Joe was well into his Arctic travels when the first passengers began to tour Alaska by steamship in the 1920s. By the time I got here, more than half of those who visited the state did so by ship, but when you choose to cruise, the destination becomes secondary. Passengers see a different Alaska entirely than those who hike its trails, drive its roads, ride its ferries, or crisscross its vast expanses by bush plane. They spend a week on the water but never get wet. It’s safe and scrubbed of all risks of discomfort. No bad hotels, no grungy restaurants, no logistics to plan. Of course for some people those are the best parts of traveling. Seeing Alaska by cruise ship is like driving across a state without leaving the highway except for gas stations and rest areas. I’ve had a two-hour layover in the Denver airport, but I’ve never been to Denver. Alaska is a hell of a backdrop, but that separation makes it not a place so much as an exhibit, not a home to various ecosystems and cultures so much as a theme park celebrating them. Cruise ships take the travel out of tourism. Check into the hotel, and let the hotel hit the road.
My reservations about this form of tourism don’t deter anyone. More than 1.5 million people visit Alaska by cruise each year, and the industry is responsible for 40,000 jobs and roughly $1.35 billion of the state’s economy. There are benefits to cruising. It makes Alaska accessible to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t get to see it otherwise. Whether it’s the “real” Alaska or some watered-down version becomes a moot point because everyone’s Alaska is different, even mine.
And right now mine is being interrupted by the Statendam’s arrival. A few minutes after the anchor drops, the surface of the water settles and the birds return, though the sun does not. She becomes quiet as a ghost ship, her brightly lighted portholes the only sign of activity, her passengers dining, dancing, drinking, invisible to the world around them, self-sufficient in this self-contained floating city.
Come morning, the tenders will ferry passengers ashore, moving against the stream like salmon, and I’ll join them along with representatives of the local tourism industry, city and borough assembly, and chamber of commerce for a community appreciation luncheon I’m covering on board. She’s not going anywhere—even from a distance I can make out the individual links of the chain that tethers her to the seafloor, each link weighing as much as a refrigerator.
We stow our fishing gear, and I pull the Monkeyfist’s own anchor—a double-fluked Danforth the size of a toaster—and feel comparatively insignificant in the Statendam’s lee. A pebble beside a mountain, a barnacle on a whale.
Mike gazes up at the ship like he’s thinking of mooning her, but he’s probably just admiring her lines; he loves boats, all of them. As we run back toward the harbor, I give him the wheel and look back over our wake from the stern deck. More horizon emerges on either side of the ship now, and the sun has reappeared just long enough to drop behind the mountains. But even from this distance the Statendam looks impossibly big. Was this how Joe felt the first time he saw the borderless sprawl of the Arctic?
I’m sipping coffee on the city lightering dock the next day, watching one of the Statendam’s red-roofed tenders vomit a payload of passengers. Most disembark in pairs, two-by-two like the animals on Noah’s gopherwood cruise ship. Some cluster in larger groups, families with children in tow. None is alone. Many of the couples wear matching polo shirts or sweatshirts and gender-neutral pants, a survival technique for an unfamiliar place. (“Have you seen my husband? He was dressed just like me.”) Others wear Holland America–branded jackets or carry logoed rain ponchos. It’s not raining at the moment, but this is Sitka. Passengers and locals gathered at the dock eye each other with friendly curiosity. The mayor greets the new arrivals officiously, but, in XTRATUFs and Carhartts, no one seems to realize he’s the mayor. Then we all trade places.
In the event of an emergency at sea, the tenders do double-duty as lifeboats. They’re basically floating buses, each 33 feet long with a passenger capacity of 150, not luxurious or even particularly comfortable but sturdy and designed to withstand rough seas. Ours motors out to meet the Statendam where I left her last night.
A handful of neatly uniformed crew members and Al Parrish, Holland America’s vice president in charge of the company’s Alaska operations, welcome us aboard. Our role reversal continues as Parrish treats us like tourists, leading us around the ship and showing off its amenities. It’s not just a floating city but a floating museum too. Its art collection, worth more than $2.5 million, focuses on Dutch history and exploration. In a yawning three-story atrium at the aesthetic center of the ship, a 26-foot sculpture, The Fountain of the Siren, makes you forget you’re on a boat.
Parrish walks us through several restaurants and cafeterias, a sports bar, a piano bar, a disco. Each is clean, bright, and fancy, no dive in sight. Passengers can buy cigarettes or gifts in a duty-free shopping mall, swim laps in indoor or outdoor pools, soak in a number of hot tubs. Other amenities include basketball and tennis courts, an aerobics center, a fitness room, a beauty salon, and massage facilities. Comedians, musicians, and variety acts perform at nightclubs each night, as if a chunk of the Vegas strip got tired of the heat and ran away to sea. There’s even a fully equipped casino and video arcade.
Parrish doesn’t show us any staterooms—all full, he says—but he does mention the size of the penthouse suite: at almost 1,200 square feet, considerably bigger than my house. I ask, but crew quarters remain off-limits to non-company personnel. I’ve known people who worked these ships and met others at local bars after their gigs ended, voluntarily or otherwise. The tales they tell are a far cry from how The Love Boat depicted the industry when I was a kid. Twelve-hour-plus shifts, ten bunks to each 10-by-10-foot cabin on dark, windowless decks deep in the belly of the beast, long hours with few recreational opportunities beyond the liquor sold at near-criminal markup in the company store. There’s always a stark contrast between the passengers and the 600 able-bodied crew who serve them on the Statendam and ships like her, but you’d never know it from our tour. The crew we meet are cheerful and polite.
The Sitka delegation came expecting a meal, and is about to get it. Passengers have a choice of dining options, from a casual buffet to a five-course menu or more gourmet fare in the reservations-only restaurant, and we sit down to lunch in the latter, a drawn-out affair prepared by the Statendam’s head chef. Everything’s good—fresh seafood, thick cuts of beef, crisp vegetables, all plated with flair—but nothing’s outstanding. It’s a facsimile of a gourmet meal that lacks emotion. Still, the impressive plating draws oohs and aahs from the visitors. The mayor, who owns a bar on Lincoln Street, gives me a thumbs-up. You can’t eat like this in town.
That’s part of the disconnect with the cruise industry in Alaska; the ships are so effectively self-sufficient that they relegate their destinations to distractions. Why eat or shop ashore when you can buy everything you need on board? The ticket price even includes the cost of most meals. Like the passengers themselves, the money visits town but it doesn’t stay. In an effort to remedy this disconnect, the state will assess a head tax on cruise ship visitors a few years from now, and the industry will sue. It’s a complicated dance between two parties who need one another but don’t necessarily like one another, and this “community appreciation” visit by Sitka’s policymakers and business owners—with its high-end meal comped by the cruise line, and Parrish’s warm welcome—has the feel of a backroom deal, an under-the-table handshake. A gift to appease the local gods.
As I polish off my crème brûlée, I find myself wondering what Joe might have thought of this, the spectacle of the boat, the comfort it offers passengers. He never knew such comfort in his life, much less at sea. On Christmas Day 1912, Joe cooked “duck stew, potato soup, and a delicious pie made from 24 fox hearts” that he made with a crust of flour, fox fat, and a few dried onions. The following Christmas, a day he described as “clear, strong W breeze, snow drifting, 24° below,” he made a meal of “
roast duck, bear meat pie, and the last of the prunes.” He had been saving the duck for months. “We have so much to be thankful for,” he wrote.
The following winter, his fifth straight in the Arctic, he inventoried his larder and detailed its contents: flour, oats, rice, dried prunes, and beans, and an emergency reserve of two 100-gallon drums of rotting seal meat. “We have plenty of coffee, tea and sugar,” he wrote that January, “but no lard, butter or salt.” Even that seems gluttonous in comparison to the severe winter he suffered from 1918 to 1919, his leanest yet: “We ate about 1 tablespoon of macaroni soup and a piece of meat, one for each, about 3/4ths-inch square. The soup was cooked in the drippings from the meat. We have this much left for tomorrow’s rations. The dogs have nothing to eat.” Nor did the dogs fare well that winter.
It is no use, we have to have something to eat but the dried deer skin. I told him to get the bear dog [King] and kill him. He is the weakest of our dogs. He can scarcely drag himself along. Well, we had something to eat. I ate King’s heart. It was small, not as big as an egg. I never thought a dog could have such a small heart. It was all I could eat. The meat was tough and I could not each much of it. I hope we will soon reach the cache.
Compare that to the Statendam’s menu, which boasts “a level of elegant sophistication unmatched anywhere on the seven seas . . . appointed with Bulgari china, Riedel stemware and Frette linens.” I’m sure Joe ate his fill of Dungeness crab and salmon during his time in Alaska; I doubt it was served with “spiral shaved cucumber,” “lemon garlic herb slash,” or sesame soy kalbi.
Holland America began sailing in Europe in 1873, and in its first few decades carried hundreds of thousands of people to the New World. As early as 1895, the company expanded from transit to tourism, establishing the model for its future. Launched in 1897, the first iteration of the Statendam sailed between Amsterdam and New York. Steerage-rate tickets cost $10, first class $750. A sixteen-day cruise between the same ports on a Holland America ship today costs anywhere from $2,500 to $6,600, depending on accommodations, but would be significantly more comfortable, even for bottom-basement ticketholders.
According to historical information on the passenger and shipping industry, monthly boat service to Alaska began in 1867, soon after the United States purchased the territory from Russia. As word of the dramatic scenery spread, demand grew. To meet the need, the Alaska Steamship Company formed and launched its first ship, the 140-foot Willapa. Early ports of call included Juneau, Skagway, Cordova, and Valdez. Shortly after the Klondike gold rush, would-be miners clamoring for tickets led the company to expand its route to include Nome.
In 1909 the company sold to a syndicate funded by the Guggenheim Company and J. P. Morgan with mining interests in the Wrangell Mountains. A subsequent merger with the Northern Steamship Company gave the new corporation control over most of Alaska’s shipping routes, with an eighteen-ship fleet and service from Ketchikan to Kotzebue. In the 1930s it bought its oldest rival, the Pacific Steamship Company, and grew yet again.
Recognizing the increasing demand for passenger service north, the Alaska Steamship Company began passenger tours out of Seattle that called at a number of Alaska ports. Each ship carried more than 200 passengers, with accommodations ranging from steerage to private-bath cabins for those able to pay a premium. Early magazine ads boasted that all Alaska Steamship vessels were “equipped with radar, radio, radiophone and latest safety-at-sea instruments and devices,” showing photographs of men and women in knickers and jaunty hats playing shuffleboard on the deck of a Seattle-to-Juneau cruise. A July 4, 1935, menu from the 416-foot Aleutian offered passengers Russian caviar canapés and eastern oysters on the half shell alongside baked premium ham and something called the Petersburg Shrimp Wiggle.
The idea of cruising in comfort through an otherwise inhospitable land was taking hold. Still, the journey wasn’t without peril. The Alaska Steamship vessel Yukon ran hard aground in a February snowstorm off Cape Fairfield in 1946. Six years later, the Baranof collided with the Greek steamer Triton on her way to the Inside Passage.
By 1954 labor problems, new competition from passenger air service subsidized by the federal government, and ongoing financial problems led the company to terminate its passenger business. It shut down cargo operations and folded completely in 1971. Other businesses filled the gap. Bush pilot Chuck West, leading flight-seeing tours above the Arctic Circle since the 1940s, built his own chain of hotels beginning in Fairbanks to support his vision for Alaska tourism. He started Gray Line Tours, the first Alaska motor coach line, and in 1957 began offering small-ship cruises. West eventually renamed the company Westours and moved it to Seattle. He’s often credited with being the first to recognize the tourism potential of Alaska. In 1971 he sold Westours to Holland America and in 2005 died at his cabin outside Haines.
Other businesses saw West’s success and wanted a piece for themselves. In the 1960s British giant P&O and Princess Lines began offering regular cruises in Alaska, and Holland America joined in 1975 with a single vessel, the 452-passenger Prinsendam. More than a dozen lines offer cruises in Alaska today. Each tries to differentiate itself. Some cater to a demographic that skews older, while others aim for a Vegas-style atmosphere. Some offer a more-relaxed pace, adventure, romance, or a more-social environment in which passengers are likely to make friends.
Some lines focus on small-boat tours to places larger boats can’t go. The Liseron, for example, a 145-foot wooden minesweeper built in 1952 and restored by the Boat Company in 1989, carries just twenty passengers but offers a two-to-one passenger-to-crew ratio, gourmet meals, and guides trained as naturalists who lead off-boat sightseeing and fishing adventures by kayak and skiff. The ship itself is beautiful in a way that large cruise ships are not. Wooden boats in general bear a charisma no synthetic material can match. Building them requires skill but also passion, every nail driven by hand. The upkeep they require means that the love is ongoing rather than fleeting. Cruise lines trade their giant vessels for younger, better models every couple of decades, while wooden boats continue to see service and age gracefully. Though built for a utilitarian purpose, the Liseron’s sleek lines and appointments give her character. John Wayne’s yacht, Wild Goose, now a charter ship, shares a similar design, heritage, and beauty. Compare that to the big steel ships like Statendam—in The Only Kayak, Kim Heacox says of one, “It didn’t look like a ship; it looked like the box the ship came in.”
Small-boat cruises are more intimate, but they’re not for everyone. The relative safety of crowds and the lush quarters of first-class ships draw most people to cruising. Ships like the Liseron offer a different experience entirely, and they come with a price. A seven-day cruise from Sitka to Juneau on the Liseron or her sister ship can cost upward of $6,900, depending on time of year. Bookings sell out quickly.
In 1970 fewer than 23,000 cruise ship passengers visited Alaska. By 1985 that number grew tenfold. Today it’s more than 1.5 million, with all signs pointing to continued growth. The trend holds worldwide as well, where the industry is valued around $40 billion. Collectively, cruise lines carried as many as 16 million passengers last year, and, as major lines add new destinations and bigger ships, passenger traffic increases by about 8 percent a year. There’s still room to grow, too. According to Cruise Market Watch, less than a quarter of the US population has ever taken a cruise—and all the world’s cruise ships filled to capacity all year long would still equal less than half the annual total of visitors to Las Vegas.
Safety concerns may temper that growth. So far, the industry has had an excellent record in Alaska, but that could change. If it does, the ramifications of a cruise line accident in a remote location could prove significant. Each year, global warming opens more of the Arctic to maritime travel and shipping traffic in the Bering Sea and Northwest Passage, but international governing organizations have yet to establish shipping lanes for newly trafficked areas. As commercial
shipping across the top of Russia increases along with the cruise industry presence in the Arctic, the risk—if not the likelihood—of an eventual accident rises with it. The water there is frigid, making abandoning ship more dangerous, and even passengers who reached shore would still have to fight for survival. Arctic destinations like Banks Island have no buses, ambulances, or first responders.
In 1952 the 369-foot Princess Kathleen, a luxury steamship carrying nearly 400 passengers and crew, hit a rock at Point Lena, near Juneau. The ship’s initial SOS went out on the wrong frequency, and it took two hours before the Coast Guard learned of the grounding. The first rescue ship arrived three and a half hours after the incident. By then, many passengers had already gone ashore and hiked to the road. When the tide came in, the Princess Kathleen slipped off the rocks and sank, and for the next half century she periodically leaked oil and fuel into the surrounding water.
The Prinsendam, Holland America’s inaugural Alaska cruise ship, caught fire in 1980 while sailing in the Gulf of Alaska. The master sent a distress call and ordered an evacuation. Luckily, a nearby tanker and the Coast Guard cutter Mellon were close enough to assist, and all passengers and crew were brought to safety.
But what if no ships had been in proximity? Two years ago, the cruise ship Clipper Adventurer struck a charted rock in Coronation Gulf under clear, calm conditions. It took two days for rescuers to reach the ship.
Holland America, purchased by Carnival Corporation in 1989, has worked to lead the industry on a shift toward diminished environmental impact. That effort is evident on the modern Statendam, Parrish says, which uses an experimental “xenon process” filter to produce “effluents and discharges near drinking water–quality standards.” The cruise line hopes to use the filtered water as a secondary water source for laundry and cleaning services, among other uses—but he doesn’t specify those uses.
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 7