Reference
- Freighter TravelFreighter travel is a ‘niche’ area of ocean travel that allows passengers to travel on board cargo freighters that have been designed to include passenger facilities. The types of vessels carrying passengers include container ships, general cargo ships, bulk carriers, roll-on roll-off ships, refrigerated ships, mail and supply ships and coasters. Most ships of this nature carry a small number of passengers, often no more than 12, but in the case of the RMS St Helana up to 125 persons. Voyages may be quite short, as in the case of coastal vessels, or up to 50 days on the longer trans-oceanic voyages such as that from Europe to Asia.
When vessels do dock in a port the short turnaround times made possible by modern discharge and loading technologies may mean that ships remain in port for only 18-24 h. For travellers who are intent on combining a long sea voyage with time to explore new destinations, short turnaround times are a distinct drawback. The daily cost per passenger usually ranges between US$100 and US$125, much less than on cruise ships. Meals are provided but, as freighters are working ships, passengers are often a secondary concern. While some freighters have small swimming pools, on-board activities are often limited to reading, enjoying the fresh air and sun and interacting with the crew and officers on the bridge.
Freighter cruises have filled a gap left by the collapse of most of the world’s ocean liners following the introduction of scheduled air services. Voyages of this nature are suited to the small number of travellers who are not prepared, or unable, to fly, as well as to those seeking to recapture the nostalgia of the long sea voyages of the past. In the golden age of freighter travel, a person seeking adventure booked on a tramp steamer in the same way that people now travel by plane, and often paid for their passage by working as a deck hand. Freighter travel is also very popular with maritime enthusiasts and is supported by the emergence of a small number of specialist travel agencies. The growing popularity of this form of travel, particularly in the seniors market, has also resulted in a number of shipping lines including passenger cabins in the design of new-generation cargo vessels.
Examples of freighter travel include the Aranui 3, a mail and supply ship that travels between Tahiti around the remote Tuamotu and Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, and the RMS St Helena, which sails between St Helena, Ascension Island, Walvis Bay, Cape Town and the UK on trips that may last between 3 and 34 days. The RMS St Helena is the last of the Royal Mail ships that once serviced the UK’s large number of colonial outposts. - CRUISESIn the era before commercial airlines, travelling for business or pleasure was undertaken by ship and train, and often involved lengthy periods confined in small cramped quarters, periods of inevitable seasickness, and a rather monotonous diet. Ocean passenger lines plied between America and Europe, between Europe and the Far East including Australia and New Zealand, and to more exotic destinations in Africa, India and Latin America. With the advent of steamships, the length of passage to America from Europe was reduced, and many passenger lines competed for customers by providing luxury accommodation for those who could afford to pay.
As taking holidays became more common, the idea of an ocean cruise became the dream holiday for many people in the 1940s and 1950s. Ships were constructed with stabilizers that reduced the effect of the boat's rolling and pitching motion. These ships often had well-appointed cabins, dining rooms and ballrooms, deck-side swimming pools, and games such as deck quoits. Cruise-line operators developed programmes in exotic areas with long periods at sea, broken by port calls where the adventurous could visit for a short period, being taken ashore by small boat in some of the more remote locations, such as the islands of the Pacific.
Ocean yachts and liners still offer cruises of varying length in many parts of the world, but they are less in demand than before, since the opportunities for visiting faraway places have been vastly expanded by modern jet travel. In addition ocean cruising by yacht has become a real possibility for many people since the costs of an ocean-going craft have decreased and per capita income in Europe and America has been rising over the last forty years.
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Perspectives
The Outlaw Ocean
"A riveting, terrifying, thrilling story of a netherworld that few people know about, and fewer will ever see . . . The soul of this book is as wild as the ocean itself." --Susan Casey, best-selling author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean An adrenaline-fueled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world's oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation. Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways -- drawing on five years of perilous and intrepid reporting, often hundreds of miles from shore, Ian Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world. Through their stories of astonishing courage and brutality, survival and tragedy, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil and shipping industries, and on which the world's economies rely. Both a gripping adventure story and a stunning exposé, this unique work of reportage brings fully into view for the first time the disturbing reality of a floating world that connects us all, a place where anyone can do anything because no one is watching.
The Ghost Ships of Archangel
An extraordinary story of survival and alliance during World War II- the icy journey of four Allied ships crossing the Arctic to deliver much needed supplies to the Soviet war effort. On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of thirty-five cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel--the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance, even as they avoided joining the fight in Europe while the Eastern Front raged. The high-level politics that put Convoy PQ-17 in the path of the Nazis were far from the minds of the diverse crews aboard their ships. U.S. Navy Ensign Howard Carraway, aboard the SS Troubadour, was a farm boy from South Carolina and one of the many Americans for whom the convoy was to be a first taste of war; aboard the SS Ironclad, Ensign William Carter of the U.S. Navy Reserve had passed up a chance at Harvard Business School to join the Navy Armed Guard; from the Royal Navy Reserve, Lt. Leo Gradwell was given command of the HMT Ayrshire, a fishing trawler that had been converted into an antisubmarine vessel. All the while, The Ghost Ships of Archangel turns its focus on Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, playing diplomatic games that put their ships in peril. The twenty-four-hour Arctic daylight in midsummer gave no respite from bombers, and the Germans wielded the terrifying battleship Tirpitz, nicknamed The Big Bad Wolf. Icebergs were as dangerous as Nazis. As a newly forged alliance was close to dissolving and the remnants of Convoy PQ-17 tried to slip through the Arctic in one piece, the fate of the world hung in the balance.
Ocean Travel and Cruising
A one-of-a-kind analysis of ocean cruising In Ocean Travel and Cruising: A Cultural Analysis, noted author Arthur Asa Berger turns his critical eye to the phenomenon of ocean cruising. This academically solid yet reader-friendly book brings a multidisciplinary cultural studies approach to the subject, examining ocean cruising from economic, semiotic, sociological, psychoanalytic, and marketing perspectives, and offering insights not provided by the more traditional sociological approaches to the subject. You'll explore cruise demographics, the relationship between cruising and gender, the sociology of dining on cruise ships, hedonism and pleasure seeking, the "compulsion to cruise," consolidation in the industry, the exploitation of workers on cruise ships, and a great deal more.
Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age
The Vikings were the master mariners and ship-builders of the middle ages: their success depended on these skills. Spectacular archaeological finds of whole or partial ships, from burial mounds or dredged from harbours, continue to give new and exciting evidence of their practical craftsmanship and urge to seek new shores. The nautical vocabulary of the Viking Age, however, has been surprisingly neglected - the last comprehensive study was published in 1912 and was heavily dependent on post-Viking Age sources. Far better contemporary sources from the later Viking Age are available to document the activities of men and their uses of ships from c.950-1100, and Judith Jesch undertakes in this book the first systematic and comparative study of such evidence. The core is a critical survey of the vocabulary of ships and their crews, of fleets and sailing and battles at sea, based on runic inscriptions and skaldic evidence from c.950-1100. This nautical vocabulary is studied within the larger context of "viking" activity in this period: what that activity was and where it took place, its social and military aspects, and its impact ondevelopments in the nature of kingship in Scandinavia. JUDITH JESCH is Reader in Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, and author of Women in the Viking Age.
Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology on the Indian Ocean
Recognising the fundamental role both of shipping communities and the technologies crafted and shared by them, this book explores the types of ships, methods of navigation and modes of water-borne trade in the Indian Ocean region and the way they affected the development of distinctive settlements against a changing but strong sense of regional consciousness and identity.
The Last Slave Ships
A stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after the shuttering of the massive illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These traffickers were determined to make Lower Manhattan a key hub in the illegal slave trade to Cuba. In conjunction with allies in Africa and Cuba, they ensnared around two hundred thousand African men, women, and children during the 1850s and 1860s. John Harris explores how the U.S. government went from ignoring, and even abetting, this illegal trade to helping to shut it down completely in 1867.
Ocean Travel
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Boats were the only long distance transport for centuries. Sailors in the remote Marquesas Islands use traditional navigational skills similar to those of the Phoenicians, the first trading empire.
Cruise Ships
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowThe cruise ship industry has grown rapidly in recent years, leading to larger ships that can carry more people. Statistics show cruises are safe, but the Costa Concordia disaster in 2012 raised questions.
Ship Building in Antiquity
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowExperts discuss ancient ship building construction techniques and demonstrate a copper plating process. The Meinz Museum in Germany houses five ancient Roman ships. The Nemi Museum houses boxes containing thousands of nails
Online Resources
- Cruise Tourism: Emerging Issues and Implications for a Maturing IndustryCruise tourism is increasingly recognised as a successful and dynamic subsector of the global tourism industry, with the major cruise lines occupying ' the highest ranks of the tourism and leisure sector, as measured by shareholder capital and annual profits' (World Tourism Organization [WTO], 2010, xi). However, while initially characterised by its rapid speed of development, and noted for more than two decades of high growth levels, more recently some markets have experienced demonstrably slower rates of growth. For example, the North American market, acknowledged to be the largest in the world, has lately undergone decline in its share of the global cruise activity in terms of both passenger numbers and spend. While this may be due in part to the economic volatility of key source markets during the second half of the last decade (Cruise Lines International Association [CLIA], 2009), it is clear that operators have for some time been keen to reposition ships in order to offer new destinations to additional geographic markets. At the same time, while recognising that regional markets may be in different stages of their life cycles, the sector has been placing greater emphasis on competitive pricing, sales promotions and onboard revenue maximisation. Not only do these activities illustrate the keenly competitive nature of the cruise business but they also serve as key indicators of market maturity.
- Ocean, travel, and equivocation: A response to Anne Salmond’s “Tears of Rangi”Salmond's paper speaks to two significant but rather underexplored aspects of the turn to ontology: travel and equivocation. In current debates, the ontological turn is often taken as a (re)turn to the radical alterity of non-Western modes of conceptualizing and composing worlds. The radical alterity of non-Western ontologies can be fruitfully understood in light of histories of travel that have brought about the encounter between Western and non-Western ontologies. Focusing on travel obliges our arguments to begin from the middle-ground where different parties encounter, exchange, and diverge. In these encounters equivocation plays a significant role.
Ancient Ships
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowShips discovered in Lake Nemi are the most complete wrecks of their period ever found. The massive ships reveal the excesses of the Roman Empire and remarkable construction techniques. Engravings reveal a connection to Caligula.