even a seasoned passenger like Daniel Klein can still end up on the wrong side of the ship’s health protocols.

Daniel Klein: I actually got food poisoning and ended up getting quarantined ’cause they think you have norovirus. Right, of course. And they know, they know you don’t, but they’re being careful. They asked me in the medical center, “Well, in the last 24 hours, have you spoken with anyone?” And I said, “Only two people.” And they said, “Who?” And I said, “The cruise director and the captain.” And they said, “Ha ha ha.” And I said, “No, the cruise director had my picture, knew I was here, and introduced me to… And captain, we all talked for like half an hour. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Lance Still: So why do you think diseases spread so efficiently aboard ships?

Charlotte Hammer: You have the potential for prolonged exposure because of being closer together and for a prolonged period of time. There is a limit to how you can ventilate a ship just because of what a ship is like. You usually have low ceilings. You have indoor cabins very often. Um, you do have crowding in some areas.

Lance Still: So when people think about cruise ships and disease, norovirus comes up a lot. That’s a repeat offender. But are there other infectious diseases we should think about?

Charlotte Hammer: Absolutely, and norovirus is, is such a, uh, frequent flyer-… because it is quite transmissible. It goes very easily via shared touch environments, which you have a lot, and also you have shared food. You have shared water sources and so on. So with water, things like Legionella come to mind, um, which also likes, for example, hot tubs, which can aerosolize it, um, but also through other water systems, but also things like E. coli, salmonella, when you think about the high volume catering needs, particularly of large ships.

Lance Still: Legionnaires’ disease spreads through aerosolized water droplets, not person to person. In 1994, 50 passengers across nine consecutive voyages of the same ship contracted it from a contaminated whirlpool. The outbreak went undetected for three months until a physician in New Jersey noticed that three of his hospitalized patients with atypical pneumonia had all been on the same cruise. More recently, between September 2022 and April 2024, the CDC investigated two separate Legionnaires’ outbreaks on two cruise ships. The source in both cases, private balcony hot tubs. Not the public spa, not the pool. The amenity sold as a luxury upgrade. A private hot tub on your own balcony with its own jets retaining water between uses, running a heating element continuously, and never once tested for Legionella because private balcony hot tubs weren’t required to meet the same standards as public ones. Six of 10 of those private hot tubs on one ship tested positive. Passengers on surrounding decks were also at risk because the jets aerosolized the water into the air. You didn’t have to use the hot tub, you just had to be nearby when it was running. Why is clear communication so important during any outbreak?

Charlotte Hammer: So for any outbreak response to work anywhere in the world, in any community, in any setting, there’s one key ingredient, and it doesn’t matter how much resources you have, and that’s trust. Nothing works without trust. And we see that again and again, that if trust breaks down, your outbreak response breaks down. So when you have good communication and you have trust, that means you have earlier reporting. That also means there will be more compliance with control measures. Again, if you don’t trust the person issuing a recommendation, why on earth would you do it?

Lance Still: What should people do if they get sick on board?

Charlotte Hammer: So you want to report early. Um, you just want to let someone know, and both in terms of your service to the general public on the cruise to make sure if there is something going on, containment is faster. There’s no much, uh, on- onward transmission, but also for your own interest because if no one knows you’re ill, no one can help you. It’s, it’s that simple. And usually if someone knows you’re ill, someone can do something about it.

Lance Still: In January 2020, a passenger who had been infected with a novel coronavirus boarded the Diamond Princess. He left the ship in Hong Kong on January 25. By the time the ship returned to Yokohama, Japan on February 3rd, public health officials were already trying to understand what they were looking at. 10 people initially tested positive. Japanese authorities quarantined the ship. Roughly 3,700 people were now part of one of the earliest major COVID outbreaks outside mainland China. A cruise ship had become a case study. So when you think about something like Diamond Princess at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, what did it teach the world about quarantine, asymptomatic spread, uncertainty, the, the virus itself?

Charlotte Hammer: Yeah, I I still so vividly remember the days when we had this list of most affected countries, and it was China way, way, way off the scale, and then next one was international conveyance, which sort of everyone knew was the Diamond Princess. But more importantly, from a public health point of view and, and a science point of view, a ship is sort of a natural experiment because you have this closed environment, and in some ways, as horrible as this is for the people on the ship, this is incredibly informative in the early stages of such a situation like we had with the, with the Diamond Princess. So you had this amplified environment, so you had to take that into account obviously. But you had information on how does asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission actually contribute to spread. So how much silent spreading do you have prior to isolation? Imagine some of these cabins are really small. They are indoors. If you do that over weeks, people will go crazy. The behavioral side of this is not to be underestimated.

Lance Still: Later analysis suggested that intervention probably prevented a much larger outbreak, so that response mattered. But the Diamond Princess also revealed the brutal contradiction of onboard quarantine. The ship was protecting the outside world from the outbreak while the people inside were still living it. Quarantine reduced the spread beyond the ship. It did not make the ship safe. A temporary civilization of roughly 3,700 people had become one of the most significant epidemiological events of the early pandemic. So far, we’ve been talking about what happens when disease boards a ship and starts moving through it. Norovirus moves through hands and shared surfaces. Legionella grows in water systems. COVID turned the Diamond Princess into one of the earliest case studies in onboard quarantine. But a ship is not just a closed environment. It’s a route through the world.

ACT FOUR: WHEN THE SHIP HITS THE FAN

Lance Still: A cruise ship is engineered to make the ocean feel almost optional. The carpet doesn’t move. The bars stay open. The buffet replenishes itself. The theater lights come up on time. Your bed gets made while somewhere below you, engines, stabilizers, pumps, generators, ballast tanks, fire sensors, and bridge officers are working to keep an impossible thing feeling ordinary. But the ocean is not just scenery. It’s not the background. It’s the condition. So modern ships are safer in many ways and more complex in others.

Tim Maltin: No, I wouldn’t accept that, I’m afraid. I would say that modern ships are not as safe as the Titanic. I would say that the metal in Titanic was very, very thick. It was perfectly adequate for whatever she was normally supposed to be doing. Uh, if you run any ship at 22 knots, which is nearly 30 miles an hour, at, at a million-ton piece of ice, you’re gonna blow it up, basically. Most modern ships have basically walls down the middle of the vessel. That and watertight decks, which Titanic didn’t have, all of that makes a vessel tend to, um, to flip over very quickly, basically. You know, the sort of Poseidon Adventure type, type thing. So actually I would say that Titanic’s design was among the safest of ships that ever put to sea. She just had a very, very unusual and, in some ways, unlucky encounter.

Lance Still: Titanic was a catastrophe produced by an extraordinary convergence of conditions and terrible luck. So many things had to go wrong in exactly the right order that it can feel like an act of divine determinism. And Titanic changed maritime safety. The industry learned how to prevent another Titanic. But modern cruising didn’t eliminate disasters. It just broadened the menu. A century later, in January 2012, the Costa Concordia was sailing near the Italian island of Giglio when its captain took the ship away from its planned route for a close sail-by salute. The reef was charted. The ship struck it anyway. The impact tore open a hole, flooded the engine room, and knocked out power. What turned a serious accident into a catastrophe was a pile of human errors stacked one on top of another. But danger was minimized. Passengers were told that there was an electrical problem, and some were sent back to their cabins. Authorities were not given a clear account of what happened. The order to abandon ship came more than an hour after the impact. When the ship was already leaning so severely that some of the lifeboats could no longer be launched safely. Then the captain left while hundreds of people were still aboard. A furious Coast Guard officer ordered him to return. He did not. 32 passengers and crew members died. Titanic happened far out in the North Atlantic, in darkness, after a freak encounter with an iceberg. Concordia hit a known reef close enough to shore that passengers could see the lights of the island. The danger was visible. The information existed. The safety systems existed. And the disaster kept getting worse because each bad decision narrowed the choices left for everything that came next. Costa Concordia became notorious because people died in a disaster that should never have happened. Carnival Triumph became notorious for something else. The ship didn’t sink, but it did stink. It became spectacularly, publicly, almost mythically disgusting. In February 2013, the Carnival Triumph was sailing in the Gulf of Mexico when a fuel line failed near one of its engines. Fuel sprayed, a fire broke out in the engine room, and the ship lost primary power. The fire was controlled. The hull remained intact. More than 4,000 passengers and crew were aboard a damaged ship that was still floating. But the machinery that made the ship livable began shutting down. The toilets stopped working. Sewage backed up. The air conditioning failed. The elevators stopped. Refrigeration and food service collapsed. Cabins grew hot and foul, and passengers dragged mattresses onto the open decks because sleeping outside was better than staying in their rooms. Food became whatever could be handed out safely: cold sandwiches, snacks, candy, and the detail that came to symbolize the entire voyage, ketchup on a bun. News helicopters began circling overhead. Passengers stood on deck and tried to spell help out for the cameras. Those images went everywhere. The ship had a name, but the public gave it a different one, the Poop Cruise. When Triumph lost power, the difference between a floating resort and a floating sanitation crisis turned out to be a handful of systems most passengers had never thought about. The restaurants, cabins, and bars were still there. Without power, they were just rooms inside of a steel box full of hot, miserable people. Titanic defined maritime disaster for more than a century. Concordia showed how human error can turn a survivable accident into an absolute catastrophe. Triumph showed how quickly systems failures can turn a fantasy into an unlivable, disgusting nightmare.

ACT FIVE: THE BODY AT SEA

Lance Still: And then there’s the smallest system on the ship, the human body. Ross Klein is a professor of social work at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and an internationally recognized authority on the cruise ship industry. He has taken more than 30 cruises, written four books about the subject, testified before Congress, and served as an expert in lawsuits involving the industry. His view of onboard medicine is blunt.

Ross Klein: Healthcare onboard a cruise ship is not even at the same level as an emergency department at your local hospital. If something serious happens to you, you’re gonna need immediate care and very likely air evacuation.

Lance Still: That doesn’t mean the medical center is fake. It doesn’t mean the doctors aren’t real. It doesn’t mean that no one can help you.

Ross Klein: And I don’t want to impugn the level of medical care onboard a cruise ship, but I think one has to be, has to be realistic in terms of what the level of care may be.

Lance Still: Cruise ships can treat a lot: seasickness, dehydration, a bad cut, a minor injury. The medical center can assess you, medicate you, isolate you if you’re contagious, and decide whether or not you can stay onboard. But if the problem needs a hospital, the ship becomes the place where the decision gets made, not the place where the problem gets solved. An appendicitis that needs surgery is not something the ship can solve at sea. A broken hip is not just a broken hip when the nearest hospital is a helicopter ride away. A cardiac emergency may need equipment, specialists, or procedures that the ship doesn’t have. Those are medical problems anywhere, but they become logistical problems because the person is having them on the ship.

Ross Klein: There’s certain things that no matter how qualified the physician is, uh, if it happens on a cruise ship, it, it, it’s not gonna be a, a, a good outcome. So they… I guess it’s recognizing the cruise ship may be similar to your general practitioner’s office.

Lance Still: So if you have an appendicitis, you’re gonna be airlifted off.

Ross Klein: the ship. If you can be airlifted, in terms of if you’re within distance, and if you’re near a country you want to be airlifted to.

Lance Still: Two things can be true at once. There is real medical care onboard, and if the emergency is larger than what the ship can handle, the next system you’re relying on is evacuation. Onboard medical care is usually billed to your ship account. A hospital in port may require payment before discharge. Your regular health insurance may reimburse some of it later, or it may not. Travel insurance is what helps cover the gap, especially if evacuation or trip interruption enters the picture.

ACT SIX: CRIME, DISAPPEARANCE, AND JURISDICTION

Lance Still: Everything we’ve talked about so far assumes the worst things that can happen on a cruise are accidents. The ship loses power, the seas get rough, a virus spreads, people make mistakes. But some of the wildest cruise ship stories are not about systems breaking. They’re about what happens when you combine thousands of strangers, private rooms, alcohol, money, vacation brain, and sometimes, a moving crime scene. And at sea, the first question is not always what went wrong. Sometimes, it’s who has the authority to do anything about it? A cruise ship operates under the flag of a country that may be thousands of miles away. When it docks, the port state has authority. When it leaves, the legal picture changes again. If the victim is American or the ship left from a US port, the FBI may have authority, but authority is not the same thing as control. I asked Ross Klein what that jurisdiction actually looks like in practice.

Ross Klein: If it’s US citizens on a ship leaving from a US port, the FBI has authority over any crime against any US citizen anywhere in the world.

Lance Still: So the problem is not always that no one has authority. The problem is sometimes what gets reported to that authority in the first place.

Ross Klein: The industry came in, and they’re trying to offer, “We don’t need to arrange. We’re gonna do this.” And what they offered was that they’re going to voluntarily file with the FBI all crime reports from onboard cruise ships.

Lance Still: For a while, that created a broader paper trail. Then the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act passed. The data being sent to the FBI could be accessed through the Freedom of Information requests.

Ross Klein: When the act was finally passed and started taking effect and the industry realized that the data they had been giving to the FBI was available through Freedom of Information, they stopped providing that information.

Lance Still: What remained became more narrow: certain serious crimes, certain thresholds, certain victims, which means the question becomes not only who has jurisdiction, but who decides what kind of incident it was.

Ross Klein: Now, who determines whether it’s serious bodily injury or an assault? The crew member on board the cruise ship, ‘kay? And they have a vested interest to keep it at a lower level than a higher level. The same happens with sexual assaults, ‘kay? The crew member determines whether or not it’s gonna be listed as sexual assault rape, sexual assault inappropriate touching, or sexual assault groping, and the only one that gets reported is rape.

Lance Still: The Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act passed in 2010 after more than a decade of congressional hearings. It requires cruise lines to log and report certain serious crimes to the FBI, maintain records of deaths and disappearances, and keep security information available to the passengers. Which brings us to the next question: What happens when something is reported? This is where it helps to hear from someone who has actually done the work on board. Vince McNally spent six years working in cruise ship security for Holland America after a 30-year career with the FBI. He’s investigated crime at sea, worked with shipboard security teams, and seen firsthand how cruise lines respond when something goes wrong far from the shore.

Vince McNally: My job is to handle the day-to-day security of the ship, handle the inspections, the Coast Guard when they come on board, conduct all the investigations, as well as each time a ship comes in, I’m there making sure everything goes correctly. You never know when something will happen on a cruise ship.

Lance Still: Vince describes a missing person report as immediate. Security gathers. They get a photograph and a description. Departments search their sections. Everyone works by radio. The ship has protocols, and when someone is missing, time matters.

Vince McNally: As soon as the person is reported, it’s an immediate call for all our security, and we all meet in one spot, and then we get the information, photograph of the person, and we go through the whole ship. Each department on the ship has a protocol, too. They help us look through the sections, too.

Lance Still: A cruise ship is not empty of care or procedures. There are people on board trying to solve problems before they become disasters, but there are limits.

Ross Klein: On a ship of, let’s say 4,000, 5,000 passengers, there may be only 20 security people, and they’re covering 24 hours a day, right? So any one time, you may only have a dozen security people, even less than that, maybe eight people on duty. So it’s not the best of coverages.

Lance Still: The ship does have tools, cameras, key card records that show who entered which cabin and when, security logs. The closed nature of the environment, which makes disease spread so efficiently, also makes some investigations easier than they would be on land, but only if they’re reported quickly.

Vince McNally: If something’s missing or you think that you’re running into an issue or you have a problem, theft, anything, you immediately contact, you say, “Security.” Well, how do you contact security? Call the front desk. They’ll immediately send somebody there, ’cause it needs to be reported right away, and that’s one of the key problems with investigations. You can have a lot of reports of incidents, but not able to follow up because it’s too far of a period of time.

Lance Still: Report it right away. That sounds obvious until you’re embarrassed, drunk, frightened, unsure, or trying not to ruin the trip. But on a ship, delay changes everything. And when someone goes overboard, every minute matters even more.

Ross Klein: They call it Man Overboard, but Person Overboard systems. And what, what these are is that basically electronic sensors, so that if anything were to go over the side of the ship larger than a certain size, so it wouldn’t pick up the size of an infant, but it would pick up the size of a small adult. Okay? If any goes overboard, it’s then reported to the bridge so they can then investigate. And there’s a normal maneuver, uh, that ships will do if a person goes overboard where, where they do a, a backwards eight to come back to that location. You can look up the cases. Uh, Samantha Broberg, mother of four, three young children, uh, goes on a cruise with, with, with her friends on a Carnival cruise, and, uh, they get into drinking, and she’s had… It’s about 2:00 in the morning. She’s had a bit too much to drink, goes onto the deck, pulls a chair up against the railing, uh, and she loses her balance and gone. No one knew she was gone until, like, eight hours later.

Lance Still: Every year, somewhere between 19 and 25 people go overboard from cruise ships. When it happens, the survival rate is about 17%. So yes, overboard incidents are rare, but rare is not the same as survivable. In May 2016, Samantha Broberg boarded the Carnival Liberty in Galveston, Texas, with friends for a four-day Caribbean sailing. The ship had camera footage of what happened, but no one was watching it in real time. The crew didn’t know she had gone overboard until 15 hours later after reviewing the footage. Her body was never found, and her widower sued Carnival, arguing that the cruise line had over-served her and failed to protect her. But the federal judge found Carnival was not legally responsible, saying the company could not be responsible for what it didn’t know. A tragedy can be real, a delay can be devastating, and the legal question can still turn on what the cruise line knew, what it should have known, and when. The Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act requires cruise ships to integrate technology that can capture images of passengers or detect passengers who have fallen overboard to the extent that technology is available. That distinction matters. A camera may record the fall, but a detection system alerts the bridge when it happens. In practice, many ships rely on cameras that may document what happened after the fact, rather than systems that automatically alert the bridge in real time.

Ross Klein: We don’t have a system that everyone agrees works, and that’s the argument they’ve been making for the past 15 years. We don’t need it because we can’t agree on what, what is the, the standard. And I think what it comes down to is an issue of liability. Because if, if you have a system that alerts you that a person’s gone overboard, and you don’t rescue them, then the question is… Well, there’s two questions. One is that putting the system on admits that there may be a problem, so it’s foreseeable. And then if you don’t act when that happens, then there could be negligence. So I, I think it’s a, a financial decision. The risk of having a system has greater potential cost in terms of lawsuits than not having a system.

Lance Still: Cruise ships have crimes. So do hotels. So do cities and college campuses, resorts, airplanes, parking lots, and anywhere else humans gather in large numbers with money, strangers, and temporary anonymity. The lesson isn’t that you should be afraid of cruising. The lesson is that you should not let the cruise line do all the thinking for you.

Tim Maltin: Well, I, I would go on with, uh, with excitement, but also with a bit of caution. In the same way as you’re going to any other new place, whether it be a city or a, or a resort or, or whatever. I, you know, you go with a bit of cautiousness. You scope it out. Uh, and I think you, you, you’d approach a cruise in the same way. And it’s not to dampen your enthusiasm, but to be aware that it’s a new environment and, uh, not to take things for granted.

Lance Still: That means the boring advice matters, knowing what you’re stepping into. Because when something happens at sea, the question is not only what happened, it’s who saw it, who recorded it, who reported it, who has the authority, and whether anyone still has time to act.

ACT SEVEN: HOW TO ACTUALLY HAVE FUN

Lance Still: We’ve covered plague ships, norovirus, rogue waves, engine fires, missing passengers, jurisdictional nightmares, and several very compelling reasons to avoid the hot tubs. So let’s get back to why people love this. And for all the things that can go wrong, Daniel Klein keeps coming back to why people love. cruising in the first place.

Daniel Klein: So the best thing is that you don’t have to do anything. I, I think most Americans these days are pretty stressed out. We’re all working pretty hard. We’re all worried about losing our jobs. We’re all worried about, you know, all sorts of things. For me, it’s just I get on board, and someone makes my coffee. I don’t even have to put creamer in. Someone does that for me. But for the most part, to me, it’s really about the people you’re with and the crew. There are definitely ships where, like the Princess ship we just got, got on, it was an older ship. It wasn’t the, the fanciest one in the fleet, but the crew was spectacular. And by the third night, I knew three or four bartenders and, and people who were really paying attention to us and, and making sure we had a good time. And to me, that can really matter.

Lance Still: The trick is to not turn your vacation into a threat assessment. The trick is to do a few boring things early so the rest of the trip can be fun.

Vince McNally: First thing when you get on is use the safe. Put… And don’t bring all of your jewelry with you. It’s not necessary. But put your passport in there. Put your, uh, money in there because you really don’t need it. You have your key card, and 90% of the time, the ship goes at sea the next day, so put everything away.

Lance Still: The cabin door is worth checking twice. Not all of them close automatically. Give it a pull when you leave. Use the deadbolt when you’re inside. If there’s a balcony, keep that door locked at night. You don’t need to make the whole ship your business. Just make yourself known to a few people who would notice if something seems off. If something is missing or something feels wrong, report it right away. The same is true for the safety instructions most passengers try to ignore. They’re boring until they’re the only thing you need. The muster drill exists because ships have sunk with passengers on board. When the Costa Concordia struck rocks off the coast of Italy in 2012, the ship had not yet held its muster drill for the passengers who had just embarked. That’s why the boring safety briefing matters. Knowing where your assembly station is and how to put on a life jacket before you need that information is the difference between moving with purpose and moving with panic.

Daniel Klein: When you walk on the ship on most cruise lines, the first thing you do is go to your muster station. That’s gonna be printed somewhere on your ticket, and there’ll be helpful people right there to tell you, “Hey, yep, that’s in the dining room. That’s over there,” wherever it is. And you’re gonna go, and you’re gonna watch a short presentation on safety, how to put on a life jacket, uh, what you do, what the, what the alarm sounds like. Uh, on some cruise lines, you can watch those in your stateroom or, or on your phone beforehand. And then they’re basically just gonna scan to show you were there. Now, that is 1,000 times better. When I started cruising, they did the muster drill in person. Everyone had to go stand there, and there was always someone who didn’t show up, so you’d end up there for 35, 40 minutes.

Lance Still: The modern version takes minutes. Do the drill. Know your station. Then go enjoy yourself A lot of crew’s advice is not about being anxious. It’s about handling the boring stuff early so it doesn’t ambush you later. On shore excursions, the basic rule is simple. In unfamiliar or higher-risk ports, use the ship’s tours. They’re vetted, and they can guarantee you get back on time. In well-developed ports, going independently can save money and give you more freedom.

Daniel Klein: So if you do something independent, ensure you’re back at the ship an hour before they’re, they’re supposed to leave. I mean, don’t even take any chances, ’cause they’re, they’re ruthless when you’re not on a shore excursion. Wow. If you’re on a shore excursion, they’ll wait for you, but if you’re on your own… So I, I think it’s just more a matter of, yeah, take advantage of the savings. Go back early, have a drink someplace.

Lance Still: Either way, before you go wandering around a port you don’t know, check the US State Department travel advisory for that country. The ship’s bubble ends at the gangway. Charlotte Hammer has spent her career studying how disease moves through human systems.

Charlotte Hammer: You want to focus on a smaller number of pretty high-impact behaviors. That also means it’s much more likely that you’re gonna sustain them. If you only do one thing, the best thing you can do is to wash your hands before eating and after bathroom use. And that is really good advice just generally in life. So if you drill that into your brain, uh, it will stand you in good stead.

Lance Still: For a small health kit, oral rehydration salts, anti-nausea medication, some ibuprofen or acetaminophen, a few N95 masks. Not because cruise ships are uniquely dangerous, but because minor problems become bigger problems when you’re three days from a pharmacy. Her number one recommendation needs no equipment and costs nothing. If you get sick, report it early.

Charlotte Hammer: If no one knows you’re ill, no one can help you. It’s that simple. And usually, if someone knows you’re ill, someone can do something about it. Also means if you didn’t bring paracetamol or didn’t bring your rehydration salts, on a cruise you usually have a fairly well-stocked pharmacy. Someone can do something. Be a sensible human being. And if you do get ill, make sure you are well-hydrated. Ideally, make sure you don’t get to the point where you need any actual medical intervention. Um, so take good care of yourself, basically.

Lance Still: And do get the travel insurance.

Vince McNally: Number one rule, whenever you go on a cruise, get travel insurance. Don’t do it without it. Make sure it includes evacuation. Because if you get sick, really sick, or, and/or hurt yourself badly, and you’re in Timbuktu, you wanna be able to get back to the hospital in the United States, to Canada, or wherever you are. You wanna go home and to have the, uh, care you need.

Lance Still: Travel insurance is not just a reimbursement for a missed vacation. On a cruise, the important part is medical evacuation Medevac is the expensive, complicated process of getting you from wherever the ship can get you off to the place where you can actually receive medical care. Sometimes that means an ambulance from the port. Sometimes it means an air ambulance. And sometimes it means coordinating between a ship, a local hospital, an insurer, and your doctor back home.

Tim Maltin: I think people should, should understand that basically if you look at stats, cruising is extremely safe. It’s like air travel. It’s, it’s, it is extremely safe. So I don’t think anyone should listen to this and think, “I’m not gonna book that cruise,” or, “I’m gonna cancel my passage.” Absolutely not. You will have a terrific time. It will be great.

Lance Still: That is the person who wrote three books about the Titanic telling you to go on a cruise, which is probably the right place to land. Go have fun. Just don’t let the fantasy do all the thinking for you, because the point is not to ruin the pleasure of cruising. The point is to understand the place you’re in and then enjoy the very strange, very specific world it creates. Every subculture has its rituals. Cruising has more than most. There’s the sail away party, which happens on every ship the moment the gangway lifts, and passengers waving at the port as it shrinks behind them. A quick note, though, the sparkling wine circulating on trays during the sail away party is usually not complimentary. Check before you accept. There are towel animals. Every evening while you’re at dinner, your cabin attendant folds your bath towels into a swan, an elephant, or a monkey hanging from a coat hanger. It’s one of the more purely whimsical things a stranger has ever done for you without being asked. On Carnival, the crew occasionally stages what’s known as a towel animal invasion, in which hundreds of towel animals appear overnight on pool chairs across the entire ship. And then there are the ducks. Someone at some point started hiding rubber ducks around cruise ships for other passengers to find. Finding a duck in an unlikely location has become an unexpected highlight of the cruise for families who didn’t know they were even looking for one. The other thing devoted cruisers understand is that a ship of thousands is still a village if you know where to look.

Daniel Klein: You could be as social or as alone as you want on a cruise. And a lot of times there’s a meetup party, and I went to a meetup party and I, I was handed a lei by, by my friend now, Megan, and, and met her husband Jeff. And, and I’ve sailed with them five or six times. We’re going on a sailing in September. Find your like-minded people. If, if, if you put in the Facebook group, “I really wanna try every bourbon on the ship. Who’s with me?” You might find another bourbon aficionado. I find that going up to smoke a cigar, that cigar people are very congenial, and they’ll hand you a cigar. They’ll, “Oh, this is my favorite.” And “Hey, who’s got a light?” Like, sometimes who’s got a light leads to the person you’re talking to all night.

Lance Still: And that’s what cruising actually is. Underneath the logistics and the liability calculations and the jurisdiction arguments, it’s a temporary civilization that keeps producing unexpected connections. Strangers who become friends over a shared bar, a shared meal, or a shared patch of deck. 38 million people boarded a cruise ship last year, and most of them had a wonderful time. Most of them are coming back. The ships are bigger than they’ve ever been before. An expedition vessel can take you past glaciers, penguin colonies, volcanic islands, and waters most people will only ever see in documentaries. A megaship can give you seven days of water slides, jazz bars, and sunsets over open water without ever asking you to think about where you are. That is the trick, and it’s a good trick. But this show is never about the trick. It’s been about what happens when the trick stops working. The point is to not anticipate every disaster. The point is to be ready to meet the one that actually happens. That’s the accommodation mindset. Not a checklist, not a bunker, a way of moving through the world with your eyes open, your judgment intact, and your attention on the people around you. Know your muster station. Pack some N95 masks. Learn the bartender’s name. If someone near you looks lost, frightened, or sick, say something. Those same instincts that work everywhere else work here, too: kindness, empathy, paying attention, and a strong dose of self-awareness. That is how temporary civilizations hold together. But if the moment comes when they don’t, you’re not helpless. No one is coming, which means the next move is yours. But at least you know you can wash your hands. Out. For resources, links to everyone you heard from today, and more on cruise safety, crime at sea, and what to know before you sail, visit nooneiscomingpodcast.com. You’ll also find information there about Vince McNally’s volunteer work with 9/11 first responders and veterans, people still dealing with the consequences of what they lived through years, sometimes decades later. It’s work he continues to do because long after his career in the FBI and on cruise ships ended, Vince is still very much in the business of helping people.

Transcript lightly edited for readability and speaker attribution.