Noordam (III) Historical

The third Noordam sailed in the gap between two distinct ages of cruise travel — the era of the North Atlantic liner was over, and the era of the Caribbean megaship had not yet fully arrived. The Caribbean cruise market was still finding its shape in the 1970s and early 1980s, still settling into the patterns of port call and sea day that would eventually become formula. The ships of that period were mid-sized by later standards, manageable in harbors that the larger vessels of the following decade would find difficult.

Holland America Line operated in that transitional period with the same approach that had defined it since the liner years: Indonesian crew, Dutch officers, a formality at dinner that hadn't entirely given way to the casual atmosphere that the larger ships would eventually normalize. The Noordam name had been in the HAL fleet since the early twentieth century. This was its third use — a ship that inherited a name with history and served in a period when the cruise industry was becoming, for the first time, something ordinary people could imagine doing.

The ships of this era are less remembered than the great liners that preceded them and the massive resort vessels that followed. They served in the in-between time, when cruising was still becoming itself. What they offered was unpretentious and real: a small ship, warm water, ports worth walking, and a crew that knew what it was doing.

— In the Wake editorial

My parents had taken us to the same lake house in Wisconsin every summer for twelve years. When my father retired in 1978, he said he wanted to do Christmas somewhere warm, and my mother said if they were going to go somewhere warm they should go on a ship. She had read about it in a magazine. My father said he didn't know anything about ships.

So we went on the Noordam, my parents and my sister and me. I was seventeen. St. Thomas, St. Maarten, some other island I don't remember as clearly. My father wore a jacket to dinner every night, which he also did at home, so that was normal. My mother kept a small notebook of things she wanted to remember. We snorkeled for the first time, all four of us, off St. Maarten — my father had never put his face in the ocean before. He came up sputtering and said "Well, that's something."

It was a smaller ship than the ones my kids sail now. The dining room was not vast. The entertainment was not elaborate. None of that is what I remember. What I remember is my father standing at the rail on the last evening before we got back to Fort Lauderdale, watching the lights on the water, and saying to no one in particular: "I should have done this twenty years ago." He was sixty-one. He meant it about the sea, I think. Or maybe about many things.

— Michael B., Chicago, written 2009