Rijndam (II) Historical

The Rhine — Rijn in Dutch — has been the working artery of Northern Europe since before recorded history. It runs from the Swiss Alps through Germany and the Netherlands before emptying into the North Sea at Rotterdam. Holland America Line's roots were in Rotterdam, and the company named its ships after Dutch geography the way a family names children after ancestors: deliberately, with the expectation that the name would carry meaning.

The second Rijndam inherited that lineage. She sailed in the era when HAL was rebuilding its postwar fleet and reestablishing its presence on the North Atlantic routes that the war had interrupted. She was a working ship in a working period — not the golden era of the great liners, not yet the full transformation to leisure cruising, but the decade in between when Holland America was doing what Dutch companies do: rebuilding methodically, getting back to the business at hand.

By the time the jets had reshaped transatlantic travel in the early 1960s, the Rijndam — like most of her generation — was adapting to Caribbean cruising. The routes were different. The passengers were different. The purpose had shifted from practical transportation to leisure. But the ship was the same ship, doing the same steady work with the same crew. That adaptability, in the end, is what defined the mid-century HAL fleet: capable ships that served well across multiple eras without requiring the era to explain itself.

— In the Wake editorial

I went to Amsterdam in 1961 to see my grandmother, who was eighty-two and unlikely to make the trip the other way. My company gave me two weeks. The flight would have taken a day and cost most of what I made in a month. The Rijndam took eight days and cost considerably less. It was not a difficult decision.

I had never crossed before. I had imagined it as a kind of luxury — deck chairs and four-course dinners and salt air. Some of that was right. What I hadn't imagined was the social reality of eight days with the same 800 people. By day three you knew who sat at the bar every afternoon and who walked the promenade at seven in the morning. By day five you had found the two or three people who were going to matter for the rest of the crossing. I found a Dutch engineer named Pieter who was returning from a conference in New York, and we spent most of the last three evenings in a corner of the lounge arguing about jazz and civil engineering and whether the Dutch polders were an act of arrogance against geography. He thought they were practical. I thought they were magnificent. We were both right.

I flew back. It was faster, and by then I knew I would return. But the crossing on the Rijndam was the thing I thought about when I got home. Not Amsterdam, not my grandmother's apartment on the Prinsengracht. The crossing. Eight days of nothing but ocean and the particular education of being confined with strangers for long enough that they stop being strangers.

— Joseph M., Boston, written 1998