Majesty of the Seas (1992-2020) — Historic Sovereign Class Ship

Majesty of the Seas made her last sailing in March 2020, twenty-eight years after Queen Sonja of Norway christened her on the docks in Miami. She was not the largest ship ever built. She was not the first. She was not the one that the headlines remembered.

She was the one that made it possible for the rest.

For nearly three decades, Majesty loaded the first-timers. The newlyweds with sixty-three dollars in their checking accounts. The families stretching a vacation budget across a four-night Bahamas cruise. The retirees who had saved since 1985 for a trip they weren't sure they could afford. She took them to Nassau and CocoCay and brought them back, and something changed in them during those three or four nights between Miami and the islands. They had eaten a white-tablecloth dinner. They had ridden a glass elevator through a Centrum atrium that pioneer designers had named for the thing at the center of things. They had stood at a rail and watched the open sea at twenty knots, and they had become cruise people — and some of them never stopped.

That is the faithful work of a gateway ship. She did not need to be grand to be significant. She needed to show up, reliably, season after season, and lower the price of admission to something beautiful. 73,941 gross tons of dependable steel, and she never once asked for credit.

Her sisters — Sovereign of the Seas and Monarch of the Seas — were beached at Aliaga, Turkey in July 2020, a few months after the world closed. Majesty survived that round. She passed to Seajets, a Greek operator, renamed Majesty of the Oceans, and anchored in the Gulf of Elefsina near Athens. She is still there, the only surviving Sovereign-class ship, floating quietly in a Greek bay while the rust comes and the paint peels and no one comes aboard.

There is something fitting in that — the last of her class waiting at anchor, not far from where ancient ships once gathered, having outlasted everything that was supposed to replace her. She earned her rest. She served twenty-eight years without complaint, and she carried more ordinary people to their first night at sea than any number could count.

Well done.

— In the Wake editorial

I boarded Majesty of the Seas for the first time in 1995 with sixty-three dollars in my checking account and a three-night Bahamas cruise that my mother-in-law had paid for as a guilt offering after ruining our wedding reception.

That's the honest version. The polished version is that we chose Majesty for an affordable getaway. But the truth is messier, the way truth usually is. My wife and I were twenty-four, barely married, and her mother had made a toast at our reception that mentioned her ex-boyfriend. Twice. The cruise was supposed to patch things over.

Majesty didn't care about our family drama. She was 73,941 gross tons of dependable steel, docked in Miami, ready to take us to Nassau and CocoCay and back in three nights for less than we'd spent on the wedding photographer. She'd launched in April 1992 as the third and final Sovereign-class ship — not the first mega-ship (that honor belonged to her sister Sovereign), not the largest (ships were already growing beyond her). But Majesty became something more important than first or biggest. She became the gateway.

That first evening, my wife and I stood in the five-story atrium and looked up. Glass elevators rose through the space like something from a science fiction movie. The two-deck dining room waited below, set with white tablecloths and more silverware than we owned. A pianist played standards on a baby grand while passengers in resort wear drifted past carrying drinks with umbrellas.

— Bobby H.