Volendam (III) Active

The second Volendam had been torpedoed in August 1940 while carrying 320 British children to safety in Canada. All the children survived. The ship survived too, was repaired, and served out the war. But the name carried weight after that — not of disaster, which it hadn't been, but of the particular kind of weight that comes from being the ship that was almost the City of Benares and wasn't.

When Holland America put a third ship into service as the Volendam, they were doing what they had always done: carrying the name forward, maintaining continuity with a history that stretched back to the founding years of the line. The third Volendam was a postwar ship, part of the fleet that HAL rebuilt and expanded as the cruise market grew through the 1950s and 1960s. She served in the same waters the second Volendam had sailed — the Atlantic, the Caribbean — but in a different world, one where the Atlantic crossings were giving way to Caribbean itineraries and the word "cruise" was acquiring its modern meaning.

She was not a famous ship. She did not have a famous moment. She carried the Volendam name through a period of transition and passed it on intact. That is its own kind of legacy — the ships that kept the fleet moving in the years between the great events.

— In the Wake editorial

My grandmother had a theory that you could tell everything you needed to know about a ship from its dining room. Not the food — she was not especially interested in food — but the arrangement. Were the tables close enough together that you had to talk to strangers? Was the lighting good enough to read a menu without strain? Were the waiters instructed to hover or to appear only when needed? She applied this analysis systematically to every ship she sailed, and she sailed many.

The Volendam, she told me, had a good dining room. The tables were at a civilized distance. The lighting was warm but functional. The waiters — Indonesian, she noted, which she considered a mark of quality — were present without being intrusive. She had the same table for the full ten days and the same steward, who learned by day three that she took her coffee without milk and remembered it without being reminded for the rest of the crossing.

She sailed the Volendam in the late 1960s, on a Caribbean itinerary that included several ports she had never visited. She was seventy-one. She had been widowed two years before and her children had worried about her sailing alone. She reported that she had found the solitude quite manageable and the company, when she wanted it, readily available. She came home with a new theory about the relationship between good service and human dignity, which she considered one of the central questions of civilization. The ship, she said, had done its job.

— Claire V., Toronto, writing about her grandmother Elsa, 2011