Prinsendam (I) Historical

MS Prinsendam was a small ship for a small-ship purpose. At 8,566 gross tons, she was suited to the places larger vessels cannot go — the narrow channels of southeast Alaska, the quieter ports of Southeast Asia, itineraries where the destination matters more than the ship. She entered service in 1973 and carried approximately 350 guests. For seven years she did her work without incident.

On October 4, 1980, a fire started in the engine room while she was sailing in the Gulf of Alaska with 519 people aboard. By morning she was burning. The evacuation into lifeboats was orderly. Over the hours that followed, the US Coast Guard, the Canadian Coast Guard, and the US Air Force coordinated the largest peacetime air-sea rescue in Coast Guard history. The tanker Williamsburg diverted to assist and helped bring passengers safely from the lifeboats. Not one of the 519 persons aboard was lost.

The ship herself could not be saved. She burned for days, capsized, and sank on October 11.

The story of the Prinsendam is sometimes told as a disaster story. It is more accurately told as a rescue story — one of the most complete evacuations of a burning vessel at sea, in some of the most demanding water on earth, carried off without a single fatality. The crew received recognition for their conduct during the evacuation. So did the Coast Guard. The passengers, by most accounts, gave credit to both.

— In the Wake editorial

I have sailed on cruise ships seventeen times since October 1980. I mention this because I want anyone who is reading this and is anxious about ships to know that what happened on Prinsendam did not end my sailing. It changed it, but it did not end it.

The alarm came before dawn on the fourth. I was asleep in my cabin and I was dressed and at my muster station before I was fully awake. The crew was calm. That is what I remember first — not the smoke, not the cold, not the sound of the engines going quiet, but the steadiness of the crew. They had drilled for this. It showed. We boarded the lifeboats in good order. There were forty-three people in mine, including a retired school principal from Vancouver who took attendance by asking everyone their name and cabin number and writing it in her address book with a pencil stub.

We were in the water for several hours before a helicopter came. After that it was a matter of patience. I watched the ship burning in the distance. I didn't look away from it. I don't know why. The principal led us in a few hymns. Nobody complained. The tanker that came to us was enormous and impossibly reassuring. Eventually we were aboard it, wrapped in blankets, and someone handed me a cup of tea that was the best thing I had ever tasted.

All 519 of us came off that ship alive. I have thought about that number often in the years since. It is not a small thing. It is an extraordinary thing, and it happened because people had thought carefully about what to do when things went wrong, and then did it.

— Dorothy A.