
A warrant has been issued for the arrest of the luxury cruise ship Crystal Symphony, 781 feet long, 99 feet wide, 12 decks tall. It was last seen in Bimini, The Bahamas, hiding in plain sight.
The COVID-19 pandemic mothballed the $90 billion global cruise ship industry for fifteen months. It limped back to action last July. The first ship to return to sea was billed as “safer” for passengers than remaining on land. Since then, the über-contagious Omicron Variant has spurred an alpine surge in cases. The complicated system of keeping cruise ships free of disease became vastly more complicated, then proved to be ineffective.
Crystal Symphony first fell prey to the immediate crisis of a COVID-19 outbreak earlier this month. I was a guest lecturer onboard, wearing a contact tracer device that looked like a wristwatch (but which did not tell the time). Day after day, an untold number of passengers and crew members disappeared from view into quarantine. The Cruise Director himself numbered among the missing, unseen for the last third of a ten-day voyage. I submitted to being tested on demand three times in five days, as the captain and his medical staff scrambled without success to contain the contagion. Jamaican authorities disallowed people from the ship from coming ashore. Shipboard amenities closed, one by one, until on the morning of disembarkation in Miami, a general eagerness prevailed among the ship’s passengers to get off the boat.
Then Crystal Cruises itself succumbed to the long-term crisis that the pandemic has brought to the industry, when its parent company, conglomerate Genting Hong Kong Limited, lost its financial footing, and suddenly suspended operations of Crystal Symphony, and its sister ships Crystal Serenity, also running Caribbean routes, and Crystal Endeavor, a brand-new vessel customized for Antarctic Ocean cruising. Fuel providers in Miami, owed more than $1 million, sued the company, leading to the arrest warrant for the ship, which now is on the lam.
If COVID-19-induced bankruptcy forces Crystal Cruises out of business, it could be a coalmine-canary moment. Other smaller players in the highly concentrated industry, which is dominated by three corporations—Carnival, Norwegian, and Royal Caribbean—may meet the same end. If Crystal cashes out, it will be the last chapter of a story that began in 1885, when the formation of the new Japan Steamship Company—known by its Japanese acronym, NYK, for Nippon Yusen Kaisha—announced to the world that the modernized Empire of Japan would be a major player in geopolitics henceforth. NYK became the preferred way to cross the Pacific before WWII, like Cunard Line was on the Atlantic, with newspapers covering the passages of Hollywood movie stars from Los Angeles to Tokyo and Shanghai. But the war sent every NYK ship to the bottom, and the line was slow to rebuild, finally re-establishing passenger service with the creation of Crystal Cruises in 1995.
The NYK connection ended in 2016, when Genting acquired the property to add to its cruise holdings in twenty countries around the world. Its European subsidiary, in arrears to German creditors, is the weak link in Genting’s maritime chain. Its dissolution, caused by COVID-19, could cause Genting to fold, taking Crystal Cruises with it. Will a tsunami of failures then ensue, as the pandemic rages on, and the business model of cruise ships, touted as being safer than real life, proves to be illusory?
Eric Paul Roorda is the editor of The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2020). His next book is The Dictator Stands Alone, which explores the symbiosis between tyranny and tourist development in the Dominican Republic, and is a sequel to The Dictator Next Door (1998). Save 30% off The Dictator Next Door with the coupon code E98RORDA. Read the Introduction to The Ocean Reader free on our website and save 30% on the paperback using the coupon code E20RORDA.