Maasdam Historical

MS Maasdam entered service in 1993 as the second of Holland America's S-class ships, built by Fincantieri in Italy at 55,451 gross tons for approximately 1,258 passengers. That capacity number mattered. She was large enough that passengers could disappear for an afternoon and genuinely not know where they were on the ship, and small enough that by day four you recognized faces at breakfast. That is a difficult balance to build, and HAL got it right with the S-class.

She sailed for twenty-seven years. Alaska summers, Caribbean winters, European repositionings in spring and fall. The interiors — dark teak panels, antique Dutch maps in brass frames, commissioned oil paintings of harbor scenes — aged the way good wood ages. The Indonesian crew culture that Holland America had cultivated for generations was the defining feature for many passengers who returned year after year: a steward who remembered your coffee preference from the prior sailing, a dining room server who asked after your daughter by name. That kind of institutional memory belongs to the crew, not the ship, but it lived aboard the ship, and it traveled with her across twenty-seven seasons.

HAL sold Maasdam to Greek operators in 2020. The pandemic had emptied the ships and the industry was contracting, and the S-class was old by then in any comparison to newer vessels. The line moved on. The ship moved on. But the passengers who knew her had something most cruise relationships don't: enough time, and enough repeat sailings, to become part of a community that existed only at sea. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

— In the Wake editorial

My wife and I sailed Maasdam four times in twelve years. This is the story of the fourth time, which happened to be the last time, though we didn't know it then.

It was Alaska in June 2019. We had done Alaska twice on Maasdam before — Glacier Bay and Hubbard Glacier and the Inside Passage — and we had decided that this was our ship for that itinerary. She was the right size for the channels. She moved slowly enough past the glaciers to actually see them. And the crew knew us, which sounds like a small thing and is not.

Our steward on that fourth sailing was a man named Ferdi from Jakarta who had been sailing with HAL for eleven years. He had been our steward on the 2015 Alaska sailing. He was not our steward on the two Caribbean sailings in between. But when he found our name on his cabin list in 2019, he had our preferences ready on the first morning: the extra pillow arrangement my wife prefers, the International Herald Tribune outside the door, the ice bucket refilled without asking. He greeted us in the corridor on embarkation day as though we were returning to something that had been waiting for us.

Maasdam was sold in 2020. I read about it on a Tuesday morning and told my wife, and she said, "Well, at least we went four times." That's the right way to think about it. We got our years. Ferdi got his, too — wherever the ships take him next.

— Gerald and Norma P.