Rotterdam (V) Historical

She was the last great transatlantic liner Holland America ever built, and she was built at home. Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij — the Rotterdam Dry Dock Company — laid her keel in the harbor she would look out on for the rest of her life. She launched in September 1958 and made her maiden voyage to New York in September 1959. 38,645 gross tons of steel, and she carried 1,456 passengers in accommodations ranging from First Class suites to Tourist Class berths, because that was what the transatlantic still was — a service for everyone who needed to cross.

Her design was unlike anything before it. Rather than a tall smokestack amidships in the traditional way, she wore twin funnels set low at the stern. The aerodynamic reasoning was sound: the soot went aft, and passengers on the forward decks had an unobstructed view of the horizon for the first time on a ship of her size. Dutch craftsmen fitted her interior with tile mosaics, Delft pottery, and paintings commissioned specifically for the ship — a floating museum of mid-century Dutch design.

She served Holland America for thirty-eight years. Queens and presidents traveled aboard her. So did hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who needed to get from Rotterdam to New York or back, or who simply wanted to spend a week at sea. When the line finally sold her in 1997, it took another decade and more than a few difficult negotiations before she found a permanent home: moored in the harbor of the city that built her, converted into Hotel SS Rotterdam. The staterooms are still available. The teak promenade deck still wraps the hull. The twin funnels still point toward the Rotterdam sky.

Some ships come home. She got to do it literally.

— In the Wake editorial

My parents immigrated from the Netherlands to Canada in 1962. They never talked much about the crossing — not because it was painful, but because it was forty years past and there were other things to talk about. My father mentioned once, in passing, that the ship was called the Rotterdam, and that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

When I was planning a trip to the Netherlands in 2018, I read that the Rotterdam was permanently docked as a hotel in the city. I booked a room without explaining to my parents why I was staying there. They were both in their eighties. I brought them down to the waterfront by taxi, and my mother's face when she saw the ship from the dock was something I had not prepared myself for. She reached for my arm.

We had coffee in the observation lounge. The staff know the ship's history — they're trained to, and they tell it well. One of them walked us to the preserved navigation bridge and my father stood at the window where the officers would have stood and looked out over the same harbor he'd sailed away from fifty-six years earlier.

He put his hand on the brass rail and did not say anything for a while. Then he said: She took us there.

It was the right thing to say. I didn't correct it.

— Elise van D.