Nieuw Amsterdam (III) Historical

When Holland America Line named a new ship Nieuw Amsterdam in 1983, they were asking two words to carry a great deal. The second ship with that name — the 1938 SS Nieuw Amsterdam — had been "the Darling of the Dutch": launched by Queen Wilhelmina, a ship that survived the war without ever surrendering to German control, that carried 378,361 Allied troops and came home with her colors intact. She had been retired in 1974 after thirty-six years of service. The name was too significant to abandon.

The 1983 Nieuw Amsterdam was a different kind of ship. She was 33,930 gross tons, built at Chantiers de l'Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire, designed for Caribbean and Alaska cruise itineraries rather than the North Atlantic crossings that had defined her predecessors. She was a purpose-built cruise ship — not a liner doing the practical work of moving people across an ocean, but a vessel designed for the itinerary itself, for the ports and the experience rather than the crossing.

She sailed for Holland America Line for well over a decade, serving the routes that had become HAL's core markets. She was a capable ship on those routes — praised for her Indonesian crew, the attentive service style the line had maintained from the liner era, and a scale that still felt manageable compared to the ships that would come later. She was not the Darling of the Dutch. But she carried the name into an era of cruise travel the first two Nieuw Amsterdams could not have imagined, and she carried it with the quiet consistency that HAL ships were known for.

— In the Wake editorial

My wife and I booked Alaska for our twenty-fifth anniversary, 1991, on the Nieuw Amsterdam out of Vancouver. I had been to Alaska once before, briefly, for work. She had never been. We wanted to see Glacier Bay.

What I remember most is the scale problem. I am a civil engineer. I understand large numbers professionally. But standing on deck in Glacier Bay — the Margerie Glacier in front of us, a wall of ice maybe seventy meters high and a mile and a half across — I kept converting it to things I knew. Office buildings. Bridge spans. It didn't help. The numbers didn't translate. My wife said at some point: "I think you just have to look at it." She was right.

The ship was excellent in the way that things are excellent when they don't call attention to themselves. The Indonesian crew knew their jobs and did them without ceremony. Dinner was served at the same time every evening, in the same seats, by the same steward. In Juneau we took the tram up to Mount Roberts and ate at a place overlooking the harbor. I could see the Nieuw Amsterdam at the dock from where we sat, which pleased me — knowing exactly where the ship was and that it would be there when we came down.

We've been back to Alaska twice since. Different ships, different ports. The glacier at Glacier Bay is smaller now than it was in 1991 — I've read the measurements. But the scale problem is still the same. You still just have to look at it.

— Robert K., Portland, written 2004