Noordam (II) Historical

The name Noordam — North Dam — comes from the geography of Amsterdam itself, the kind of naming that makes Dutch place names compact histories. Holland America Line first used it in 1902, for one of the classic liners of the early transatlantic fleet. When they named a new ship Noordam in 1984, the gap between those two vessels represented almost the full arc of modern ocean travel — from steam-driven immigrant ships crossing the North Atlantic to purpose-built cruise ships circling the Caribbean.

The 1984 Noordam was 33,930 gross tons, built at Chantiers de l'Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire — the same French shipyard that had just completed her near-identical sister, the Nieuw Amsterdam. The two ships looked alike, operated alike, and served the same routes. What differed was the name, and the weight of history each name carried into the cruise era.

Noordam II served for more than a decade on Caribbean and Alaska itineraries, doing the work that had become HAL's core business. She was a capable ship — well-regarded for the Indonesian crew, the Dutch officers, and the service culture the line had cultivated since the liner years. Not a flagship, not a record-breaker, just a well-run ship doing what Holland America ships did: getting people somewhere worth going and taking good care of them on the way.

— In the Wake editorial

My husband and I took the Noordam for our thirtieth anniversary in February 1992. We had four children. We did not bring them. This was the first vacation we had taken without at least one of them in nineteen years, and we were not entirely sure how to behave.

The first day felt strange. We sat at dinner and had an actual conversation — not managed around anyone else's schedule or interrupted by anything — and realized we had to work at it slightly. We had gotten out of the habit of just talking to each other. By the second day it was easier. By the third day it was what we were doing, the thing we had come for.

The ship was elegant without making you feel you had to be. The crew was quiet and efficient in the way that good service always is — you only notice it when it's absent. We anchored in St. Maarten and St. Lucia and somewhere else I can't remember as clearly. What I remember most is a particular evening on the stern deck, watching the wake behind the ship in the dark, neither of us saying anything for a long time. We had been married thirty years and we were still finding out things about each other. I think the ship had something to do with that — the removal from ordinary life, the being somewhere that required nothing from us except our presence.

We sailed HAL two more times after that. Both were good. But that first week, on the Noordam, was the one that mattered most.

— Helen W., Cincinnati, written 2001