Rest easy, Deuxmoi fans. We’re not here to put Tom, Suri, or the youngest Beckham son on blast. And we’re certainly not talking about Penélope or Celia. (Frankly, we could be talking about Ted. But that’s another column.)
Our topic instead is the devil’s vacation—those chthonic voyages aboard behemoths weighted with viral load and alleged human rights abuses, yet somehow still buoyant enough to float.
For weeks, internet rubberneckers have been gripped by the sorry tale of the MV Hondius, an Atlantic pleasure cruise mysteriously struck by hantavirus—a rodent-borne disease that has no vaccine or cure. (You may be familiar with the ailment from its role in the death of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa.) Though the travelers on that doomed ocean liner have finally been evacuated, there’s already another nautical horror story in the news. Just days ago, the CDC announced that over 100 passengers and more than a dozen crew members on a different ship, the Caribbean Princess, have been infected by norovirus—a less fatal but more disgusting illness.
Epidemics such as these are distressingly common. More than 200 people on a different Princess Cruises vessel, the Star Princess, were hit by norovirus this past March. There’s only one Netflix documentary called Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, and that one’s about malfunctioning toilets, not pathogens—but for the last three years, the CDC has kept a running tally of gastrointestinal disease outbreaks on cruise ships that’s upsettingly long.
Taken together, the evidence is enough to make a rational person wonder why they should bother taking a cruise at all when they could instead pocket $5,000, enter a preschool classroom, and exit with all the norovirus they can eat.
Looking for further proof that man wasn’t meant to scale rock walls and plummet down water slides while daiquiri-drunk on a very large boat? The diarrhea stories are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. (Icebergs—another reason to be suspicious of cruises!) In 2017, California Sunday magazine published a gripping, unforgettable 6,500-word feature about impoverished Filipino cruise ship workers trapped in a modern-day version of indentured servitude where they might earn as little as $450 per month for a grueling, 70-hour workweek.
Though that story was published almost a decade ago, labor conditions hardly seem to have improved. This winter, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority opened an investigation into Carnival Cruises after the operator was accused of putting workers on the Carnival Encounter in overcrowded conditions without safe free drinking water and paying them as little as $2.50 per hour. (“We respect this process, and we hold our shipboard team members in the highest regard,” Carnival replied in a statement. “We welcome AMSA’s oversight as an important assurance mechanism for our crew and our operations.”)