An Atlantic Crossing

However, on the ship’s video system, the daily movies start at 10 a.m. Today is Sleepless in Seattle, among other movies. Lunch in the Lido begins at 12:30 p.m. Dinner is served in the dining rooms at 6:30 p.m. or 8 p.m., depending on your seating. The after-dinner show begins at 9:30 p.m., and may run as long as two hours. The ship library closes at 8 p.m.

We are on the S.S. Rotterdam. We reached the open sea by 6 p.m. on April 13, four days ago, but stayed indoors to study the inside of our cabin. The ship rises and falls as if we lived in an elevator traveling constantly between floors one and four. Deep in the night you feel the long slow climb, the long tumbling fall of the swells. When you walk the corridors you may take up to three steps before you realize your feet have not touched the floor. After a while you get into the rock of it, and even subconsciously your world rises and falls with the gentle, interminable rhythm.

The Rotterdam is an old-style steamship, flagship of the Holland-America line, its fastest as well as its oldest ship. She is 750 feet long, 95 feet wide, 35,000 metric tons, capable of 35 knots on the open sea. The Rotterdam is a liner, as opposed to a cruiser, at home coasting ports of call as well as crossing oceans. She represents, perhaps, the last relic of a way of life which the population of young cruise-takers, drinking heavily on their party boats in the Caribbean, can’t understand and don’t want to. She crosses the ocean in seven days-much longer than the six hours it takes to fly over it-all the while hosting banquets and balls, and dances and formal dinners. In the modern age, such luxury is anomalous, the privilege only of those travelers wealthy enough to afford it. The ship’s passengers are ancient-90 percent over 70, many in their eighties, and most are women. Aboard the Rotterdam they have relocated their favorite era and stuck to it. They have spent about $40,000 to be here. Yet to hear them talk, it’s not an admission price at all they have given, but a kind of betrothal gift, the token one party offers another for the promise of abiding together always, in that sphere of shared taste, age and experience. They love the Rotterdam. They know that with her passing, as with their own, the midnight buffets and dinners with the Captain will also perish. They want to go around with her, together, one more time.

I went also.

The Rotterdam was built in 1958 and is a very old ship to still be in service. Not that she is fragile. While the younger boats beach or burn up in the Caribbean, the Rotterdam plies her steady way, captained by Jacob Dijk, a tall, iron-gray sort of man who as a child watched her launched.

She is a state ship, meaning her funding came from the people of Holland. Her decorative style therefore is richly imbued with the 1950’s Dutch conception of chic, which turns out to be angular forms in glass and furniture of blue and gold velvet. She has decks of impressive teak planking which compose the shuffleboard court. But so warped is the wood, and so unpredictable the path of the game disks, that in a scoring competition, you’d have better luck overhanding them from the bridge. In other rooms: walnut and oak paneling and more than a hint of mahogany.

She has murals and mosaics depicting peasant scenes from 18th-century Southeast Asia. In the library there are purple velvet footstools and desks of blond wood. At every place where the business of hands is conducted, innovative carpentry meets the need in white, well-varnished woods.

There are two dining rooms, offering a clue as to how many people should be present today. The ship can accommodate almost 800 passengers, but on this trip, we have more crew than passengers. The crossing of the Atlantic is actually the last leg of a voyage which began in San Francisco in January. The 1995 Grand World Cruise, they call it, to distinguish it from the other 26 times the Rotterdam has gone around the world. The passenger list has dwindled to 500 or so-many got off in Israel-even though the crew’s numbers have remained closer to 600.

She has a ballroom called the Ritz-Carlton, where an orchestra plays every night, and which contains a lavish staircase up to the balcony. She has a buffet restaurant called The Lido, where roll-down blinds cover each window, and where each table contains a green broadleaf plant, and other plants and ferns stand on dividers among the tables. The lighting is recessed in the ceiling. Aft of the Lido is an outside deck with a swimming pool, deck chairs, and room for the outdoor cookouts they have on every fair day. There’s also the outdoor bar, sheltered by an overhanging deck.

She has a large smoking room, three indoor bars, a card room, a library, a movie theater, a video room, several laundries, a fitness room and two decks full of shops. She has a casino, a photo gallery, a land excursion office, a shuffleboard and tennis deck, though probably no one could play tennis on that surface. The deck chairs are of carved and bent wood, beautifully lacquered, cantilevered, masterpieces of both craft and engineering. Like all the furniture on the Rotterdam, they are unique, attractive, and now almost antique-the kind of furniture you can picture one day in a museum as an excellent representation of something, Dutch Renaissance, perhaps. All of it was built for this ship.

They don’t build ships like this anymore. And as her passengers know, the Holland America Line was recently purchased by the Carnival Cruise Line, the same company that has built ships with names like Ecstasy and Imagination and that is currently building the largest pleasure ship in history to accommodate 4,000 passengers at once. Everyone thought the Rotterdam’s end had arrived. But a company representative came out and nosed around, and rather liked the vessel. So her demise was not imminent.

One almost feels relief among the 500 septuagenarians and octogenarians aboard for this fact. One feels that they, as well as you, want this era to continue just a little longer.