Veendam (III) Historical

Holland America's postwar fleet was built around a fundamental question the whole industry was asking: what are ships for, if not crossing? The answer arrived gradually through the 1950s and 1960s — ships were for going somewhere warm, for the experience of being at sea, for a kind of leisure that the transatlantic crossing had only accidentally provided alongside its primary function of transportation. The Caribbean cruise was not an invention of the 1960s, but it became, in those years, the thing cruise travel was.

The third Veendam served in those pivot years. She was not built for one era or another but caught between them — a ship that had launched into one world and adapted to another, as the routes she ran shifted from North Atlantic crossings to warm-water itineraries with multiple port calls. The Veendam name was well-established in the HAL fleet by then, a name that had crossed the Atlantic dozens of times and survived a world war. The third ship to carry it inherited that stability and applied it to a new kind of cruising.

She was a capable ship in a transitional period — not the most celebrated vessel in the fleet, not a record-setter, but a reliable ship doing the specific work that the era required. When she was retired, the name went on to a fourth and final Veendam. But the third ship is the one that navigated the pivot, that sailed through the decade when cruising became what it now is.

— In the Wake editorial

I booked the Veendam because it was available and within my budget. I was twenty-six, single, between jobs in the way that twenty-six-year-olds sometimes are — not quite directionless, but not quite directed either. A friend had suggested the Caribbean for a week. The Veendam was the ship that fit.

I expected to find it strange, being on a ship alone at twenty-six. Most passengers seemed to be couples or families. But a ship is actually quite good for solitude with company — you are never more than forty feet from other people, but no one requires anything from you. I read three books. I sat on the pool deck in the afternoons and watched other people's children throw things into the pool. In Curaçao I walked the city alone for four hours, found a restaurant where no one spoke English, pointed at something on the menu, and ate a meal I still couldn't name if I tried.

What I remember about the ship itself is the smell of it — salt and diesel and something institutional, like a hotel that had been at sea for decades. The dining room was formal in the evenings, which I found I liked. It imposed a structure on days that had no other structure. You dressed for dinner. Dinner happened at the same time. You sat with the same people. One of them was a retired schoolteacher from Minnesota who had been cruising for twenty years and knew everything about every port. She told me where to walk in Curaçao. She was right about all of it.

— Dana S., Seattle, written 2003